Why Copenhagen Failed

The Copenhagen climate summit of December 2009 was a massive failure, sealed by the highly publicised stand-off between China and India on one hand, and the OECD countries led by the USA and the "European climate catastrophe triumvirate" of Germany, France and UK.

The OECD group demanded large, rapid and worldwide cuts in CO2 emissions and a forced march to developing non-oil and non-fossil alternate energy, making this also an energy summit.

As the Chinese and Indian leaderships and delegations many times pointed out, their per capita energy consumption is far lower than per capita energy consumed by the OECD countries. If CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning are so dangerous for the climate, the OECD should start first and do most to cut global emissions.

In the run-up to the conference, for many months in 2009, press and media in most OECD countries was saturated with "climate catastrophe" reports and scientific-looking findings of fast and dangerous global warming from the UN IPCC, the group of climate scientists headed by UN climate chief Rajendra Pachauri. The leaders of the "European triumvirate" with extreme views on climate change, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, went so far on occasions as announcing the Copenhagen conference was "the last chance to save the planet".

Many non-OECD leaders of the G20 group, not only the Chinese and Indians, repeated that the scientific base for claiming the Earth's climate is rapidly warming with dangerous, or even disastrous results for everybody by about 2050 or 2075, is unsure and far from proven.

The development of alternate non-fossil energy is in fact another subject, needing a different framework and approach - not the creation of confused and widespread fear that "climate catastrophe" can only be averted by very rapidly using less oil, coal and natural gas across the world, in every country. Taking only oil, present average per capita consumption rates are about 14 barrels per year for the approximate 1.15 billion persons in the OECD countries.

If this was reduced to the 2009 world average per capita rate of 4.8 barrels per year, the world's remaining oil reserves as currently estimated by the IEA, other agencies, and major oil corporations at about 1200 billion barrels, would be sufficient for at least 125 years. This, for a start, would not only produce a big cut in CO2 emissions but also stretch the oil age by a long period, enabling energy transition to be better planned and organised.

Rather than a panic measure based on false fear of "climate catastrophe", energy transition could be planned, financed and organized to the benefit of all.

As we know, the most extreme OECD leaders waving the spectre of "climate catastrophe" want a very rapid energy transition away from oil, perhaps cutting worldwide fossil energy consumption by 80 per cent before 2050, and 40 per cent by 2020. Their justification for this extreme rapid energy transition is so-called "runaway global warming", due almost exclusively to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This theory, of CO2 being the worst and most intense greenhouse gas making it the only one the public should worry about, and world average temperatures rising fast and continuously, is not scientifically proven. Scientific challenge to the theory have steadily risen. In past earth history there have been geological ages with 4 times the current, supposedly dangerous high levels of CO2.

Also in the past, with absolutely no fossil fuel burning, there have been periods of much higher average temperatures. More recent geological history, in particular the last 100 000 years, shows the earth is still coming out of a long cycle of periodic ice ages. There may in fact be as much chance of the world going back into ice age, as being "roasted and burned" by global warming.

No one can know, or say that our present inter-glacial period (Holocene), which started about 12,000 years ago, is permanent. Even worse for politicians, press and media journalists who claim the present trend of global warming is very dangerous, there has been no increase in the warming trend for at least 8 to 10 years: the global warming experienced through about 1980-2000 is not continuing.

The evidence of this was deliberately hidden, by supposedly "eminent" climate scientists associated with or reporting to the UN IPCC. Later called "Climategate", the proof of this tampering with global temperature data is now widely available on Internet. Reasons for this desperate and clumsy attempt to maintain the myth of "runaway global warming" can be surmised as wanting to keep up the flow of large research funding and prestige conference events for UN IPCC scientists and advisers, and to maintain media exposure in the footsteps of Al Gore.

Transition to non-fossil energy will of course come, one day. Taking all the fossil fuels, each of them is a storehouse of petrochemical and carbon-based chemical raw materials, rather than only an energy resource to burn. World petrochemicals utilise no more than about 6.5 Mbd of oil and 3.5 Mbd equivalent of natural gas, and smaller quantities of coal - but this is enough to produce nearly all world plastics and their related olefins and polyamides, as well as paints, dyes and process chemicals, and the petro-based medicines the world currently consumes.

Bioplastics not using petrochemical feedstocks or using small quantities of them, are surely a growing industry, but current world output is below 200 000 tons a year. Petrochemical based plastics and industrial materials output is above 1 million tonnes a day. Conserving fossil energy minerals for non-energy feedstock uses is a much better strategy than simply burning them.

This rationale underlines the more reasoned, more intelligent policy for alternate and renewable energy investment accompanied by a value-added strategy, where careful analysis of economic value is used to make the "After Oil" investment choices.

This is light years away from the "climate catastrophe" arguments used by supposedly serious and respected OECD political leaders, but a rational approach will always and finally win.

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