Special to ‘The Bengal Post’ - 15 December 2010

by Praful Bidwai

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh has declared the outcome of the Cancun climate conference a major victory. Many others have welcomed it for preserving the integrity of the United Nations multilateral process, under which an effective and equitable global climate agreement can hopefully be reached next year. So low were the expectations from Cancun after all the wrangling to undo past gains from the climate talks and the rich countries’ effort to wriggle out of their commitments to fight climate change, that any agreement, however weak, could be made to look like an achievement.

In reality, Cancun was a huge failure in delivering what climate science says is the minimum necessary to halt a climate catastrophe. This demands limiting global warming to 1.5-2 °C and reducing greenhouse gas emissions drastically—by 40 percent for the developed countries by 2020. With Cancun, 2020 global emissions will probably exceed by 9-12 gigatonnes (million tonnes of CO2-equivalent) the 44-gigatonne threshold for averting irreversible climate change. Even if the rich countries deliver the emission cuts they promise, the Earth will warm up by 3.2 to 5 °C, with horrific consequences—ecological devastation, millions of deaths and colossal economic damage.

Cancun will go down as a turning point, where the relationship between the industrialised North and the developing South on climate-related obligations was reversed. The North conceded almost nothing. And the South accepted new obligations. Cancun can only be considered a modest success on the criterion that it lets the world live to fight another day.

The Cancun Agreements (CA) postpone major decisions on binding emissions-reduction commitments and North-to-South funds and technology transfer. They blur the distinction between the North, historically responsible for three-quarters of global emissions, and the South. The CA don’t follow the science-based process of setting emissions-reduction targets for individual countries. They allow countries to set their targets arbitrarily. For instance, the US, the world’s worst polluter, has offered pathetic emissions cuts of 4 percent by 2020.

At Cancun, there was no agreement on a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s sole legally binding climate agreement. Its first term expires in 2012. The Protocol mandates the North to accept quantified emission cuts, and to financially support Southern climate-related actions and low-carbon technology development. Instead of accepting a clear North-South differentiation, the CA create a single instrument, paving the way for abolishing the Protocol—stridently demanded first by Japan, and then by others. (The US never signed the Protocol.)

Many Northern countries have failed even to meet their modest emissions-reduction targets (5.2 percent on average) under Kyoto’s first term. Seventeen of the 41 have actually increased their emissions—some by 40 and 100 percent. Yet, they aren’t penalised for this gross irresponsibility. The global recession has strengthened their reluctance to invest funds in reducing emissions.

The CA breaks the firewall agreed in 2007 between the North’s obligations and the South’s “actions” and impose an international regime of scrutiny for the South, which must report its emissions and climate-related actions biennially.

The CA fails to deliver on or skirts these key issues. However, there’s limited progress in adaptation to climate change, and establishing a Green Climate Fund with $100 billion by 2020. But this is only a fraction of the $500-1,000 billion needed annually to stabilise the climate. The Fund is a distant objective. Who pays the money and how it will be channelled is unclear. The North remains loath to lose control over how the South spends climate-related funds.

The CA will greatly boost carbon trading—through REDD and inclusion of Carbon Capture and Storage, a dubious technology, under the so-called Clean Development Mechanism. The CDM allows Southern “green” projects to earn carbon credits. The North can buy credits and evade reducing its own emissions.

The CDM is conceptually flawed. Using market mechanisms to combat climate change is irrational to start with. Even former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern admits that climate change represents history’s greatest market failure.

The CDM gives huge emissions allowances to Northern corporations and promotes inappropriate business-as-usual Southern projects (e.g. making a refrigerant gas—only to burn it to earn credits). This defeats the purpose of reducing emissions. Carbon trading is also highly speculative, akin to sub-prime bank lending. It’s dominated by futures trading in credits which may never materialise.

The Cancun Agreements are bad for the world, unfair to the South’s vulnerable people, and soft on the North. Of the promised $30 billion “fast track” finance by 2012, the North has mobilised only $4.5 billion. Much Northern assistance will be private-sector and involve loans or equity. Some of it will merely recycle existing aid flows.

Only Bolivia had the courage to oppose the CA. Why did India sign them in violation of its own “non-negotiables”: a second term for the Kyoto Protocol, accelerated support for the South, and technology transfer without IPR restrictions?

The only explanation is, a combination of external pressure, and New Delhi’s shrewd calculation that the Agreements impose relatively light obligations on India—although they place even lighter ones on the North. This cynical approach fits the worst-case scenario discussed in my 2009 book, An India That Can Say Yes: A Climate-Responsible Development Agenda for Copenhagen and Beyond.

India’s policy-makers refuse any caps on the country’s emissions under the pretext of “development”. Actually, they want to promote elite consumption. That’s why they signed a deal that’s bad for the world, and eventually, for India too—thus shooting themselves in the foot.