KEY POINTS:
When denial fails, try evasion. Almost all the climate change deniers, even US President George W. Bush, now allow the forbidden phrase to pass their lips. But that doesn't mean they have really accepted the need to do something about it. The preferred tactics now are distraction, diversion
and delay.
That's why the US Government has just held a mini-summit on climate change just two days after the United Nations held a one-day summit to prepare for the December meeting in Indonesia that must set the targets for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol expires. The Bush Administration, which refused to ratify the Kyoto pact, doesn't want any hard targets at all, so the name of the game is sabotage.
"Each nation must decide for itself the right mix of tools and technology to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective," Mr Bush said. In other words, there should not be negotiated targets for actual cuts in emissions, with penalties for those who do not meet them.
"By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem," said the US President. "And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it."
What Bush proposes to do about it is host another conference next year to "finalise the goal" (but not a mandatory goal, you understand) and discuss ways of attaining it. Then there could be another conference in 2009 and another in 2010 ...
Evasion and delay. The aim is to prevent the Kyoto accord's 144 signatories from setting hard targets for deep emission cuts, or at least to provide a plausible political shelter for governments that oppose mandatory cuts but need to look like they are fighting climate change in the eyes of their own people.
That shelter, which is now called the Asia-Pacific Partnership, was set up last year and last week gained a new recruit: Canada. The existing members are the US and Australia (huge emitters of greenhouse gases that never joined the Kyoto process and until recently were climate change deniers). Also China, India and South Korea (Kyoto signatories that, as developing countries, were exempt from emission limits under the existing treaty but fear that they would face limits in the next phase) and Japan (which accepted a Kyoto target for 2012 but has no hope of meeting it now without heroic efforts).
Together, they account for half the world's emissions. Canada is a big emitter that committed itself to reduce emissions under Kyoto but made no effort to reach its target.
The Bush Administration has thus succeeded in splitting the world in two on the climate change issue. An overwhelming majority of the 39 developed countries have agreed to get back below their 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 and will meet their targets (usually about 5 per cent below) or at least come close.
A few rogue industrial countries have shunned the Kyoto process entirely or missed their targets very badly and have now joined the most rapidly developing countries (whose emissions are soaring) to subvert or evade the next phase of cuts. It's exactly what you would expect in any large undertaking that involves many different countries and there's no point in getting upset about it. The only question is how to get past it.
Australia will probably join the post-Kyoto process as soon as Australian voters have dumped Prime Minister John Howard, a serial climate change denier who looks certain to lose the election later this year. After six years of drought, Australians are losing their scepticism about climate change.
So are Americans. Seventy per cent of Americans identify climate change as a major problem and many states are pressing ahead with their own greenhouse gas reduction programmes. As California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has committed his state to deep cuts) said at the UN summit: "California is moving the United States beyond debate and doubt to action. What we are doing is changing the dynamic."
An even bigger problem is Asian giants China and India, whose hopes of achieving full developed-country status depend on historically unprecedented economic growth rates. They will not abandon those hopes while other countries still live in lavish consumer societies.
So how can they be persuaded to accept emission controls? With great difficulty, but it is their climate too. The deal will require the old industrialised countries to take even deeper cuts in their emissions in order to leave the emerging ones some room to grow.
It must also involve technology transfer and subsidies from the old rich countries to help them switch from carbon dioxide-intensive technologies for power generation (like two new coal-fired generating stations in China each week) to cleaner ones.
That will be one of the most difficult political bargains that has ever been negotiated but the prospect of global disaster may help to concentrate people's minds.
