The Crisis of Cause and Effects

The Climate Crisis is two crises.  There are the causes and there are the consequences.  The causes of global heating--carbon and other greenhouse gases pollution--are about the future, because there is a time lag in when they add to the ongoing heating of the planet and what that does to change the Earth for the worse, and for a long time.

Although there are some efforts on the agenda of this year's climate talks to address at least procedures for addressing causes, the UN is scheduled to once again revisit what the nations of the world can do, separately and together, to deal with those causes in 2015.

The effects that are being felt now and will be felt in the near future were caused by greenhouse gases pollution that happened years ago.  Nothing can be done about that pollution now.  But those effects are already wreaking havoc around the world.  Rich countries can still absorb the costs of extreme weather, sea level rises and other land displacements, upticks in related diseases, economic losses from forest fires and droughts and floods.  They can still do so even while ignoring the reasons for these changes.

But poorer countries can't afford to deal with the effects, and they also can't afford to ignore what caused them.  What the rich countries should and can and will do to help poorer countries address the effects of the climate crisis is the chief subject of the 2012 UN climate conference, which is at the moment struggling to make some sort of agreement before it ends.

According to this story, things are going just as badly in dealing with effects as in addressing causes.  This report tells basically the same story.   Poorer countries are basing their requests on justice: the richer countries caused the pollution, they should pay for the effects they caused.  A mechanism to assign responsibility and create a fund has been proposed, but rich countries are very reluctant, and unless last minute negotiations result in a miracle, the best that will come of this is  some advance in the debate, and the worst even more bitterness and division.

Basing this on justice is perhaps not the best approach or the most practical, since rich countries are not wild about being locked into levels of participation by law, regardless of what's going on in their own economies. In any case, the world is very far from where it needs to be on both causes and effects

Update: The final agreement did establish the principle of compensation by rich countries, and formally extended the Kyoto Protocol, though it may be superceded by an agreement on causes in 2015.  

The New York Times account ended with this paragraph: “What this meeting reinforced is that while this is an important forum, it is not the only one in which progress can and must be made,” said Jennifer Haverkamp, director of the international climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The disconnect between the level of ambition the parties are showing here and what needs to happen to avoid dangerous climate change is profound.”

In his remarkable novel 2312--about the future three hundred years from now--Kim Stanley Robinson calls the historical period we're now in "The Great Dithering."  Surely future generations will see it as such.  Even while issues get clarified and some progress is made, it is not fast enough or big enough to address this long crisis.  But let's have a little sympathy for the people who go to those meetings and fight the good fight, even knowing that little if anything will be accomplished.  It may pay off one day.  In any case, what else can they do but the best they can do right now.