Pollution's price

Only globally coordinated international law that is binding and can be enforced through sanctions when violated is capable of possibly preventing Greenland's ice sheet from significantly melting, semi-arid regions from drying to the point where millions of people are forced to flee and extreme weather conditions from significantly impairing even wealthy countries' economic powers.

If we continue to build coal-fired power plants and increase our use of gasoline and diesel vehicles, then we will literally be burning up many people's futures. Approximately half of the carbon dioxide generated by that exhaust will remain in the atmosphere for centuries to come, and will continue to accumulate - unless we reduce output by at least 50 percent - and will raise temperatures in the lower atmosphere, the surface of the Earth and gradually the inner-regions of the ocean to levels which homo-sapiens have never experienced.

Only after a delay of decades will the full level of warming be reached, which will only be complete after centuries. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries even without further warming of surface temperatures.

Humanity has never had to solve a long-term problem such as this, which is why our present political infrastructure is of little use for this Herculean task. We need global domestic policies such as those of the European Union that already exist for a small portion of the international community.

Carry out the polluter-pays principle

As yet, every country deals with the external effects of supplying energy in its own ways. Nearly all countries go so far as to promote global warming by reducing the prices of all or some fossil fuels for all or some portions of their populations, and they saddle succeeding generations or the general public - but not the emitters - with external effects such as health costs, air pollution or climate damage. Each year, direct or indirect subsidies account by approximation for 300 billion euros ($450 billion) worldwide. Nearly all humans pay nothing for the emission of hazardous substances such as illness-causing diesel soot, and fainthearted European emissions trading of carbon dioxide is still far removed from an actual internalization of such external effects.

Germany's National Environmental Agency calculated in 2007 that a kilowatt hour of electricity generated by a black coal-fired plant should cost 7 euro cents more with adherence to all environmental costs and 8.9 euro cents in the case of brown coal, which means that wind power, with an electricity-compensation price of 8.5 euro cents today, would already be cheaper than energy generated by brown coal. All the same, the large electricity distributors continue to speak of subsidizing renewable energy sources and most citizens parrot what they say.

Personally, the four largest energy providers in Germany would only be acceptable choices as providers if their portfolios included a portion of renewable energy sources larger than the national average. At much less than 2 percent, they lie miles beneath today's average of 16 percent of energy coming from renewable sources.

What would a Copenhagen Protocol a success?

First of all, when it includes binding and stronger emissions reductions for all industrialized countries by 2020 of at least 25 percent measured against the output of emissions in 1990.

Second, if the integration of countries with emerging markets - which encompass about half of all humans and in several of which the per-capita emission level is rapidly approaching our own - were to succeed along with initial reduction measures through partial financial compensation of their reduction and adaptation measures through global emissions trading amongst industrialized countries.

Third, if industrialized countries give financial support for measures to adapt to the changing climate to particularly affected developing nations.

All of the above was already covered in the declaration of the 13th United Nations Climate Change Conference on Bali.

But now several countries are hesitating, including the United States. Its new president is being limited by the long-term effects of erroneous politics led by a public and its representatives who are so unwilling to see the facts that the average US citizen will remain the front-runner when it comes to emissions for a long time to come.

Fourth, I would like to see a commitment to a long-term objective of emission equality, recognition of the equal rights of every human to produce emissions, and therefore much stronger emissions reductions for strong emitters such as the United States and the United Arab Emirates as a precondition for global emissions trade - adherence to the polluter-pays principle. Emissions would cost money and the market would initiate a rapid alteration to the energy supply system. We would only need a five-thousandth of the potential energy of the sun, and every country would have the bulk of its energy resources (sun, wind, water) within its borders. The conflicts connected to the appropriation of oil and gas would be things of the past.

But even should this succeed, coming generations will still have to carry the burden because we did not undertake the comparatively marginal effort of emissions reduction as compared to the cost of adaptation. This is in part because we did not initially know about the issue, and then nearly all of us suppressed it, and in part we still do not want to recognize it.

Should nothing be accomplished in Copenhagen, the possibility that in the 22nd century many cities with millions of inhabitants on weakly protected coastlines will further sink rapidly increases. Even before that occurs, millions of people will have been displaced from regions of industrialized nations distressed by water.

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Grassl is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. From 1992 to 1994 and from 2001 to 2004 he belonged to the German Advisory Council on Global Change. Grassl was also the director of the World Climate Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. He also worked for eight years on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Geneva.

Editor: Sean Sinico