[CC] 56 Papers in 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial on Climate Crisis (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

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Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:10:32 -0500
From: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: 56 Papers in 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial on Climate Crisis

56 Papers in 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial on
Climate Crisis

By E&P Staff

Published: December 06, 2009 7:10 PM ET

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004051277


NEW YORK Tomorrow 56 newspapers in 45 countries take
the perhaps unprecedented step of speaking with one
voice through a common editorial. Many if not most
will publish it on the front page, warning of a
"profound emergency."

The Guardian of London, which helped draft the
editorial, published it today, with a note at the end.
Here it is. *

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate
change will ravage our planet, and with it our
prosperity and security. The dangers have been
becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have
started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been
the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting
and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a
foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the
question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but
how little time we have got left to limit the damage.
Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and
half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has
consequences that will endure for all time and our
prospects of taming it will be determined in the next
14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192
countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not
to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to
seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of
politics. This should not be a fight between the rich
world and the poor world, or between east and west.
Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by
everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The
world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises
to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to
peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A
bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can
prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch
continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all
species could become extinct, untold millions of
people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by
the sea. The controversy over emails by British
researchers that suggest they tried to suppress
inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to
dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions
are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a
fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could
only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the
White House and the reversal of years of US
obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the
mercy of American domestic politics, for the president
cannot fully commit to the action required until the
US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree
the essential elements of a fair and effective deal
and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a
treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should
be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can
go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the
rich world and the developing world covering how the
burden of fighting climate change will be divided —
and how we will share a newly precious resource: the
trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit
before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth
that there can be no solution until developing giants
such as China take more radical steps than they have
so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of
the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere –
three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since
1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed
country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce
their emissions within a decade to very substantially
less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause
the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest
regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they
will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus
pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their
own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped
for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by
the world's biggest polluters, the United States and
China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world
digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help
poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean
technologies to enable them to grow economically
without growing their emissions. The architecture of a
future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous
multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting
forests, and the credible assessment of "exported
emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more
equitably shared between those who produce polluting
products and those who consume them. And fairness
requires that the burden placed on individual
developed countries should take into account their
ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members,
often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer
more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less
than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far
less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will
have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that
cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing
to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more
intelligently. We will have to pay more for our
energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the
prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already
some countries have recognized that embracing the
transformation can bring growth, jobs and better
quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own
story: last year for the first time more was invested
in renewable forms of energy than producing
electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades
will require a feat of engineering and innovation to
match anything in our history. But whereas putting a
man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of
conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must
be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve
collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of
optimism over pessimism, of vision over
short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the
better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around
the world have united behind this editorial. If we,
with such different national and political
perspectives, can agree on what must be done then
surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape
history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a
challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw
calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We
implore them to make the right choice. * This
editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers
around the world in 20 languages including Chinese,
Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian
team during more than a month of consultations with
editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like
the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the
unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front
page. E&P Staff






http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004051277

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