Who will history hold accountable for climate change?...

The climate change conference in Copenhagen is looking to be a bust. Without anything but a broad and unambitious target and a series of commitments to a potential $100B adaptation fund, the years of preparation, money and expectations have amounted to almost nothing -- pending some last minute super-deal.

The protests will continue. Environmental groups will hand out evermore awards to the world's worst polluters. The news might even give it some noteworthiness until Tiger's next disaster. Some delegates will go home uninspired and deflated, while some others will be happy to have that big climate thing out of the way. And the residents of Copenhagen will come out of their homes and finally be able to enjoy their pints of Carlsberg in peace.

Let's put on our doom and gloom hats for a second and fast forward fifty years.

Despite the efforts of local communities and regional governments, global emissions have scarcely fallen as a global agreement could never be hatched and short-term economic and trade interests proved dominant. Global temperatures have increased dramatically. Sea-walls are now among the main exports of the EU as fast-paced climate change adaptation measures are taken all over the world. Mitigation is a word forgotten, much like the once-magnificent offshore wind turbines lying at the bottom of the sea after being mangled by increasingly intense storms. Much of south-east Asia is underwater, billions of environmental refugees painfully roam the earth and countries are fighting wars to secure what's left of the supply of fresh water. Meanwhile, the world's elite are riding jet skis through the Northwest Passage and suntanning by Santa's North Pole Resort & Casino.

A frightening world and probably an unlikely one within the next fifty years. But say it happened. Say the worst climate fears came true. How would our current world leaders go down in history?

Would they be to blame? Would we look at the pending disaster of Copenhagen as the defining point?

Canada's leaders have been noticeably lacking in enthusiasm for preventing climate disaster, winning Fossil Award after Fossil award. George Monbiot thinks Canada is the biggest barrier to any global climate deal. Or should we shift the blame to the world's biggest emitters like China and the United States? Even the second-coming that is Barack Obama has managed to disappoint at the summit.

And will they feel guilt as the climate gets worse?

What about the deniers who have prevented action thus far? The administrations of George Bush and John Howard were notorious for exacerbating the more ridiculous climate change deniers. Are they more to blame than our leaders today?

Or should we be criticizing the 'promise but no delivery' policies of Clinton and Chretien, who got into a political pissing contest over Kyoto targets but showed little for it? These two certainly weren't the only ones to come up short on delivery.

Or is Harper right that the developing countries of the world are to blame? Have we even reached the defining point of the climate crisis?

Maybe the past 200 years of industrialization and excessive lifestyles in the developed world is to blame.

The point I'm trying to make is that pinning the potential climate crisis on one person or group is impossible. Blame can be thrown over so many parts of the world, over hundreds of years and over so many people. But not one person and not one instance. Unfortunately, that means people won't feel the necessary responsibility they hold, easily thinking it is someone else's fault. This makes it much harder to do anything about it.

Assuming I'm still around, I'd be very interested to read those history books fifty years from now...