“Humanity faces a profound emergency,” says The Guardian, along with 55 other newspapers in 45 countries. Each published a common editorial urging leaders of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen to rise to the challenge of climate change.
Even the recent controversy over leaked emails “failed to dent the mass of evidence” on which predictions of global warming are based. “The facts are clear.” Unless global emissions peak and begin falling within the next five to ten years, temperatures will rise more than 2˚C. Continents will be parched, millions displaced and whole nations drowned by the sea. Copenhagen won’t produce a “fully polished treaty”, but the politicians can agree the essential elements of a deal, at the heart of which must be a “settlement between the rich and developing worlds” on how the burden will be divided.
The trouble is, it is precisely this sort of “emission-fest” that makes one question the sincerity of our politicians, says Dominic Lawson in The Independent. Take Gordon Brown, who has recently been fulminating at so-called climate change ‘flat-earthers’. The same man insisted on a third runway at Heathrow, while his administration released the Lockerbie bomber to smooth approval of a vast oilfield exploration contract for BP in Libya. As for the carbon-trading schemes that will supposedly solve the problem, they are so flawed they have prompted James Hansen, America’s “most strident advocate of the need to reduce carbon emissions”, to announce that he wanted Copenhagen to fail.
Except I don’t want it to fail, says Hansen in The New York Times. It’s not too late to “trade cap-and-trade for an approach that actually works”. Cap-and-trade (whereby “clean” companies sell carbon credits to “dirty” ones) “merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars”. Instead, we need a ‘fee-and-dividend’ system which rewards every individual action to reduce emissions: high-emission goods would suffer extra fees that would then be distributed as dividends to those consumers making the greenest choices.
Fine, but a few vital numbers have been largely “stuffed away from sight”, says Christopher Booker in The Daily Telegraph. Under last year’s Climate Change Act, Britain is already committed to shelling out £18bn a year (£725 for every household) from now until 2050. And hundreds of billions of dollars will be required to bribe developing countries (who didn’t cause the CO2 problem) into making “token gestures” towards curbing their own emissions – at the very moment when we are accepting targets that will make our own economies progressively much less productive.
Even so, says Lord Stern, author of the eponymous landmark 2006 review on global warming, in The Times, it is far cheaper to act now. This is no time for pessimism, agrees The Independent. China – the world’s biggest carbon emitter – and India are making encouraging gestures. And the US president, Barack Obama, is pledging to cut emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. The world must unite. “The consequences of collective failure to act are frightening to contemplate.”