The real attitudes to the Copenhagen world summit on climate change are now spilling out. With just a week of formal negotiations left before the Copenhagen talks begin, the US strategy is becoming clear. The Obama Administration now does not expect the Senate to vote before December on its crucial global warming bill (called the Energy Efficiency and American Power Bill because the words ‘claimate change’ are still taboo in the US), which drastically reduces Obama’s room for manoeuvre. The American plan therefore now comes down to:
1 the replacement of the Kyoto global protocol by a loose system of individual country pledges to cut their national emissions,
2 the replacement of legally binding targets by voluntary commitments,
3 the right to the use of unlimited carbon offsets purchased by investment in clean technology abroad.
The impact of these three demands would not only take the Kyoto framework backwards, it would expose the world to the most extreme effects of climate chaos in less than two decades.

The first US demand would take the guts out of any global solution. Emission cuts would be determined, not by the science, by by economic convenience and industrial lobbying. Blair argued previously when he was still PM, in order once again to suck up to US interests, that countries could not be expected to move on climate change faster than their economies would allow – as though nature would accommodate itself to economic expediency and the electoral cycle.
The second represents the lethal undoing of any serious systematic effort to deal with climate change at all.
the present snail’s pace of global advance in cutting emissions would abruptly come to a dead stop. Voluntary commitments mean in effect that nothing will be done at all except for political showmanship.
The third would reinforce the disutility of the first two demands by allowing any emission reductions made to be undertaken abroad. By investing in ‘green’ projects overseas, carbon credits would be purchased which would be counted against any voluntary domestic targets. The position could even be reached whereby greenhouse gas emissions would not be cut at all on the home front, and the burden of cuts was transferred entirely on to the third world.
The rich and powerful have always been known, not only for monopolising wealth and power for themselves, but also for offloading any liabilities on to anyone else but themselves. They did it dramatically over the banking crisis. But never before have they done it on such an apocalyptic scale as to subordinate the global survival of the human race on Earth to their own short-term selfish interests.

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