David Spratt and Damien Lawson offer a pungent description of the flaws and weaknesses of the Copenhagen Accord. However their analysis of how this came about is based on mistaken assumptions and fictions about what happened at the COP, and a superficial and unhelpful misreading of the forces and motives that shaped the final agreement. If we are to dig ourselves out of the very deep hole we are now in, a reality check would be more helpful.
They write as if there had been no change at all in the American political scene since the rise of Bush II – as if the underlying intent of the ‘United States’ is monolithic and immutable. Only if one supports this view can one say, as they do, that ‘the United States won. Killing the Kyoto Protocol (KP) as the primary international climate policy instrument has been their intent for years, so the impasse which flared at COP15 has deep roots on the long road to Copenhagen.’
The stand-offs between the USA and the Kyoto Protocol, and between China and the USA, are indeed long and complex. They are in part based in the unjust and inequitable stance used by Bush (and Howard) to justify inaction until major emerging economies such as China adopted measurable and verifiable emissions reduction measures – despite the clear requirements of the UNFCCC that developed countries lead in their actions. They also reflect the undeniable fact that China, now the planet’s largest single national emitter, is moving into a position where it too must take increasing responsibility for its emissions.
Unfortunately for all of us, the balance of forces shaped by almost a decade of neo-conservativism in the USA retains a strong hold over both the US ‘psyche’ (look at the opinion polls) and also, more importantly, the numbers in Congress. In particular, because the Kyoto Protocol is seen by many in the USA – and not just those on the Right – as reinforcing the right of developing countries to not adopt emissions targets, and therefore working against US economic interests, the KP remains illegitimate in the USA. The numbers for its ratification are simply not there in the Congress at present, whatever the liberal minority might want.
So, without both symbolic and substantive movement by China at Copenhagen, there would be no chance of getting the US Congress to pass even the weak US climate Bill (with its target of minus 17% from 2005, or minus 4% at best from 1990 by 2020).
This is the ugly reality of the Bush legacy, like it or not (and there are many in the Obama administration who are deeply unhappy about this). And it was this legacy that Obama was seeking to ovrturn. As I will explain, there are more than a few forces happy for him to fail – and not just climate skeptics and industry groups within the US.
So, to ignore the complex realities of US domestic politics – as Spratt and Lawson do – is comforting if one wants to run a facile line on ‘USA’s’ intent, but this obstructs any consideration of domestic political blockages and how to deal with them.
Let us then turn to what actually happened at Copenhagen during the negotiations. The negotiating run-up to the COP was handled with incompetence by many parties – with no text being put on the table for consideration until far too late in the day.
Then, when the Danish Chair’s text was ‘leaked’ early during the COP itself, it was seen by many as a preemptive move by a small bloc of developed countries. The leaked text heightened a tone of suspicion about backroom deals and deepened rifts between various developing and developed country groupings – and was rejected.
So by the time we got to the last days, and high-level negotiations between heads of state, little of substance had been resolved. There was no coherent ‘main text’, only a flimsy fabric built of bracketed (disputed) points.
The disputes were in five critical areas: over the over-arching goal – the limit for global warming (whether 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees); individual countries’ targets and their aggregate ambition by 2020 and 2050; funding for adaptation; transparency and international reporting of measures by developing countries; and the legal form of the final agreement and its relationship to Kyoto.
The sense already afoot before the COP began, that the best that could be achieved was a political agreement and a negotiating path towards a legally binding document sometime next year, was well entrenched.
Nevertheless, there was no sense – contra Spratt and Lawson – that the developed countries, including the USA, were hostile to enforceable targets. There was disagreement about whether or not these would be embedded in a new agreement under the Kyoto Protocol, or some other single agreement – but the two-track process that had been set in train in Bali (and related to the US’s position outside the KP) could have been maintained all the way to a two track agreement (and still survives).
SO why then does ‘the Copenhagen Accord (CA) [contain] only voluntary, non-binding, self-assessing targets which amount to “pick a figure, any figure, and do what you like with it” because you will face no penalty for blowing it’.
On the final day, President Obama tabled a new draft text that included a long-term warming goal (admittedly 2 degrees), commitment to a peaking date, annexes that would require developed countries to submit targets that amounted to these broader outcomes, a verifiable record of commitments and measures undertaken by developing countries, and also significant short and medium term adaptation funding for the Least Developed Countries and other needy states.
It now appears, from substantial testimony emerging from various negotiating teams, that most of these points were wrenched from that draft by China – not the USA – during backroom negotiations that (sometimes) included the USA, and Brazil, India and South Africa. It was not that ‘China appeared not to care too much what happened one way or the other’. Apparently it did – with very significant and damaging force.
Similarly it is not true that ‘the COP15 failed because the US and the major economic powers did not want the KP renewed’. This is wrong in terms of the sort of agreements that might have been achieved or were sought, although it is correct that blockage over the KP was used as a political football throughout.
