Michael McCarthy, The Independent 20 Oct 09;
Why are we asking this now?
Yesterday Gordon Brown, at a meeting of ministers from 17 "major economies" held in London to discuss the talks, warned that countries were not moving fast enough to reach an agreement.
What is at stake?
A global deal to cut the carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, industry, transport and deforestation which, all governments now accept, are causing the atmosphere to heat up, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of us.
That seems like a no-brainer. Why shouldn't all countries agree to that?
While all countries now recognise the problem – a no-brainer is right – they have very differing views about what their role in the solution should be. Cutting CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be done, but not with the wave of a wand. It means redesigning whole economies on a low-carbon model, which involves a lot of effort and a lot of expense; among much else, you have to close down your coal-fired power stations or fit them with costly equipment to capture their CO2 and bury it underground. And the argument at Copenhagen will essentially be about how the effort and the expense should be shared out between nations. If that can be agreed, a deal will be done. If it can't, the world is in for trouble.
So who's arguing?
In the simplest terms, two sides have to come together to do a deal: the rich, mainly western countries of the developed world, such as the US and Britain, and the poorer (but rapidly growing) nations of the developing world, led by China and India. The argument is about responsibility and fairness, and it turns on the fact that most of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere now (and it remains for a century or more) has been put there by the rich countries, who have been pumping the stuff out since the industrial revolution 200 years ago; but most of the extra CO2 that will go into the atmosphere in the future will be put there by the developing nations, who are now embarked on a period of unprecedented, explosive economic growth, much of it powered by burning coal, with the principal purpose of drawing their peoples out of poverty.
Throughout the 20th- century the US was the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world; but in the last two years China has overtaken it, having doubled its carbon emissions from 3bn to 6bn tonnes in a mere decade, and they will continue to grow. So you might say that China, with India, Brazil, Indonesia and their fellow developing economies, are now making the problem worse – and they are; but that the US, with Britain, and Germany and France and the other rich countries, started the problem in the first place – and we did. (And we too are worsening the problem every day, of course, with our own carbon emissions.)
What are the implications for responsibility and fairness?
The principal one is that the rich West has to lead the way in cutting carbon, and this has been recognised by all sides since the first global warming treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The treaty said that the international community had "common but differentiated responsibilities" with regard to the climate, and this principle was put into effect in the Kyoto Protocol to the treaty, signed in 1997.
Under Kyoto, the rich industrialised countries agreed to cut their carbon emissions by fixed amounts by 2012, but the developing nations were not required to make any cuts at all. They were allowed to carry on with business as usual.
Has anything changed since then?
Yes. First, although most of the rich countries, including Britain, accepted Kyoto, the US Congress would not ratify the treaty, as many US politicians felt it was giving a free ride to countries such as China who were economic competitors; George Bush withdrew the US from Kyoto in 2001. Second, the carbon emissions of China and India and their fellows have mushroomed in a way that no one imagined possible in 1997, and they will represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth; if unchecked, they will derail all other efforts to control climate change. So the point is, the Chinas and Indias now have to make emissions cuts themselves, or first, the US will not join in a new treaty, and second, the fight to limit atmospheric CO2, and thus future temperature rises, will be lost. But China and India have always argued that they are only growing in the way the West did, and that is true; and now they find the western nations saying: 'don't do what we did, do what we say', which is clearly unfair. The deal at Copenhagen is essentially about what the West can offer to make that unfairness acceptable, and what carbon-cutting actions the Chinese and Indians and other developing countries can take, which will in turn be acceptable to the West.
What might be the offers?
The rich countries have to make clear commitments to cut their own CO2 significantly by 2020, and will have to agree massive financial help – billions and billions of dollars – for the poorer nations to continue their growth in a low-carbon way. For their part, the developing nations will have to agree some sort of numerical targets to cut their own CO2 – something which was once anathema to them, as they saw the imposition of targets on them as a ruse by western competitors to hold back their growth. All sides now have to do things which are demanding.
Then why might the talks fail?
The European Union is signed up to tough emissions cuts and backs a big financial help package; even nations such as Japan and Australia, formerly laggards, have started setting serious CO2 targets. It is the position of the US which is crucial. President Barack Obama has to take something substantial to the table in Copenhagen in December in terms of US domestic action, but the Bill which will define US climate policy is stuck in the Senate, and will not go through until Mr Obama's healthcare package is dealt with, which may not be in time. Can Mr Obama offer something to China and its fellows which Congress will ratify? Maybe. The British Government is optimistic that he will. But if he can't, there will be no deal.
Is that the only threat?
That's the major threat, but it's by no means the only one. This is a treaty whose initial text was 200 pages long and contained 2,000 "square brackets" – points of disagreement. It has to be agreed line by line by 192 countries whose representatives are all playing to different domestic agendas and who might have difficulty agreeing on the colour of an orange. If anybody tells you this is a simple matter, don't listen. It's true we have the technology to solve global warming, but this is not about technology. This is about politics, about the art of the possible. And it's the most difficult piece of politics the world has ever seen.
Could the Copenhagen climate meeting end in failure?
Yes
*The US may fail to come to the table with an adequately serious offer on climate.
