Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

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  Copenhagen is a picturesque city, full of cobblestoned streets and parks. But when I arrived in the dead of winter in the middle of a swirling snowstorm just past 3 A.M. on December 17, 2009, it was bitterly cold and the negotiations had gone into deep freeze. In just two days the conference would end, and it seemed as if this opportunity for action would slip through the world’s fingers.

  On one side of the debate were the emerging powers, or as I began to think of them, the “emerging emitters,” considering their quickly growing share of total carbon dioxide output. Most of them were seeking to avoid a binding agreement that would limit their growth. On another side were the Europeans, still hoping to extend the Kyoto Accord that had placed big burdens on rich nations but essentially had given large developing countries like China and India a free pass. Many poor and small countries, especially the island nations, were desperate for an agreement that would help them stave off or at least mitigate the climate changes they were already experiencing.

  The United States was pushing for what we considered a realistic achievable outcome: a diplomatic agreement agreed to by leaders (rather than a legal treaty ratified by Parliaments and enforceable by courts), which would commit every major nation, developed and developing alike, to take substantive steps to curb carbon emissions and report transparently on their progress—neither of which had ever happened before. We didn’t expect every country to take the same steps or even cut emissions by an equal amount, but we were seeking an agreement requiring every country to assume some responsibility to reduce emissions.

  One of my first meetings in Copenhagen was with the Alliance of Small Island States. It is estimated that global sea levels rose by 6.7 inches over the course of the 20th century. As Arctic ice continues to melt, sea levels will continue to rise at an increasing rate and threaten the very existence of some of these small countries. In 2012, when I visited the Cook Islands for a meeting of the Pacific Island Forum, leaders there told me that climate change was the single greatest threat facing their nations.

  Islands and low-lying nations are on the front lines of this struggle, but the rest of us are not far behind. About 40 percent of all humankind lives within sixty miles of a coast. Sprawling cities near coastal deltas, including those of the Mississippi, Nile, Ganges, and Mekong rivers, are at particular risk. We have to project forward and think about what will happen as climate change continues and sea levels keep rising. What will happen to those billions of people if their homes and cities become unlivable? Where will they go? Who will provide assistance?

  Imagine the violence that could follow in the wake of more severe droughts and extreme food and water shortages in fragile states, or the effects on global commerce as farms and infrastructure are destroyed in floods and storms. What will be the impact on global trade and stability as the gap between rich and poor countries widens further? When I met in Copenhagen with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who emerged as a spokesperson for some of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and least able to manage them, he told me that the world was expecting a lot from us, and that this was a moment for American leadership.

  Despite all the high hopes leading up to this conference, and perhaps to a degree because of them, things went badly from the start. Interests collided, nerves frayed, and compromise appeared out of reach. We needed to change the dynamic somehow. Early in the morning on December 17, I called a press conference. Our team at the conference hall found a large room with stadium-style seating, and when I arrived there were hundreds of journalists from all over the world packed in and eager for any bit of news that might herald a break in the deadlock. I told the crowd that the United States was prepared to lead a collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations mitigate the damage from climate change—if we could also reach a broad agreement on limiting emissions.

  The idea began with the Europeans, particularly British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had proposed a similar deal in the summer. Prior to my arrival in Copenhagen, Todd and Deputy National Security Advisor Mike Froman recommended that I have it in my back pocket in case we needed to jump-start negotiations. By offering a concrete commitment, I hoped to breathe new life into the talks, put pressure on China and the other “emerging emitters” to respond, and win support from developing countries who would welcome this new assistance. The journalists and delegates started buzzing immediately, and many were thrilled. The Danish Prime Minister captured the changing mood when he said, “There’s a feeling among negotiators that now we have to go into business, and now we have to be flexible, and now we have to try as hard as we can to make real compromises.”

  But the good feelings didn’t last long. The fundamentals of the impasse remained firmly in place. That night, with President Obama not yet in Copenhagen, I joined other world leaders for a contentious debate that stretched late into the night in a small and overheated room. The Chinese weren’t giving an inch; neither were the Indians and Brazilians. Some of the Europeans were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good—and the possible. We emerged, frustrated and tired, sometime around 2:00 in the morning, still without an agreement. Exhausted Presidents and Prime Ministers rushed for the exit, only to find a traffic jam of motorcades and security vehicles. So we stood there in what amounted to the world’s most unusual taxi line. Patience began to wear thin. Here we all were, hungry and sleepy, with nothing to show for our efforts. No previous climate conference had included so many leaders at the highest level, and yet we were no closer to reaching an agreement. Finally President Sarkozy of France could take no more. He rolled his eyes and with a look of extreme exasperation, he declared, in English, “I want to die!” We all knew what he meant.

