BUSHarper Fiddles While Rome Burns

Okay, we've got the script. No climate deal at the G8 summit. In fact, no deal at all until and unless India and China capitulate to our terms. We'll cut 20% or 30% but they have to cut 20% or 30% or whatever it takes to match us.

Sounds fair, doesn't it? Sure, as long as you don't let facts get in the way. If you leave reality aside (and George w. & his Boy Clone of the North wouldn't have it any other way) then it makes perfect sense. It's when you add reality to the BUSHarper mix that it all turns really crunchy.

Sure China has just surpassed the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China's population is also about four times greater than that of the U.S. That means, man for man, the average Chinese citizen is four times smaller - carbon footprint-wise - than his American counterpart.

So you're being told by a guy who is producing four times as much greenhouse gas as you that you're all going to have to make the same cuts. Even if you did that, the white boy's emissions would still be quadruple the Chinese guy's - in perpetuity to boot. White, yellow - sounds a tad racist, doesn't it? You might not think so but I'll bet you sure would if you were the Chinese guy.

Here's the other little slice of reality. China has just surpassed the United States in overall GHG emissions, only just. It's been the industrialized West that has contributed most to the problem we have today. It's our accumulated greenhouse gas emissions that we're now dealing with and we'll be dealing with that for decades to come. We had a couple of very dandy centuries out of it during which we Euros became insanely wealthy and powerful and exercised dominion over just about any place we found worth the bother.

This isn't lost on the Chinese guy or the Indian guy either. They know that the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers which threatens their key river systems that irrigate their agricultural heartlands that are essential to sustaining a population of more than a billion of their countrymen wasn't their doing. They've already put that one on our tab.

One more little point. China has become the leading GHG emitter by virtue of Western companies shifting their industrial production to China in pursuit of the low wage labour force. China is now making the goods for us that we would otherwise be making ourselves with the associated greenhouse gas emission problems. It's our consumption that's driving China's emissions as much as China's production. I wonder what China's GHG emissions would be if it was only based on domestic consumption?

We're not just outsourcing jobs. We're also outsourcing greenhouse gas emissions. Same thing with the Athabasca Tar Sands. We get the fallout, the U.S. gets the oil.

In any case, the Chinese, Indians and the Third World for that matter kind of feel like they're owed something by us. What? Hard to put a finger on it but maybe they would settle for Western leadership grounded in realism.

It's a global problem. That's why it's called Global Warming. The only way we'll ever deal with it is through global solutions. Now you won't get the consensus necessary for effective global solutions without rethinking our relationship to the world and each other.

Take our planet's atmosphere, the place where much of the global warming stuff happens. Whose atmosphere is it, no one's or everyone's? If you say it's nobody's then everybody's free to dump as much crud into it as they see fit because no one has any right to complain. That's a key element to the BUSHarper approach.

If, however, you decide it's everyone's, that puts it in a whole new perspective. I then hold an undivided, one-six and a half-billionth share in it, and so do you. That would mean that the United States and Canada, together, would hold about a one-twelfth interest in it. Add Europe into the mix and we might get slightly better than a one-fifth share in the atmosphere. Oh dear, wouldn't that set the cat among the pigeons.

There's so much room for argument - and deadlock - when these realities come up. What if the Chinese offered to cap their per capita greenhouse gas emissions at just one-half of the North American footprint? That'd be pretty hard to argue with, wouldn't it? They could easily do that today, go on about their business, and tell us to get back to them when we begin to reach that balance. That would make us look pretty damned stupid, wouldn't it?

Washington still insists on dictating the terms of any global climate change treaty and it wants those terms to reflect its own interests first and foremost, not the planet's. America can hold out - for now - but it won't be able to dominate the agenda forever. In its quest for excess (imagine waging an enormously expensive war without end on money borrowed from abroad) it has lost both prestige and influence.

If America won't accept terms that will bring the Chinese and Indians willingly onside there probably won't be a climate deal until the U.S. declines a lot further. Eventually there'll be an equilibrium under which commonality of interests will prevail. The question is whether we'll get there in time.