Hopes fading for Copenhagen climate change treaty, says Ed Miliband

Political agreement rather than full treaty is now goal of the meeting, says energy secretary
Allegra Stratton
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 13.55 GMT
The climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, today became the first British politician to acknowledge publicly that the Copenhagen summit would produce no legal climate change treaty, but insisted a politically binding agreement was still possible – which he described as "a meaningful political track with strong numbers committed by all countries".
Both Miliband and Gordon Brown are due to travel to Copenhagen in the hope of agreeing binding cuts in emissions that will slow climate change. Brown has described the summit as the world's last chance to prevent "catastrophic" climate change. MPs from across the house yesterday described it variously as important as the Bretton Woods talks and the most important international talks since the second world war.
But speaking in the Commons, Miliband said: "The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well," and described a "history of mistrust" between developed and developing nations with negotiators "stuck in entrenched positions". African nations walked out of the latest round of UN climate change talks in Barcelona this week, calling for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from richer nations.
He went on: "The Danes, who are the hosts of the meeting, have said rather clearly in the last couple of weeks they think achieving a full legal treaty, given the pace of the negotiations, is unlikely.
"We would have preferred a full legal treaty, it has to be said. I think the important thing about the agreement we now seek in December is that while it may be a political agreement it must lead, on a very clear timetable, to a legally binding treaty." Sources said a meeting in Mexico in December 2010 would be more likely to see the legal treaty sealed.
Yesterday top US officials stated that a legal deal was all but impossible in the Danish capital and the president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, also dimissed the idea of a legally binding treaty. He said: "Of course we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty by Copenhagen. There is no time for that."
Miliband's speech was the first public reappraisal of the British position since officials began to shift the line after the Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said the results of the Copenhagen negotiations would not have a legal status.
Government sources said it has become increasingly obvious as time goes on that negotiations are moving very slowly making a legally binding treaty in December unlikely. But one noted that the Kyoto protocol followed the same course from political to legal agreement. "I don't think we are downbeat about this," said one.
They said that any pledges made at Copenhagen would be as difficult to escape as if they were legally binding, because nations would have made their commitments at the very public forum of a UN meeting. They also pointed to the precedent of 2001 climate change talks which were only converted to a legal status months after political will was agreed.
Instead, British negotiators now want Copenhagen to seal a political agreement and a timetable that leads to a legally binding treaty.
Miliband said: "I'll be completely clear about this, I think an agreement without numbers is not a great agreement. In fact, it's a wholly inadequate agreement."
He added: "We must have reduction commitments from developed countries. We also must have action from developing countries which translate into reduced quantities of emissions – not cuts in emissions, yet, from major developing countries before 2020 but real actions which contribute to the kind of peaking of global emissions which I think is a central part of this agreement."
In reality the government's shift probably began in September, when the Guardian revealed that the US wanted a new approach that would move it away from a legally binding world agreement to one where individual countries pledged cuts in their national emissions without binding timetables and targets – a change from the Kyoto deal in which total emissions were determined by the science, to one in which individual countries pledge their own emissions cuts.
A senior government source said: "The key question has always been: will you or won't you get numbers? Just because you're not getting the legal bit doesn't mean you won't get numbers. And we are hopeful of getting meaningful numbers."