LONDON: Ten years ago the world saw the most generous gesture in the history of international relations. To support the lifestyle of millions, one group of countries relinquished their claim to the debts — worth trillions of dollars — of another. In 1992 most of the poorest countries in the world queued up to sign the United Nations framework convention on climate change. In a stroke they wrote off the historical ecological debts of rich countries, run up by their burning of finite fossil fuels and the resulting legacy of global warming.

The convention called for a plan to stop dangerous climate change based on precaution, equity and the high-polluting countries taking the lead. Poor countries agreed their price before signing. But has it been met over the past 10 years?

The review is dismal. Aid has fallen dramatically. The price of commodities depended on by poor countries have halved since 1980. Heavily indebted countries have “unsustainable” debt return, and they will have to pay, even if it means less money available for health, education and the environment.

This is how the poor have been paid back for their forgiveness of the carbon debts of the rich. By contrast, rich countries committed a paltry $400 million a year from 2005 to help developing nations adapt to climate change. At the same time the rich countries subsidize their dirty domestic fossil fuel industries by a minimum of $70 billion to $80 billion a year.

Incredibly, global warming has been squeezed off the agenda at Johannesburg. Is it because the different treatment of ecological debt and financial debt is too embarrassing? Because if you change the accounting system to measure what really matters, such as whether or not the environmental budget is balanced, Europe and the US look hopelessly indebted.

For at least two centuries industrialized countries built their wealth on a dripfeed of fossil fuels. Since Britain received its first oil shipment in the 1860s, the global economy expanded enormously. Oil equals economic opportunity, but also unprecedented trouble. For every fossil-fuel step forward, the global economy takes three steps back due to the global warming.

According to the World Disasters Report, three things have shot up over the past 30 years: the number of climate-related disasters, their economic costs and the number of people affected.

Experts talk of “adapting” to global warming. But for island dwellers whose land barely breaks the ocean’s surface, their only adaptation is to become environmental refugees. The full scale of damages is potentially so large that it promises the end of human development.

Fossil fuels will have to be rationed. The big question is, how? Echoing his father at the first earth summit, George Bush says he will do nothing to hinder the US way of life. America behaves like a dissolute aristocratic son, selfishly blowing the family’s inheritance.

But controlling global warming means shrinking and sharing the carbon emissions cake. A workable global deal means moving, in a set time, to equal slices. Yet rich countries seem only capable of passing on bad habits. Research shows that for every ton of carbon pollution Britain has cut over the past 10 years, it adds three by backing dirty fuel projects in developing countries. One step forward, three steps back.

Today, the global economy is like a multinational audited by Andersen, guided by nonsense statistics.

At Johannesburg the world needs another gesture as generous as that made by poor countries at Rio. The rich have to leave space in the atmosphere for poor countries to develop.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.