The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  The next day, Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s environment minister, resigned as COP president. Her handling of the conference had not been a success. In 2010, she was appointed the EU’s first climate change commissioner, where she endeavoured to start a trade war with China by extending the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to international airlines.

  Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen took over. His debut as COP president was peppered with hostile interventions challenging the status of the texts proposed by the Danish presidency. It was an issue of ‘trust between the host country and parties’, China said, noting that the process had not been transparent.[19]

  That afternoon, the working group on long-term cooperative action under the convention held its closing plenary. It was chaired by the convention’s first and longest serving executive secretary, Michael Zammit Cutajar. So many changes had been suggested that it would not be possible to prepare texts in time for the COP plenary two days later, Zammit Cutajar said. His proposal that the entire package be adopted as ‘unfinished business’ was accepted.[20]

  If this group wasn’t going to produce a text, who was?

  A day later, with world leaders gathering in Copenhagen, Angela Merkel voiced her fears. ‘The news reaching us is not good.’[21] A sense of foreboding spread through the delegations. ‘There are more than one hundred and thirty leaders here. If they cannot seal a deal, who can?’ asked Ban Ki-moon.[22] ‘I believe in God. I believe in miracles,’ Brazil’s President Lula declared the next day.[23]

  The outside world had little inkling how badly things were going. The Danes ensured that the country delegations were hermetically sealed from the NGOs and the media. According to ITN’s Jon Snow, covering the conference for Channel 4 News, tight security made it very difficult to doorstop conference participants. So the media relied on NGOs, who didn’t know either, and Yvo de Boer, whose press briefings seemed perpetually upbeat.[24]

  The West had one more card to play. ‘It was unforgettable political theatre,’ reported the Independent’s Michael McCarthy. ‘Like a poker player with a sudden new bet, the power-dressed Mrs Clinton changed the game instantly as she pulled her gigantic sum out of the US back pocket.’[25] The United States, announced Clinton, was willing to work with other countries towards a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020 – conditional on all major economies standing behind ‘meaningful mitigation actions’.[26]

  The message was clear – and it wasn’t subtle: an extra $100 billion a year for Africa if China capitulated; not a cent if it didn’t. In any case, it was made up of funny money – ‘public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance’, Clinton said in her speech.[27] As an administration official explained, ‘The private sector is going to be the engine that drives all this.’ In other words, flows which in all likelihood would be happening anyway, so much of it wouldn’t be additional money. ‘A lot of this is not aid in the traditional sense of aid,’ the official said.[28] How could it be otherwise, given that the West’s public finances had been shot to pieces? Republican congressional leaders said they would introduce a ‘disapproval resolution’. Republican House leader John Boehner commented, ‘The administration wants to give billions in US taxpayer dollars we don’t have to other countries.’[29]

  On the last Thursday of the COP, there was a high-level segment for speeches by world leaders. Gordon Brown, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was biblical. ‘Hurricanes, floods, typhoons and droughts that were once all regarded as the acts of an invisible god are now revealed to be also the visible acts of man,’ Brown said.[30] His talks during the week had convinced him that while reaching agreement was difficult, there was, ‘no insurmountable [sic] wall of division’ that prevented agreement.

  Where Brown was declamatory, Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, was earnest, more of a ‘let’s all hold hands’ homily than a sermon. ‘We need to help each other. But we also need to stand ready to change our way of living, our lifestyle.’[31] Renewable energy was ‘so important’. Germany and the European Union were ready and willing to ‘open their arms’ to take the negotiations forward and reach agreement so that world leaders could face the world on Friday and be able to say they had got the message: ‘Life cannot go on as it was. The world needs to change.’

  Jabbing the air, French President Nicolas Sarkozy harangued delegates. ‘A failure in Copenhagen would be a catastrophe for each and every one of us,’ he said.[32] Much of it was directed against China. ‘Who could dare to say they should be against giving money to the poorest countries?’ He was crude. If there wasn’t an agreement, ‘Let me say to my African friends, you’ll be the first to suffer from it.’ Without naming them, he dared the Chinese to come to the podium. ‘Who would dare say that the poor countries of Asia should be treated the same way as Brazil and China, the giants of tomorrow?’ He railed: ‘Mes chers amis, time is short. Let’s stop posturing.’ It was pretty desperate.

  Even as the Europeans spoke of the perils and dangers of climate change, a rumble from Europe’s periphery betokened a real crisis. During the conference’s first week, credit rating agency Fitch had cut Greece’s rating to BBB+ with negative outlook the day after Standard & Poor’s said it was considering downgrading Greece.[33]

  The conference’s Big Three – the leaders of the US, China and India – were slated to speak the following day. Before then, Queen Margrethe II hosted a dinner. Sarkozy had called for the leaders to negotiate the agreement after the gala dinner, so the outcome could be presented to the world on Friday, the COP’s last day.

