I read a really good book by Steve Schlesinger a few years back called Act of Creation. It’s about the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations was born. There was a lot of intrigue and high drama, with plenty at stake. There are stories of heroes, too, like Edward Stettinius, the unsung Secretary of State that Truman inherited from Roosevelt and who, as chairman of the US delegation, was instrumental in the delivery of a fairly healthy baby.
It’s 64 years later and there’s a lot riding now on the proceedings in Copenhagen. I would hope there’ll be one or two good profiles of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at some point down the line. But right now, we just have to be in the moment and speculate that the (largely) very good folks on the job are sensitive to the critical importance of their work and have the poise, intelligence, good will and commitment to bring it all off.
As of yesterday, here is a Reuters “Factbox” on the score. Issues up in the air include the targets for emission reductions; whether or not the Kyoto Protocol will continue or be replaced by an entirely new pact; to what extent developing nations will be held to account for emissions; how to finance mitigation, adaptation, and “capacity building” and how much will be available, and when; and what shape an expanded role for the “carbon” markets will have. Financing the prevention of deforestation and forest degradation is definitely going forward – a quantum leap from Kyoto – but how exactly that’s going to look is up in the air. It’s been understood for a month, for many of these issues, that no final decisions will be taken in Copenhagen. (See Copenhagen or Bust?)
It appears that things are a little disarrayed, but there are also indications that frantic but focused negotiations behind the scenes are producing positive results. The conference, as you know, is scheduled to be wrapped up in three days with over 100 world leaders putting their imprimatur on an agreement. Angela Merkel admitted her nervousness about hitting the mark by Friday. Reuters further reports Ministers try to break deadlock at climate talks. Some of the trouble lies in “…disputes over the level of emissions cuts by rich countries and a long-term global target to curb a rise in global temperatures which could trigger rising sea levels, floods and drought.” Yvo de Boer said: “We have seen significant progress in a number of areas but we haven’t seen enough of it…we are in a very important phase.”
One thorny issue for developing nations is MRV – measurement, reporting and verification. The lead story in my copy of the “NY Times” this morning was on an impasse between the US and China on MRV. The PRC refuses to be monitored, it seems, while the US is saying, No MRV, No Deal. In fact, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has an op-ed in today’s International Herald Tribune that addresses this critical matter. She says that we must see “…all major economies … agree to a system that enables full transparency and creates confidence that national actions are in fact being implemented.” The Chinese already have a credibility problem, having been recently denied credits for some windpower projects under the Clean Development Mechanism for, allegedly, “fudging the numbers,” as the “Wall St. Journal” put it here. (Tom Friedman really got up my nose recently when he referred to the Chinese leadership as “enlightened.” Here’s my response.)
Secretary Clinton makes, to me, a further critically important point in her op-ed. Switching over to clean tech is the most economic and environmentally sound approach to life going forward on this planet. Why some of the leading developing nations are so adamant – along with the fossil fuel special interests, plus much of Big Ag and Big Power – about the “freedom” to continue their development along the lines that for two centuries has generated massive pollution with a concomitant impact on health, crushing costs, geopolitical instability and the destruction of the economies and cultures of many, many places around the world – see the natural resource curse, for instance – is beyond me.
Clinton says: “The simple fact is that nearly all of the growth in emissions in the next 20 years will come from the developing world. Without their participation and commitment, a solution is impossible. Some are concerned that a strong agreement on climate change will undermine the efforts of developing nations to build their economies, but the opposite is true. This is an opportunity to drive investment and job creation around the world, while bringing energy services to hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.”
If you know this blog, you know that “opportunity” is one of my favorite words. Wake up, lead Copenhagen negotiators from the developing world, and smell the opportunity.
UPDATE: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today that “The president believes that we can get an operational agreement that makes sense in Copenhagen.” See this from Reuters. British PM Gordon Brown arrived at the talks a couple of days ahead of schedule to put his shoulder to the wheel. Echoing the Stern Review, Brown said that inaction would cause “a reduction in our national income of up to 20 percent, an economic catastrophe equivalent in this century to the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression in the last.”
Gibbs also released a statement yesterday on further progress on the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) Global Partnership. In Copenhagen, Energy Sec. Steven Chu announced the MEF “Technology Action Plans” along with the US’s Climate REDI program. (See yesterday’s post below.) I continue to be mightily impressed by how focused and hard-charging the Obama Administration is being on climate and energy.
