A conference is being held in Copenhagen to address the climate change crisis, in which one hundred world leaders are participating, and which 192 countries are attending. The objective of the conference is to arrive at a framework for climate change mitigation that would replace the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The broad participation of this number of states, and heads of states, means of course that they must arrive at some kind of a deal; otherwise, why would there have been this need for such a massive presence and broad participation? Despite this, however, most expectations regarding a deal to reach an agreement that would bind the [signatory] countries to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, over a specified period of time, are not encouraging. What is expected, instead, is a political document announcing the long-term action plan for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Regardless of what the participants in the conference in Copenhagen will agree upon, one may observe that, for instance, many major industrial and developing nations have set for themselves specific targets for a specified period of time in this regard. As such, some are relying on this kind of national commitments to cut emissions, as an alternative to an international agreement. Of course, this will be a long path, strewn with many obstacles. First, there are the standards and criteria that will be adopted by each state as it announces the rate of emission cuts in each respective state; unfortunately, these standards vary from state to state, which opens the door for further differences. Second, there is the question of implementation, and thirdly, there is the question of how to measure this implementation and how to determine who will be the monitoring party. In fact, the experience of the Kyoto Protocol, in terms of these three basic points, is not encouraging. Furthermore, differences extent far beyond these three issues. For instance, there are divergent views within the industrialized countries themselves, especially between Europe and the United States, and between the industrialized nations and the emerging nations (China, India and Brazil). The disagreements involved here thus lie in how to assign responsibilities in what regards the points of origin for the formation of greenhouse gases, as emerging countries, along with a large number of third world countries, are demanding compensations for any reduction in the emission of industrial gases in their territories, as this would slow down their economical growth. Moreover, there also are disagreements between the oil exporting countries on one hand and the industrialized countries on the other hand, as the former are in turn demanding compensations for any reduction in the reliance on fossil fuels. This is not to mention the warnings of the threat of the small island-nations sinking. The reparations being sought from the industrialized countries are estimated at 100 to 200 billion dollars up until 2020. Here, the following questions arise: who will bear the brunt of paying such huge sums of money, and how will the due payments be divided among the industrialized countries? How will the paid sums be distributed among the third world countries, and what type of monitoring and control will the industrialized nations require to ensure that that countries receiving the compensations are adhering to the emission cuts as planned? It should be mentioned here that the Kyoto Protocol did not offer one single penny to those countries that adopted greenhouse gas emission-cutting plans; and as for the fund established especially for this purpose, and which was set up under the supervision of the United Nations in 2007, it only has about 33.7 million dollars, of which around seven millions were spent to establish the fund and finance its administrative costs. The first payments for the pollution control programs and desertification mitigation programs are not expected to be made until mid-2010. There is also another fundamental disagreement that is still unresolved: what is behind the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Is it the result of the nature of economic growth and its reliance on fossil fuels in generating energy – or in other words, is the underlying reason [for global warming] human in nature, or is it the nature of the Earth and its climate, and across millions of centuries, to be in constant change? Consider the previous areas covered by sea water and which became deserts in past centuries, something that has also happened in the Mediterranean area in some period of history, before fossil fuels were ever used. Officials are thus still concerned by the dispute over the validity and the accuracy of scientific studies, something that was raised at the Summit in Copenhagen as a result of the leaked e-mails exchanged by scientists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. In fact, this very issue was raised by the Indian expert Rajendra Pachauri, the Head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What is the impact of climate change then, on the use of petroleum? It is clear that reducing the consumption of fossil fuels, including oil, is a fundamental goal for this movement. But if we take into consideration the massive reserves of hydrocarbon fuels (seven trillion barrels), the tireless research for the “greening” of the different types of fuels, and the high annual population growth which will increase the world's population to approximately 9 billion people by 2050, if the population growth continues at the current rates. If we take this into consideration, in addition to the possibility that the standard of living in the emerging countries would improve, this only means that an increase in the consumption of energy will happen. It is thus likely that the world will resort to a “basket” of energy sources, where reliance on hydrocarbon fuels remains significant, especially oil and gas, in addition to the other alternative forms of energy. *. Mr. Khadduri is an energy expert
