The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  Politicians sought the cover provided by what scientists said should be done. The latter obliged with the Bali Declaration. Signed by more than two hundred scientists, the declaration said that a new climate treaty should limit temperature increases to no more than 2oC above pre-industrial temperatures, a number already adopted by the European Union. A ‘fair and effective’ agreement, in the opinion of the scientists, would require greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 to be no more than half their 1990 level.[9]

  Unwisely, the UN’s Yvo de Boer aligned the secretariat with the EU by circulating a four-page text containing the twenty-five to forty per cent figure. Its preamble cited the ‘unequivocal scientific evidence’ that required Annex I nations to cut their emissions by this magnitude, although there was no evidence as such, only computer simulations based on a series of unverifiable assumptions.[10] Defining the emissions caps upfront was dismissed by Harlan Watson of the US negotiating team. ‘In our view that pre-judges the outcome of the negotiations over the next two years.’[11] In this, the US had the support of Canada, Japan and Russia.[12] De Boer disagreed. It would be a ‘critical issue’ for the negotiations.[13]

  By trying to turn Bali into a showdown with the US over the quantum of emissions reductions, the EU was repeating the mistake of Kyoto. The critical issue was not the quantum of emissions reductions, but the extent to which non-Annex I nations would be subject to them. A treaty that didn’t include commitments for China and the other large non-Annex I economies would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Were the EU and the secretariat trying to disprove Einstein’s definition of insanity?

  In part, the EU’s negotiating obtuseness reflected its immense institutional inertia in having obtained agreement among its twenty-seven member states. In part, it was because lead responsibility lay with member states’ environment ministries and the European environment commissioner who saw their principal constituency as environmental NGOs. Then there was the superficially attractive narrative that framed President Bush, who would be leaving the White House in thirteen months, as the principal obstacle to reaching agreement.

  In a lightning visit, Bush’s opponent in the 2004 election endorsed the EU narrative by attacking the Bush administration for undermining attempts to agree stringent emissions caps. Global momentum would make emissions caps a reality whatever the opposition of Bush or from Congress. ‘This is going to happen,’ Kerry told reporters. ‘It’s going to happen, because it has to.’[14]

  By contrast with the EU’s environment ministry-led approach, the US negotiating position was the product of an inter-agency process convened by the National Security Council and involved the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Justice, State, and Treasury, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the National Economic Council and the EPA. The State Department led the negotiations, institutionally vastly more experienced in international diplomacy than Europe’s environment ministries.

  Before heading to Bali, Dobriansky and her team in the State Department met negotiators who had served in the Bush I and Clinton administrations. Several from the Clinton administration emphasised the importance of obtaining high-level commitments from non-Annex I parties. This, they argued, needed to be set forth in Bali. One former senior State Department official asked for a private meeting with Dobriansky to give her some insights before Bali. ‘Very helpful, very useful,’ Dobriansky recalled.[15]

  Thus there was a consensus among current and former executive branch policymakers of both parties. Furthermore, the US had reached agreement on a text with key parties prior to Bali, according to Dobriansky.[16] Yet what transpired in the Bali conference hall suggested something rather different and made the denouement at Bali the most dramatic of all the COPs before Copenhagen.

  Snow lay thick on the ground in Kyoto ten years before, and snow would fall on the delegates in Copenhagen two years later. Lying eight degrees south of the equator, Bali was better located for a December meeting on global warming. It drew nearly eleven thousand participants. They included more than three thousand, five hundred government officials, outnumbered by five thousand, eight hundred representatives of NGOs, UN bodies and agencies and nearly one thousand, five hundred accredited members of the media.[17]

  The Indonesian government brought some welcome colour. COP President Rachmat Witoelar and others on the conference platform wore tropical shirts. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wrote a song for the occasion – its lyrics a marked improvement on the Dutch poet laureate’s efforts at The Hague in 2000:

  Mother Earth is getting warmer

  Climate change is tragedy for all

  Together we must find answers

  Don’t let it destroy our life

  Ill-at-ease government leaders and ministers were invited to sing the chorus as a video of smiling children, burning forests and trees uprooted by storms was beamed into the hall:

  We all gather in Bali

  We all gather in Bali

  We want to save our planet

  We want to save our planet

  We are all united here in Bali

  For a better life, a better world

  For you and me[18]

  The Indonesians also broadened the talks beyond environment ministers to bring in trade and finance ministers. These included talks aimed at removing trade barriers and tariffs on environmental goods and services. There was little doubt about the geopolitical orientation of the conference chair as a leading member of the G77. In 1955, Sukharno, Indonesia’s first president, hosted the Bandung Conference, the first major Asian/African conference, and in 1961 founded the Non-Aligned Movement together with Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Nehru (India) and Nkrumah (Ghana).

