Ambassador Nishimura was in good form today:
“We know this is so dangerous, we know we urgently have to act, Japan will never fail to be a front runner but please understand any serious and responsible government cannot make that decision blindfold. … I cannot understand why people encircle us, press us, instead of providing us with the necessary information as to who are coming to join us in combating this huge battle which even the dissapearance of all the Kyoto countries overnight would not solve. Without giving me this information I am scared. Without giving me this info as to who will come to this battle, I cannot aspire for as much change as I would want.”
He was raising the valid point that the Kyoto signatories only account for 30% of global emissions. The pressure he was under was to accept a 2008 target date for the next phase to be agreed so there would be a seamless continuation of Kyoto after 2012.
Going beyond 2008 might make sense in that George Bush would then be out of the White House but the real question is why we will we have to wait until then to see whether the Americans, Chinese and Indians are indeed ready to act.
Few of the other contributions at post 2012 Ad Hoc Working Group generated such heat. The Climate Action Network stuck the boot into the Canadian Government for having abandoned their committment to Kyoto. The Saudi and Russian representatives would make you sick such is the unctuous manner in which they wrap their naked self-interest in ethical spin.
A contact group will now meet over the next few days to discuss the work plan for the group for the next year and whether a statement can be made to let the wider world know the urgency of the problem. The text of that statement will be as good a marker as any as to where this process is going.
Earlier in the day there was an excellent presentation on the ethics of climate change arranged by the Rock Ethics Institute. Their work can be found on http://rockethics.psu.edu/climate/index.htm
Various speakers argued we need to frame the decisions on climate change in an ethical as well as a scientific and economic perspective. That there is now a growing consensus on the ethical princliples that will have be applied to the issue. That it is wrong to wait for others to stop before acting, in the same way it would be wrong to continue robbing a bank just because other people were also robbing it at the same time. That those who have created the problem should pay for the damage done. That this is the crucial human rights and intergenerational justice issue.
The group wants to extend the website as a live forum to analyse the presentations made by different governments to highlight the hidden unethical assumptions that underpin their arguments.
Quote of the day came from Benito Muller, a professor of Philosophy in Oxford who was arguing that a sense of fairness is an innate condition in human beings. To prove the point he recalled that the second thing almost all children learn to communicate after the first words ‘”mama ” or “dada” is to scream “it’s not fair”. Don’t I know.
Great to get a taste of what goes on at these conferences, and what it is like to be there.
Keep up the good work.