Facing unfairness

What will be achieved at the climate negotiations at Copenhagen in December?

I put this question to a climate-change economist I met yesterday, and his answer was pessimistic: not enough. Despite Obama's good intentions, the American offer on emissions reductions will have been severely watered down by US senators in the pay of industry. And now today comes this piece of cheerful news from the BBC: the Indian government has released a report promising (threatening?) that that country's greenhouse gas emissions will more than triple over the next two decades:

"According to the report, India's greenhouse gas emissions will rise from about 1.2bn tonnes at present to between 4bn and 7bn by 2030.

Releasing the document, India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh said it demonstrated his country's seriousness towards climate change.

At the same time he argued that the world should not worry about the threat posed by India's carbon emissions, since its per-capita emissions would never exceed that of developed countries."

I suspect this is just spin, intended to make sure developed countries come up with some really serious proposals; in which case, Ramesh is perhaps to be congratulated. But if he really does mean it, he is demonstrating an astonishing degree of either ignorance or stupidity. The scientific consensus is that CO2 emissions need to drop to only about 10-20% of their current 35bn tonnes per year by 2050 -- that is, to 7bn tonnes at most -- if we are to have a reasonable chance of averting disaster. That's the same as the upper end of the forecast for India -- but it's for the whole world. In other words, even if all the rest of the world drops its emissions to zero, India on its own is promising to make sure we edge right up to the brink of the precipice.

Let's be very clear. It's not fair. Yes, the developed countries have caused nearly all the problem so far. Yes, they did it by exploiting the rest of the world, who have been kept in poverty as a result. Yes, they should take the lead in reducing emissions and be generous in sharing resources and technology to allow poorer countries to follow.

All true. But the earth's climate system has no notion of "fair". It just reacts to the sum total of emissions, regardless of which countries produce them.

We have a choice. Either we put fairness first, and accept that developing countries have a right to follow the same disastrous course that developed ones already have. And then we all suffer the consequences of climate catastrophe together. That's fair -- though actually, not quite, because countries with hotter climates and more low-lying areas will reap the whirlwind even before the rest of us do.

Or we focus on doing what needs to be done, and while doing our very best to be fair too, we make sure we never regard justice as an excuse for ignoring what the scientific evidence is telling us must happen.