Fighting a common enemy

Day by day at the Kyoto conference on climate change, the focus has fallen ever more sharply on the North-South dispute as the key to a settlement. To Washington, it’s essential. The US Senate vows it won’t ratify a Kyoto agreement that does not limit fuel emissions by Third World nations.

“I don’t believe it has a chance in the world,” Sen. Chuck Hagel said while dropping by the Kyoto talks.

But the developing world insists that the United States and the rest of the industrial North first meet commitments they’ve already made to rein in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they spew into the atmosphere, goals that few are meeting.

“That does not give them a moral platform to ask anyone in developing countries to take up new commitments,” said Mark Mwandosya, the deliberate, deep-voiced Tanzanian diplomat who is a spokesman for the South at Kyoto.

Both sides have a stake in heading off global warming. But the South’s may be larger: British scientists reported new calculations that rising sea levels from ocean warming might drive 200 million people from their homes in the 21st century, mostly in such low-lying Third World states as Bangladesh.

Africa is expected to be the continent hardest hit by drought and other climate disruptions.

Warming may already be hurting some in the developing world. American glaciologists report, for example, that poor highland people in South America are losing traditional water sources as glaciers shrink.“People in developing countries are more worried about this problem than any politician in the United States,” said Bill Hare, a global warming campaigner for Greenpeace International. “At the end of the day, they are more susceptible.”

The conflict is rooted in 20th-century history and 21st-century economics. The climate change treaty of 1992 set a voluntary goal for 34 industrialised nations to reduce, back to 1990 levels, their emissions of greenhouse gases, mostly from fossil fuels, which trap heat in the atmosphere.

The current negotiations, scheduled to end on Wednesday, are intended to change those voluntary goals into binding limits, but only for the original 34 nations.

The developing world has been exempted from the outset, since it was the industrial revolution in Europe and North America that boosted carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by some 30 per cent since the early 1800s and since it was agreed that poorer nations can ill afford the technology and the energy restraints that would be required.

But in a fast-changing world, the balance of emissions will shift.

The developing economies of the South are expected to account for two-thirds of global carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. And some industry leaders in the North, particularly in the United States, fear competition from a China or India free to burn all the cheap coal it wants.

Washington, meanwhile, has proposed a more indirect approach: allow northern companies to build emissions-saving factories and generating plants in the South, and credit them against northern emissions quotas.

But that, too, arouses rich-poor antagonisms, notes Argentine economist Graciela Chichilnisky. “They fear that it’s a faustian bargain” that by restraining their own energy growth, Third World countries are selling off their right to economic growth.