LITTLE ROCK — THE OTHER night a friend asked us what we’d written about the Copenhagen conference on climate change, carbon control, environmental technology, the ecological future of Spaceship Earth, cabbages and kings and the 101 other Very Important topics covered by that huge, long-awaited and now suddenly fizzled gabfest.
Last week-it now seems like last year-a flurry of agreements, binding and mostly non-binding, ended the conference not with a bang but with a whimper heard ’round the world. It was the biggest anti-climax since Geraldo the Great Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault to find little more than dust. Any policies coming out of Copenhagen promise to be equally empty.
To sum up the deal made at Copenhagen, the developed world vaguely promised to give the undeveloped one $30 billion over the next three years-plus $100 billion a year after 2020-in exchange for equally nebulous promises not to develop very quickly. As with Obamacare, the theoretical benefits are to come first, then the real pain by some always delayable deadline.
Besides the cocksure confidence the delegates displayed in man’s ability to reset the world’s thermostat, this kind of deal-making in which no one takes the deal made very seriously was the one consistent thread in the tangled web woven at Copenhagen.
There is consolation in the grand fizzle at Copenhagen. For there is something worse than the conference’s failure. And that would have been its success at slowing the world’s economic recovery and so dooming still more in the Third World to the bitter fruits of abject poverty: more malnutrition, more disease, and more chaos and instability in general.
Doing nothing has certain advantages over doing the wrong thing, especially on a grand and confusing scale. Besides, the failure of this lavish conference means the delegates can anticipate still more such elaborate confabs around the world with still more hyped media coverage where they can all preen at public expense.
SO WHAT did we have to say about all this, and the big lead-up to it? Our friend had us stumped. We couldn’t think of a thing we’d said, and certainly nothing of any substance. Maybe because the conference and all the folderol leading up to and away from it were so insubstantial. And our policy here on the editorial page, which we’ve tried to adhere to over the years, is that when we have nothing to say about something, not to say it. We’ve read too many editorials in distinguished journals that, when they have nothing to say, make the grave mistake of saying it. It doesn’t exactly make for fascinating reading.
There were plenty of agreements made at Copenhagen but the major ones were non-binding. Those are the kind of deals that delegates embrace enthusiastically in their speeches but take care not to sign lest their countries be held to their word. They’re the kind of oral agreements that the irrepressible Sam Goldwyn, Hollywood mogul and Mr. Malaprop himself, once described as not worth the paper they’re written on. Or rather not written on.
Almost coincident with the grand conference at Copenhagen a treasure trove of leaked documents appeared out of the very center of global alarmism over climate change, the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University at Norwich, England, which is “widely recognised as one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change,” according to its web site. By now this same outfit is widely recognized as a center for the suppression of dissenting views about the causes of global warming. If this is science, what would dogma be?
Conspiracies to suppress scientific dissent scarcely ended with Galileo’s trial, but at least the church eventually repented and begged pardon. There is little if any sign that the wannabe Al Gores at East Anglia, more politicians than scientists, have been chastened by what’s come to be known as Climategate. Instead, they have adopted a variation of the Dan Rather defense: falsified maybe but accurate.
Barack Obama’s appearance at the last minute was the final, flashy touch at Copenhagen as he made much ado about much of nothing. The president hasn’t demonstrated his diplomatic finesse so convincingly since he went to the same city not long ago to not get the Olympics for Chicago. Which may have been a blessing in disguise, too. (The traffic in the Loop is already bad enough.) NATURALLY the president and his handlers came back from Copenhagen declaring a great victory-carbon control in our time! But surely even they didn’t believe it. Certainly the Europeans didn’t. As soon as the Grand Conference concluded, the market for carbon-control permits on the European continent dropped dramatically, as if investors were confirming that the countries represented at Copenhagen weren’t serious about controlling emissions. And no poll is more reliable than the market, where people put their money where their opinions are. It’s a great test of sincerity.
To quote the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “The failure of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen to produce a strong, binding agreement to cut carbon-dioxide emissions sowed gloom in European carbon markets Monday, with prices for carbon-emissions permits falling more than 8 percent.” Following the lead of the Chinese and Americans,the Europeans didn’t sign on to further reduce their own carbon emissions. Nothing fails like failure. Or is more contagious.
Despite the spin put out by White House about what a great success Copenhagen had been, other sources were more candid. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, and his secretary for climate change (yes, there is such a position in the British cabinet) blamed the way the conference was organized for its failure.
To quote Mr. Brown: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.’’
This is not the kind of statement politicians issue at the end of a successful conference. This is the kind of statement politicians issue when they’re searching for somebody else-the little fellow, the United Nations, fate, their stars-to blame for their own failure.
The final accord at Copenhagen didn’t specify, not in writing, how much big countries like the United States and mainland China are now supposed to reduce their carbon emissions. Nor did the conference decide just how much all the other countries were going to sacrifice in order to clean up the world’s climate. Just about the only thing the delegates could agree on was to jet off to the next world climate-change conference, which is already scheduled for Mexico City, the one sure effect of which will be to add still more carbon to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Editorial, Pages 58 on 12/27/2009