China has made a dramatic move in the run up to the December Copenhagen conference, which is set to decide on a successor (if any) to the (much ignored) Kyoto climate change protocols. It says that since the projected cost of its reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to anywhere near an effective level will increase dramatically after 2030, it and other developing countries should be compensated by the rich world (which caused virtally all of the accumulated damage so far, but are set to see its comparative emissions fall drastically). The logic seems to go like this: if it signs on to Copenhagen or other more-immediate targets, especially in the present time of pronounced eceonomic weakness, even for China, in order to avoid paying even greater sums in future (costs of dealing with the problem after any delay will increase the bill enormously, according to sceintists and economists), the rich world should pay for part of the cost of avoiding the delay. And according to the Chinese, waiting till after 2030 will result in a bill of no less than 7.5% of GDP after 2030.
The Chinese also want more technology transfer, claiming that they simply don't have the technological means to cut emissions in half by 2050 (though this is much less than what is necessary to seriously hold off deleterious effects of climate change). Good luck. Such technology almost invariably occupies the misty regions between national-security, rent-seeking and mass-produced consumer goods that preoccupies lobbysits and policy-makers. The idea that such issues can be ironed out in anywhere near a sufficient way be December, never mind afterward, is far fetched, at least under present institutional circumstances.
In fact, UN economists have argued that
"advanced countries had already used up a good part of the "atmospheric space" for greenhouse gas emissions in their climb to the top of the development ladder over the past 60 years." and that "[g]iven the close link between energy use and economic growth, there is a real concern that the sustainable development ladder has already been kicked away and with it any real chance of combining climate and development goals." And you thought neoliberalism had already done a sufficient job at that task...
Still, there's one more ludicrously desperate, highly problematic option, if all else fails: geoengineering. And who knows how the costs and benefits of that, spread appropriately unevenly, will be spread under the same inhumanly irresponsible conventions that allowed the climate change problem to get to such a destructive point in the first place....