Pragmatic suicide
During the talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in Bonn last week, the head of the US delegation, Jonathan Pershing, said: 'We want to be in [the new UN climate pact], we want to be pragmatic, we want to look at the science.' So how will the Obama administration reconcile political 'pragmatism' with the scientific realities? 'There is a small window where they overlap. We hope to find it,' Dr Pershing explained. But it doesn't really exist.
Signing the United States up to the new climate treaty that will replace the Kyoto accord in 2012 is essential. The 1997 Kyoto treaty was gutted to accommodate American objections, but even so president Bill Clinton, who signed it, never dared to submit it to Congress. His successor, George W. Bush, then 'unsigned' it.
A dozen wasted years later, the climate problem has grown hugely, so this time everybody else is determined that the US must be aboard - and Barack Obama also wants the US to be part of the treaty. But we recently learned what he thinks is 'pragmatic'. It is that the US should cut its emissions back to the 1990 level by 2020.
'Pragmatism' is the excuse you use when you do less than you should, because doing more is too hard. Taking a dozen years just to get US emissions back down to where they were in 1990 definitely qualifies as 'pragmatic', but it also qualifies as suicidal folly.
The Hadley Climate Centre in England, one of the world's most respected sources of climate predictions, recently released a study showing that even rapid cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, turning the current 1 per cent annual growth into a 3 per cent annual decline within a few years, would still warm the world by 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2050.
That is dangerously near the 2 degrees Celsius rise in average global temperature which is the point of no return. Further warming would trigger unstoppable natural processes, releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from melting permafrost and warming oceans. This would make the planet up to 6 degrees hotter than the present by the end of the century, raising sea levels and turning much of the planet to desert.
The remaining farmland, mostly in the high latitudes, would only be able to support at best 10 per cent or 20 per cent of the world's current population.
The Obama administration's offer falls far short of that goal. Under the Kyoto accord the US promised a 7 per cent cut on 1990 emissions by 2012, but Mr Bush abandoned that target and US emissions are now 16 per cent above the 1990 level. Mr Obama is only promising to get back down to the 1990 level over the next 11 years, and forget about the further cuts that the US signed up to a dozen years ago.
Mr Obama is clearly calculating how much he can get through Congress. As Dr Pershing said in Bonn: 'If we set a target that is unmeetable technically, or we can't pass it politically, then we're in the same position we are in now - where the world looks to us and we are out of the regime.'
But this is not an ordinary bill where you settle for what you can get through Congress after the usual horse-trading. If there's going to be a 40-day flood, you either build an ark or you learn to breathe underwater. Building half an ark is not a useful option.
Mr Obama's offer means the US would be cutting its emissions not by 3 per cent a year, the minimum global target if we hope to avoid more than 2 degrees of warming, but by only half that amount. In the long term, it leads inexorably to disaster.
Most other industrialised countries are on track to meet or exceed their modest Kyoto targets.
Britain and Germany will both be 20 per cent below their 1990 emissions level by 2012, and Germany is promising 40 per cent cuts by 2020.
The European Union promises a 20 per cent cut by 2020, but will go up to 30 per cent if other industrial countries do the same.
Even that would barely meet the annual 3 per cent cut in emissions we need if we are not to sail through the 2 degree point of no return and trigger runaway warming. And we have yet to figure out how to bring the rapidly developing countries into the regime, for their emissions, though starting from a low base, are growing very fast.
We are in deep trouble, and 'pragmatism' will not save us.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
