In just over a month, the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen will attempt to strike a balance between developing nations who need to reduce their use of carbon, and industrialized nations who have already deforested their own nations and perpetrated many of the environmental mistakes which they are seeking to prevent their poorer counterparts from repeating. In theory, with our largely intact rainforest, Guyana ought to be well placed to strike a deal with the Europeans and Americans. Certainly, when seen within the context of US and NATO spending in places like Afghanistan and Iraq the level of compensation being asked for the protection of our entire forest is extremely modest. But nobody with any experience in these matters expects the horse-trading in Copenhagen to be straightforward.
International conferences are inevitable if global climate change is to be managed coherently but they are also events at which developed countries are used to getting their way. Rather than transfer even small amounts of money to poorer countries with standing forests – even if this provides carbon offsets at a fraction of current market rates – industrialized nations will almost certainly prefer to argue for expensive and unproven carbon capture techniques which would boost their own economies, purely on the basis of self-interest. Whatever the high-minded rhetoric, the fiction that every member of the conference is working together towards similar, rational, market-driven solutions, will end as soon as the economic cost of serious preventive measures runs counter to the rather narrow interests of the G20 economies.
The technicalities of cap and trade agreements, and the politics of evaluating forests — why US $1 a tree? Why not $5, or $15?) — are in themselves fascinating and ought to be widely debated, but it is easy to lose sight of the larger consequences of global climate change when focusing on these details. In fact, one of the central difficulties with the conference will be that although every participant can agree on the dangers of unchecked climate change – at least on paper – for practical reasons, each nation will approach solutions with a different level of urgency. Bangladesh, which regularly experiences catastrophic flooding, cannot possibly entertain a dispassionate and rational view of mitigation measures that will take decades to work, but a sheltered and prosperous European country may see mid-term mitigation as perfectly reasonable.
Forty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock put forward what is known as the Gaia hypothesis: the idea that the collective presence of life on earth functions as a self-regulating system and impartially checks processes which threaten to destroy its balance. In other words, life as a whole – not just human life – acts in concert to maintain its environment. For three and a half billion years, this collective force has kept earth’s temperature between 10 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius. As Lovelock explains, if the planet’s temperature had “depended only on the abiological constraints set by the sun’s output and the heat balance of the Earth’s atmosphere and surface, then . . . all life would have been eliminated.” Since its introduction the Gaia hypothesis has been so heavily researched and documented that it is now a widely embraced scientific theory. Most of the assumptions of modern environmental science, for instance are contained in its original conjectures.
In our time, however, man-made climate change may have put the entire system out of balance, perhaps irretrievably, at least by us. Some scientists fear that the earth may already have passed what is sometimes called her “carrying capacity” and that the increasingly damaging effects of climate change are simply the system’s initial efforts to push back. Recently, Mr. Lovelock, using computer models of changes in the atmosphere, has concluded that the planet is poised for a very rapid temperature increase up to four times larger than previous predictions (from 15 to 24 degrees Celsius). Should this happen in the next few years or decades it will open the door to the sort of environmental Armageddon that Hollywood has been selling for years. Given the potential seriousness of that threat, our collective bureaucratic dithering over genuine mitigation efforts seems unconscionable. Rome may not yet be burning, but this is no time for fiddling.