Climate Sans Borders

As the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen scheduled in December approaches, the debate over responsibility for the danger we have created is heating up. The industrialised world is urging developing nations such as China and India to accept limits on carbon-dioxide emission as a pre-condition for their own emissions-reduction plan. Countering such demands, China and India retort that the West, being principally responsible for the build-up of greenhouse gas, should take the first step and cut some slack to the still-poor developing countries. Even now, the Copenhagen negotiations seem to be headed for a stalemate, or at best another unenforceable commitment like the Kyoto protocol. For all their talk of a global threat, politicians find it hard to admit to their fellow countrymen the simple fact that national borders are irrelevant to the climate.

Millions of people living on the Bay of Bengal will be made homeless as the sea level rises. That they never drove a car nor owned a television or had the smallest carbon footprint on earth means nothing. The carbon-innocence of those whose homes may be swept away by fast-melting Himalayan glaciers too would not make any difference. Shoppers in California, who enjoy cheap Chinese-made goods at their local Wal-Mart, did not expect the ‘brown cloud’ of pollution blown across the Pacific by jet stream from China to add to their smog. In the end, the impact of pollution affects all.

A recent study showed that one-third of China’s pollution comes from the production of exports. Instead of focusing on the collective responsibility of both buyers and sellers, the statistics produced only finger-pointing. Chinese officials urged Americans to change their lifestyle and consume less. China’s critics, on the other hand, blamed China for shipping its pollution to the suppliers of components and raw materials. Nobel-laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joined the fray by calling for a carbon tax on Chinese exports.

Krugman argues that “shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a ‘carbon tariff’ that reflects the emissions associated with those goods’ production.” To the riposte that such taxation goes against WTO rules, Krugman says, “Sorry, but the climate-change consequences of Chinese production have to be taken into account.” Precisely where that responsibility lies will be debated in the months leading up to Copenhagen.

Against the backdrop of a debate about who is more to blame for greenhouse emissions, the world remains on an inexorable path of warming. What used to be a permanent ice sheet covering, Greenland is cracking and glaciers have broken up. The Arctic is becoming ice-free in the summer, creating a feedback loop of further warming of dark ice-free water, and accelerating the prospect of rising sea level. Such a rise will, at some point, make the Maldives disappear and devastate the lives of tens of millions of coastal residents from Bangladesh to South-east Asia.

Himalayan and Tibetan glaciers have been shrinking at an alarming rate threatening the livelihood of over a billion people dependent on the major river systems of Asia. These hithertofore slow-motion changes have been accelerated along with fossil-fuel generated economic growth. That acceleration is now being monitored in daily satellite images of the troubled earth. The images along with predictions by scientists have cast dark shadows over decades of economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the developing world and increased comfort for millions of others in the developed world. But, as the environmental cost of the growth comes into focus, governments have engaged in the blame-game.

The US notes China’s emergence in 2008 as the world’s top polluter and calls for capping its emissions urgently. China points to years of western pollution that is responsible for 64 per cent of problems associated with climate change and its own per capita emission of four tonnes compared to the US’s 20 tonnes. It is unquestionably a tough job bordering on political suicide to ask global citizens rather than citizens of specific blameworthy countries to bear hardships now — as a low carbon policy definitely would — in order to prevent some nebulous disaster in the future. But leaders of both the developed and developing world must at some point acknowledge the threat hanging over humanity like Damocles’ sword. The threat of global climate change is not one that can be calculated on a national per capita basis.