There was a clear victor. Equally clearly, there was a side that lost more comprehensively than at any international conference in modern history where the outcome had not been decided beforehand by force of arms.
* The third part of the Founex formula related to money. The principle was uncontroversial, but there were always disputes over the amount, who would get it and who would control it.
[1] Barack Obama, ‘Remarks in St Paul’ in the New York Times, 3rd June 2008.
[2] AFP, ‘Climate deal “worst in history”: G77’ 19th December 2009.
[3] Jack Lefley, ‘Last 10 years have been warmest on record because of man-made climate change’ in the Daily Mail, 16th December 2008.
[4] http://icecap.us/images/uploads/RarelatewintersnowfallinBrazil.pdf
[5] http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/dec/17/rain-snow-moving-las-vegas-valley/
[6] Wall Street Journal, 15th January 2009.
[7] Vicky Pope, ‘Scientists must rein in misleading climate change claims’ in the Guardian, 11th February 2009.
[8] Ben Webster and Peter Riddell, ‘Global warming is not our fault, say most voters in Times poll’ in The Times, 14th November 2009.
[9] Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 17th January 2009 http://www.pic2009.org/pressroom/entry/remarks_of_president-elect_barack_obama_-_philadelphia_pennsylvania/
[10] Rasmussen Poll (17th January 2009), 44% Say Global Warming Due To Planetary Trends, Not People http://www.rasmussenreports.com:80/public_content/politics/issues2/articles/44_say_global_warming_due_to_planetary_trends_not_people
[11] Economy, ‘Jobs Trump All Other Policy Priorities’, Pew Research Center, 22nd January 2009 http://people-press.org:80/report/485/economy-top-policy-priority
[12] Group of Eight, ‘Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future’ paras 2 & 61 http://www.g8italia2009.it/static/G8_Allegato/G8_Declaration_08_07_09_final,0.pdf
[13] ibid., para 60.
[14] ibid., para 65.
[15] White House, Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Declaration of the Leaders The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate’ 9th July 2009.
[16] Silvio Berlusconi, ‘Chair’s summary’ 10th July 2009 http://www.g8italia2009.it/static/G8_Allegato/Chair_Summary,1.pdf
[17] Group of Eight, ‘Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future’ para 64.
[18] Gordon Brown, ‘PM’s speech to the Major Economies Forum’ 19th October 2009 http://www.docstoc.com/docs/22881299/Transcript-of-Gordon-Brown-Climate-Change-speech
[19] ibid.
[20] ibid.
[21] Nigel Lawson, ‘Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too’ in The Times, 23rd November 2009.
[22] John Vidal and Damian Carrington, ‘Ed Miliband attacks Tory climate “saboteurs”’ in the Guardian, 3rd December 2009.
[23] Damian and Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Gordon Brown attacks “flat-earth” climate change sceptics’ in the Guardian, 4th December 2009.
[24] Michelle Grattan, ‘We will have climate policy, Abbott says’ in The Age, 2nd December 2009.
[25] Tom Burke, ‘The Future of Climate Policy’ 18th June 2009 http://tomburke.co.uk/category/speech/
[26] World Council of Churches, ‘Churches to Ring the Alarm on Climate Change’ 12th November 2009, http://www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/article/1634/churches-to-ring-the-alar.html
[27] Archbishop of Canterbury press notice, ‘Faith and Climate Change’ 29th October 2009 http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/770/faith-and-climate-change
[28] Rowan Williams, ‘Environment Service at Westminster Central Hall’ 5th December 2009 http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/852/environment-service-at-westminster-central-hall-london
[29] Dina Cappiello and H. Josef Hebert, ‘Analysis: Obama won’t break new ground at summit’ Associated Press, 16th December 2009.
[30] Suzanne Goldenberg and Jonathan Watts, ‘Kerry’s promise of support in US Congress raises hopes for deal’ in the Guardian, 7th December 2009.
[31] Al Gore’s speech at the Copenhagen on 15th December 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcUllhQ7C0Q
[32] Fiona Harvey and Joshua Chaffin, ‘EU raises stakes on emissions reductions’ in the Financial Times, 7th December 2009.
[33] Harvey and Chaffin, ‘EU raises stakes on emissions reductions’.
[34] ‘India and climate-change negotiations: Back to basics’ in the Economist, 5th December 2009.
[35] Fiona Harvey, ‘Beijing set to drop funding demand’ in the Financial Times, 14th December 2009.
[36] Margot Roosevelt, ‘Californians flock to Copenhagen’ in the Los Angeles Times, 16th December 2009.
[37] Paul Krugman, ‘An affordable truth’ in the The New York Times, 7th December 2009.
[38] Stephen Power, ‘Obama, in Shift, Expects Climate Deal at Summit’ in the Wall Street Journal, 5th December 2009.