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  What a difference a day makes. Sitting next to President Obama in the small leaders’ meeting he and I had just forced our way into, I hoped that we might finally be getting somewhere. I looked across the table at Wen Jiabao, then at the leaders of India, Brazil, and South Africa. They represented about 40 percent of the world’s population, and their place at this table symbolized a profound shift in global influence. Countries that just a few decades before had been marginal players in international affairs were now making crucial decisions.

  Watching the body language of these leaders, I was glad that President Obama had decided to come to Denmark. He had originally been scheduled to land in Copenhagen on Friday morning, the final day of negotiations. We had hoped to have a deal ready for his arrival, but the deadlocked negotiations made that impossible. Back at the White House his advisors grew nervous. Given how stuck the talks were, was it even worth the President’s time to make the trip? This was another case when I thought we had to “get caught trying.” I called the President and assured him that his personal intervention might provide the push we needed to break the impasse. He agreed, and Air Force One soon touched down in freezing Copenhagen.

  Now here we were, making a last-ditch effort. Among the sticking points was this: If nations agreed to cut their emissions, how would those commitments be monitored and enforced? The Chinese, always allergic to outside scrutiny, were resisting any robust reporting requirements or verification mechanisms. The Indians, however, were more amenable. The country’s soft-spoken Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was gently pushing back against the Chinese objections. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, who had been one of our most strident critics in earlier meetings, was also more constructive and conciliatory.

  We could feel the momentum in the room shifting, and we weren’t the only ones. In a surprising display, one of the other members of the Chinese delegation, a talented diplomat with whom we generally had very cordial relations, started loudly scolding the far more senior Premier. He was quite agitated by the prospect that a deal might actually be at hand. Wen, embarrassed,
instructed his interpreter not to translate the outburst. Trying to get the meeting back on track, President Obama, in his cool and calm way, asked Wen what the other Chinese official said. The Premier looked at us and said, “It is not important.”

  In the end, after lots of cajoling, debating, and compromising, the leaders in that room fashioned a deal that, while far from perfect, saved the summit from failure and put us on the road to future progress. For the first time all major economies, developed and developing alike, agreed to make national commitments to curb carbon emissions through 2020 and report transparently on their mitigation efforts. The world began moving away from the division between developed and developing countries that had defined the Kyoto agreement. This was a foundation to build on.

  That’s what the President and I told our European friends when we met to debrief them. Crammed into another small room, Brown, Sarkozy, Angela Merkel of Germany, Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, Lars Rasmussen of Denmark, and José Manuel Barroso of the European Commission listened carefully to President Obama. They wanted a legal treaty out of Copenhagen and didn’t like our compromise. However, they reluctantly agreed to support it since there was no viable alternative. The Europeans were right that we didn’t achieve everything we wanted at Copenhagen. But that’s the nature of compromise.

  In the months that followed, dozens of nations, including all the major developing countries, did in fact submit proposed plans for limiting emissions. And they are, as best as we can tell, acting to implement those plans. We built on this foundation in follow-on conferences over the next four years in Cancun, Durban, and Doha, all leading to another gathering in Paris in 2015 with the hope of achieving an even stronger agreement applicable to all.

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  After Copenhagen, I began looking for ways to keep making progress, even if political opposition in Congress and disagreements with China and others on the world stage made it difficult to achieve the kind of sweeping reforms we needed to combat climate change. As a girl in Illinois, I played my share of softball, and one of the lessons that stuck with me was that if you try to hit only home runs, you’ll end up popping out more often than not. But if you also go for singles and doubles, even walks, they can add up to something even bigger.

  That was the idea behind the Climate and Clean Air Coalition I announced in February 2012, with the purpose of reducing what’s called “super pollutants.” More than 30 percent of global warming is attributed to these particles, including methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are produced by animal waste, urban landfills, air conditioning units, burning fields, cooking fires, and oil and gas production, among other things. The pollutants are also highly damaging to people’s respiratory health. The good news is that these greenhouse gases disperse in the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide, so an aggressive effort to reduce them can slow the rate of climate change more quickly. According to one study, “A sharp reduction in emissions of shorter-lived pollutants beginning in 2015 could offset warming temperatures by up to 50 percent by 2050.”

  Doing that would buy the world precious time to develop new technologies and the political will to deal with the tougher carbon problems. I started talking to like-minded governments, especially the Scandinavians, about what we could do. We decided to form a public-private partnership consisting of governments, businesses, scientists, and foundations. I held an event at the State Department with the Environmental Ministers from Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, and Sweden, the Ambassador from Ghana, and the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to launch the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. In 2014, there are thirty-seven country partners and forty-four nonstate partners, and the Coalition is making important strides toward reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production and black carbon from diesel fumes and other sources. Addressing waste management in cities from Nigeria to Malaysia, reducing black carbon from brick production in places like Colombia and Mexico, and curtailing methane emissions in Bangladesh and Ghana may fly under the radar, but steps like these are making a difference in the global effort to address climate change.

