Text 10 Copenhagen Conference

The most important year for climate change since 2001, when the Kyoto protocol (which set targets for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions) was agreed, will be 2009. The first period of the protocol runs out in 2012. The deal to replace it is supposed to be done at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which starts on No­vember 30th 2009 and is due to end on December 11th. No deal means that mankind gives up on trying to save the planet.

The accord needs to be a substan­tial one, not just a face-saving agreement to declare that the issue must be tackled. The rich world (especially America) needs to commit itself to legally enforceable car­bon-emissions reductions for the second period of Kyoto, from 2012 to 2016 and be­yond. The big emitters from the develop­ing world, such as China, need to commit themselves to something substantive – not economy-wide emissions-reductions, but, for instance, carbon-intensity targets (cuts in carbon emissions per unit of gdp) or measures directed at the power sector in particular.

The rich world, which has been re­sponsible for most emissions so far and recognises that it needs to pay up because of that, also needs to find a way of trans­ferring money to the developing world to help it pay for cutting carbon. The Clean Development Mechanism, which was set up under Kyoto to allow rich countries to buy carbon credits from poor countries that have cut their emissions, does that al­ready, but is probably not robust enough to do the job on the scale needed. There needs to be some new vehicle, such as the Superfund proposed by Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia. He thinks the world should copy America's ap­proach to other forms of pollution: make polluters contribute to a fund which pays

for the costs of cleaning up.

Text 11 The Strength of Europe

The European Union has led the fight against climate change. As part of its implementation of the Kyoto protocol, it set up its ground-breaking Emissions-Trading Scheme which allows companies in EU member-states' dirty industries to trade carbon-emissions permits and has thus put a price on carbon. And in 2007 the European Com­mission produced the “20/20/20 by 2020” plan: emissions cuts of

20% below 1990 levels (plus a 20% gain in energy ef­ficiency and 20% of energy from renewables) by 2020. But the plan must be approved by the Council of

Ministers and the European Parliament in 2009, and it is meeting hefty opposition –from heavy industry, and coal-dependent countries such as Poland. Getting the package through will be hard; but any backtracking in Europe will undermine America’s efforts.

A change of attitude in Beijing is also crucial to a deal in Copenhagen. It was China’s refusal to agree to any form of constraint that led America to walk away from Kyoto in 2001. These days China, now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, accepts the need to take action against climate change; it argues that, through energy-efficiency and renewable-energy tar­gets, it is doing as much as can reasonably be expected. But the American Congress will want China to take on extra commitments – perhaps in the form of targets for particular industries – if it is to legislate cuts. And the Chinese government resists the idea that it should have to give ground in order to get America to move.

Getting progress on climate change in these three places would be tough at the best of times, and the year ahead looks like being one of the worst of times. A sub­stantive deal in Copenhagen therefore looks unlikely; but the world's leaders are not likely to give up trying to save the planet there and then. Perhaps the likeliest outcome in Copenhagen in 2009 is a repetition of what happened in Kyoto in 2000 – a big bust-up, another meeting called and a deal done the following уеаr.