For those that have followed the politics of climate change the biggest game in town is the US-China playoff. In the past neither of the two biggest carbon emitters have been willing to commit to any significant reduction scheme in any sort or form (nor the Kyoto Protocol). That may now be changing. An article in the Guardian today reports that senior government leaders met in “the final months of the Bush administration for secret backchannel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change”. Wow, how about that, straight out of left field.

The trouble with climate change is not the science behind it (although some people dispute its existence altogether), but that it is a exceptionally complex collective action problem cross-secting a number of disciplines including natural sciences, political science, economics, and ethics, to name just a few. Climate change is also multi dimensional to other environment problems and cannot just be mitigated through carbon emissions (although that is the most pressing concern). It is this complexity and the ethics behind climate change that has caused a stagnated and plurality of responses to climate change. A lot of recommendations and plans exist to deal with climate change, and we as an industry know that technology can greatly help to mitigate it, but there is no agreed shared solution as of yet.

The reason why ethics is so important in the debate around climate change is because climate change is at heart both an individual and collective problem, and a intra-national, international and inter-generational equity problem. Basically we have to recognise that our own actions and those of our fellow countrymen (all over the world) are causing this problem now and for the future, and unless we do so we will get nowhere. Ethical considerations also concern who needs to do what when because of the unequal levels of development and historical responsibility.

In one way we can understand (the reasons behind it anyways) why the US has been reluctant to commit to any reduction scheme. As the biggest polluter (per capita) the US would have to both lead the way and pay the most for mitigating climate change (which has been a combination no politician has wanted to embrace).

Now, China has long claimed that it has a moral and historic right to reach developed country living standards much in the same way we developed in the last century (ie spitting out carbon uncontrolled and unhampered). To some degree (according to moral philosophers) they have this right if we are looking at equity for present generations on a country to country analysis. But how good is that for the world as a whole and for any future generations?

Coming back to the good news, according to the Guardian the US-China deal “will be serious, will be substantive, and will happen” in the run-up to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December. Let’s hope that both sides have first of all understood that a solution must rest on shared understandings, have read the updated science, embraced the role of technology and are not stuck on Kyoto-era data and solutions, which would do us no good what so ever…

Technorati Tags: climate change

Tags: climate change

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Energy and Environment, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.