Imagine that a Department of Motor Vehicles office joined forces with an Alitalia ticket counter and set out to save the world. That’s what the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen was like -- a bureaucratic mosh pit of confusion, rumor, bad food and daylong lines leading to a toothless accord.
Now it’s the morning after, and the hangover is painful. Many are blaming Copenhagen’s weak outcome on the dysfunctional UN process. For 193 nations to agree on anything this complex is simply impossible, they say. Future climate talks should include only the dozen or so countries that produce most of the emissions. The face-saving accord Barack Obama hammered out with key players Friday night is the way it will work from now on.
That may be true, yet it ignores a crucial fact: All of the parties knew going in that this conference couldn’t produce a strong agreement. A truly global deal was out of reach because the U.S., as Obama said at the end of his grueling 15-hour visit, “was coming with a clean slate” -- America hadn’t passed a bill committing itself to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. has kept the world waiting 12 years for that crucial step, ever since it walked away from the Kyoto Protocol. U.S. negotiators like to talk about the “lesson of Kyoto,” which is don’t agree to anything in the UN process that they can’t sell back home. It’s a valid one.
But other nations have a Kyoto lesson of their own: Don’t agree to anything real until the U.S. proves it is serious by passing a climate bill of its own. America, after all, enjoyed a century-long head start on industrialization, yet it is the only developed nation that has refused to get started with binding cuts.
What Matters
So what matters most about the Copenhagen Accord is this question: Does it make it more or less likely that Obama can overcome opposition to climate action and move a carbon cap through the Senate?
Fence-sitting senators are worried that a U.S. climate bill would ship jobs to China, so Obama’s marathon talks were focused on winning concessions from Premier Wen Jiabao. Now the race is on in Washington to spin the result. Democrats are proclaiming that Obama got what he needed to secure the backing of key Midwesterners. Republicans claim the opposite. Who’s right? Let’s look at what Obama got, and what he didn’t get.
There was never a chance that China would commit to binding reductions at this conference. Years ago, the UN talks that led to the Kyoto Protocol let China and other developing nations off the hook for those. That is Kyoto’s original sin and a main reason the U.S. walked away from it, consigning the treaty to failure.
China Onboard
Since then the challenge has been to draw China toward a deal so the U.S. would finally act, thus helping to get China fully onboard. And in Copenhagen, for the first time ever, China, India, and other major developing countries pledged to take voluntary steps to curb global-warming pollution -- the most that can be expected of them until the U.S. passes a climate bill.
That constitutes progress, but since fence-sitting senators don’t trust China to make good on its promises, the bone of contention between Obama and Wen was whether China would submit to independent monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV). And as Obama tried to cut a deal on MRV, Wen snubbed him, sending underlings to two sit-downs with the president.
China obstructed in other areas, as well, even vetoing deep cuts by developed nations, lest it one day be subject to them. Obama had to crash a meeting with Wen and the leaders of Brazil, India and South Africa to reach the final deal.
Giving a Peek
In that deal, China budged a little. It agreed to full MRV for emissions reductions paid for by others, but not for measures it will be making on its own. Those voluntary moves will be subject to China’s own reporting and verification, “with provisions for international consultations and analysis.”
China agreed to give outsiders a peek, in other words, but its promise is so vague it will reassure only senators who want to be reassured. It’s not going to get Republican skeptics on board, obviously, but it might give cover to some undecided Democrats. If it does, Copenhagen will have been a success.
Obama knew all of this going in. He baked his cake last summer, when he decided to push health-care reform and not the climate bill. He chose not to mount a full-scale public education campaign on climate science and solutions to counter the choir of skeptics. That decision ruled out the possibility of a triumph in Copenhagen.
So we are where we were: waiting for Obama to lead the charge in the Senate. A majority of Americans want to see a climate bill passed, but support has slipped thanks to the hacked e-mails known as Climategate -- the latest phony “proof” that global warming, in spite of mountains of evidence, isn’t really happening.
Obama needs to explain the realities of climate science to the American people and persuade those willing to listen that a carbon cap will help revive the U.S. economy, not strangle it. Until he does that, rush hour diplomacy -- in Copenhagen or on Pennsylvania Avenue -- simply won’t be enough.
(Eric Pooley, a former managing editor of Fortune magazine who is writing a book about the politics of global warming, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Eric Pooley at epooley2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page