05-07-04
The Church of England has declared its support for a challenging proposal to
tackle the threat of climate change. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan
Williams, says the plan, known often as "contraction and convergence",
offers a way to act justly towards the poorest.
The idea, hatched by the Global Commons Institute, says all the Earth's people
have equal rights to cause pollution. Already endorsed by other faith groups, it
says nobody, however rich, should cause more than their allotted share.
"Contraction" means cutting the world's output of the gases (like
carbon dioxide) which scientists believe are threatening to heat the atmosphere
to dangerous levels.
"Convergence" means sharing out between countries the amount of
climate pollution which the scientists say the Earth can tolerate, so that by
perhaps 2050 every person in the world is entitled to emit the same amount of
pollution.
The idea has won the backing not only of religious groups like the World Council
of Churches butalso of the chairman of the UK's Royal Commission on
Environmental Pollution and of Sir John Houghton, an eminent climate scientist
Now the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Dr Williams, has added
his voice to the growing chorus of support for the work of the modest
London-based Global Commons Institute. In a lecture in London, entitled Changing
The Myths We Live By, he said we had to avert a global ecological crisis that
could ultimately jeopardise "our viability as a species".
The archbishop criticised specifically "the addiction to fossil fuel of the
wealthy nations; this is what secures the steady continuance of carbon
emissions, but it is also what drives anxieties about political hegemony".
He said: "Since the oil production of relatively stable and prosperous
societies is fast diminishing, these countries will become more and more
dependent on the production of poorer and less stable nations. How supplies are
to be secured at existing levels becomes a grave political and moral question
for the wealthier states, and a real destabiliser of international relations.
This is a situation with all the ingredients for the most vicious kinds of
global conflict -- conflict now ever more likely to be intensified by the
tensions around religious and cultural questions."
What was also at stake, Dr Williams said, was "our continuance as a species
capable of some vision of universal justice". He feared "the prospect
of a world of spiralling inequality and a culture that has learned again to
assume what Christianity has struggled to persuade humanity against since its
beginning -- that most human beings are essentially dispensable, born to
die".
Contraction and convergence, the archbishop said, sought to achieve fairly
rapid and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions "in a way that
foregrounds questions of equity between rich and poor nations".
He said: "This kind of thinking appears utopian only if we refuse to
contemplate the alternatives honestly." Calling for a new senseof public
seriousness about environmental issues, Dr Williams urged the UK government to
take the lead in pressing the contraction and convergence agenda.
Source: BBC News