Can politics save the world from climate threats?
- Source: Global Times
- [01:05 September 21 2009]
- Comments
By Tian Wei
The origins of climate change theory dates back to as early as 1904, when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius investigated the effect that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would have on global climate.
His discoveries were largely ignored, however, until 50 years later when Roger Revelle, a geophysicist from the US, picked it up and demonstrated that carbon dioxide levels in the air had increased as a result of the use of fossil fuels.
However, all these pieces of scientifi c evidence for climate change meant nothing until Al Gore, a student of Revelle's, became a US Representative and co-sponsored the first Congressional hearings to study the implications of global warming 30 years later.
Finally, in 1997, more than 160 nations met in Kyoto, Japan. They negotiated some binding limitations on greenhouse gases for the developed nations and came up with plans known as the Kyoto Protocol.
Let's do some math. So, it took almost 100 years for a devastating issue discovered by scientists to be finally addressed by politicians. However, once politics were involved, a solution was being put on the table in less than two decades, definitely a fast track, when compared to the former time scale.
There are certainly obvious advantages for politics to be involved but the opposite can be true as well, especially when you also count in the following decade in which the issue of climate change was both delivered and denied, and as a result, debated in both domestic and international politics.
So far, no plan with global commitment has been made, though expectations are high for the coming UN summit on climate change this week and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh days later.
On the one hand, the idea of climate change has reanimated many long-standing debates and its fate has a lot to do with a great number of domestic and international political issues.
The world now is looking at Washington whose withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in early 21st century bogged down the issue of climate change worldwide. Now, there is a change of administration and apparently a change of heart as well, since the Obama administration puts climate change high on its agenda.
If the current debate over healthcare in the US Congress is any indication, getting both the House and the Senate pass a climate change bill this year would be very challenging.
However, without that political commitment from Washington, which until recently was the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, developing countries were reluctant to sign firm agreements. Now both China and India are talking about the well-known Kyoto principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities."
As a result, so many political issues are reignited here: The credibility of the Obama administration, Washington's willingness to lead the world against global challenges not
long after it led the rest of us into the global fi nancial slump, the global issue of power, justice, development and responsibility, and the long-time dividebetween the North and the South, the East and West, just to name a few.
On the other hand, after trying everything, politics seem to be the only powerful tool the world has on hand to pin down actions against global warming by convincingat least two kinds of people:The ideologues who have a knee-jerk negative reaction to any kind of environmental regulation or, for that matter, any kind of government regulation, and those people who perceive that their economic or political interests would be threatened if the country were to address theissue in a substantive way, such as the representatives of certain industry companies and industry sectors.
In less than three months, 120 countries will convene in Copenhagen for action on a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Before that, the world will have a preview of the political will as early as this week.
Tian Wei is the host of “Dialogue” on CCTV's English Channel, and the main anchor of CCTV's special coverage of important domestic and international events. Previously, Tian worked in Washington D.C. as a correspondent, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her blog is http://blog.cctv.com/html/09/960109.html. Reach her at tianwei.gt@gmail.com
