Climate change is in danger of becoming the poor relation at the G8 summit. It has no pop icons throwing gala concerts or summoning up a fleet of small boats to transport protesters across the Channel.
By contrast, Make Poverty History is proving the most popular mass movement of the year. The city of Edinburgh has been placed in a state of fear and alarm by Bob Geldof’s summons to a million people to march on it.
Margo MacDonald, a member of the Scottish Parliament, cut to the heart of the global poverty debate by demanding to know where they are all going to find a toilet, which spectacularly missed the point of a demonstration in support of decent drainage for the people of Africa, many of whom have none all year round.
It should be a comfort to anyone on the left that collective protest is alive and well, and that many of the public are so moved by poverty that they want to march and be counted. But it is perplexing that there is not a similar uprising to demand action to avert a man-made environmental disaster that threatens extinction to many extant life-forms.
It is all the more perplexing because climate change will visit on the poor of the world a level of destitution and hunger that will swamp any progress on debt secured at Glen-eagles. Africa will suffer both more frequent droughts and more serious floods. The projected increase in global temperatures within the lifetime of the younger protesters at Live 8 could increase crop failure in Southern Africa by half. By the centenary in 2036 of Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro, there will be no snow left on its summit.
Political leaders mostly handle this awesome problem by accepting it exists and then failing to follow through the implications for public policy. This week, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative opposition, Michael Howard, wrote in The Guardian that climate change is one of mankind’s greatest challenges. But barely a month ago during the British election campaign, he presented a Conservative manifesto that did not once mention climate change or propose a single measure to halt it.
If we want to halt global warming, we cannot leave the volume of carbon emissions to be the plaything of the free market. Climate change is a classic case where leaving every decision to be taken by what makes market sense for every individual results in an outcome that is potential suicidal for the collective.
The harsh reality is that we do not have long to get climate change under control. The British government convened an international conference of scientists earlier this year that produced alarming evidence that we may have less time than we thought to stabilise climate change. If we do not cut carbon emissions over the next decade, then the process may become irreversible.
The Amazon rainforest may collapse into savannah and remove one of the carbon sinks. The increased acidity of the oceans may reduce their capacity to absorb half the carbon in the atmosphere. Once past these tipping points, the world will be confronted with runaway global warming.
All of which should give added urgency to the debate on climate change at the G8 summit. But you would search in vain for any hint of urgency over climate change in United States President George W Bush’s responses at his press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It is a tragedy that at this moment in history the world has to negotiate with a US administration that is saturated in US oil interests. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, came straight from the chief executive’s chair at Halliburton, an oil construction company, and Bush’s election war chest had funds from Texan oil companies.
The American people repeatedly prove themselves more progressive than the alliance at the top between their political leaders and corporate interests, and a dozen states have now adopted their own strategies to cut carbon emissions. But the harsh arithmetic remains that the total cut in greenhouse gases under Kyoto by the rest of the world is entirely undone by the equal increase in emissions by the US.
The test of success of the G8 summit on climate change is whether Bush is compelled to sign up to conclusions that accept there is a pressing problem and that the US must be part of the solution to it.
It is a tribute to Blair’s confidence that against the resistance of Washington he persisted in making climate change one of the two top agenda items for his G8 presidency. He now needs to be able to show that the peoples of the G8 countries demand action if he is to get Bush to open his eyes to the urgency of the problem.
Any retired pop star out there willing to launch a march to save the planet before it is converted into a pressure cooker? — Â