[39] Gordon Brown, ‘Copenhagen must be a turning point’ in the Guardian, 7th December 2009.
[40] Amanda Debard, ‘Climate-research furor might not stop US deal – Scientist decries “smear”; lawmakers want answers’ in the Washington Times, 5th December 2009.
[41] Ben Webster and Murad Ahmed, ‘Climate scientists’ email was hacked by professionals’ in The Times, 7th December 2009.
[42] Marlowe Hood, ‘Copenhagen scientists, negotiators slam “Climategate”’ AFP, 7th December 2009.
[43] Hood, ‘Copenhagen scientists, negotiators slam “Climategate”’.
[44] Webster and Ahmed, ‘Climate scientists’ email was hacked by professionals’.
[45] Jan M. Olsen, ‘UN climate boss to CEOs: play a more serious role’ AP, 11th December 2009.
[46] Russell Gold, ‘Exxon Bets Big on Gas With Deal for XTO’ in Wall Street Journal online, 15th December 2009.
[47] Damian Reece, ‘While Copenhagen talks, Exxon bet $41bn on low-carbon gas’ in the Daily Telegraph, 15th December 2009.
[48] Prince of Wales, ‘The eyes of the world are upon you’ in the Guardian, 15th December 2009.
[49] Al Gore’s speech on 15th December 2009.
[50] Hannah Devlin, ‘Gore’s Arctic claim unites scientist and sceptic alike’ in The Times, 16th December 2009.
[51] Ben Webster, ‘2010 will be the warmest year on record, predicts the Met Office’ in The Times, 11th December 2009.
[52] Anna Cuenca, ‘Maverick trio scoff at the West at climate summit’ in AFP, 16th December 2009.
[53] ‘968 arrests at Copenhagen mass climate rally’ in AFP, 12th December 2009.
[54] ‘Violence breaks out at Copenhagen climate protests’ in AFP, 12th December 2009.
[55] Richard Ingham, ‘After gruelling summit, a contested deal emerges on climate’ in AFP, 19th December 2009.
32
Never Again
If by the end of next week we have not got an ambitious agreement, it will be an indictment of our generation.
Gordon Brown, 7th December 2009[1]
How are we going to look on Friday or Saturday if there are more than a hundred heads of state and government from all over the world and that what we say to the world is it was not possible to come to an agreement?
José Manuel Barroso, 14th December 2009[2]
Battle was joined on the second day. The Guardian leaked what quickly became known
as the ‘Danish text’, a negotiating draft circulated by the Danes as COP president.
Sudan’s Lumumba Di-Aping claimed the draft destroyed the Kyoto Protocol and the UN. ‘It sets new obligations for developing countries,’ Di-Aping charged. ‘It does away with two years of negotiations.’[3] Oxfam’s Antonio Hill said the draft was a backward step. ‘It tries to put constraints on [emissions in] developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.’ Andy Atkins for Friends of the Earth called the text profoundly destructive: ‘It violates the principles of UN negotiations.’[4]
In part, the vehemence was synthetic. ‘Some changes, but nothing earth-shattering,’ a veteran developing country negotiator told the Earth News Bulletin.[5] For India and China, the thirteen-page document contained two highly objectionable features.
The first was substantive. The parties were to agree that global emissions should peak ‘as soon as possible,’ with 2020 in square brackets as the backstop year and that global emissions should be cut by fifty per cent by 2050 (compared to 1990) and by an unspecified X per cent by 2020.[6] It set out a vision of long-term cooperative action, under which all parties, except the least developed nations, would have been obliged to take some form of mitigation action, i.e., be subject to limit or reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.
Developing countries would undertake to reduce their collective emissions compared to business as usual (here the text provided a Y) to peak at a specified date and decline thereafter. On Attachment B, each developing country was to list its proposed actions together with the quantified emissions outcome expected from each action. Attachment B would morph into Appendix II of the Copenhagen Accord, in the process losing its essential feature – quantification.
Their second objection was procedural. The Danish text attempted to bring together in one agreement the two post-Bali streams, the first under the convention and the second under the Kyoto Protocol. The latter enshrined the Berlin Mandate and provided the best defence against the threat of quantified mitigation targets.
It also had the benefit of keeping the eyes of the world on the performance of Annex I parties in meeting their Kyoto obligations. ‘You will find a huge gap if you make a comparison between their pledges and the actions they have taken so far,’ China’s envoy Yu Qintai observed on the conference’s third day. ‘We have no lack of legal documents, but a lack of sincerity for taking action.’[7]
It was in the interests of India and China to frustrate post-Bali discussions. Even the EU, wedded as it was to Kyoto, recognised its insufficiency. On the conference’s first day, Sweden, speaking for the bloc, stated that Kyoto alone could not achieve the goal of having emissions peak by 2020 and halve them by 2050 to meet the 2oC limit.[8] When discussed two days later, India, China and Saudi Arabia opposed a new protocol, with China urging focus on countries implementing their existing Kyoto commitments.
