Bangladesh told the West to start making contingency plans for millions of refugees if they were not willing to cut carbon emissions. They also called for tax penalties on countries which did not cut their emissions to a safe level. The whole show will continue in Geneva for two weeks in December and then move to Kyoto in Japan next year as governments gyrate round the globe in a diplomatic dance with death. Ominously, as the conference began, hurricane Bertha caused 500,000 people to flee their homes in Florida and exceptional floods hit Italy. Thomas Spencer, British MEP and President of Globe International, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment, suggested that hurricanes should be named after oil companies to remind people who is responsible for climate change.
International agreements are notoriously laborious.
The Law of the Sea took 26 years to negotiate, then another 20 years before it was ratified. For all our sakes, the climate change negotiations must be finished sooner. Titus Alexander is a community education advisor and member of the New Economics Foundation and Global Commons Institute. An Overview of World Politics' by Titus Alexander is published by Polity Press on 25 June 1996, price 12.95 paperback, 39.50 hbk.