Environmental horse trading

It should come as no surprise to anyone that horse trading over a would-be climate deal in Copenhagen will go on till practically the very end, with all parties keeping their cards very much close to their chest.

This does or should not preclude countries - ours included - from setting out their individual position as the UK has done for the global climate change negotiations.

To prepare for the future the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs even published new detailed information by the Met. Office on how climate change could affect the UK. Such a study in Malta would surely be welcome by one and all when we know that there are some highly-qualified people at our end too.

While the horse trading goes on, many countries are helping everyone, whether as individuals, communities or businesses, to play their part.

Can we say the same for Malta now that the climate change mitigation document has been approved by Parliament unanimously without even the need to take a formal vote?

On Europe's part, its attempt to reassert its international leadership in the fight against global warming by offering to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95 per cent by 2050 and by 30 per cent by 2020 is welcome indeed. Have we as applicants for Annex 1 status tried to figure out how that can impact on us locally? But even here there is a caveat. The EU commitment is qualified. It is bound to one big important if. If a climate change pact is sealed in Copenhagen between December 7-18!

The EU still has to settle disputes over its own carbon trading scheme and how the developing world will be paid to cope with the impacts of global warming. We will also have to see whether such funds will be pilfered from existing aid budgets.

So far, the EU has even failed to agree on a funding package for developing countries or, rather, to be more precise, on how much the EU itself will contribute and how to split the bill. As someone put it, the politicians were the only winners in this deal in the sense that each national leader gets to go home and report victory to their domestic audiences.

Where we also come into play is both regarding the aviation sector and our ship registry. Aviation would have to cut its emissions by 10 per cent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels and shipping by 20 per cent. In this case, agreement seems to have been reached already. Lord Stern feels very strongly on this issue since he estimates that international shipping and aviation could further reduce the global total by at least half a billion tonnes.

It comes as welcome news that India and China signed a major agreement on combating climate change. Some might easily dismiss them as major emitters but they are also most vulnerable to climate change, particularly since both happen to be in the process of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. While some have shown concern about these would-be regional pacts others have considered them both productive and smart moves.

With a likely failure of the Copenhagen summit still more than a remote possibility, it is pointless stating that there should or will be no Plan B. Many are drawing up such contingency plans, not only to gain leverage when going into Copenhagen but also to "show the world they have other options if the global talks break down".

Obviously, if a multilateral agreement fails, bilateral and regional accords will follow.

Although doom-laden scenarios are sometimes taken with a pinch of salt, it is nothing but sheer realpolitik when the World Wide Fund for Nature recently concluded, through an analysis by Climate Risk, a leading consultancy, that, beyond 2014, the upper limits of industrial growth rates will make it impossible for market economies to lower emissions enough to limit the worst impacts of global warming.

We might all talk of the directional shift towards clean technology but reality dictates that clean industry sectors can only expand so far, so quickly. Waiting until later than 2014 can prove to be cataclysmic indeed!

Although developing countries have been at the receiving end of much criticism, one still has to admit that many of them have already drawn up detailed plans for making the transition to a low-carbon economy, in a more effective, efficient and focused manner than bigger and far more advanced countries.

Any assistance to these countries must be over and above current commitments on ODA - official development assistance. I was intrigued to read the other day that even a pro-government economist admitted in his regular column in this newspaper that our shift to renewables has been non-existent and that the economics of climate change have been treated lightly so far. I think that not only should we have top-notch economists modelling collaborative action but also using such modelling in relation to our own climate change mitigation policies. The econometric ground of such models should make it better for us to be able to represent the behaviour in our own energy-economy systems.

In my opinion the major fault line will not only be that of climate finance but also as to who will pay to protect the poorest countries that will bear the brunt of climate change.

To conclude, here are some interesting comparisons between the two emitter, US/China, that a Greenpeace briefing drew up last month. In China, CO2 emissions per capita are 4.6t while they stand at 19.1t in the US. Private cars per 1,000 people stand at 17 and 445 respectively. Regarding investments in green recovery, in China green measures as a percentage of total stimulus stand at 34 per cent while green measures in the US stand at 12 per cent.

On renewable, the Chinese share should go up to 10 per cent by 2010 and 15 per cent by 2020 while in the US there are no national goals but 28 states have their own renewable targets with variable levels and time tables.

Mr Brincat is a Labour member of Parliament.

brincat.leo@gmail.com, www.leobrincat.com