No real climate deal in Copenhagen, but no end to the threat of one — VOICES for REASON

Thankfully, no binding agreement was reached on the global economic suicide pact that delegates were trying to craft at the climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite President Obama’s personal intervention—which apparently does not have magical agreement-forging powers (who knew?)—all that emerged from the meeting was a toothless “accord” and an agreement to keep talking.

But even though the provisions of the accord are legally non-binding, they do represent small steps toward actual commitments. The accord includes pledges to “enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change,” to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius,” to “cooperate to achieve the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible,” and to provide undeveloped countries with “adequate funding” to adapt to climate change.

This last item was a major theme of the conference. The fact that poor countries are much more vulnerable to severe climate events than industrialized nations is widely recognized, and it is used to argue that developed nations have a duty to dole out massive amounts of foreign aid to help undeveloped countries adapt.

What’s not widely acknowledged is the fact that preindustrial countries have always been vulnerable to drought and hurricanes and heat waves and so on—and they always will be so long as they remain preindustrial. What keeps them at risk is not the possibility of large-scale changes to the climate, but their poverty and lack of technology. Their climate vulnerability is primarily a result of their lack of industrialization and political freedom. The proper solution would be for them to embrace capitalism and then rapidly industrialize, not for the West to dole out billions in climate welfare, which, realistically, will just end up disappearing into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt third-world dictators.

Nevertheless, delegates from Tuvalu to Sudan spent the whole conference staging a foreign aid shakedown, trying to cash in on Western guilt. Walking out of the talks at one point, a group of delegates threatened to scuttle the negotiations unless industrialized countries agreed to massive transfers of global warming guilt money. Said one negotiator from Burkina Faso, “We need to see developed nations give us a plan of what [financial] transfers will come in five years, 10 years and how much over the years ahead, and we aren’t seeing that.” In the end—to mollify these delegates—industrialized nations agreed to pay for a climate adaptation fund that will reach 100 billion dollars a year by 2020. (Yes, that’s billion with a “b.”)

The Copenhagen Accord may not be a binding treaty—fortunately—but it is a small step closer to the climate policy precipice that our leaders are marching us all towards. We need to do everything we can to fight it before the whole world goes over the edge.

Image: flickr/woodleywonderworks