The excitement over next week’s Copenhagen conference recalls for me the furore many years ago when I published an article on the colossal amount of foodgrain that India loses because shockingly bad storage means decomposition, pests and theft. I thought it an illuminating — and damning — expose at a time when the terminological revolution hadn’t reduced famine to scarcity, certainly not in Bihar and Orissa. But some readers objected that the writer worked for an American firm that made massive metal-lined silos that it hoped to export to India.
Forty years on, as presidents, prime ministers and businessmen are rubbing their hands at the prospect of a $3-trillion greenhouse gas emissions market, I am still not sure that a direct interest (the profit motive, in short) invalidated the case for secure storage facilities. But the controversy did uphold the truth of the old Yorkshire saying that where there’s muck, there’s money. So, too, with carbon emissions. Carbon has emerged as a trading commodity, with experts complaining that the current price of $13 a tonne is too low to encourage expensive clean technologies such as wind, solar or nuclear power.
The Third World argues that the First World’s wealth generation caused carbon emissions. Having grown rich on fossil fuels and still belching out vast quantities of carbon dioxide, the US, Europe and Japan should make the first and deepest cuts. The flaw in that righteous stand is that its most vehement proponents are also the worst offenders. China is the second worst with 45,301 million tonnes of carbon emission between 1997 and 2007. India is fifth with 11,870 million tonnes in the same period. The South pollutes the planet because it is poor; the North is rich because it did so.
So, who’s left? If some poor countries don’t emit as much carbon as they are entitled to — surely, a curiously cynical notion! — let them line their pockets by selling, no, auctioning (bidding pushes prices up higher) their emission credit to rich countries that have exceeded their quota.
Rich countries have a dual duty. They should compensate poor countries for past damage caused by the carbon emission. They must also pay for the sophisticated technology the poor need to avoid making similar emissions as they industrialise to raise the living standards of the billions languishing below the poverty line in Asia, Africa and South America. At one time, developing nations hoped to raise $10 billion annually by levying a charge on every passenger flight, which would have meant costlier travel for the public. Then came proposals to tax all financial transactions, and a tax, too, on carbon. Brazil and Malaysia have reservations about the North’s charge that deforestation accounts for 17 per cent of all carbon emissions, and about how this can be countered.
Now, there’s agreement in principle that the rich will pay (bribe?) the poor to cut down on emission, but no agreement on how much or how or, for that matter, who should control the funds. The South wants $400 billion annually by 2020, and more later. It claims that 1 per cent of the North’s GNP would be a fleabite compared to the fortune poured out to avoid a global recession, and nothing compared to the long-term price that North and South would both have to pay if the peril of climate change is ignored. Britain suggested that the North should contribute $100 billion a year. The European Union raised this to ¤100 billion, starting from 2012.
The payers also want funding to be channelled through the World Bank or the Global Environment Facility. These American institutions are instruments of traditional colonial capitalist exploitation, protest the recipients. Nor is the South, with its experience of profiteering buccaneers and preference for state control, enamoured of the notion that the market should raise the bulk of the funds. The EU’s suggestion that carbon markets and the private sector should provide at least 50 per cent of the funds is not acceptable. Misgivings about target fulfilment, the use of compensation money and the future livelihood of people in the Amazon forest complicate the issue.
But as the debate rages, businessmen are licking their chops at the prospect of more than $10-trillion investment in low-carbon technologies by 2030. Environmentalists, human rights activists and global charities may make the most noise. But whether or not any agreement is signed, the moneybags in Copenhagen’s lobbies will pull the strings.
As the silo article confirmed, where there’s muck there’s money.