So the question then is why did China pursue this approach? Spratt and Lawson write that ‘with central planning of their booming green/climate sector, [China has] no need of global agreements or carbon prices to drive their industry policy; they may even have a competitive advantage in seeing the process fail.’
True. That ‘competitive advantage’ would be greatly enhanced if the negotiations were a failure, for the initial inclination would be to slate the failure home to the usual suspect, the USA – as has indeed happened. For then, without a strong deal, Congress would fail to pass the US climate Bill, stalling whatever kick-start this Bill would provide for an American clean energy economy. (Despite its sluggishness, the US economy is still six times larger in aggregate terms than the China’s, with one quarter the population and ten times the annual income per capita. So, if the US does turn around – even if ‘not on a dime’ – then it will be a force to be reckoned with.) The USA could then, again, be reviled as a pariah state and blamed for failing to lead.
It was most likely this brutal assessment that led China to challenge the US as directly as it did, gutting the draft in the hope of scuttling US domestic progress via a failure in Copenhagen that would be blamed on Obama. (It also explains the US’ brutal response in trying to weld developing country support to its draft accord via the offer of ‘tied’ adaptation funding).
Consider, however, what the big-picture outcome of a failure to pass the US Climate Bill might be. We are not talking about a CPRS in a minor state here, but the failure to get legislated targets and implementation from the world’s biggest developed country emitter and second largest emitter overall. Such failure would – via CBDR – give China carte blanche to adopt the softest of domestic mitigation efforts and still look good. Such failure would shatter momentum towards any sort of collective, global mitigation effort. This was a high stakes game indeed!
Ultimately this damagingly self-serving gambit – a pure power play for short-term economic advantage and greater political power derived by pulling the USA down a peg – will likely damage China’s reputation as a defender of developing countries’ rights. (It also makes no sense in terms of China’s longer-term interests, as China itself is highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming.)
Fortunately it has probably largely failed. In the end, although the CA is exceptionally weak and is merely a process ‘noted’ at the COP, it has provided a starting point from which to strengthen over the next year – and seems likely to be sufficient for Obama to claim a victory that will provide enough momentum to pass the Climate Bill next year.
OK, so then where does this leave us? I don’t agree with Spratt and Lawson that ‘what happened at Copenhagen is probably the start of a process where the real politics of international climate policy-making becomes the prerogative of the G20, and similar forums, where the big developed and emerging polluters can pretend to save the world (by talking 2-degree targets) while acting for 3-to-4-degree targets, and selling that as a success at home without those pesky developing nations causing trouble.’
Inclusive multilateralism (with all states at the table) isn’t dead yet. But it is very unwell. It is increasingly tempting to suggest that a strong agreement between the top 25 emitter nations – including many developing countries – would come close to covering some 85 per cent of GHG emissions for, at the end of the day, no process can endure a handful of states acting as the proxies of the major powers to block and wreck – as did Sudan on China’s behalf. The danger is, of course, that excluding such interventions also leaves the most important players in terms of impacts – small island states, low-lying states, and least developed countries – voiceless.
We now have a highly fragmented and deeply divided groupings of states, which have been pushed about by China (and the USA) but to no satisfactory conclusion, and we need to think of how to get around this problem. Fast.
I also don’t agree that ‘all rich nations assume that those with money can adapt to 3 degrees or more.’ No reading of the climate policies of the UK or Germany supports this view.
However Spratt and Lawson are absolutely right to underline that while the science leads to 0-to-1-degree targets, the large emitters refuse to commit to actions that will leads to less than 3-to-4 degrees because it challenges their “business-as-usual”, corporate-dominated approach, and that the best commitments on the table at COP15 would produce a 3.9-degree rise by 2100.’
It was notable at Copenhagen that China did not demand stronger targets from the USA, nor did it push hard for 1.5 degrees. On the contrary, and remarkably, it said that even a 2 degrees warming limit was secondary to its development needs.
In conclusion, each country brings the contradictory contemporary and historical burden of its own internal politics clanking into these international negotiations. That includes the USA and China and, of course, Australia.
Between now and the end of next year, we in civil society need to be mercilessly clear and accurate in our analysis of the political landscape we must navigate. We need to articulate a very clear alternative that builds on the Copenhagen Accord (whatever it shows itself to be by 31 January next year, when national commitments are revealed) in order to bring a much more focused, and more politically powerful, set of demands first to our individual countries and then to the UN process. This is a step along from where we were before December in Copenhagen.
But we can only begin to do all this by first understanding the complexities of our situation – not by telling ourselves comforting political fairytales instead.
Peter Christoff teaches climate policy at the University of Melbourne and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Environment at Oxford University. He is also on the Board of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
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