The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  In Britain, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Bahá’í, Jain and Zoroastrian faith leaders put their names to a joint statement overseen by Ed Miliband and filmed by the Foreign Office for worldwide distribution. Tackling the causes of global warming was an unequivocal moral imperative, the statement declared.[27]

  Two days before the conference, more than twenty of Britain’s church leaders painted their hands blue and called for an ambitious deal in Copenhagen. Addressing an ecumenical service in Westminster City Hall, the Archbishop of Canterbury provided some perspective. ‘It looks in the last few decades particularly and perhaps the last few millennia as if the human race has on the whole not been very good news for the rest of creation,’ Rowan Williams told the congregation.[28]

  From the spiritual to the temporal, Copenhagen would test the willingness of developing countries to accept the idea that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would boost their economies. If the notion of a green recovery was widely believed, countries would be falling over themselves to outbid each other with offers to cut their emissions. In the event, although President Obama talked the talk, only the EU walked the walk, offering to up their twenty per cent emissions cut to thirty per cent if others followed. None did.

  The environmentalist agenda made inroads in developing nations. Unlike the West, especially Western Europe, economic considerations were paramount. The refusal of developing countries to subscribe claims about the benefits of ‘green growth’ set the scene for a confrontation between Western environmentalism and the Third World’s growth ambitions. Copenhagen thus brought the series of UN environmental conferences full circle.

  Separated by thirty-seven years, Stockholm and Copenhagen shared similar symbolic actions. Nixon’s EPA announced its DDT ban and Obama’s EPA issued its finding that carbon dioxide was dangerous. There is the role of environmental NGOs; introduced by Maurice Strong at Stockholm as messaging propagators, but drastically curtailed in Copenhagen’s Bella Center as the conference teetered on the brink of chaos.

  Then there are the roles of India and China. For Strong, both were crucial. He had courted Indira Gandhi, who delivered the conference keynote address. Did her warning that the welfare of men came before the preservation of beasts still reflect developing country attitudes? Copenhagen would provide the answer.

  In 1972, China was groping to find its place in the world. Strong had coached its delegation so the Stockholm Declaration could be adopted by consensus. In 2009, China was the world’s second largest economy. Its diplomats were confident and highly proficient in navigating their way around the climate change negotiations. At Copenhagen’s climactic moment, China fielded a mid-level official in face-to-face negotiations with the president and other world leaders which determined the outcome.

  The accommodation between environmentalism and the developing world – hammered out in the Founex formula by Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward in 1971 – was based on a non-binding aspiration by developing countries not to emulate the developed world’s path of industrialisation. If their development path deviated from the one preferred by environmentalists – Barbara Ward and Fritz Schumacher in the 1970s and their successors such as Al Gore and Prince Charles today – each developing country could decide for itself its trade-off between economic growth and environmental objectives.*

  The Founex formulation was not written into the international climate change agreements, but it permeated their every pore. There are innumerable references to ‘sustainable development’ from the preamble of the 1992 convention to the critical paragraph 1 (b) (ii) of the Bali Action Plan on nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing countries ‘in the context of sustainable development.’

  Although the use of the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ became de rigueur in the West by companies and governments, for developing countries, the meaning of sustainable development is about environmental policies not constraining human needs and aspirations and the Brundtland Report giving overriding priority to the world’s poor. The texts do not define what is meant by sustainable development, but it is clear from them that the concept chiefly applies to developing countries. There is no mention, for example, of sustainable development in the corresponding paragraph 1 (b) (i) of the Bali Action Plan with respect to developed country parties.

  For the West to prevail at Copenhagen, the large emerging economies, principally China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea, would have to agree to at least one of two propositions: first, that they no longer considered themselves to be poor or developing nations; second, that the threat posed to them by global warming was so grave that it overrode the condition accepted by Strong to gain Third World participation at the Stockholm conference – that environmental protection would not fetter their development ambitions.

  This made the Copenhagen conference unlike its predecessors and something international conferences try and avoid. The logic of global warming – the harm caused by an extra tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the same irrespective of how it got there or who put it there – and the economic priorities of developing countries made confrontation inescapable. It permitted only a binary outcome. One side would win; the other would lose.

  The alignment of the main blocs at Copenhagen was also different. In Rio, Kyoto and Bali, the US and the EU had clashed. For the first time, they pitched camp on the same ground. There was EU grumbling about the scale of the US cut – four per cent below their 1990 levels by 2020 compared to the EU’s twenty per cent. But both believed a credible agreement had to involve the major emitting nations.