  One of my partners in this effort was Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. He invited me to visit Norway and see firsthand the effects of climate change on shrinking Arctic glaciers. I arrived in the picturesque Norwegian city of Tromsø, which sits north of the Arctic Circle, in June 2012. In the summer the temperatures there climbed into the 40s and daylight lingered nearly all night. Jonas and I boarded the Arctic Research Vessel Helmer Hanssen for a trip up a fjord to get a closer look at the melting ice. The air was so clean and crisp, I could hardly believe it. The mountains, still mostly snow-covered, seemed to jut up right out of the icy water. Jonas pointed to the receding glaciers with concern. Summer thaws were now leaving parts of the Arctic Ocean ice-free for weeks at a time. In fact, glaciers were retreating almost everywhere around the world, including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, and Rockies and in Alaska and Africa.

  Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the United States, and erosion, melting permafrost, and rising waters are already forcing some communities along the coast to relocate further inland.

  In 2005, I joined Senator McCain and two other Republican Senators, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, for a trip to Whitehorse, Canada, and Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point of the United States. We met with scientists, local leaders, and First Nations elders to hear from them about the effects of climate change. Flying over the vast coniferous forests of the Yukon, I could see huge brown swaths of dead spruce trees, killed off by infestations of bark beetles that had moved north because of warmer temperatures, especially the milder winters. Those dead trees became kindling for forest fires that the Canadians told us were happening more frequently. We could see the smoke for ourselves as it billowed up from a nearby blaze.

  Virtually everyone I spoke to on that trip had a personal wake-up call about what was happening. A tribal elder recounted how he had returned to a lake where he had fished as a boy only to find it dried up. I met lifelong participants in dogsled races who told me they no longer even needed to wear gloves. In Barrow the sea used to freeze all the way up to the North Pole beginning in November. Now, residents told us, they found slush instead of ice. At Kenai Fjords National Park, rangers showed us the measurements of the shrinking glaciers. It had gotten so bad that you couldn’t even see the ice from the visitors’ center built a few decades earlier to showcase the stunning view.

  Seven years later, in Norway, I was seeing even more evidence of the steady march of climate change. I liked Jonas and admired his passion for protecting his country’s precious ecosystem. Unfortunately there was only so much Norway could do on its own. So he threw himself into the intense diplomacy needed to bring all the Arctic powers together. He and I discussed our shared efforts at the Arctic Council, the international organization responsible for setting out the rules for protecting the region. Tromsø is now home to its permanent headquarters. The Council includes all the key players: the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. I shared Jonas’s commitment to the Council, and in 2011 I became the first U.S. Secretary of State to attend one of its formal meetings, which was held in Nuuk, the remote capital of Greenland. One of my allies in pushing greater American involvement in the Arctic Council was the Republican Senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski. She made the trip with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and me. I signed the first legally binding international agreement among the eight Arctic states, putting in place plans for search-and-rescue missions for ships in distress. That was a start, hopefully paving the way for future cooperation on climate change, energy, and security.

  The melting ice was opening up new opportunities for shipping and oil and gas exploration across the Arctic, setting off a scramble for resources and territorial rights. Some of the energy reserves could be enormous. Russian President Vladimir Putin had cast his eyes o
n the region and directed his military to return to a number of old Soviet bases in the Arctic. In 2007, a Russian submarine even deposited a Russian flag on the floor of the ocean near the North Pole. Russia’s moves raised the prospect of an arms race in the region and the “militarization” of Arctic relations. Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, has said that to “defend national sovereignty” in the Arctic, his country needs “forces on the ground, ships in the sea and proper surveillance.” China, too, is eager to gain influence in the region. It’s hungry for energy and excited by the prospects of new shipping routes that could cut the travel time between ports in Shanghai and Hong Kong and markets in Europe by thousands of miles. China has launched several Arctic research expeditions, built its own research center in Norway, expanded investments in Nordic countries, signed a trade agreement with Iceland, and gained observer status at the Arctic Council.

  Jonas and I discussed the need to prevent this latter-day gold rush from overwhelming the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem and accelerating climate change. Increased economic activity was inevitable and could be conducted responsibly, if we were careful. But more ships, more drilling, and more military forces in the region would only accelerate the environmental damage. Just imagine the impact of an oil spill in the Arctic like the one that hit the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. If we let the Arctic turn into the Wild West, the health of the planet and our own security would be at risk.

  In the future, I hope that the Arctic Council is able to reach agreement on how to protect and use the Arctic. This challenge may not galvanize public opinion today, but it’s one of the most important long-term issues we face.