To appreciate the complexity of the issues being put forth at the Copenhagen summit, which starts today, it is enough to remember that the most prominent scientist in revealing the dangers of climate change, James Hansen, hopes that it will collapse. Hansen, who has for twenty years been working on warning politicians in his country and international organizations of the gravity of the increase in the temperature of planet Earth, fears – according to British newspaper The Guardian – that the United Nations conference on climate change will emerge with a compromise along the lines of “merchandizing” carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and putting them up for offer in a kind of stock market, where those who want to continue polluting would buy the shares of those who do not pollute. In other words, such a market, if it is established, would allow rich countries to continue pumping millions of tons of harmful gases after paying compensations to poor countries, which would bring globalization, based on unbridled exploitation of the earth's resources, into a new phase, one which would consecrate and in fact magnify the vast gap between those who have and those who do not, making it insurmountable. The “four great polluters” (the United States, China, India and the European Union) come to the summit carrying promises of reducing their emissions of toxic gases in proportions ranging between twenty and thirty percent over the next twenty years (taking the averages of the year 2005 as the reference). Such proportions represent the minimum which scientists say it is inevitable to commit to, if mankind wants to avoid a rise in the earth's temperature exceeding two degrees centigrade and to remain within acceptable margins of environmental safety. Moving to three degrees, on the other hand, would mean setting off a cycle which the world would neither have the ability to stop nor to bear the catastrophic consequences of, amounting to nothing less than changing the face of the earth as we know it today to the worse, the rise of sea-levels and the immersion of vast stretches of dry land not being the least of them. In a related context, there is one aspect that does not receive much attention in the large number of writings and information warning of the destruction of the environment and of climate change. Indeed, the prevailing tendency in the popular media is usually limited to focusing on immediate dramatic perspectives. Floods, collapsing icebergs and the terrible images of black smoke rising from factories and power plants obscure the perspective of the suffering which millions of people will be subjected to, not from environmental problems alone, but rather especially from turning them into a single issue and the mother of all problems, for which one should ignore all of the effects they will have on the world's inhabitants. And as with the major developments that mankind has gone through in the past few centuries, such as the industrial revolution and the triumph of capitalism and globalization, there are fears that it will be the most fragile and poorest segments of society, equally in industrialized and developing countries, which will pay the price of combating climate change. The aforementioned idea of the “carbon stock market” is only a first glimpse of what could be contrived by the imagination of those who have no purpose in life but to achieve profit in the quickest of ways, regardless of ethics or of the enormous human cost. Added to this is the fact that the behavior aiming at profit by any means is still in control of the world's economy, despite the severe blows it suffered during the recent global financial crisis. And indeed, if previous experiences do not encourage one to be optimistic about the progress of the suggested solutions to worsening environmental problems in directions different from those that led to the catastrophes we have witnessed, hopes remain hanging on bringing together the efforts of civil society organizations and of governments that are becoming increasingly aware of the risks entailed by the current approach.
