The failure of the participants in the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen to agree on principles for an international emissions trading or taxation system was distressing. Much international idealism and expertise had been invested in this goal, which we can see now is probably unachievable in the medium-term future. But is this the best or only policy goal for international cooperation in climate change mitigation?
A mid-term round of senior UNFCCC officials' talks took place this month in Bonn. It offered modest hopes for ways forward in global climate action, addressing the task of emissions mitigation in ways less tied to particular market mechanisms for global cooperation.
We need to understand why Copenhagen failed if we are to learn from that failure.
First, Western governments underestimated the strength of developing countries' entrenched grievances that the imperialist West had industrialised and grown wealthy at their expense, even today through its continued dominance of global trade and financial systems.
Such ideological stereotypes in the South have been the leitmotif of multilateral diplomacy since the 1950s, dominating every major international treaty-making process. Why should climate change be different, particularly when the science validates the idea of a massive Western debt to the South, in the form of dangerous quantities of carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere during the West's 300 years of successful industrialisation?
Leading developing country governments (China, India, South Africa, Brazil — the BASIC group) are determined to hold to the Kyoto principle of differentiated responsibilities for developing and developed countries.
The most shocking thing about Copenhagen was that for the first time, the world's environmental movement found itself ranged with the West against the South. There were intense feelings of mutual betrayal between Western-based environmental NGOs whose world view is dominated by the imminent climate crisis, and Southern governments whose world view is coloured by historical resentments and suspicions.
The latter were angry at Western NGOs and media attempts to exploit the fears of low-lying island states as emotional blackmail of the South as a whole.
Add to this inflammatory mix these factors:
First, Southern suspicions that the West might want to use its wealth to subsidise keeping them in a permanent state of underdevelopment, by using aid flows to purchase developing country wilderness areas as offsets to unimpeded coal-based economic growth at home. Second, Southern suspicion of shonky Western emissions accountancy, that could see Western governments claim dubious green offsets from