Tackling Redhouse gas emissions

The 17^th conference on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change claims to have invited delegates from all member states of the UN to discuss on and arrive at a consensus toward the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in December next year. However, recent trends amongst participants have shown that the principle negotiating blocks are the USA, the EU and the BRICS nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Unfortunately, trends have also shown that no consensus on anything is reached until the last moment of the conference, thanks primarily to the lack of commitment each nation is willing to put up.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, put a binding legal agreement upon developed nations (or, as it calls them, “annex 1 nations”) to cut down on their emissions or face UN-imposed sanctions. As frail as the embargoes may themselves sound, most developed nations with the exception of the USA ratified the agreement and began the arduous process of, to use an appropriate mathematical term, “leaning” down. A recent study by The Economist has emerged that shows how Czechoslovakia cut down its emissions by as much as 30 per cent. But that misses the point: the focus has since shifted away from every country to a certain group of countries, each with its own brand of interests.

The successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which will take effect from 2015 onward if it is formulated in 2011 or 2012, will have to accommodate the emissions of developing nations. Before the Kyoto Protocol came into effect, more than half of all global emissions came from developed nations; today, 58 per cent of all emissions are by developing nations. This means that a binding legal agreement will have to lean down the USA, the EU as well as the BRICS bloc, and therein lies the rub.

The USA is willing to accede to such an agreement if the same limits and sanctions are imposed on all countries that ratify it, shirking away from a West-specific clause that will jeopardise its capacity to keep the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian economies in check. India, in turn, has a different concern altogether. The average emissions per capita per annum of an Indian are a mere 1.2 tonnes, and with more than 400 million of its people still living in poverty, India’s needs are more pressing than America’s because its need for development is righteously immense. Therefore, leashing both the USA and India with the same amount of rope makes no sense. However, the prospect of finally leashing the USA has the EU excited, which makes the BRICS’s resistance all the more important, all the more precarious.

Because of the significant unified bargaining power of the BRICS block, the biggest threat it could face is one of its members breaking rank, which the head of the Chinese delegate almost did. On December 6, Mr. Xie Zhenhua announced that China was ready to participate in a treaty that would legally bind both developing and developed nations, an announcement that is sure to have sent a shiver down the convention’s spine. However, before anything radical materialized, Mr. Zhenhua clarified that China was willing to participate in a treaty that would bind only the developed nations even though developing nations would be a part of it.

What is he trying to say? That the developing nations will evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions of the developed nations? Or that China was prepared to break away and form its own bargaining front? Or was it simply a case of reckless overstepping that was quickly mitigated by the realization that China would have nowhere to go from thereon? Greenhouse gases can step aside: it seems a blast of hot, red air demands some attention now.