Text 10 Copenhagen Conference

The most important year for climate change since 2001, when the Kyoto protocol (which set targets for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions) was agreed, will be 2009. The first period of the protocol runs out in 2012. The deal to replace it is supposed to be done at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which starts on No­vember 30th 2009 and is due to end on December 11th. No deal means that mankind gives up on trying to save the planet.

The accord needs to be a substan­tial one, not just a face-saving agreement to declare that the issue must be tackled. The rich world (especially America) needs to commit itself to legally enforceable car­bon-emissions reductions for the second period of Kyoto, from 2012 to 2016 and be­yond. The big emitters from the develop­ing world, such as China, need to commit themselves to something substantive – not economy-wide emissions-reductions, but, for instance, carbon-intensity targets (cuts in carbon emissions per unit of gdp) or measures directed at the power sector in particular.

The rich world, which has been re­sponsible for most emissions so far and recognises that it needs to pay up because of that, also needs to find a way of trans­ferring money to the developing world to help it pay for cutting carbon. The Clean Development Mechanism, which was set up under Kyoto to allow rich countries to buy carbon credits from poor countries that have cut their emissions, does that al­ready, but is probably not robust enough to do the job on the scale needed. There needs to be some new vehicle, such as the Superfund proposed by Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia. He thinks the world should copy America's ap­proach to other forms of pollution: make polluters contribute to a fund which pays

for the costs of cleaning up.