Day 2: Big carbon, and crunch time

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 | uncategorized

8 Dec

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

The tick… tick… tick-tick-tick-tick…tick… tick… of the central heating woke me at some unholy hour this morning.

I reached for my cellphone in the gloomy artificial light that cut through the blinds from the street outside: 2:34am glared up at me from the phone’s screen.

“Blast.”

But in the three hours of sleeplessness that followed, I lay under the thin duvet listening to the building creak and clatter its way towards the frigid Nordic dawn, and I pondered the very point that this old building was making, inadvertently or not: that for modern society to have thrived as such high latitudes, in such cold places, as those seen in parts of northern Europe, Asia, the US and Canada, you need loads of energy.

And this is one of the points that’s the crux of the talks here in Copenhagen – that the developed world economies have had unfettered access to the atmospheric “landfill” where they have dumped their gaseous waste for the past 250 years. They’ve built their economies into modern giants, based on the fact that they haven’t had to pay anyone to remove this waste for them. The atmosphere has done that free and gratis.

Now developing countries want equal and fair access to throw their own emissions up into the atmospheric waste dump, so they can get their own economies on a par with their wealthier counterparts.

But now the atmospheric “landfill” is almost full – so the globe’s countries are negotiating who gets access to the remaining bit of dumping space. Developing countries say it’s only fair that they have access to that space, because they need to lift their people out of poverty. But rich countries don’t want their economies to collapse as they make the painfully slow switch to a low-carbon economy.

Meanwhile the small island states, like Tuvalu and the Maldives, and the world’s least developed countries, say that these talks aren’t about bickering over who gets to use that last bit of landfill, it’s about their very survival.

Because if global warming continues as it is, some of these countries may not survive the new, harsher climate regime and rising sea levels which that atmospheric pollution will bring. For countries like Tuvalu, it might already be too late. That realisation, in itself, is enough to drive sleep from the room.

Scorched

Rational Writing by Leonie Joubert