Caroline Calais -- Democracy in Americas

Few results in Poznan - fight against climate change starts at home

by Dallas Environmental Policy Examiner: Caroline Calais

. It’s no surprise. With the U.S administration a lame duck, few results were bond to come out of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Poznan. Countries now set their hopes on next year’s Copenhagen conference. Still, the Poznan meeting was not a total loss. The conference agreed to a 2009 work program and a series of decisions will help to accelerate the negotiations in finding a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol.

“Poznan has proved a useful staging post on the way to the Copenhagen conference a year from now, when the world must conclude an ambiguous new global climate agreement for the post-2012 period”, European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said. “The growing consensus over the past 10 days, including on developing a shared vision for the new global agreement is encouraging, but there is still a huge amount of work ahead of us to reach satisfactory agreement in Copenhagen”.

The most crucial stepping stone is to set a target for emission reduction.

“ The latest science is telling us that developed countries as a group must reduce emissions 30% by 2020 to prevent climate change from reaching dangerous proportions”, Stavros Dimas said. “The EU is committed to a 30% cut if other developed countries commit to comparable reductions under the Copenhagen agreement.

But with most countries slow to accept environmental responsibility it might be a tough going. Economic theory makes a correlation between GDP and pollution. When a country has low GDP it doesn’t pollute so much, but pollution increases with industrialization and GDP growth. It is first when a country has high GDP it spends its resources to clean the air. The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) calculates, for example, that China accounts for 13% of world carbon emissions, ranking second behind the United States. China’s world pollution is expected to increase to 19% by 2015.

And China has, since it started to reform its economy in 1978, averaged about 9.4 percent of annual GDP growth, and today accounts for four percent of the world economy. Mr. Zheng Bijian, chair of the China Reform Forum, also points out that China’s foreign trade worth $ 20.6 billion is the third national total in the world. (“China’s peaceful rise to great power status”, Foreign Affairs 2005).

Larry Schweiger, President and CEO of National Wildlife Federation said: “Many countries are showing a greater commitment to stop dangerous climate change, but success also depends on the U.S rejoining global climate negotiations and for us to do our fair chair by dramatically cutting global warming pollution at home”.