Beyond that climate change conference

Opinion
Saturday, December 26th 2009

As was expected by many the much-heralded Copenhagen summit on climate change has essentially achieved no more than an agreement to try to come to an agreement of some kind sometime, hopefully in 2010 or certainly in the not-too-distant future.

Countries inevitably seek their interests and when it got down to the wire. The two major polluters, the United States of America and China, along with the European Union and Brazil, South Africa and India all simply dug their heels in holding out for their respective interests or positions, arrived at a non-binding consensus and simply agreed to consider talking. There was no binding agreement nor does anyone expect such an agreement in 2010.

The rest of the almost 192 countries were simply given ringside seats amongst the major players notwithstanding the Port of Spain Consensus on Climate Change that supposedly represented the wishes of about one-third of the planet’s human population.

Some of the critical issues determining the outcome obviously centred around the quanta of the respective cuts and not surprisingly the matter of verification, given China’s system of government. In spite of projecting itself as being innovative and moving to green technologies, China continues to fuel its economic growth with imported oil and gas and by exploiting its extensive deposits of coal in electricity generation. China, like every other country, was simply seeking its interests.

It is all very well for Prime Minister Patrick Manning to go to Copenhagen, glowing with confidence after having hosted two major summits at great cost and having come in for much praise from participants. But both summits were largely rituals that could never have had any significant influence on the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, given the deep political divisions of the countries of the Americas and the considerable political diversity of the Commonwealth countries and the varying sizes of their respective populations.

Even as CHOGM was in full session China and India were already in discussions about Copenhagen and their respective positions. Nevertheless Mr Manning did have a moot point made at the UN General Assembly that he repeated there, that absolute emissions and not the per capita formulation be employed in determining permissible levels of emissions.

But this argument has now in a way come back to haunt him and no amount of spin will gainsay the reality of total size of population giving T&T a seat at the centre of the action. With our 1.3 million or about 0.02 per cent of the world’s population we could only be spectators in the back row of the arena as the population giants circled each other searching for openings.

No amount of rhetoric about the future of the world being determined in Port of Spain or appeals for ’brotherly love’ could ever change the harsh reality of geopolitics.

Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161574431