At Poznan, no one is listening

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/11/climate-change-peak-oil

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At Poznan, no one is listening

At the world climate change summit, few delegates paid attention to the tale of oil's inevitable demise

Jeremy Leggett
guardian.co.uk, Thursday December 11 2008 14.30 GMT

Another year passes, another climate change summit arrives, the 14th in the annual series. The community of nations have been talking for more than 18 years now about how to stop humanity's remorseless effort to cook its own home. These gabfests have largely been action-free zones. I have attended too many of them, but this year it was time to risk my blood-pressure on another.

I took the train to Poland, a prospect that sounds like a recipe for slow-travel hell, but in fact was both easy and productive. You take the afternoon Eurostar to Brussels, the evening express to Cologne, the night train to Poland, disembark after eight hours sleep just in time for breakfast, with a massive reading backlog dismantled along the way. Much less carbon emitted than would have been the case flying, and Ryanair's boss – Michael O'Leary – deprived of his thin margin. All in all, a good day's work.

At the talks, little had changed since my visit to the Montreal summit of 2005. Thousands of delegates throng in cavernous halls, trying to find out what is going on behind the closed doors of the intergovernmental side meetings where most of the serious stalling is done. The "http://www.climnet.org/fossil/welcome.php">Fossil of the Day" award – a statue given each day by environmental groups to the worst foot-dragger among the 100-plus national governments and dozens of industry lobby groups – is still being dished out. The star renegades in the first week of this summit were Poland and Japan. Candidates are never in short supply. During my stay they included Chancellor Merkel, who is angling for massive exclusions for German heavy industry in carbon permitting, and Kuwait and Qatar, who are claiming they should qualify for the putative fund compensating victims of climate change because sea-level rise may damage their offshore oil rigs.

One of my missions was an effort to raise the peak oil issue. I suspect that most of the 9,000-plus attendees – diplomats, lobbyists and journalists – may have little idea how strong the evidence is that a global energy crisis lurks just a few years in the future, and that it will have massive implications for climate change policymaking.

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