Citola Blog
Dancing The Cancun
So what are the prospects for Cancun, and the UN climate-change conference in December? Here are the few certainties we can ascertain from the evidence available to us here at Citola.
First and most obvious is that the political grandstanding will still dominate. If we were to stand outside the conference hall selling t-shirts bearing the legend “Cancun: Attitude Capital Of The World”, we might not sell a lot of them – but we might also be in line for a prize for nailing the eco-conference dynamic in a single, snappy PR line.
That said, we see evidence of serious, multi-lateral intentions to produce something more concrete. For example, NIgeria has signed up, just recently, to the much-criticised accord produced in Copenhagen in December. It failed, however, to sign up to any specific provisions for cuts in emissions. If only Nigeria, whose government recently banned the football players representing it in the South African World Cup from representing the country for the next two years, were as serious about ecology as soccer.
Optimistic noises are also coming out of India. Again, given that India is one of the biggest polluters on the planet, one imagines that they can only improve on present performance (just our take – and we do appreciate the Asian argument that they should have the right to develop as the West did before the green debate became a global issue). Here’s a typical report, uncritical and if anything positive, about the prospects for Cancun.
And so to Russia, where the leading Russian-domiciled English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, opines that the Kyoto Protocol (soon to expire, but never mind that) is not strange or unrealistic (see the end of the piece). But Russia has for so long been far from the ecological debate that the publishers of this article feel the need to explain what it means (and to insist that it is not some sort of Western demon designed to inhibit economic progress) before coming to a broadly positive conclusion.
Last of all come the Canadians, who have been hosting the G8 and G20 meetings of leading economies. It may just be that they’re all nice people who are naturally optimistic, but we do begin to see some sort of consensus emerging that progress is possible.
Let’s hope so.
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