I had the honour to address COP1 in Berlin. I had the impertinence to suggest that future meetings be held on the great Antarctic iceberg as a way of dramatising the urgency of our task. Kyoto is much more pleasant than an iceberg, but the urgency has intensified.
The nature of the challenge of climate change is now clear. It is not scientific. It is not technological - we are an adaptive species. As John Prescott said yesterday, the challenge is political, and I would add, it is intellectual, institutional, and ethical. After a week of debate about important details, I suggest that the time is right for a statement of an even more important principle. After years of debate, about "efficiency" I suggest that your results cannot be brought to success without a statement about equity. The "sense of the Senate" resolution made the fair political point that they could not ratify a treaty, that was not seen to be fair by the American people. A treaty would have to include meaningful participation by developing countries. I would say to my friends in Congress that you cannot ask for that involvement on the basis of efficiency alone, You must specify that the nature of that involvement will be equitable. I am not a Government. I speak this morning only for an organisation of environmentally- committed parliamentarians from 47 countries. With all the humility appropriate to a non-negotiator, may I suggest a text to this great gathering of negotiators.
Many of you know the Contraction and Convergence analysis. It offers a framework for an answer. It offers an envelope of equity within which we can trade and barter our way to collective sanity in the coming decades.
Let us make a start in this direction. Let the Conference of Parties resolve " to agree to negotiate a legally binding "Equity Protocol" establishing the principle that the apportionment of global emission entitlements be deliberately converged to a point of equal per capita shares at a date to be agreed."
I invite the Government of Japan to propose such a text, which is in line with their policy statement at AGBM7. I invite the European Union, whose efforts entitle it to take a leadership role, to propose such a text. I invite the United States, which rightly takes its stand on the basis of a "global solution to a global problem" to draw the logical conclusion of its own approach, and to propose such a text.
And in response: May I invite the Africa Group whose statement in August led the way to respond to such a text. May I invite the AOSIS states whose very survival depends on our collective success to back such a proposal. May I invite the Governments of China and India to seize this opportunity of an equity protocol that would entrench in our process the principle they have correctly and courageously fought for.
In life the right thing to do is the right thing to do. It is occasionally true in
diplomacy that an ethically just answer is also the only available way out of an impasse.
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