[prakruti] Now, global warming is a threat to all - Hindu/Guardian

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At 10:15 PM 4/19/07, you wrote:

>Date:20/04/2007 URL:

>http://www.thehindu.com/2007/04/20/stories/2007042004871100.htm

>

>

>

>

>Opinion - News Analysis

>

>Now, global warming is a threat to all

>Jonathan Freedland

>The big powers are at last beginning to see sense.

>

>— PHOTO: AP

>

>U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and British Foreign Secretary Margaret

>Beckett during the U.N. Security Council debate exploring the relationship

>between energy, security, and climate, in New York on Tuesday.

>IF BRITISH politics were a dinner party then Tony Blair would be that

>guest who got up to say goodbye an hour ago, insisting he had to be off —

>only to hang around by the front door, his coat on and car keys jangling,

>chatting about this and that, and never actually leaving. The result is a

>strange sense of limbo, where the old period has not quite ended and the

>new one has not yet begun. A sense of drift has hovered over the British

>Government since the attempt to push the Prime Minister from office last

>September. It feels like nothing is happening.

>So it's heartening to hear of one area, at least, where the British

>Government has taken a lead. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security

>Council discussed climate change for the very first time. Not some

>environmental subcommittee, not a platitudinous exchange of slogans in the

>General Assembly, nor even the intergovernmental panel on climate change,

>but the Security Council. It was debating carbon emissions and the danger

>they pose to the Earth.

>The Security Council had never talked about global warming before — and it

>was not keen to start on Tuesday.

>Of the permanent members, the United States, Russia, and China had all

>objected, Moscow's Ambassador to the U.N. admitting he was " lukewarm

>because of where it is discussed. " Translation: the Security Council is

>meant for grown-up stuff involving bombs and bullets, not airy-fairy talk

>about trees and polar bears. Unluckily for Washington, Beijing and Moscow,

>the presidency of the Security Council rotates, and this month it's

>Britain's turn. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett insisted this was what

>she wanted the Council to discuss, and on Tuesday it did.

>Despite the misgivings of those big three, it turned out to be quite an

>event: a record turnout for a debate of this kind, not confined to the 15

>members of the Council but with speeches from 52 different countries. By

>the end, a strong majority agreed that climate change posed a clear threat

>to international security.

>Pragmatic reasoning

>That was the entire point of the exercise, to reframe the way people think

>about this problem. There's good, pragmatic reasoning behind that. The

>glum reality is that governments tend to take security threats more

>seriously than any other kind. Just think of what Washington has spent on

>the " war on terror. " If George W. Bush gets his latest budget through

>Congress, he will have spent $750 billion of American taxpayers' money on

>the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a little over five years.

>Environmentalists drool when they imagine what they could have done with a

>fraction of that money. Even a quarter of the total, say a meagre $200

>billion, could have paid for enormous strides towards a low carbon

>economy. It could, for instance, have paid to transform the way we

>generate electricity, by capturing carbon and storing it in the ground,

>rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

>That, when it happens, will be a massive, international infrastructure

>project. But if governments approached it with the degree of urgency,

>will, and wherewithal they apply to traditional national security threats

>— with the seriousness and money-no-object commitment Mr. Bush and Mr.

>Blair showed to the " war on terror " — then suddenly it would look

>eminently possible.

>In the most direct way, the overheating of the Earth promises danger —

>including threats the Security Council would immediately recognise. If

>land becomes uninhabitable through flooding as glaciers melt and sea

>levels rise, or through drought as things get hotter, the people now

>living on that land will move. Credible forecasts speak of 200 million

>people displaced by the middle of the century. Some of that movement will

>be within countries, but some will be across international borders — and

>we all know the strains that can produce. There will be clashes over

>limited resources as people compete over fertile land and drinkable water.

>That is not entirely in the future. Already the issue is acquiring the

>more familiar shape of an international relations problem. Note the

>description by Uganda's President Museveni of rising emissions as " an act

>of aggression " by the rich nations against the poor. We pollute for

>decades; they pay the price in lost landscapes and lost lives.

>As the consequences of global warming become more visible, and more felt,

>that sentiment will grow — along with the conflict, or even international

>terrorism, that it might bring.

>Tuesday's debate is a sign that the penny is beginning to drop. Maybe not

>in Russia, whose U.N. ambassador warned against overdramatising the

>problem of global warming, nor in the White House, which offered the

>Security Council an empty statement on Tuesday, in keeping with the Bush

>administration's shaming record of denial.

>Still, and in defiance of all that, two U.S. Senators, Republican Chuck

>Hagel and Democrat Dick Durbin, have tabled a bill that would demand all

>U.S. agencies come together to produce a national intelligence estimate of

>the threat of climate change. Such exercises were once reserved for the

>Soviet nuclear arsenal or the state of the Middle East.

>These changes matter. The big powers know how to put out fires when they

>want to. Now they just have to realise they are facing a blaze larger than

>any of us have ever seen — and one that could engulf us all.

>- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

>© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

 

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