  American negotiators came to Copenhagen determined to apply the lessons from the failure of Kyoto. They didn’t want an agreement they couldn’t get through the Senate and warned that Obama wasn’t going to arrive in Copenhagen and act as a deus ex machina, as Gore had done. ‘We don’t want to promise something we don’t have,’ chief negotiator Todd Stern told reporters.[29]

  Congressional Democrats were as supportive to the American position in Copenhagen as they had been hostile at Bali, despite it being identical. ‘The concerns that kept us out of Kyoto back in 1997 are still with us today,’ Senator Kerry told the conference. ‘To pass a bill, we must be able to assure a senator from Ohio that steelworkers in his state won’t lose their jobs to India and China because those countries are not participating in a way that is measurable, reportable and verifiable.’[30]

  Gore made the same point. Obligations applied to one part of the world but not to another part could heighten people’s fears about their economic circumstances. ‘I would ask for an understanding of the difficulty that goes for elected officials.’[31]

  On the other hand, divisions within the EU were more visible. Britain and France wanted to raise the EU’s offer to a thirty per cent cut. ‘Because of the economic recession, a thirty per cent cut is much more like a twenty per cent cut two years ago,’ Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, explained from Brussels.[32] At least the recession was helping save the planet. Speaking for coal-dependent central and eastern European states, Poland’s Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, minister for European affairs, was having nothing of it. ‘The conditions for that are non-existent.’[33]

  Arrayed on the other side were the G77 plus China, along with the usual assortment of NGOs. Sudan, China’s principal ally in Africa, spoke for the bloc. Its core was formed by Brazil, South Africa, India and China – the BASIC nations, the last two constituting the bloc’s inner core.

  Before the conference, China announced that it would cut its carbon-intensity by forty to forty-five per cent in 2020 compared to 2005, a move which unsettled India. At a November meeting in Beijing, the BASIC group reiterated its non-negotiable position. A relieved Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, expressed confidence that China would not ‘ditch us’. Should industrialised countries seek to override th
em, the BASIC four would stage a collective walk-out.[34]

  Both sides knew the other’s strategy. The aim of the US was to peel off as many members of the G77 as possible and leave China isolated. Its big bazooka was the third part of the Founex formula: money, huge amounts of it, targeted at the African nations.

  Halfway through the conference, China’s vice foreign minister, He Yafei, told the Financial Times that China would not be the fall guy if there were a fiasco. ‘I know people will say if there is no deal that China is to blame,’ he said. ‘This is a trick played by the developed countries.’[35]

  The rest of what went on at Copenhagen was noise. It was fractious, at times farcical – the largest gathering of world leaders outside the UN in New York – but such were the tensions between them, no team photo.

  There was the usual PR hoopla of climate conferences, but more so. The Nepalese Cabinet was helicoptered to a remote plateau in the Himalayas. They took part in a traditional Sherpa prayer ceremony before approving the speech that Nepal’s PM would deliver in Copenhagen. Sonoma County, California, despatched a seven-person delegation at a cost of $225,000. ‘This is a Disneyland for policy wonks,’ exclaimed Gary Gero of the Los Angeles-based Climate Action Reserve.[36]

  Coca Cola was the most visible brand in Copenhagen, its logo and ‘Hopenhagen’ splashed across city billboards. More than forty thousand people came, but the lines to enter the conference were a lot longer than at Disney. On the first day, a snag in credentialing left more than a thousand delegates shivering outside the fifteen-thousand-capacity Bella Center for nine hours. Less remarked was the bitter cold. Climate change conferences were irony-free zones when it came to adverse weather events like heavy snowfall.

  ‘Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen,’ economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times.[37] So was the White House. Pointing to signs of progress toward a ‘meaningful’ agreement, the president’s trip was rescheduled to the end of the conference.[38] Gordon Brown wrote that Copenhagen was poised to achieve ‘a profound historical transformation: reversing the road we have travelled for 200 years’.[39] Quite why it should make sense to turn the clock back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brown didn’t say.

  It was different on the ground. The COP’s opening was pushed off balance by the furore of the Climategate emails. ‘It’s an eleventh-hour smear campaign,’ Hockey Stick author Michael Mann said, adding, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong; I have nothing to hide.’[40] The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s James Overland complained: ‘It has sucked up all the oxygen.’ IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele agreed: ‘We are spending lots of useless time discussing this.’[41]

  Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad al-Sabban called for an independent inquiry. The ‘level of trust’ had been shaken, ‘especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that … is going to mean sacrifices for our economies’.[42] The IPCC’s Pachauri went on the offensive. ‘The only debate is who is behind it, I think we should catch the culprits.’ Climategate was an attempt to tarnish the IPCC. ‘The Fourth Assessment Report is completely objective, totally unbiased and solid in its scientific assessment,’ Pachauri claimed.[43]

  Striking a markedly less belligerent note, the UN’s Yvo de Boer conceded the emails looked ‘very bad’ and were fuelling scepticism, but media scrutiny was not unwelcome:

  It’s very good that what is happening is being scrutinised in the media because this process has to be based on solid science. If quality and integrity is being questioned, that has to be examined.[44]

  Pachauri’s bravado didn’t last. As well as the inquiry mandated by the Dutch Parliament, Pachauri and Ban Ki-moon subsequently asked the InterAcademy Council to investigate the IPCC.

