At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore last Sunday, Barack Obama acknowledged what many had suspected all along: that a comprehensive climate deal in Copenhagen, next month, is “beyond reach.” On a 3-day visit to China this week, Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao suggested that Copenhagen will be used instead as a staging opportunity to outline a two-tiered interim agreement. In lieu of an all-encompassing protocol, Obama expressed support for Denmark Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen’s plan, whereby the 192 nations convening in Copenhagen would formulate a nonbinding political agreement calling for reductions in global warming emissions and aid for developing nations. The group would also formulate a plan to put together a binding global pact in 2010. This later agreement would include emissions targets, enforcement mechanisms and aid for poorer nations.
This admission could have come a bit earlier (the summit begins in 20 days), though I don’t find it surprising. The U.S. Senate hasn’t passed its own national carbon legislation and likely won’t until the spring. Further, some feel that putting an emphasis on a climate bill, before tackling U.S. health care reform, sends the wrong message to many for whom health care hugely outranks a desire to tackle climate change. The UK government’s former chief scientist Sir David King stated, “Copenhagen has come a year too early. There was no way Obama could get this together for December this year.”
For those of us with an eye on the medium term, it will be interesting to see whether this newly downbeat approach will lessen the pressure on U.S. lawmakers to pass a climate bill any time soon. A short term consideration is whether Barack Obama will even go to Copenhagen for the climate summit next month. Andrew Revikin, from the New York Times rightly points out that there are significant political risks associated with the decision to stay in the U.S. or to attend. Consider, however, that the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony is set to take place in nearby Oslo, Norway on December 10th. With Obama in town for his prize ceremony, it would take an act of strategic avoidance to miss Copenhagen altogether. Andrew Light, at the Center for American Progress points out that the Nobel Peace Prize committee may well have tipped the scales in favor of Obama going to the talks simply by giving him the excuse of being nearby. With this, it seems likely that the President will attend the climate summit, albeit briefly, delivering an elegant speech about the climate, not a signed commitment to fix the climate.