  During the dinner, Wen Jiabao picked up a rumour that he hadn’t been invited. Annoyed at the perceived snub, Wen repaired to his hotel, sending He Yafei in his place. It meant that China was represented by someone who knew the negotiating texts better than any of the leaders in the room.

  As daylight broke on Friday morning, Air Force One touched down at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport. It was cold and windy and started to snow as Obama stepped into his limo – his second trip to Scandinavia in a week. The first was to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. It was also his second trip to Copenhagen in three months, having flown there to support Chicago’s losing bid for the 2016 Olympics. This time Obama was prepared for failure and armed with a draft statement prepared by Jonathan Pershing for that eventuality.[34]

  To Jon Snow, it seemed as if the drama that tumultuous day centred on the schedule of the president’s plane.[35] Obama hadn’t planned to stay long. A snowstorm was forecast to hit the eastern seaboard, bringing forward his return flight.

  The next twelve hours were not only to be the end point of two years of negotiations since Bali to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. For the first time, the international community was to come together to agree a comprehensive, global approach. ‘Kyoto was a treaty that aimed at making a point, but less successful at making a policy,’ Blair told a meeting at the conference, ‘Copenhagen is where we need to make a policy.’[36] 18th December 2009 was thus the culmination of nineteen years of climate change negotiations since the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change nineteen years before – on 21st December 1990.

  The speeches of the Big Three delineated the gulf separating the West and the world’s major emerging economies. President Obama used his not to persuade, but to lecture. In similar language used to justify the Iraq War, climate change posed a ‘grave and growing danger’.[37] America was taking action to cut its emissions not only to meet its global responsibilities, but also because it was in America’s self-interest. America would proceed to a ‘clean energy’ economy, no matter what happened in Copenhagen. It was essential to America’s national security to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, an argument used to domestic audiences, which jarred with an international one comprising America’s tra
de partners and oil exporters.

  Any agreement must have a mechanism to assess compliance. ‘Without such accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page,’ he said. ‘It would be a hollow victory.’[38] This was aimed at China, which had been resisting pressure to accept some form of verification. By then, it had signalled it was ready to concede – in a way that made the entire issue moot.

  With time running short, ‘The question is whether we will move forward together or split apart, whether we prefer posturing to action.’[39] He left a sting in the tail. ‘We have charted our course. We have made our commitment,’ he concluded.[40] The message was stark: take it or leave it.

  To those who hoped Obama would rescue the conference by making some grand offer, it was a terrible letdown. At no point in his remarks had the president mentioned the goal – so dear to the Europeans – of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 2oC, which Obama and other members of the G8 had affirmed at L’Aquila in July.

  The reaction in the Tycho Brahe conference hall was as chilly as the weather outside. Suddenly the realisation dawned on the NGOs – and from them to the world beyond – that Copenhagen was heading for disaster and Obama was doing nothing to stop it. In truth, there was nothing he could have done to have turned the conference around.

  Every inch undisputable Third World authenticity in a dark Nehru jacket and blue turban, India’s Manmohan Singh recognised the sensibilities of Western environmentalism. He praised the ‘valiant efforts’ to build a global consensus on ‘highly complex issues’.[41] The vast majority of countries did not support any renegotiation or dilution of the principles and provisions of the climate change convention and in particular the principle of equity enshrined in ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’.

  More action should be expected than at the time of the Rio treaty and the Kyoto Protocol. That meant adhering to the Bali mandate for future discussions – a clear signal that agreement wasn’t going to be reached at Copenhagen. Kyoto should stand and the parties to it should deliver on their ‘solemn commitments’. India, entirely voluntarily, had made a pledge to reduce the emissions intensity of its economic growth by around twenty per cent by 2020. India would deliver this goal regardless of the outcome of Copenhagen.

  Speaking deliberately, Singh told the conference that any agreement on climate change must respect the need for development and growth in developing countries. Every citizen had an equal right of entitlement to the global atmospheric space, Singh concluded.

  The growth of developing country emissions was now the single largest driver of global emissions. India’s position was incompatible with Western demands for a global limit on carbon dioxide emissions and setting a date when emissions would peak and then decline. If the computer models relied on by the IPCC were to be believed, the 2oC aim could be consigned to history.

  Like Obama and Singh, Wen Jiabao did not mention the 2oC goal in his speech, half of which was taken up with telling the conference what China had already done. In modernising its economy, China had scrapped heavily polluting steel, cement and coke-making plants. It was investing in renewable energy and had planted the world’s largest acreage of man-made forests. It had reduced its carbon dioxide intensity by forty-six per cent in fifteen years and aimed to do so again.

  ‘Dear colleagues,’ Wen continued, the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ was the ‘core and bedrock’ of international cooperation on climate change. ‘It must not be compromised,’ Wen stated.[42] Developed countries had accounted for eighty per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution:

  If we all agree that carbon dioxide emissions are the direct cause of climate change, then it is all too clear who should take the primary responsibility. Developing countries only started industrialisation a few decades ago and many of their people still live in abject poverty today. It is totally unjustified to ask them to undertake emission reduction targets beyond their due obligations and capabilities in disregard of historical responsibilities, per capita emissions and different levels of development.[43]

  Wen criticised the West for its failure to honour its commitments. A one-thousand-mile journey starts with the first step, yet emissions from many developed countries had increased. It was more important to focus attention on achieving promised reductions in the short-term than setting long-term goals, Wen argued.