  ‘We are all united here in Bali,’ the chorus sang.

  Up to a point. The delegates were united in their determination to present the outcome of the COP as a success, a sentiment which the G77 plus China used to isolate the United States in the COP’s final minutes.

  The underlying motivations of the key players can be assessed by their responses to attempts at Bali to find breaches in the Berlin Wall separating the Annex I parties from the rest. There was a renewed effort on voluntary commitment, which China and the G77 had chased off the agenda at Buenos Aires in 1998. At Bali, it was Belarus’ proposal to ‘legitimise’ its participation in Kyoto’s first commitment period, supported by Russia and the Ukraine. It sank without trace.

  On the conference’s third day, there was discussion of a long-standing Russian proposal to enable developing countries to take on voluntary emission limits. It attracted the support of the EU and other Annex I parties. India and Saudi Arabia voiced their opposition.[19]

  There had been ongoing discussion about how to carry out a review of the Protocol. The fifty-four-member African Group and China warned against ‘undermining the Protocol’, even though it specifically required the review. India went further, wanting to rule out new commitments for developing countries.[20]

  At the beginning of the conference’s second week, there was another meeting on the review. Annex I parties wanted it to focus on the effectiveness of meeting the Protocol’s objective. Growth of non-Annex I emissions would inevitably call into question the Annex I bifurcation. Russia, Canada and Australia wanted to establish a working group.* They were opposed by South Africa, China, India and Saudi Arabia. Joined by the EU, the three Annex I parties then proposed requesting proposals on how to amend the Annexes to the Protocol, i.e., to provide some form of graduation mechanism. They were opposed by a solid phalanx of China, India and Saudi Arabia.[21]

  The consistent pattern of opposition by the G77 plus China provides context for their public statements in front of the cameras. At the high-level segment a couple of days later, the US restated President Bush’s position that a future agreement should include a long-term global emissions goal and nati
onal plans with measurable mid-term goals. In front of the TV cameras, South Africa declared that it would take serious mitigation actions (i.e., limits on greenhouse gas emissions) that were measurable, reportable and verifiable.[22] If made in good faith, why had South Africa – with China and India – acted to block discussion that might result in a developing nation becoming an Annex I party or acquiring similar obligations? It was a question that would hang over the climactic events during the COP’s grand finale.

  Before that came the conference highlight. The hall was packed and security tight. Many delegates were forced to watch the proceedings on TV. For a time, Rajendra Pachauri was locked out of the hall.[23]

  ‘Fresh from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo alongside the IPCC, Academy-award winner, best-selling author, former Vice President, Senator and Congressman from the United States of America and climate change’s single most effective messenger to the world, I present to you Al Gore,’ Cathy Zoi – an employee of Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection – told the cheering hall as Gore strode across the platform.

  ‘We, the human species, face a planetary emergency,’ Gore intoned. ‘That phrase still sounds shrill to some ears but it is deadly accurate as a description of the situation that we now confront.’ He spoke of his shock as scientists had repeatedly brought forward estimates for the date when the entire north polar ice cap would disappear. Years ago, they had thought it might be gone towards the end of the twenty-first century. Only three years ago, they thought it could happen by 2050. ‘Now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as five to seven years.’

  He compared people who believed in the threat of climate change, but did nothing about it, to victims of Nazi death squads.

  ‘First they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, so I said nothing. Then, they came for the Gypsies, and I was not a Gypsy, so I said nothing,’ and he listed several other groups, and with each one he said nothing. Then, he said, they came for me.

  Those who thought that the climate crisis would only affect their grandchildren – and, as the crisis got closer to them, their children – were wrong. It would get them too. ‘It is affecting us in the present generation, and it is up to us in this generation to solve this crisis.’ Quoting Churchill, most world leaders were like the appeasers of the 1930s and ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

  Speaking ten years and four days after his appearance at the Kyoto conference where he had publicly instructed American negotiators to make concessions, Gore dropped a second COP bombshell. ‘I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth.’ His voice tightened as he wiped sweat from his face. ‘My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.’ The hall went wild with applause and cheering. There were others, Gore said, who could also help move the process forward, but they weren’t named – and would the audience have cared? They had just heard what it was convenient to believe.

  Those who had just applauded his ‘diplomatic truth’ had two choices. They could direct their anger and frustration at the United States. Or they could decide to move forward without the US; do all of the difficult work and save a large, blank space in the document and footnote it: ‘This document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway.’

  The negotiations would culminate in Copenhagen in two years’ time. ‘Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now,’ Gore told the delegates. ‘You must anticipate that.’ He could not guarantee that the next president would have the position he assumed – ‘but I can tell you that I believe it is quite likely’.

