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

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Katara's human cargo
When the sins pile up
Militancy and small arms proliferation
The great game along the Silk Route
Now, global warming is a threat to all
Talks begin on global union
Corrections and Clarifications
Worrying gun culture
Timely help
Immature
Doctors for villages

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu