Two disasters with very different responses

Last week, negotiators from around the world met in Geneva to discuss how to pay for action on climate change. This climate finance meeting, following July’s climate negotiations in Bonn, represents the resumption of a process aimed at finding a solution to the global threat of climate change.

After the debacle of last year’s Copenhagen climate summit, it was hoped that the resumption of talks would see urgent and dramatic progress towards global action. In Bonn however, as Save the Children’s Eliot Whittington reported, a negotiating text of 45 pages spiralled to more than 100 pages, as countries reinserted issues that were dropped from the text in Copenhagen. Discussions over the future of the Kyoto Protocol were also clearly deadlocked.

Overall, there is widespread pessimism that an agreement will be reached in Mexico at the end of the year. Some slow progress on issues like financing institutions and technology transfer cannot dispel an overall feeling that, at this rate, a climate catastrophe will not be averted.

It might be tempting to dismiss the Bonn and Geneva meetings as more of the same in the torturous world of global climate diplomacy. But there is a basic contradiction between attitudes to climate change, and another recent environmental disaster. The lack of progress on climate change contrasts starkly with reactions to BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In many ways, these two environmental disasters are very similar. Oil spills are an acknowledged risk for companies extracting and shipping the stuff in large quantities all over the world. Likewise, the industrial world has known for years that continuing to emit greenhouse gases in huge amounts will exact an environmental price in the form of climate change.

Neither BP nor the industrial world intended to do damage to the environment. Neither was acting illegally when the disasters took place. They were just going about their business. But both the BP oil spill and climate change have undeniably brought damage and suffering to the lives of people who had nothing very much to do with the cause of the disaster.

In both cases – whether it is the people of the Gulf Coast or the poorest communities in Bangladesh – those suffering most from the disasters are not those responsible for them.

However, it is here that similarities between the two environmental disasters begin to diverge. There is a wide acceptance that BP should pay to clear up the Gulf Coast oil spill. It didn’t intend to cause the catastrophe, nor was it solely responsible, but nonetheless it is duty-bound to clear up the mess.

It is also accepted that BP should pay large sums of money in compensation to people whose livelihoods have been affected. Contrast this with the reluctance of rich countries to cut emissions and compensate the world’s poorest for climate change.

The two disasters are also on completely different scales. The full damage and cost of the BP spill will not be known for a while. We know, however, that 11 people were tragically killed in the original explosion, the livelihoods of millions will be affected and BP has put $20 billion in trust for compensation, reflecting estimates that the total cost of the damage will run into the tens of billions.

Climate change, on the other hand, is currently estimated to be responsible for approximately 300,000 deaths every year – 85 per cent of which are likely to be children under five living in poverty.

With changing weather patterns, these deaths are being caused mainly by an associated increase in conditions that are already among the biggest killers of children: malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. Recently, the World Bank upped its estimate of the cost to poor countries of adapting to climate change, to between $70bn to $100bn every year until 2050, giving a total cost that could run into the trillions.

Industrialised countries have already pledged to find funds to help developing countries. But initial pledges of money look like reallocated aid funds – only dealing with climate change by taking away from our efforts to help tackle poverty. Industrialised countries need to up their game quickly and find funds to help.

Of course, big developing countries like China, South Africa and India are also increasingly adding to the global sources of pollution. But climate change is a cumulative problem.

The majority of greenhouse emissions currently in the atmosphere and affecting today’s climate are down to rich countries that have been industrialised for over a century. It would be strange for those governments to avoid accountability for environmental destruction in a way that would be considered irresponsible and wrong if perpetrated by a commercial company.

Climate change is not going to end any time soon. With luck, Deepwater Horizon will remain shut off, and will not leak any more oil into the Gulf (albeit leaving behind an enormous mess). But the industrial world is still pumping out greenhouse gases at an unprecedented rate and shows no real signs of stopping soon.

There is a strong feeling that progress is being made only in tiny steps, when giant strides are needed. Major negotiations will not be picked up again until October, when governments come together in China, before the big end-of-year summit in Mexico.

When they resume talks, representatives from those countries that have both the most wealth and the greatest responsibility for causing climate change should remember the people of the Gulf Coast. They should consider the outrage that has greeted BP and how much greater it would have been if the oil company had refused to pay for the destruction it had caused.

They should ask themselves whether it is remotely defensible to avoid action, and deny compensation to the world’s poorest, in the face of a much bigger environmental catastrophe.

Tags: BP oil spill, Copenhagen climate summit, Kyoto protocol

• This entry is filed under Climate Change.
• You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
• You can leave a response.