In an attempt to close down this avenue, the formal discussions on future cooperation under the convention produced an unworkable outcome. ‘The negotiating text evolved into the most complex document in the history of the UNFCCC, with nearly two hundred pages reflecting various proposals by all UNFCCC parties and thousands of brackets indicating areas of disagreement,’ the authoritative Earth News Bulletin reported.[9]
Seemingly arcane arguments over whether Copenhagen should produce a unified document or two separate ones in reality were a fight to determine the future of the climate change regime. A unified approach, reflected in the Danish text, would have demolished the Berlin Wall. Two documents meant primacy for the Kyoto Protocol. Because the US was not a party to the Protocol, the first agreement would probably be the last as it would most likely be dead-on-arrival in the United States Senate.
So the G77 plus China lined up foursquare behind Kyoto. ‘The death of the Kyoto Protocol would be the death of Africa,’ declared Ethiopia’s PM Meles Zenawi, speaking for the fifty-three-nation African Union. ‘I have been assured of China’s support and India will probably take the same position.’[10] Surprisingly, Ban Ki-moon lent the neutrality of his office to the two documents camp.* Until there was a legally binding treaty, ‘The Kyoto Protocol remains the only legally-binding instrument that captures reduction commitments,’ Ban told the conference. ‘As such it must be maintained.’[11]
On the conference’s fourth day, a second front opened, with a skirmish between the US and China over money. China argued that countries like the US had a duty to pay out billions of dollars in compensation to poorer, developing countries. US negotiator Jonathan Pershing rejected China’s demand. ‘If you think about what will be prioritised in terms of the needs of the … poorest countries, the countries that are hardest hit, I wouldn’t start with China.’[12]
The spat got personal. Responding to a comment by Todd Stern that China was too prosperous to be a recipient of US climate funding, He Yafei expressed shock. ‘I don’t want to say the gentleman [Stern] is ignorant … but I think he lacked common sense … or he’s extremely irresponsible,’ He told a press conference. (Stern later described his comment as ‘a bit unfortunate’, but the position remained the same).[13]
At stake was one of the key principles of the climate change negotiations. ‘Common but differentiated responsibilities’ runs through the texts as frequently as ‘sustainable development’. Indeed, ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ is mentioned on the first page of the text of the convention and ‘sustainable social and economic development’ on the third. Yet the West and the developing world had a profoundly different understanding as to what it implied.
Western negotiators emphasised the ‘common’ part of the formulation and interpreted responsibilities to mean forward-looking obligations, an interpretation supported in the convention which goes on immediately to speak of countries’ ‘respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.’ As the West is richer, it is more capable of taking action. As developing countries become wealthier, they too can assume greater responsibilities.
Developing nations emphasised ‘differentiated’. For them, responsibility is historic – the nations who had been responsible for increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the ones obliged to take action. Developing nations could also point to the convention. Its third paragraph states:
the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs.[14]
At a meeting with journalists in Copenhagen, China’s He Yafei argued that history was the basis on which the negotiations could move forward:
For developed countries, they have to face the history squarely. The obligations for developed countries to live up to their commitments in emission reduction and the provision of funds and technology transfer, is an obligation they have undertaken … The key, the prerequisite, for a successful Copenhagen conference, is that developed countries need to live up to their responsibilities.[15]
On America’s denial of China’s eligibility for climate change funding, it was as if
all of us are sitting for dinner, we finish the main course, and then comes the dessert. The poor man walks in and sits down and has dessert. And we say right, you have to pay for the meal.[16]
Was China like the poor guy being slapped with the bill?
We still have over one hundred and fifty million people under the poverty line, according to UN standards. If you care to go into the interior parts of China, the south-western parts of China, you will see lots of poverty. So poverty reduction – to provide a better life for Chinese people – is and will be the priority for the Chinese government.[17]
Whatever the outcome of Copenhagen, He warned, it should not be done at the exp
ense of the rights to development by developing countries.
Yet the US and the EU and other Western nations were adamant that in some way or another, developing countries would have to limit and then reverse the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions. Was there any way of bridging the divide, perhaps with ‘green growth’? Takers for that proposition were hard to come by.
As each day passed, expectations were downgraded. Before the start of the COP, the possibility of Copenhagen producing a treaty text was replaced with the aim of a strong political declaration with a firm timetable to a treaty before 2010 was out.
On 15th December, Pope Benedict XVI sent a World Peace Day plea. ‘It is indeed important to recognise, among the causes of the current ecological crisis, the historic responsibility of the industrialised countries.’[18]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 52