COPENHAGEN: Seize the chance

Today The Climate Change conference of 192 nations is starting at Copenhagen. In an unprecedented manner, 56 newspapers of 45 countries are publishing a common editorial with the above title. A gist of the main points of this editorial is given below. 1. Today the question is no longer whether the humans are to blame for the climate change, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. 2. May the representatives of the 192 countries not hesitate, not fall into dispute, not blame each other, but seize the opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. 3. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rise to 2o C, which will require global emissions to peak and begin to fall within the next 5-10 years. 4. Few believe that Copenhagen can produce a fully polished treaty, but the politicians can and must agree upon the essential elements of a fair and effective deal, and a firm time table for turning it into a treaty. 5. Three quarters of all the carbon dioxide emitted since 1850 originated from the rich world. However, the numerically large populations in countries like China and India necessitates that these and other developing countries properly share the burden of limiting the additional trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels. 6. Social justice demands that the industrialized world dig deep into their pockets to help poorer countries to adapt to climate change and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without increasing their emissions. 7. To overcome climate change, people everywhere will have to change their life styles and kick their ‘carbon habits’. For the next few decades world will require a feat of engineering and innovation that will match or surpass those for splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. Let this spurt of innovation be in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill and not out of greed or competition as in the past. 8. Let the Copenhagen meeting reveal the triumph of optimism over pessimism, and vision over short sightedness. Let history judge this generation as one that saw a challenge and rose to it, and not as one so stupid that saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. (Source: The Hindu, December 7, 2009)