How to achieve global consensus on addressing the challenge of climate change is today an unresolved and intensely debated issue. The matter is a sensitive one, as the quest for a global response raises questions as to how to share the burden of reducing the threat among the countries of the world. After all, it is undeniable that the nations of the world have had varying roles in causing the problem, and also have differing vulnerabilities to the harm caused by climate change. The lack of progress in achieving a global consensus can be best explained by looking at the design and implementation of the international 'rules' that have been established thus far. These rules have focused solely on the volume of national emissions, rather than on the activities that lead to climate change in the first place. Consequently, efforts to reduce global emissions pit old emitters against new ones, and the key issue for the negotiation is when emissions of all countries will peak. The time has come to rethink this model for international analysis and cooperation.
To date, developed countries have not met a single one of their commitments, including on promised transfers of financial resources and technology to developing countries. Even their submissions during the ongoing negotiations remain non-committal on all of the issues. It is thus that the basic assumption of global environmental sustainability laid out 50 years ago – that developed countries will do whatever has to be done to support actions by developing countries – no longer holds. For instance, at the recent meeting of G8 countries in Italy, developed countries continued to insist on a global goal of halving emission levels by 2050. All the same, only a few of the developing countries had been able to bring their emissions down to 1990 levels by 2000, as required by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Rightly viewing these reduction requirements as a threat to their own economic wellbeing, the developed countries are today attempting to alter the agreed-upon balance of obligations, working to shift the burden for change onto developing countries.
Even the European Union, a strong champion of action on climate change, has been notably lax in addressing global warming. According to data recently released by the UN for the European Commission, emissions from the EU energy sector, accounting for almost 80 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, increased by 2.2 percent from 1990 to 2006, despite the EU's widely discussed 'emissions trading' scheme. Transportation emissions, likewise, increased by more than 25 percent, and emissions from energy industries by 3.7 percent. Meanwhile, emissions in Japan and the United States over the same period showed double-digit growth. Clearly whatever system had been set up to deal with these complex issues is essentially broken.
Industry vs lifestyles
All this talk of about how humans are responsible for climate change, though wholly accurate, is not good for our sense of self. Intensive as the search for other culprits has been, we have not been successful in fully demonising a readymade set of polluters: livestock. Those sneaky cows and sheep are, by some estimates, responsible for some 20 percent of the ongoing warming. How can the carbon footprint of creatures whose major activities involve looking morose and grazing all day be so large, you may ask. Their entire contribution comes in the form of the methane they emit. All jokes aside, it is a serious (and stinky) issue. But a solution has been found. A company known – very cleverly – as Mootral, has come up with a natural garlic-based feed supplement that takes on the bacteria in the animals' stomachs, purportedly reducing the methane emission by about 15 percent.