I really don’t know whether to weep or to laugh at the bizarre spectacle of what’s going on at the climate change summit in Copenhagen:
COPENHAGEN — The United States pledged Thursday to help build a $100 billion annual fund by 2020 to help poor countries cope with climate change but said its commitment depends on whether the nations gathered here forge a substantive environmental pact that includes “transparency” on tracking emissions cuts.
Seeking to break through an impasse, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the historic talks must result in an international accord that includes emission reduction commitments from both developed and major developing countries; financial and technological assistance for poor countries; and a way to independently verify the cuts all nations made. Such language is essential to U.S. senators, who have yet to pass climate legislation and would have to ratify any future climate treaty.
Clinton warned that China — which has resisted attempts for international verification of emission cuts and told officials here before Clinton spoke that a global pact seems unlikely — must agree to monitoring if a deal is to be reached.
For some reason the whole thing reminds me of the old Soviet-era quip, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”. If the G77 countries get their way, that’s pretty likely to be the outcome. The developed nations will pretend to contribute to a a fund and the developing nations will pretend to cut emissions.
I don’t which is a more cynical view, thinking that, if the technocrats at this summit truly believed in the urgency of the problem they’ve convened to address, they’d behave differently or thinking that they’d behave in just this way.
Well, there’s always the Montreal Protocol and the actions against ozone depletion, so it’s not as if international environmental efforts are wholly an act of futility. Yes, yes, it’s a massive difference in terms of size and economic effect, but still …
That definitely becomes clear once you read on where Clinton thinks the funding should come from – it’s a maze of unclear commitments, “private-public”, “US possibly 20%”, blah, blah, blah. The “$100 billion” number sounds impressive until you realize the above, and was probably meant to placate some of the Third Worlders who are demanding financial assistance (with no conditions or hard commitment to reduce emissions, which is par for the course on any form of aid) in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Something which, of course, no US or even European government could ever seriously agree to.
On a side-note, it’s always interesting reading to read up on whether the amount of aid given by a country to someone or something on an issue is the same as the amount pledged.