politics | Copenhagen 15

Inside Story - Climate change - 20 Dec 09

Some poorer nations have taken the position that because the industrialized world is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere – in effect exhausting the environment’s capacity to cope with carbon – rich nations must pay “damages” or “reparations”. These payments presumably would be used by emerging economies to cope with the climate changes that already are devastating some of them, and to increase their standards of living while minimizing their emissions.

But the United States’ chief negotiator, Todd Stern - an attorney and by all accounts a very good and moral man – rejects that argument. Speaking at COP-15, he repeated President Barack Obama’s recent promise that the United States will pay a “fair share” of financial assistance to emerging economies. But, he said: "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that."

Through most of the past 200 years of industrial revolution, Stern argued, people were “blissfully ignorant” that carbon emissions caused climate change. Therefore, he contended, the people of the United States need not feel a sense of guilt.

Except for the fact that that ain't true.

In the United States, presidents at least as early as Lyndon Johnson were warned that climate change was coming. In 1965, Johnson’s panel of science advisors told him:

By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in the atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur.

Every U.S. president since has known of the risks of climate change. Every president and Congress since has failed to adequately mitigate or manage that risk. Although then Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the United States in 1998, the U.S. Senate made clear it would note vote in favor of ratification. As a result, President Clinton didn’t bother to try.MORE

Coming directly from Obama himself: How the Sausage gets made in Copenhagen

But the joke, in a sense, may be on the rest of the conference. After all the giant globes, endless late-night sessions debating paragraphs, wraparound ad campaigns and so on, one of the first substantive declarations of these talks came from…1,230 kilometers away in Paris. The Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi stopped there en route to Copenhagen for a little meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. And apparently en route he'd taken a phone call from some guy named Barack Obama. And that was enough to persuade him to sign off on, in essence, the American deal. Two degrees. (Never mind that the IPCC had made clear that two degrees more heating means four degrees in Africa, which means better find some habit to replace eating.) $10 billion in "fast-start" financing. (Given the 4 billion people in the developing world, that's $2.50 apiece; sorry about that global warming, but enjoy this fries-and-a-Coke.) This is how power works. The US president doesn't want to put political capital on the line to push the US Senate, so the leader of the African negotiating bloc gets the word, and the deal gets cut. It's wonderfully naked, and the extra bonus up-yours was cutting the deal along the Champs Elysees.

Obama’s Climate Position: A Lie Inside a Fib Coated with Spin

The problem is the basic charade underway here. This conference, at least at the moment, is not about "saving the climate" in any meaningful way—more and more it's about saving the political skin of certain leaders, Barack Obama among them. So let's begin with how his spokesman, Jonathan Pershing, described America's commitment to progress yesterday. "It's a vision that moves the United States down the curve of greenhouse gas emissions at a level that no other country has even begun to seriously contemplate."

This is a lie inside a fib, and so coated with spin you can hardly begin to imagine. For one thing, some other countries have committed to emitting no carbon at all by 2020—the Maldive Islands, for instance. And the Europeans have offered to cut their emissions 20% by 2020, and pledged to increase that number to 30% if the Americans would go along. In return, Pershing's boss, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by mentioning global warming in passing as a military threat, has offered a cut of 4% from 1990 levels by 2020.MORE

Divide and Conquer at Copenhagen

With the Copenhagen talks at an impasse, President Barack Obama and the leaders of other developed nations have deployed a divide-and-conquer strategy. Until now, poorer countries have presented a united front, calling for major long-term investments to help vulnerable nations deal with climate change, and a more ambitious effort to slow the warming of the planet. But industrialized nations are unwilling to make such commitments, and are now seeking to break that alliance by picking off countries one by one.

Late on Tuesday, the governments of Ethiopia and France announced that Ethiopia, "representing Africa," had agreed to adopt an "ambitious agreement" that would call for limiting the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Previously, the African bloc, along with the G77 coalition of poor countries and the Alliance of Small Island States, had firmly insisted that a 1.5 degree limit was imperative to prevent dire consequences in their regions, which are especially vulnerable to climate change. Some observers see the France-Ethiopia side deal as a breakthrough that could bring developed and developing nations closer to a final agreement. But others view it as an attempt to drive a wedge through the bloc of developing nations in pursuit of a weaker deal that won't protect the most at-risk nations from harm.

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Some developing nations fear that the stalemate at Copenhagen will impel more countries to make concessions out of a desire to get something—anything—done before the summit concludes on Friday. But for Africa, giving ground on temperature rise is a concession fraught with risk. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an average global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius—the target industrialized nations are pushing for—would represent a rise of 3 or 4 degrees in Africa. That in turn would trigger severe drought and hunger. "This is death to millions of Africans," said Hon Awudu Mbaya, President of Pan-African Parliamentarians Network on Climate Change. Said Mosisili of Lesotho. “At this 11th hour of negotiations, we appreciate that the issues are complex—but we will not sign a suicide pact."MORE

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