The Copenhagen treaty isn't just about cutting CO2 emissions through greater reliance on power sources such as wind. It's also openly about transferring billions to the developing world.
For a global gathering ostensibly designed to harness international ingenuity to arrest global warming, the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference at least has a fitting name. The website advertising UNCC seems to fit the bill, too, with the requisite photos of smokestacks, parched landscapes and natural disasters juxtaposed with wind turbines and adorable penguins.
All the more odd, then, that the draft treaty being proposed for the December meeting devotes roughly as much of its text to new foreign aid programs as it does to a plan to reduce greenhouse gases.
"we will lose all control over our sovereignty and resource base in a matter of years."Click for Copenhagen Treaty
The Kyoto Protocol -- which expires in 2012, and which Copenhagen is intended to replace -- was in some corners accused of being a covert wealth-transfer plot, since it required rich nations, unable to reach difficult targets, to buy carbon indulgences from poorer ones. "A socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations" was Stephen Harper's assessment, long before he became Prime Minister.
With Copenhagen, however, there is no hidden agenda: Its authors say transferring wealth is exactly what they aim to do. Though its draft form is a menu of optional language and policies intended to be narrowed in the lead-up to the conference, and at the conference itself, the spirit of the document is unmistakable. It proposes in plain language an arrangement that will see nations such as Canada guarantee to send billions of dollars every year for decades to the developing world as payment of a "climate debt" owed for our long history of emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There is, of course, some talk of emission-reduction targets, maximum carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, limiting global temperature increases, and plans to adapt to inevitable climate shifts, with most of the details remaining to be hammered out. But as much as anything else, the Copenhagen treaty calls for the payment by rich countries of what can probably best be described as climate reparations.
This may be what Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, alluded to last month when he doused expectations that Copenhagen would produce a "comprehensive" international climate treaty. It would be "impossible to craft and draft" a detailed plan to effectively combat climate change in time for December. "That is not possible. But it is also not necessary," Mr. De Boer said. "I think what Copenhagen has to achieve is a basic political understanding."
These are some of the understandings proposed in the treaty's current working version: Industrialized countries should compensate developing nations for not just the cost of preventing and adapting to climate change, but for "lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity" triggered by it; industrialized countries are to commit "at least 0.7%" of their annual GDP, above and beyond existing foreign aid commitments, to compensate the developing world for lost dignity and other distress (in Canada's case, roughly $10-billion a year, based on current GDP levels, on top of the $4-billion already spent on foreign aid); and that the money will be deliverable to the United Nations, which will be in charge of handing it all out. "By 2020," the treaty insists "the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [either] at least US$67-billion [or] in the range of US$70-to US$140-billion" every year. If Ottawa signs on to Copenhagen, the size of our resource-based export economy means Canada may pay more dearly for the UN's latest climate-change arrangement than almost any other country on the planet. And in the end, because it may only shift carbon-intensive production from cleaner countries to less-efficient ones, the entire exercise may do very little to limit emissions.
"The best thing we can do for the planet is get this Copenhagen process over with as soon as possible so that we can move on to real action," says Aldyen Donnelly, president of the Vancouver-based Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium, an industry association aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. If Canada does sign the treaty, she warns, we "will lose all control over our sovereignty and resource base in a matter of years."
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