Johann Hari: Don't kill the planet in the name of saving the economy

The collision of the credit crunch and the climate crunch could be a boon

We are living through two great meltdowns – the credit crunch, and the climate crunch. The heating of the planet is now happening so fast it's hard to pluck a single event to fix on, but here's one. By the summer of 2013, the Arctic will be free of ice. How big an event it this?

The Wall Street Crash hadn't happened for 80 years. The Arctic Crash hasn't happened for three million years: that's the last time there was watery emptiness at the top of the world. The Arctic is often described as the canary in the coal mine. As one Arctic researcher put it to me this week: the canary is dead. It's time to clear the mine, and run.

We now have higher levels of warming gases in the atmosphere than at any point in modern geological history. The last time they were higher than this was during the ecocene, 50 million years ago. Sea levels were 300 feet higher than today, and crocodiles swam at the poles.

So it seems strange that even here in Europe – the continent that has taken the evidence about global warming most seriously – many of our leaders are trying to use the credit crunch as an excuse to drive us deeper into the climate crunch. Last year, all the EU leaders agreed to carry out the bare minimum scientists say we need to prevent catastrophe. By the year 2020, they agreed to a 20 per cent cut in carbon emissions, a 20 per cent rise in energy efficiency, and to get 20 per cent of our energy from renewables. This meant the EU could stroll into the talks for a successor treaty to Kyoto in the strongest position to pressure the world. The continent that gave the world the Enlightenment and modern science was upholding those values – and offering our species the path out of a dead-end.

Until last week. At the EU summit to bail out the banks, several leaders began to quibble about bailing out the climate. The British Government has been trying to punch holes in it, demanding exemptions for aviation and other accounting tricks. The eastern European bloc – led by Polish PM Donald Tusk – said the deal was "too much" during a recession, but they need a Western European country if they're going to totally break the deal. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took a break from finger-printing gypsies to say: "We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote. We have time."Continued...