- So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved south."
When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?
A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world — carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture — won't. They are a global placebo. The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't seem to realise that their alternative is more implausible still: civilisation continuing merrily on a planet whose natural processes are rapidly breaking down.
Throughout the negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives — quiet, sombre people with sad eyes — as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.
These discarded ideas — and dozens more like them — show once again that man-made global warming can be stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes — but they are considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their greatest fight.
We will have to pay higher taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably powered world — but we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and free and well fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel corporations and the petro-dictatorships.
But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow. The true face of our current system — and of Copenhagen — can be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the bin.