  Like India, China’s carbon-intensity reduction was its own affair and not linked to any other country’s target. The formulation used by both leaders conveyed a clear message. India and China were not going be parties to an agreement which specified global emissions caps or dates by when emissions should peak.

  Gordon Brown called Copenhagen ‘the most important conference since the Second World War’.[44] The decisive confrontation took place at a four-and-a-half-hour meeting that afternoon in the Bella Center’s Arne Jacobsen room.

  Present were the conference Big Three – Obama, Singh and He Yafei for China; the European Big Three – Merkel, Sarkozy and Brown. The other two BASIC countries were there – South Africa’s Zuma and Brazil’s Lula, plus an assortment of other leaders, including Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi representing Africa, the Maldives’ Mohamed Nasheed for the small island states, Mexico’s Felipe Calderón (host of the next COP), Australia’s Kevin Rudd (climate change’s golden boy), and Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg (after Canada’s loss of interest, representing the original conscience of global warming) – twenty-five countries in a summit chaired by Denmark’s Rasmussen. With them were Ban Ki-moon, other senior UN officials and leaders’ advisers. Altogether there were fifty to sixty people in the room.[45]

  The leaders spent their time working on a draft that resembles an evolved version of the controversial Danish text based on the framework of a global cap – a reduction of ‘X’ by 2020 and ‘Y’ by 2050. A 1.2-gigabyte sound recording of the meeting found its way to Der Spiegel, which in May 2010 published an account of the meeting.*

  Rasmussen asked if there were any major objections. ‘We just have to go,’ Merkel responded. ‘And if we do not agree today then we have to say within four weeks because we cannot go over and say nice things but X and Y please wait one year or so.’[46]

  He Yafei said the meeting needed to go through the draft line by line, comment by comment (death by square bracket, the fate that had befallen Zammit Cutajar’s text).

  An Indian representative spoke in support of China: ‘We have all along been saying “don’t prejudge options,”’ provoking Merkel to retort, ‘Then you don’t want legally binding.’ To which the Indian responded: ‘Why do you prejudge options? All along you have said don’t prejudge options. This is not fair.’

  He Yafei expressed surprise the numbers were still there: ‘We have made our objections very clear this morning.’

  Gordon Brown intervened. ‘We are trying to cut emissions by 2020 and 2050. That is the only way we can justify being here. It is the only way we can justify the public money that is being spent to do so’ – an observation that must have struck the Chinese and Indians as otiose.

  It was also a misreading of their goal. The duo’s strategic objective consisted of destroying any prospect that their economies would be subject to international emissions controls – now and at any point in the future.

  That was clear when China vetoed the inclusion of a target by industrialised countries of eighty per cent cut by 2050. ‘Why can’t we even mention our targets?’ demanded Merkel, recorded Mark Lynas, an environmental activist advising Nasheed of the Maldives.[47] At this point, according to Lynas, Rudd started banging his microphone and a Brazilian representative asked why rich countries should not even announce a unilateral cut. When the Chinese delegate said ‘no’, Merkel threw up her hands.

  Merkel had one more go. ‘Let us suppose a one hundred per cent reduction, that is,
no CO2 in the developed countries any more. Even then, with the two degrees, you have to reduce carbon emissions in the developing countries. That is the truth.’

  China fully understood the logic of the two degree target. ‘Thank you for all these suggestions,’ He responded. ‘We have said very clearly that we must not accept the fifty per cent reductions. We cannot accept it.’

  A lit fuse reached the gunpowder. Sarkozy exploded. Speaking in French, he angrily declared China’s position ‘absolutely unacceptable’ before accusing China of hypocrisy. Poor countries would not be getting the money promised them because of China’s refusal to shoulder responsibility for the fifty per cent.

  Then President Obama spoke.

  Unlike his French colleague, the American was clinical, almost detached. The politics meant that the financing commitments had to be linked to adoption of the targets. ‘In order for us to mobilise the political will within each of our own countries to not only engage in substantial mitigation efforts ourselves, which are very difficult, but also then to channel some of the resources from our countries, is a very heavy lift,’ Obama said. ‘If there is no sense of mutuality in this process, it is going to be difficult for us ever to move forward in a significant way.’

  In the conference hall earlier in the day, Obama had been a unilateralist. Now, behind closed doors, Obama was a multilateralist. He could read the polls as well as anyone. A Gallup survey two days earlier suggested that a majority of Americans would support him on a climate pact, but that eighty-five per cent of Americans wanted the economy, not global warming, to be the focus.[48] By linking economic issues to tackling climate change, poll-driven talk of green growth was for domestic consumption, not an argument to be used with India and China.