Environment Forum

His work at the Bali climate change conference isn’t sponsored by world oil giant Exxon Mobil, although he has held past conferences which were, says Alan Oxley.

Oxley, former Australian ambassador at world trade talks and now chairman of his NGO World Growth,  believes the sense of urgency that pervades the Bali talks – meant to launch negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — is misplaced.

“There’s a surfeit of enthusiasm,” he says.

“I think there’s been a bit of a campaign to engender this sense of urgency,” he says, pointing to Britain and Germany as chief culprits.

Oxley isn’t convinced that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak in the next few years, one scenario proposed by a U.N. panel of scientists. Twenty to 30 years is fine, he says. He isn’t too worried, either, about a 2 degrees centigrade hotter world. “We need a very long-term perspective, so what’s the rush?”

Oxley is in Bali to try and calm everyone down and promote his publication — on the threat emissions cuts pose to the world’s poor. But his main agenda appears to be to argue for free trade.

He’s worried that climate change policies such as Europe’s emissions trading scheme could unleash a new wave of protectionism, whereby countries slap tariffs on imports of goods like steel and cement, to try and compensate for carbon taxes on their industry at home.

And he’s opposed to any position that smacks of unfairness — including paying developing countries like China to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, a key issue at the Bali talks.

“Over time, as prosperity rises, they’ll take more action.”

What about a global carbon market, to help cut the costs of fighting change?

“It would be easier to negotiate a global currency. It’s beyond the technical capacity of governments to negotiate.”

By the way, I’m updating this blog after Alan Oxley objected to the implication, in the original, that he was sceptical about whether climate change was happening. He called me to say that World Growth accepts that human activity is a cause of global warming but is sceptical about the Kyoto Protocol.