DutchNews.nl - 'US biggest obstacle in Bali'

Hopes were high on Friday morning that an agreement could be reached at the UN climate summit in Bali. The Dutch senior UN official Yvo de Boer said it is unlikely that the meeting would end without a deal.

'There is such public pressure to develop a result here that I do not believe ministers will be able to leave this conference without a political answer to the scientific message they have received,' De Boer, executive secretary at the UN convention on climate change, told the BBC.

Earlier, it looked as if the US and Europe would not be able to reach a compromise, leading Dutch environment minister Jacqueline Cramer to describe America as 'the biggest obstacle' to a deal.

The European Union wants the final text to include a specific commitment that the industrialised nations will cut their emissions by up to 40% by 2020. But the US and Canada want a voluntary deal to apply to all countries, whether they are rich or poor.

'They [the Americans] want to chuck everyone onto one pile,' Cramer told ANP news service. 'That means you end up with a woolly formula without detailing what commitments developed countries actually have.'

Europe wants 'firm, measurable targets,' Cramer said, adding that Russia too has difficulties with setting fixed targets.

Other than the fact that the Bali Summit provided nothing other than to agree to agree to further climate talks (and that’s all that it was), it provided absolutely no change in stopping the constantly increasing global pollution and the life-threatening build up of carbon dioxide.

Climate change added to the world’s emerging and dire problems (population explosion and its sustainability, famine and food shortage, energy resource depletion and increased energy demands, cyclic pandemics, global pollution and carbon dioxide saturation, dwindling water shortages for life etc, etc, etc), put together are immense.

Indeed together, they are a recipe of nightmarish proportions that has never been seen before by humankind. But the greatest threat to human stability is the fact that people in high places do not realize that the time-span for solving these huge global problems has a finite period of time also. The writing is now on the wall I would say for all to see if they will only look and where humanity has to react without delay, but where, reaction to global problems takes decades to solve. Therefore the lead-time that we have now is the only thing that we have in our favour. Leave it for another 20-years and we shall not have the necessary lead-time to do anything about the really 'big' problems. This is what we really have to get over to our leaders, politicians and multinational industrialists, for it will affect them as much as it will affect you and me. Indeed, if they do not change quickly there self-preservation and vested interest thinking, we shall all end up with problems that are just unsolvable due to the time-served requirement to solve them and where time will literally run out on us all.

For only by people in high places realizing our dilemmas quickly now will be able to confront them and have enough time to solve them. It is no use therefore in pussy footing around until it is too late. For hesitancy and delay today is the greatest threat to the survival of humankind and where if we do not come to our senses quickly, in fifty-years time, the world will have become very similar to most probably how we can picture in our minds, a world very much like hell itself.

Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern. Switzerland

By david hill | December 15, 2007 12:11 PM