  CEOs of Western corporations flocked to Copenhagen. ‘Not one single Indian CEO is here, and do you know why? Because they do not consider Copenhagen to be the most important event in one hundred years,’ a participant observed. De Boer was blunt. ‘Basically you’re not playing any role in a serious way.’[45]

  Five thousand miles away, Exxon Mobil demonstrated its seriousness – a $41 billion deal to acquire shale gas and fracking corporation XTO Energy. It was the largest energy sector transaction in four years and Exxon’s largest since it bought Mobil Corp in 1999. ‘This is not a near-term decision,’ said CEO Rex Tillerson. ‘This is about the next ten, twenty, thirty years.’ Combined with XTO’s holdings, Exxon Mobil would control about eight million acres of land on top of unconventional natural gas.[46]

  The quantum expansion of natural gas reserves unlocked by fracking gas shale presents the prospect of cheap, abundant energy. No one in Copenhagen seemed to notice. ‘As politicians dither and debate,’ the Daily Telegraph’s Damian Reece wrote, ‘the market has taken another decisive step in dictating where the world’s energy dollars are invested, whether campaigners like it or not.’[47] For those professionally engaged in worrying about global warming, shale gas was not part of the plan. It wasn’t ‘clean’ energy. Of the three paths to large-scale emission reductions, the collapse in Soviet communism was unrepeatable and the 2008–2009 global recession undesirable. Only Britain’s dash-to-gas – replacing coal with gas-fired power stations – required no government subsidies or artificial price support.

  No big climate conference could do without Al Gore or the Prince of Wales. Both were in Copenhagen. Prince Charles garnered the better press with his plea to slow down tropical deforestation. ‘The quickest and most cost-effective way to buy time in the battle against catastrophic climate change is to find a way to make the trees worth more alive than dead,’ he told the conference.[48]

  Although not entirely eschewing the histrionics of his Bali performance (‘the future of our civilisation is threatened as never before’), Gore was low key. His role was subsidiary, more of a John the Baptist preparing the way for He who would be flying in on Air Force One. Even so, Gore managed to land himself in hot water over his Arctic ice prediction. The date for the ‘possibility’ of an ice-free Arctic ocean ‘for a short period in summer’ had been pushed back to ‘perhaps as early as 2015’ (at Bali, the forecast had been as early as 2012 to 2014).[49] This time, Gore was swiftly rebutted. Wieslaw Maslowski, a climatologist at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that it misrepresented the information he’d given Gore’s office. ‘Why would you take anything Al Gore said seriously?’ MIT’s Richard Lindzen asked. All Gore had done was extrapolate from 2007, when there was a big retreat in the sea ice, and got zero, Lindzen explained.[50]

  Kyoto took place towards the end of a decade of rising temperatures. Coming near the end of a trendless temperature chart, Copenhagen was more of a challenge. The Met Office did the next best thing. 2010 was ‘more likely than not’ to be the world’s warmest year on record and man-made climate change would be a factor. ‘If 2010 turns out to be the hottest year on record it might go some way to exploding the myth, spread by the climate conspiracy theorists, that we’re experiencing global cooling,’ Greenpeace’s Ben Stewart said. ‘In reality the world is getting hotter, possibly a lot hotter, and humans are causing it.’[51]

  The trio of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Bolivia’s Evo Morales entertained the conference with their denunciations of capitalism as the cause of climate change. ‘When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die,’ declared Mugabe, the octogenarian Marxist who had destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy. ‘A ghost is stalking the streets of Copenhagen’ Chavez told the conference. ‘Capitalism is that ghost,’ provoking wild applause from the representatives of civil society, aka the environmental NGOs, who seemed not to know that the collapse of Soviet communism accomplished more for the environment than any other event in history.[52]

  T
he violence of some of the language in the conference hall was reflected outside. Three hundred youths shrouded in black threw bricks and smashed windows as around thirty thousand people demonstrated in central Copenhagen. Police made nine hundred and sixty-eight arrests.[53]

  NGOs stoked the anger with inflammatory rhetoric. ‘Each year three hundred thousand people are dying because of climate change,’ Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace said at a rally.[54] But they had little purchase over the governments of India, China and others in the developing world. So the story they spun at the end of Copenhagen – widely taken up by the media – was to blame the rich nations for blocking progress. ‘Rich countries have condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life,’ stormed Nnimmo Basey of Friends of the Earth. ‘The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations.’[55]

  As a description of the showdown at Copenhagen, it was pure NGO fantasy. Nor was Copenhagen a confrontation between capitalism and socialism. It was a battle between the West that had signed on to the environmentalist agenda and the largest emerging economies asserting their right to a prosperous future.

  It mostly took place away from the media behind closed doors. From time to time, the clash spilled out into the open. It didn’t need a code-breaker to decipher the positions of the main protagonists, which were clearly signalled in speeches in the conference hall.