  Gore spelt out the issues that needed to be decided in Bali. Targets and timetables, of course, together with that blank space for the next president of the United States to ink in; a plan for a fully-funded, ambitious adaptation fund (not a tough sell in a hall packed with delegates from countries who expected to be its beneficiaries); and a deforestation plan (‘it is difficult to forge such an agreement here’) – and not a word on the single biggest lesson from the Kyoto Protocol: its failure even to contemplate the prospect of major developing economies eventually being subject to a global agreement to limit their emissions.

  A global agreement was not going to work unless it included the world’s largest economies. Rather than use his standing to highlight the hole in the heart of the climate change treaties, Gore chose to isolate the US and the Bush administration as it attempted to fill the hole that the Clinton-Gore administration had bequeathed it. ‘We have everything we need,’ Gore bellowed, ‘save political will. But political will is a renewable resource.’

  It was scarcely Gore’s finest hour.

  New Scientist environment blogger Catherine Brahic described what happened next:

  The audience rises to its feet, cheers, whoops some more, Gore makes his way down the aisle, drenched in sweat, shakes the hands that are reaching towards him. The last one he shakes is that of a grinning government representative sitting just behind me – he’s from China. I ask him if political will really is a renewable resource. ‘We will see,’ he smiles.[24]

  China’s answer came two days later. Ministers and officials had wrangled for much of the day over the precise wording that might – or might not – provide a basis for some form of construction to bridge the gaping divide in the climate treaties. A smaller group met until the early hours of Saturday morning, reaching apparent agreement on the most contentious issues.

  Shortly after 8am, Rachmat Witoelar gavelled the resumed session to order. Even minor changes to the text would compromise the meeting’s ability to come to an agreement, Witoelar warned.[25] He invited the COP to adopt the draft text. Portugal, on behalf of the EU, supported the text and called for all parties to do the same. Witoelar scanned the hall. ‘India, please come forward.’

  At a small meeting mandated by Witoelar, the Indian delegate explained, the G77 plus China had agreed a modification of the text in respect of the scope of possible obligations placed on developing country parties: nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country parties in the context of sustainable development, supported by technology, financing and capacity building, in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner. The language hid a shift in emphasis. Measurable, reportable and verifiable now applied to what developed nations were to do for developing ones, de-emphasising the accountability of developing countries in meeting their mitigation commitments. ‘Mr President, this is our preference,’ the Indian delegate’s politeness indicating the strength of the hand India and its allies were playing.

  Not so the Chinese delegation, whose intervention let the cat out of the bag. It was wrong to ask the meeting to adopt a text when the other meeting, convened by the Indonesian foreign minister and other members of the G77 plus China, was discussing this very matter. ‘At this moment, we cannot adopt this decision.’

  Witoelar suspended the session.

  When it resumed, the Chinese delegation intervened again. The Indonesian foreign minister was still in consultations. It was therefore still inappropriate for the matter to be discussed. A second member of the delegation took the microphone. In English, he accused the secretariat of intentionally holding the session in the hall when he knew that the G77 was still meeting the Indonesian foreign minister. To applause, he demanded apologies from the secretariat.

  ‘Yes, I have been offended,’ the microphone picked up de Boer telling Witoelar. ‘This is a process I was not aware of.’

  Pakistan, on behalf of the G77, asked for a further suspension while negotiations continued outside the hall.

  Witoelar began the resumed session with an apology; as chair of the conference, he had not been without faults. But he had brought heavy reinforcements. ‘I c
ome before you very reluctantly,’ Ban Ki-moon told the delegates. ‘Frankly I’m disappointed at the lack of progress.’ Everyone (i.e., the US) should be ready to make compromises. ‘No one leaves this chamber fully satisfied.’

  Witoelar made another apology, asking for delegates’ understanding and forgiveness for any unintentional mistakes (i.e., that the G77 plus China stitch-up had become public in such an embarrassing manner). The apology wasn’t enough for the Chinese delegation, who wanted to know from the executive secretary why China had needed to make two speeches on a point of order earlier in the day.

  Yvo de Boer switched on his microphone. The words didn’t come easily; two or three at a time before trailing off. Then a complete sentence. ‘The secretariat was not aware that parallel meetings were taking place and was not aware that text was being negotiated elsewhere.’ He switched off his microphone, closed his light blue UN folder and left the platform. China had made its point.

  Take two. India took the floor. The G77 plus China had accepted ‘somewhat different’ language and read out the text again.* ‘This is our preference.’

  Portugal expressed the EU’s support. Cheering and applause filled the hall.

  Now it was the turn of the US. Dobriansky explained that the US had come to Bali with the hope of agreeing a strong statement about common global responsibility to address climate change, recognising differences among national circumstances. However, the formulation proposed by India was not one the US could accept as it represented a change in the balance that the parties had been working towards.