Photo : D.R.
Just a few days prior to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, the lack of pedagogical and cultural tools to help understand the questions at hand is surprising. A double DVD entitled De Kyoto à Copenhague, energies et environnement (From Kyoto to Copenhagen, Energies and Environment) is the exception. Released by Arte France, this set comes to us from Jean-Christophe Victor, the man behind the geopolitical show “Le dessous des cartes” (The Story Behind the Maps), broadcast each week on Arte. The 25 shows are divided into two categories: “energies” and “environment”. Because “everything is linked,” says Jean-Christophe Victor in his editorial. “The excessive use of fossil fuels has contributed to the rise in temperature of our atmosphere. Excessive urbanisation and deforestation have gradually led to the disappearance of our biodiversity.”
The set provides fundamental information on different subjects related to energy, with a thematic, regional and sectoral approach, and provides long-term understanding of the issues. Complementary research is sometimes necessary which it deals with precise facts. The show entitled “Géopolitique du gaz” (Gas Geopolitics), produced in 2007, touches on the Nabucco project, for example. This 3,400 kilometre-long gas pipeline allows for the transportation of gas from central Asia to Western Europe via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria and Hungary. The European Union, which supports the project, wishes, in this way, to reduce its energy dependence on Russia, one of its main suppliers of natural gas (40%). Since this episode was made, an agreement on Nabucco was signed between the five countries concerned (13 July 2009). The beginning of construction is planned for 2011, at an estimated cost of 7.9 billion euros.
More tied to current events, the environmental aspect of the set provides an understanding of the heritage of Kyoto, and the issues at stake in Copenhagen. The obligation of “clean development” for the poorest countries is particularly well explained, with examples to illustrate the point (the chapter “Climactic negotiations: 2-Copenhagen”). “Since the beginning of the application of the Kyoto protocol, in 2005, 1,792 projects (editor’s note: investments in “clean development”) have stopped 312 million tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere,” we learn. “This doesn’t seem like very much compared with the 29 billion tonnes emitted in 2005 (1). What’s more, these investments are extremely unbalanced (…). There are only 33 projects in the whole of Africa, including 16 in South Africa alone.”
(1) According to Nature Geosciences, global emissions have risen by 29% since the year 2000 (www.nature.com/ngeo).
Le dessous des cartes, de Kyoto à Copenhague
(The Story Behind the Maps)
Proposed by Jean-Christophe Victor
Arte Éditions (November 2009)
265 minutes, 24,99 euros
English 
