Ed Miliband, the UK’s Climate Change Minister, has now landed in Copenhagen and he says he is prepared for “the final push”. I should think so too. The United Nations have been having these negotiations since I was 4 years old. You would think they might just about be prepared to get a sensible global deal on climate change by now.
After a lot of discussion, the European Union has today agreed to donate $3.6 billion a year for the next three years, to help poorer countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. Britain, France and Germany are each contributing about 20%.
That sounds like a lot of money - and compared to my student loan, it is - yet let me just check how much money was spent by the UK to bail out the banks… Hm, £850 billion so far. In fact, the Royal Bank of Scotland is demanding £1.5 billion in bonuses for 5000 bankers. That is almost half of the entire amount pledged by the EU today. So how many Africans is one RBS banker worth?
The issue of finance is a big one at Copenhagen. A negotiator from the African Union reckons the main thing standing in the way of a deal is whether rich countries will come up with funding for poorer countries who are likely to be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change, have less money to deal with them - oh, and have done the least to create the problem. You can see this if you look at this map showing the amount of carbon emitted per average person, for each country of the world.
The EU also made a “conditional” pledge to reduce emissions by 30% by 2020 - they’re saying “I will if you will” to the other rich countries. It’s so that they still have something to bargain with, apparently. But it doesn’t really make sense in terms of the planet Earth, which doesn’t do bargaining. When the sea level has risen by one metre (which it might do before people born today are 90 years old), and we’re canoeing down Oxford Street, it won’t really help to say “well we didn’t want to cut our emissions too much because no one else said they would”. Come on EU, show some more leadership and make me proud to live here! Please?
P.S. Will someone please tell me why such an ridiculous man as Christopher Monckton sits in the British House of Lords? Yesterday in the Copenhagen conference centre, he told a group of young international climate campaigners that they were the “Hitler Youth”… I can’t do the story justice - read the transcript of the conversation here. And then watch this hilarious rap battle between Monckton and Al Gore.
