EDITORIAL
Beyond Durban
Published: December 16, 2011
Startling new evidence that global carbon dioxide emissions are rising faster than ever did little to increase the urgency of the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, which concluded earlier this week. Once again, the world’s negotiators kicked the can down the road.Even as delegates from nearly 200 countries were meeting, theGlobal Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists, reported that emissions from carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, the main greenhouse gas, had jumped 5.9 percent in 2010, the sharpest one-year rise on record. The report also said that carbon emissions cumulatively had risen by an astonishing 49 percent since 1990, higher than any previous estimate.
Nobody had expected great progress from Durban, the 17th in a series of habitually quarrelsome and mostly unproductive gatherings since the same countries met in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro under the auspices of the United Nations and agreed to address the gradual warming of the earth.
Yet the underwhelming response to the genuinely bad news in the new report shows again how far world leaders are from making the hard decisions necessary to control the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. And it left them further than ever from achieving their stated goal of keeping average global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — a commonly accepted threshold beyond which the planet’s climate patterns could be seriously destabilized.
There were a few modest successes. One was an agreement to set up a “green fund” to help poor nations deal with climate change and reduce deforestation, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. More important, with the United States applying much of the pressure, China and India consented to participate in any future agreement limiting emissions and play by the same rules as everyone else. Those two nations are huge producers of greenhouse gases and, until now, have disclaimed responsibility for reducing them. The latest figures show that China and India each had emission increases of about 10 percent since 2009. Since 1990, China’s emissions have tripled; India’s nearly so.
Along with all other developing countries, China and India refused to sign on to the legally binding reduction targets agreed to by industrialized nations at the Kyoto conference in 1997. This time they agreed in principle to work toward a new international agreement “applicable to all parties.” The negotiators said they hoped to have such a pact in place by 2015, but, even if that miracle occurred, ratification by member nations would not occur until 2020 at the earliest.
The question now is what to do about rising emissions in the next decade. Though Durban has kept the collective process alive, the work of actually cutting emissions will fall to individual nations, especially the big emitters, to take the initiative. In America, the Obama administration has proposed huge increases in automobile efficiency, as well as tough clean air regulations that will mothball a lot of coal-fired power plants. Additional progress may occur in states like California with ambitious programs to encourage energy efficiency and alternative fuels.
As for China, one can only hope that its dreadful pollution problems will drive it to new technologies and cleaner fuels, and that other nations will find it in their interest to do the same. What the latest data tell us is that the atmosphere cannot keep waiting for a grand bargain.
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