A matter of fact
If there’s one thing that’s clear about the UN Climate Change Summit, it’s that nothing is clear. As 110 heads of state start packing their bags ready to travel to Copenhagen for the last 24 hours of negotiations at the end of the week, there is the customary split between rich and poor countries.The proposed agreement aims to set the limit of global temperature rise to 2C, and set the amount of money pledged to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. But many countries don’t want to be pressurised into signing an agreement by the end of the week deadline.
It’s worth speculating on whether a target is wrong. Not the proposed temperature target. Nor the target of billions to spend on adaptation. But the entire focus of the conference on reaching a fixed agreement.
The facts about climate change and global warming are hard to pin down. We know the planet is getting warmer, and it’s fairly clear that human interference has played some part in that. We also know that many parts of the world will suffer catastrophically. But the nature of the problem (and because it’s a problem with nature) means it’s impossible to state precisely by how much temperatures will rise over a given period, what exactly the sources of that temperature rise are, and where, when and how large those catastrophes will be.
If we did have this information as unequivocal scientific fact, then undoubtedly the UN summit would have been a completely different conference. The firmer the facts, the less room there is for disagreement.
The absence of concrete facts means that everything is open to interpretation – which can be shaped in some way to suit just about any agenda. That’s what’s been happened in Copenhagen over the past week, and that’s what will continue to happen this week. Wealthier countries such as the US and EU will pushed for the proposed 2C limit; many of the developing countries want a maximum of 1.5C, and some African countries say they might refuse even to take part in these final negotiations because they don’t want to be pushed into a deal they believe won’t help them. And then there’s the scale of financial help to consider – how much, who pays, and where it goes. The aim is to try and negotiate an agreement that satisfies all of these agendas without any party feeling as if it’s been over-compromised.
But is it necessarily a bad thing if an agreement is not signed? Will the summit have been a failure? Or will it be a failure if an agreement is signed?
The other issue to consider is that of responsibility. The fact that there are representatives of so many countries taking part in talks in Copenhagen runs the risk of distancing the responsibility of the climate problem from each of us. It’s all-too-easy to think that because it’s a global problem it’s a national problem – one our governments should be solving for us. All too easy to wait until advice is issued, or legislation is passed, before any of us takes action minimise our use of energy and resources. It’s easy to blame multinational industries and specific countries for warming the planet, but who buys the things they manufacture? Who uses the energy they produce? Is the solution to global warming and climate change the responsibility of our governments, or each of us as individuals?
Is there any reasons why the UN summit should be any different. What’s the better outcome: the signing of a 1.5C or 2C agreement? Or for each and every country to do what we all need to do: make a genuine commitment to – first of all acknowledging there is an issue of global warming, and secondly doing everything possible to cure it as quickly as possible.
Ideally it shouldn’t matter whether an agreement is reached between countries or not in Copenhagen. A ‘country’ is not an abstract concept, it is a place populated by people. Isn’t this one of those very rare occasions when we all have the power to make a difference?
We’ve been using Google Wave as our debating environment. This is an open source package that’s free to use for anyone with access to a computer connected to the Internet. We have more than 1000 young people from more than 100 countries signed up to use it to debate climate change. Many are from the world’s poorest countries, some have come from circumstances it’s difficult to imagine surviving in. Twenty years ago there is no way many of these voices could, or would have been heard.
It is all too easy to take the Internet, and tools such as social networking for granted, and forget how amazing it is and what a social revolution it has created. For example – through our GYP debates, people are gaining first-hand accounts about exactly what climate change means to named individuals around the world. Ultimately, this kind of technology could by more effective in driving home the message about reducing global warming that any decision reached in Copenhagen.