Damian Carrington is a UK journalist and is the head of Environment at the UK Guardian newspaper (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/damiancarrington ).
Damian Carrington on Carbon Debt, Ecological Debt and the failure at the Durban Climate Change Conference (2011): “After the feast of words in Durban, comes the reckoning: the deal ensures beyond doubt that our children will be worse off than we have been. Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world's leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never. The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won't be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban. If this roadmap to agree a global deal to tackle climate change by 2015, which would take force by 2020, is a triumph, it is a pitiful one. It aspires to achieve in four year's time what was deemed essential by the world's governments in 2007, but crashed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009. That eight-year failure is why the ecological debt will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. Like a loan-shark's debt, the cost of halting global warming - and coping with the impacts already certain - spirals higher and higher the longer you leave repayment. At the moment, as record rises in carbon emissions show, we are paying back nothing.” [1].
[1]. Damian Carrington, “Climate deal: a guarantee our children will be worse off than us”, Guardian, 11 December 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/dec/11/durban-climate-change-conference-2011-climate-change .