No Climate Change Leader as Nations Meet
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR in the New York Times
Published: September 19, 2009
UNITED NATIONS — Economists point to powerhouse countries like India to
illustrate the hurdles facing some 100 world leaders due to gather in
New York this Tuesday for the highest level summit meeting on climate
change ever convened.
The Indian government has announced a major commitment to solar power as
a renewable means of bringing electricity to more than 400 million
people now living without it. Yet the government was pilloried at home
last summer for accepting the international goal of preventing a global
temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above present
temperatures by limiting emissions. Opposition parties accused it of
selling out the country’s future development.
While virtually all of the largest developed and developing nations have
made domestic commitments toward creating more efficient, renewable
sources of energy to cut emissions, none want to take the lead in
fighting for significant international emissions reduction targets, lest
they be accused at home of selling out future jobs and economic growth.
The negotiations for a new climate change agreement to be signed in
Copenhagen in December are badly stalled. With the agreement running
more than 200 pages — including what negotiators estimate are a couple
of thousand brackets denoting points of differences — diplomats and
negotiators fear that the document is too unwieldy to garner a consensus
in the coming months.
In convening the meeting, the United Nations is hoping that collectively
the leaders can summon the will to overcome narrow national interests
and give the negotiators the marching orders needed to cut at least the
outline of a deal.
“I have been urging them to speak and to act as global leaders; just go
beyond their national boundaries,” Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations
secretary general, said Thursday.
On Tuesday, the leaders, including the heads of state or government of
most economic powers, are to engage in a series of round-table
discussions on outstanding climate change issues that will be less like
negotiations than a series of college seminars designed to forge
political momentum.
“They won’t do it one by one,” said Robert Orr, the United Nations
assistant secretary general for policy planning. “Politically, they all
have to jump together, and this is the essence of this summit. We will
see if any governments are ready to say, ‘I am stepping through the door
now; are you going to come with me?’ That would be a huge break.”
Senior organizers said they had never been involved in such a high-level
summit meeting where the outcome was not predetermined. Fundamentally,
although limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees Fahrenheit is an
accepted goal, there is no consensus on how to get there.
This 2-degree Fahrenheit rise is the equivalent of the original goal of
2 degrees Celsius above the planet’s temperature just before the
Industrial Revolution.
The industrialized nations have not agreed on midterm targets. They have
made pledges of roughly half the target set by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a 25 percent to 40 percent reduction from 1990
levels by 2020.
Developing countries have agreed on the need to mitigate their
emissions, but have rejected any mandatory limit, and they demand
financial and technical support in exchange.
The issue of aid for the poorest countries to adapt to the impact of
climate change has been shunted aside. Finally, there is no agreement on
what institutions would verify that targets are being met and supervise
the finances.
“The mood in the negotiations has been that I should do as little as
possible as late as possible and let the other person go first,” said
Kim Carstensen, the director of the Global Climate Initiative of the
World Wildlife Fund.
In recent weeks, sharp divisions have emerged between the United States
and the European Union. The Europeans said that they would donate $2
billion to $15 billion a year for the next decade to help less developed
nations adapt to climate change. The Obama administration has not
offered anything close.
The Europeans also want binding, near-term targets for developed
nations, a legacy of the last significant global climate accord, the
1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration rejected because it
did not set limits on emissions from China and other major developing
nations.
The European target is a 20 percent reduction of 1990 levels by 2020,
still less than the 25 percent recommended by the Intergovernmental
Panel, although the Europeans said they would accept 30 percent if
everyone agreed.
The American position is that any targets be enforced by domestic laws
rather than international treaties, that they be verifiable and
distributed equally. A House bill approaches the European target, but
the Senate is expected to dilute it.
But the chances of a final bill’s clearing Congress by December are
increasingly unlikely, so experts are eagerly waiting to hear what
President Obama, who made climate change a key issue in his
administration, proposes in his speech on Tuesday.
A speech by President Hu Jintao of China is also widely anticipated,
with experts hoping he will announce a significant commitment to
renewable energy and emissions reductions in China’s next five-year
plan. Mr. Hu is the first Chinese president to attend the annual United
Nations General Assembly, where leaders will convene Wednesday.
Between them, the United States and China account for about 40 percent
of world emissions, split almost evenly, so if the two reach a consensus
it will also provide significant impetus for a global agreement.
The United States also suffers from the “after you” syndrome, with some
Congressional leaders demanding that China agree to reductions before
the United States agrees to an overall framework, a formula that experts
warn will kill progress.
“We don’t want to get hung up on trying to say that the U.S. and China
will reduce the same percentage or the same amount,” said Timothy E.
Wirth, the president of the United Nations Foundation and a former
Colorado senator who has long been involved in climate negotiations.
Blocs of smaller, poorer nations have their own agendas. The island
countries of the Pacific and the Caribbean will be pushing for an even
lower temperature ceiling because they fear that the rising seas caused
by even a 2-degree rise would drown or severely damage them. The
Africans are threatening to walk out of the negotiations if they are not
promised $300 billion in aid.
New Zealand objects to the fact that the negotiations have basically
ignored agriculture, which accounts for 13 percent to 14 percent of
greenhouse gases. Developing nations fear that any regulation of
agriculture could deepen the severe problems in feeding their populations.
Such issues, while parochial, may be no less important in building an
agreement that works across political borders.
“The instinct is a kind of nationalist response that can get it exactly
backwards,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at
Columbia University. “We should be viewing this as global problem
solving, not as global negotiation.”