Climate Change's Dead Letters

Photograph by Kotama Bouabane for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Charles Kenny

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place this month in Durban, South Africa. Two things to note: First, climate change shows no sign of abating; second, it’s the 17th meeting. This was also the Seventh Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, the only international agreement that legally binds some countries to agreed reductions in their greenhouse-gas emissions. The flaw in Kyoto is that it binds none of the world’s three largest polluters, which are responsible for nearly half of all emissions. The U.S. never signed the protocol, and India and China were exempted from emissions caps on the grounds that rich countries had done the majority of combusting, excreting, or otherwise expelling the gases causing the atmosphere such heartburn to date.

Remember UN climate meeting No. 15? That was in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, when President Barack Obama and fellow leaders stayed up half the night, seemingly hours away from a binding climate deal covering countries rich and poor. Today we seem not hours but years away from such a deal. The Kyoto Protocol expires next year—and the Durban meeting didn’t even seriously discuss a replacement. You might call this a glacial rate of progress, except we’re going backward (and glaciers are melting quite fast nowadays).

Disappointment at Durban will give environmentalists one more reason to gripe at the state of global leadership. They’ll have a point. The planet’s politicians have missed an opportunity to unite to confront the greatest global challenge of the new century. Yet at the same time, progress against global warming is being made at the individual country and regional level—which is good news, because for the foreseeable future that’s the only approach likely to work.

With the lack of progress on climate change in recent years, some environmentalists have been reduced to pinning their hopes on either the exhaustion of natural resources or the complete collapse of global capitalism to take care of the problem. But neither higher oil prices nor financial crises have significantly slowed the release of greenhouse gases. Because of new fossil fuel discoveries and new technologies that allow their extraction from deep seabeds or out of shale rock, global peak oil extraction won’t arrive until some time after Denver becomes a seaside resort. The global economic slowdown, meanwhile, has brought the silver filigree of temporarily holding down emissions in the developed world (2008 and 2009 actually saw declining greenhouse gas output in the U.S.). But a study released on Dec. 4 by the Global Carbon Project, an association of scientists, found that global emissions rose again in 2010 by 5.9 percent, the largest increase since 2003.

That trend is likely to continue. With China and India—the world’s largest and third-largest emitters—posting 10 percent growth rates last year, even prolonged Western stagnation won’t help the climate all that much. Regardless, a planet-wide halt to the generation of new wealth hardly seems the most sensible approach to tackle global warming.

So what would be? While the international climate negotiators in Durban were busy trying to make the U.S. congressional budget supercommittee look good, a small ray of hope emerged, courtesy of Andreas Schmitter of Oregon State University. In a recent paper in Science, Schmitter suggested that the atmosphere might be a little less sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than previously thought. A doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by 2.3 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit), rather than the previous consensus position of 3 degrees or more. While still an alarming figure, that means we may have slightly more time before Atlanta in summer takes on the charm of an Easy-Bake oven and Venice Beach is renamed Venice Levee. And every little bit counts.

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