The breakdown of the meeting on climate change in the Hague and the continuing uncertainty surrounding the American presidency mark a new and dangerous point in international affairs. The world's major states cannot agree on policies to deal with global warming. The United States faces years of indecisive government, with Washington paralysed by score-settling and legislative gridlock. Against this background, there can be no concerted action to cope with the environmental crisis. The world is set on a course of wild globalisation. In itself, the collapse of the climate talks two weeks ago in the Hague is not particularly significant. The meeting was an attempt to ratify the 1997 Kyoto convention on reducing greenhouse gases. Its failure has been widely put at the door of the Americans, but the Europeans were probably equally to blame in not following up concessions offered by the American delegation in the later stages of the talks. Whoever was most at fault, it is vital to understand that the Kyoto protocol is itself a wholly inadequate response to the hazards facing the global environment. The protocol aimed at reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to a few percentage points beneath their levels a decade ago. But even if that goal could be achieved, it would not halt climate change. The consensus among scientists is that global warming is already irreversible. According to some estimates, levels of greenhouse gates in the atmosphere would double even if every country in the world cut its emissions below 1990 levels. In fact, there is not the remotest prospect of this happening. It is not just that imposing the necessary fiscal measures is politically impossible in the US, and - as has been evident since the fuel protests in September - far from easy in Europe. It is that climate change and industrialisation in developing countries are indissolubly linked. China and India account for more greenhouse gases than the whole of Europe. The impact of industrial development in such developing countries on global warming is rising steeply. Yet, no doubt rightly, developing countries are not covered by the Kyoto protocol. It is grossly inequitable to demand that poor countries should impose controls on their industries which many of the richest countries flout daily. Why should the path of development that the world's richest countries adopted - at whatever cost to the environment - be closed to its poorest?.Excerpted from `Wild Globalisation', by John Gray, `The Guardian', December 5
