America's great test.

• Author: Yehoshua, A.B.
• Position: Essay

The editor of UN Chronicle approached me with a request to write about the subject of global warming. I am not at all young, and for most of my life it never occurred to me to regard climate change as an existential danger for mankind. The horrible wars of the twentieth century, the regional Israeli-Palestinian conflict--these, in my view, were the truly grave threats to the well-being of the world Compared with the instability and corruption of human beings, the climate seemed the firm foundation of our world, but the time has clearly come for me to take a new look, and confront issues I had never before contemplated. I have therefore turned to an expert: my son Nahum, 34, a senior economist in Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection, and a delegate to the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Here is his concise analysis:

This December in Copenhagen, if all goes as hoped, fifteen nations will sign a climate treaty (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to replace the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. This new agreement will have unprecedented significance for mankind, for many generations to come.

The goal of the treaty is to bring about a maximum reduction in future greenhouse gas emissions, with the aim of stabilizing the global warming climate at an upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius. This target represents a painful compromise. But failure to achieve it will worsen the situation and bring about a variety of further phenomena that can be classified as catastrophic blows to our climate, constituting a very real threat to the fate of humanity.

The main question for the nations gathered at the conference table, however, is not the level of emissions reduction to be adopted in the treaty. The central question is how nations will divide the burden among them, first and foremost between the developed and the developing worlds. Who will carry the greater burden of reduction? And what compensation should the developed world-via direct grants, technology sharing, and so forth-grant the countries of the developing world, to make up for the losses to their economies?

The industrialized world, which is responsible today, as in the past, for most greenhouse gas emissions, has experienced prosperity for many decades. By contrast, the developing world and the "failed world" of least-developed nations have paid a high price for the comfortable life of others. The developed world has not merely expropriated their...