Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 237

The industrial countries currently produce far more greenhouse gases than the developing world, and China has overtaken the USA and emits more carbon dioxide than any other single country. However, emissions from the developing world are increasing, particularly in countries undergoing rapid industrialization, and are expected to be roughly equal to those of industrialized countries sometime around 2035. Taking population size into account, and looking at emissions per capita, China and India currently produce lower levels than the USA, Europe, the Russian Federation and Japan, which shows why some developing countries see their own ‘survival’ emissions as far less damaging than the ‘luxury’ emissions of the already rich countries.

There is also a disjunction between the widespread acceptance of global warming and people being prepared to change their routines to help tackle it. Giddens (2011: 2) calls this (unsurprisingly) ‘the Giddens Paradox’. This states that, as people experience no clearly tangible effects of the dangers of unchecked global warming in their everyday lives, they will not change their environmentally damaging actions. Car dependency is a clear example of this. Yet, if they wait until global warming does impact on their lives, it will be too late to do anything about it. Before that happens, ways have to be found to ‘[embed] it in our institutions and in the everyday concerns of citizens’ (ibid.: 3).

Without the positive involvement of the critical mass of individual citizens, it seems unlikely that government policies alone will succeed. But a coordinated global approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is made more difficult in the context of uneven economic development at the national level, which produces as much disagreement as agreement on how to coordinate reductions and adaptive measures.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was created in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, where agreement was reached to cut emissions significantly by 2012 in order to stabilize and eventually reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Targets ranged from an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia. The USA originally committed itself to a 7 per cent cut but has never ratified the protocol. The Kyoto Protocol took 1990 greenhouse emission levels as its starting point. However, this was seen in the Global South as favouring the industrialized countries, both failing to take into account the latter’s ‘historical responsibility’ for creating global warming and, hence, avoiding attributing blame. It is also unclear exactly when developing countries will be asked to reduce their emissions or by how much. Will it allow for the inevitably higher emissions levels as their economic development catches up with that of the industrialized world? If it does not, then it may be seen as unfair and unworkable (Najam et al. 2003).

Following acrimonious disagreements and failure to secure a binding agreement at the Copenhagen talks in 2009, the Cancun meeting in 2010 was widely seen as marking progress: 190 countries agreed to bring the voluntary targets set out in Copenhagen into the process, to accept the goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 2°C, but to strive for 1.5°C. They also agreed to set up a green climate fund as part of a US$100 billion commitment to help developing countries move forward in non-polluting ways. The overall agreement is legally binding, but specific aspects such as pledges by individual nation-states to reduce emissions are not (Goldenberg et al. 2015).

In 2015, a new Paris Agreement (COP24 – the 24th ‘conference of parties’), involving 196 countries, was widely hailed as an important step forward. This agreement committed countries to reduce greenhouse gases (particularly CO₂) to keep global warming below 2ºC, preferably closer to 1.5ºC, by 2050. Yet in 2017 the new US president, Donald Trump (a global warming sceptic), announced that the USA would no longer participate in the agreement and would withdraw as soon as possible. Having promised to restart the coal industry, Trump saw the Paris targets as a threat to the US economy. This perceived choice between promoting economic growth or tackling global environmental problems is widely viewed today as wrong-headed. As we shall see later, it is possible to envisage and plan for ecological modernization and economic growth based on ‘greening’ the industrial economy, shifting away from polluting industries towards renewable technologies. Reshaping economies in this way is often referred to as the ‘green industrial revolution’ or the ‘green new deal’.

However, at the 2019 COP 25 conference in Madrid, broad agreement could not be reached on taking the Paris agreement forward to more ambitious national targets. And even if existing commitments on emissions reductions were actually met, global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 would still be 38 per cent above what is needed to restrict warming to the agreed 1.5ºC target. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said that an important opportunity to adopt a more ambitious programme of action had, once again, been missed (Carbon Brief 2019).

As with other manufactured risks, no one can be absolutely certain what the effects of global warming will be. Would a ‘high’ emissions scenario truly result in widespread natural disasters? Will stabilizing the level of carbon dioxide emissions protect most people from the negative effects of climate change? We cannot answer these questions with any certainty, but international scientific collaboration and political processes do seem to offer the most viable ways of dealing with the problem, which is, after all, a global one. In addition, the underlying anthropogenic causes of global warming require an understanding not just of the basic environmental science but also of social processes.