The Center for Public Integrity

Known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the technology is derided by its critics, who claim that – in a world increasingly worried about greenhouse gas emissions – it is one more excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. Plans for CCS, a relatively recent technology, typically involve injecting massive amounts of CO2 underground or into the oceans. Its problems are numerous: the technology is energy intensive, and there are concerns over leakage of the carbon, challenges finding appropriate storage areas, and costs so huge they could suck away funds for renewable energy.

For true believers, however, the only obstacle facing CCS is cost, and they have lobbied the European Union to launch a billion-euro series of demonstration projects. “Despite the bright long-term prospects of CCS, the question remains of how we will close the gap between the current state of affairs and the building of the profitable plant,” said Lars Strömberg of Vattenfall, the Swedish state-owned energy giant, speaking at an October conference in Brussels. (Vattenfall holds a massive interest in German coal-fueled power stations.) Even the multi-billion-euro aid now made available by the EU is not sufficient to make CCS commercially viable by 2020, proponents say.

It was an inspiring moment. “Europe has a pioneer role,” Merkel announced. “We believe that this role is necessary, not least in order to inspire and convince partners outside of Europe to similarly ambitious targets.” For Merkel, who had to unite EU nations behind a plan when she was Germany’s environment minister, the speech marked the culmination of years of dedication to curbing global warming.

Shepherding 27 countries toward an agreement had not been easy. Yet there had never been any question about the obligations of the EU — the world’s second-largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases — to reduce greenhouse emissions. The European ambition was not just the result of broad concern about the environment, but also about pride in being the world leader on the issue. The real concern now was how to distribute the burden of responsibility among EU nations, whose membership spans countries from Estonia and Romania to Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.

While the United States’ Barack Obama, China’s Hu Jintao, and Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama seized the stage, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper made only a brief stop and was soon back home, at a media event in suburban Ontario. There, in the town of Oakville, he declared that his corporate tax cuts had successfully lured back from the U.S. the headquarters of the giant Tim Hortons donut franchise. For the moment anyway, global warming could wait. It was time to bite into a double-glazed.

For Canadians, Harper’s lack of interest in the U.N. summit was unremarkable. His policies are firmly rooted in the deep conservative politics of Alberta, the oil-rich western province that is home to many of Canada’s most ardent climate change deniers, some of whom are Harper’s closest allies. These include Harper adviser and University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper as well as the Calgary-based denier organization The Friends of Science. Canadians recall a 2002 fundraising letter in which Harper launched an attack on “the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord,” referring to the 1997 treaty that tried to put controls on carbon emissions. He called the treaty “essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” And along with his cabinet members, he has made reference to “so-called greenhouse gases” and the “hypothesis” of climate change.

But there is another side to the world’s largest democracy: About 60 percent of Indians live on less than $2 per day. Over half the country’s billion-plus people lack formal access to electricity. In some of India’s more crowded states, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with a combined population of 250 million residents have no electricity for a good part of the day, and villages in much of India’s outback are not connected to a power grid at all.

It is against this stark backdrop — against the pressing national imperative to reduce poverty and improve education and healthcare — that India grapples with how to address climate change. For years, the Indian government has viewed global warming through this domestic lens, arguing that mandated caps on greenhouse gas emissions would stunt its explosive economic growth and that, in any case, the industrialized world should bear the responsibility of relieving a problem it started decades ago.

Brazil lives a paradox. On the one hand, it is the tenth largest economy in the world and an emerging regional leader with a highly popular president. On the other, it ranks 75th in human development based on measures of literacy, education, and life expectancy. It is home to the biggest chunk of the Amazon rain forest, once called the “lungs of the world,” but it is also responsible for mass deforestation, an environmental, social, and economic scourge that is blamed as a factor in global warming. The country’s continued economic development requires more and more construction — growth that will only increase demand for energy and thus carbon emissions. This puts Brazil under pressure from all sides in relation to global climate change: from political opponents and supporters, businesses and NGOs, the federal capital Brasília and the states.

China’s worst storm in decades was, according to United Nations scientists, an illustration of what a changing climate may herald for the future. As such, it was a tipping point in the country’s environmental awareness. “For the ordinary people,” says Hu Kanping, editor of the Environmental Protection Journal, “it was a historical moment for them to know what is climate change.” In an editorial comparing the storm to Hurricane Katrina, the influential Chinese business magazine Caijing wrote: “This painful experience ought to set us thinking about how we can better pay Nature the respect she deserves and should make us listen more attentively to what science tells us about how climate change leads to natural disaster.”