Until 1 January 2010 Sweden holds the presidency of the EU. This means that Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is head of the EU-delegation that today travels to the USA for a summit on climate between the EU and the USA on Wednesday. Reinfeldt will meet president Obama today and can then present the offer that the EU nations agreed on last week.
In terms of emissions the offer is: The EU nations commit to, as a whole, reduce emissions by 30% by 2020 as calculated from the level of emissions in 1990. But there is one condition – other nations must make equivalent commitments in a climate change treaty that is binding under international law.
There is also a price tag that comes with the treaty and it concerns the total cost to aid the poorest nations to reduce their emissions. The price is at least 100 billion Euros per year until 2020. (A euro costs 1,5 dollar and a little more than ten Swedish crown – 1 € = $1,5 = 10.4 SK.) They also consider that this financing of climate change measures is a precondition for a treaty in Copenhagen and that 25-50% of this sum will come from the richest nations. The EU nations are willing to bear “a just proportion of the costs”.
President Obama does not have a mandate from the Senate to negotiate on a binding treaty and if he does not obtain it before the negotiations in Copenhagen it is doubtful that he will attend. Maybe the trip to Copenhagen to get the Olympic Games to Chicago had greater priority.
In the EU family there are a number of nations from the former Soviet sphere of influence and their emissions per resident in 1990 were clearly greater than Western Europe’s. As an example it has been enormously costly to unite the former FDR and GDR but in terms of starting positions in the climate negotiations this has been a stroke of luck. It takes a bit of effort to find out what the actual numbers are but I will return to this point.
For the poorest nations, the nature of our current economic system means that they must increase their emissions in order to improve their standard of living. Take China as an example. That the richest nations will pay for less than 50% of the costs needed to allow economic growth in the poorest nations without the latter increasing their rightful proportion of emissions is not sufficient.
As usual the EU position is a mass of words without concrete proposals and therefore I would like to make a concrete suggestion to discuss in USA – The EU will pay part of a railway around the coast of Africa. The railway network between the EU nations is today the EU’s greatest infrastructural advantage. In Africa the former colonial nations of the EU built railways from the interior to the coast. The main purpose of these was to transport raw materials to waiting ships that would then take them to the colonial nations to increase their wealth. By building a modern railway around the coast and power it with renewable electricity they would create the possibility of climate-friendly trade between Africa’s nations and also the possibility of social cohesion.
Then the question is – What can USA offer?
