Climate change - The political debate

Four days after Typhoon Haiyan (a.k.a. Yolanda) struck eastern Visayas, we watched Mr. Naderev "Yeb" Sano, the Philippine representative to the UN Climate Change talks in Warsaw, Poland, break down in tears as he addressed delegates of the summit. It was a very moving speech, one that elicited applause and sympathy, not only among the delegates but all over the world. But days after that heart-breaking appeal, some countries attending that international conference declined to agree on some of the propositions advanced, which centered on the idea that carbon emitters should compensate for climate change effects.

We wrote about greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, global warming, and climate change. We discussed the devastating effects and the certainty of which these will come, and more importantly, the two courses of actions that we might engage - mitigation and adaptation. Let's examine why there are never-ending political debates in countless international talks in the last two decades, amidst the never-ending cynicism of other sectors about the veracity and certainty of it all. Or whether these are just hoaxes which man crafts for whatever reason.

Both words in the phrase "global warming" are important, the first, more so in determining cause and effect. When we said that the combustion of fossil fuel and the use of electricity, especially those generated by fossil fuel, are the main contributors to the current phenomena, it means the totality of the individual chemical-physical incidences of carbon combustion. Ergo, when we do our count and statistics, we can actually inventory carbon emission by region, by state, and by country, even to statistically compute, carbon emission per capita!

This information is readily available. Search for "list of countries by carbon emissions" in the Internet and you will get a variety of results which are mostly similar to each other. Let's try the Wikipedia list for 2008 and we get the top ten countries as: China, US, Europe, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, Iran, and UK. I think nobody will disagree that this list indicates mainly the dependency on population and state of development. Since the incremental increase in carbon emissions is "anthropogenic" (caused by man in climate change parlance), bigger countries will have a bigger share of the world's emissions.

If we try to go down further to person level, we search for "carbon emissions per capita" and we get the following top 10: Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Netherlands Antilles, Kuwait, Brunei, UAE, Aruba, Bahrain, Luxembourg, and Falkland Islands. Australia and the US are Nos. 11 and 12, respectively. We would not be surprised if they generally represent the top per capita GDP also, or the fact that majority are oil-producing countries. The generalization is that the developed countries are the major emitters of carbon. China and India may argue that they don't belong to the developed category, but their sheer size made them large emitters.

On the other hand, if we search for countries "most likely" or which will probably be most severely affected by climate change, we see a different list, one which is dominated by two characteristics - they're islands or primarily coastal, and/or they're third-world countries. Well, a developed country like Australia maybe on the list, too cause it's a huge island near the Antarctic region, and many other island-based highly developed countries, but the generalization is that those most severely affected belong to the underdeveloped category.

Which poses the question - isn't it the responsibility of countries who dumped more carbon to the atmosphere thereby inducing climate change to help countries who contributed almost nothing, relatively, but which are now, or in the future, threatened by devastation and even annihilation? This is what Philippine representative Yeb Sano was driving at, but which many developed countries hesitated to commit. The debate can run from the socio-economic-political to extreme religio-ethical. That's why there are countless summits and conferences. Of course, the first important one was the one held in Kyoto in December 11, 1997.

In 1992, countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to agree on what they could do to address climate change, and to cope with whatever impacts were, by then, inevitable. In 1997, most countries signed the Kyoto Protocol, which is the international agreement linked to the UN-FCCC, which commits its parties by setting internationally binding emission reduction targets by country, with the first period of commitment set between 2008-2012. To understand the present international discussions on climate change, let's try to review the Kyoto Protocol. (to be continued)