We suffer, today, something very near to limbo. The US regime is working diligently to deliver Kyoto a final, fatal blow. Even so, let us turn towards the future. The non-governmental organisations (NGO) community, like the climate community in general, is thick with speculation about transition from Kyoto to a just and adequate second-generation protocol. A change is coming, but still — and this is the point — it has not actually come.

Which brings us to the tendency of Southern diplomats and delegates to decry even honest concern for ecological adequacy as a stalking horse for Northern pressure. Just now, developing country commitments, or even talk of them, are far more likely to hurt the South than to protect the climate. Were we developing country delegates, we too would refuse it. And as for the NGOs, they must under no circumstances lobby the developing world to accept commitments. To do so, make no mistake, would be to carry water for the madpersons of the right.

But history is not a static thing. And all indications are that it’s about to change in some surprising ways. For one thing, Kyoto is about to enter into force. For another, the dream of the clean development mechanism (CDM) is collapsing. For a third, the policy agenda will soon begin to crowd with proposals for a global, just and ecologically adequate second-generation protocol. And when the talk finally turns, the virtue of the South’s refusal of commitments, if indeed it continues, will no longer be so obvious.

Be clear here: a just climate treaty would of course have to satisfy the South’s demand of a ‘right to development’. But it would also have to be adequate to the increasingly grim scientific bottomline. The right to development can only, at this late date, be the right to sustainable development, and it can only come within a global context in which developing countries commit themselves to emission limits.

We take it as self-evident that such commitments can only come within a treaty in which all human beings have the same per capita emission rights. For the atmosphere is a crucial economic resource, and any treaty that is not explicitly based upon the per capita principle represents a continued transfer of resources from South to North. To those NGOs who object that a per capita treaty would entail a politically impossible transfer of wealth, we say that such transfers are both justified and necessary: justified as payment for Northern overuse of limited atmospheric space; necessary because, without them, there will be no way to fund decarbonisation in the South.

It will soon be time for the South, together with its many friends in the North, to step forward with a concrete proposal, one to be adopted in the second commitment period, one that is architecturally and institutionally consistent with the UNFCCC framework. Kyoto, in other words, may yet make a difference. But only if we can rise above the habits of the bitter last decade and face the future. It will not do for the environmental NGOs to pretend that we can move forward by way of the gradual evolution of the Kyoto framework. But neither will it do for the South to become forever comfortable in rejecting all commitments. It’s time, instead, to turn to a new kind of realism, one based, as true realism must be, on justice.

Don’t get us wrong: there’s a desperate need for Northern leadership; especially so in this strange period between Kyoto’s entry into force and the arrival of its successor. This means at least two things: a serious effort to implement emission reductions in the North, and willingness to fund adaptation and capacity-building in the South. And with the US out of the protocol, this means a special obligation for the EU to pick up the slack.

The lynchpin here is leadership from the South, and we’ll need it in the next five years. It’s asking a lot, perhaps, given the North’s continued high emissions, a lot indeed. But history, as we all know, is not made under conditions of our own choosing.