It had to happen. The left hook I mentioned yesterday. We just didn't know where it would come from, although many would have guessed it would be the US. And they'd be right. Global Deal reports:
But the Americans have just dropped something of a bombshell. An hour or so ago, they read out new text to a meeting of ministers that are looking to push through a new agreement. A copy has just reached me here in the lobby outside.
The core of the US proposal is that developed and developing countries should be treated in the same way, with countries taking on targets according to "their level of economic development and significance" or some similar formulation.
Blogger David Steven suggests this is not just an amendment to text that negotiators had been working on in the early hours of Friday morning, but a completely new proposal, designed to provoke. The question is, why? Bali COP 13 is now in its final hours, and the answer may only become clear once everyone's gone home and the dust has settled.
What I'm wondering is whether it will really make much difference to the Americans, if they do pass the Climate Security Act. The Act is a protectionist measure that essentially hedges Washington's bets. If developing countries don't adopt carbon emissions targets, the Act will give America the means to block trade from those countries.
There's more than one way to slice the carbon cake, and more than one way to set targets. New Zealand is sensibly approaching their goal of becoming a carbon neutral country by slicing the cake into economic sectors. Bite-sized chunks, as it were, to make it easier to monitor progress and make adjustments along the way. There is no reason to be concerned about countries adopting such a practical approach, but what of the bumbling countries like Canada, or the fast-developing ones like China?
If internationally agreed targets for both developed and developing countries are going to be based on levels of economic development, as the US is suggesting, one way to be truly equitable would be to consider not only current emission levels but also the historic emissions from past economic activity. Just as an assessment of the sustainability of a new building considers the embodied energy in the materials used to construct it, or product labelling might include the carbon emissions from its manufacture (as the US Climate Security Act is proposing), so too entire economies have a level of "embodied carbon" that needs to be considered.
All the steel, concrete and other materials used to build the American Dream represent vast amounts of carbon emissions over centuries. To ignore that historic impact in setting emissions targets would be to severely disadvantage developing countries. This is not to say that they should be allowed to develop as irresponsibly as the more developed countries did; they can grow using leapfrog technologies that have lower ecological impacts. I am just suggesting that it would be grossly unjust to consider only current emissions in the targets.
Of course the US would not like this approach, because it would place a greater responsibility for climate change mitigation on their shoulders, but I think it's time the developing world stood up to Washington's bullying tactics.
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