*Citing the needs of their people, China and India may make offers of action that the US find inadequate.
*The huge financial agreement that is proposed may unravel because of the differing needs of each nation.
No
*When the time comes, President Obama's US will almost certainly try to offer what is needed.
*China and India are already recognising that they need to act themselves.
*All sides realise that the financial package is an essential part of any finally agreed deal.
Hopes Fade for Comprehensive Climate Treaty
John M. Broder, The New York Times 20 Oct 09;
WASHINGTON — With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it now appears that there is little chance that international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December will produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming.
The United States and many other major pollutant-emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced.
Instead, representatives at the Copenhagen meeting are likely to announce a number of interim steps and agree to keep talking next year.
“There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who leads the United Nations climate secretariat and oversees the negotiations, said late last week. “But I hope it will go well beyond simply a declaration of principles. The form I would like it to take is the groundwork for a ratifiable agreement next year.”
Negotiators have accepted as all but inevitable that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks will not resolve the outstanding issues in the time remaining before the Copenhagen conference opens in December. The gulf between rich and poor nations, and even among the wealthiest nations, is just too wide.
Representatives of the 16 largest emitting countries and the European Union, who concluded a meeting in London on Monday, said that they had made progress on the level of aid needed to help poor countries adapt to climate change and adopt less-polluting energy technology.
They also said they had settled some questions on the “architecture” of any agreement reached in Copenhagen, while acknowledging that it would fall short of a binding treaty.
Yet expectations remain high for a meeting that carries important weight not just for the environment but for a broad range of international issues, including trade, security, economic development, energy production, technology sharing and the survival of some vulnerable island nations.
So officials are now narrowing expectations and defining the areas where there is agreement, such as the need to halt and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, although how and by which nations remain the subjects of intense dispute. Negotiators are also discussing what form any declaration that emerges from Copenhagen might take and how to ensure that any promises made there are kept.
Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen is Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.
The chief American climate negotiator, Todd Stern, has said that he will not go beyond what Congress is willing to endorse. His deputy, Jonathan Pershing, affirmed this last week at a negotiators’ meeting in Bangkok. “We are not going to be part of an agreement we cannot meet,” Mr. Pershing said.
Administration officials and Congressional leaders have said that final legislative action on a climate bill would not occur before the first half of next year.
European officials have been pressing hardest for some form of binding treaty modeled on the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the United States refused to ratify because, American officials said, it imposed emissions limits on developed nations while demanding nothing of rapidly growing economies like China and India.
American officials have said that no agreement in Copenhagen is better than a bad deal that cannot be ratified or enforced. And they note that it took four years after the initial negotiation of the Kyoto accord to complete it.
There is general agreement among international negotiators and knowledgeable observers that the parties to the Copenhagen talks, held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, will agree to continue discussions next year, and perhaps set a deadline for reaching a final agreement by midyear or December 2010 at the latest.
The rest of the outcome, even the form it may take, remains uncertain. The world’s biggest economies agreed at a meeting last summer in L’Aquila, Italy, on a goal of limiting global temperature increases to about 2 degrees Fahrenheit above current levels, though they did not agree on the means to get there or on how to enforce it. Such a goal is expected to be part of any declaration from Copenhagen.
Also likely to be included is a statement that wealthy nations should cut their emissions below certain benchmarks and that emerging economies should reduce their rate of emissions growth below a business-as-usual curve. No numbers were attached to either of these pledges, and that remains the stickiest of issues.
Another unresolved issue is the financial structure of any international climate accord. The wealthy nations have agreed in principle to support low-carbon growth in the developing world and to help those countries hardest hit by climate change to adapt. But the amounts of money, the programs and the countries that would qualify for that support and for cost-sharing among donor nations are highly contentious issues unlikely to be settled in Copenhagen.
There will probably also be a promise to create an international system to monitor, report and verify emissions reductions, although there is no consensus yet on who would perform these tasks and what penalties would be assessed for failure to comply.
There is also likely to be a commitment by most nations to produce and publish economic growth plans based on lower carbon emissions and an agreement by advanced nations to share clean new energy technology with developing countries.
“The most likely form any agreement will take will be a political declaration,” said Nigel Purvis, a former State Department climate negotiator in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
“It could be a statement by senior leaders, or it could be adopted by the parties as a formal decision,” he said. “That does not make it legally binding, but it sends a signal to the world of the direction the negotiations are going and give guidance to negotiators as they continue their work.”
U.N.'s de Boer sees no new treaty at Copenhagen: report
Reuters 19 Oct 09;
LONDON (Reuters) - The Copenhagen climate change conference will set out the political framework for cutting greenhouse gases, but will not result in a new international treaty, the Financial Times newspaper said on Monday, citing a top UN official.
"A fully fledged new international treaty under the convention - I do not think that is going to happen," Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told the paper in an interview.
"If you look at the limited amount of time that remains to Copenhagen, we have to focus on what can realistically be done and how that can realistically be framed," he added.
De Boer said the conference needed to reach an "overarching decision" that sets out individual targets for industrialized countries.
In addition, it needed to decide "how major developing countries intend to engage 2020, and hopefully that puts that in the context of a long-term goal."
(Reporting by Simon Jessop)
