Copenhagen

Media coverage on the climate change conference in Copenhagen is everywhere these days that you can't actually turn a blind eye on. Seems that I should not just keep quiet on this one.

Although many would say that there is not yet scientific proof that human activity is causing global warming, I do personally believe so the same way that there is no scientific proof of existence of God but many still believe in it. Anyway this is not the point of this post.

The developing world is playing a bad role in this conference as far as I heard, taking climate change hostage to ask for economical compensation/benefits from the developed world. China, again, is one of the most shameless countries amongst.

The amount of greenhouse gas emission in China is only second to the United States at the moment and growing fast. It is foreseeable that the country will soon be releasing more greenhouse gas than any other country in the world. However, China is trying to evade its responsibility of reducing greenhouse gas emission because the US is saying that the funds it is giving would not go to China because they consider China a developed country. (Well it would do so anyway, that's just an handy excuse)

Should China actually be seen as a developing country? The Chinese government insists so naming a low per-capita GDP. Well, while the metropolitan people are enjoying every convenience of the developed world, there are people in the countryside living in extreme poverty. While the poor Chinese might be responsible of releasing ignorable amounts of greenhouse gas the metropolitan people are responsible of emitting the same or even larger amounts of greenhouse gas than people in the developed world. While one could split the poor countryside of China from metropolitan China and demands that funds only go to the countryside, the government would almost certainly never do so (just track back where did the donations for Sichuan earthquake go last year), all they want is free patented technologies and funds from the developed world and use them to boost its already deformed GDP, then use the data to continue deceiving its people of its growth despite the fact that people are ripped off by the government, and keeping its governence.

New vocabulary seems to be what the Chinese government is playing at the moment, 'reducing 45% of emission per unit GDP', clever, but hypocritic nonetheless. As we all see, China's GDP is growing at a significant speed and momentum (although its people are actually getting poorer). With the growth of GDP switching from second to third industry the emission per unit GDP would naturally reduce, but that does not mean the total emission of the country will decrease, quite the opposite, it would still be increasing. Let's do the maths, say the total GDP is 10 per year and per GDP unit emission is 1 in the year 2005, the total emission would be 10. There are 15 years between 2005 and 2020, with the GDP growth rate of 8% per annum, the GDP will become 31.72 in the year 2020, with 0.55 per GDP emission target achieved the total emission of China would become 17.45. See that? A 74.5% increase in the amount of emission! while the Chinese government blames that the target set by the US of a 17% reduction on greenhouse emission as not 'serious' enough, what about themselves trying to deceive the world and emit more greenhouse gases themselves? It is just a dirty trick because it's so obvious to most people that 45>17.

Tackling global warming is a global project that requires cooperation among all countries because the developed world and the developing world exist on the same earth. If the developed world works hard to reduce emission while the developing world is doing nothing or even increasing the amount of emission, it would just be an expensive political show with no winners eventually, because the global warming is not stopped and the huge amount of money the developed world spent on themselves and helping the developing world is giving nothing in return. The developing world might be benefitted by the funds at first but when consequences of global warming kick in they would be as fragile as everyone else.