How to make a successful failure out of Copenhagen

By Philip Stephens
Published: November 12 2009 20:29
Next month’s United Nations climate change conference is doomed to failure. The pre-emptive recriminations are already under way weeks before any delegates are due to arrive in Copenhagen. The finger of blame is being pointed firmly at Washington. It hardly seems worth the carbon to fly in all those officials, environmentalists, scientists and lobbyists, not to say presidents and prime ministers.
A word or two of definition is needed. When the UN negotiators met in Bali in December 2007, they set a two-year deadline for an agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol. The remit called for a new accord to cut global carbon emissions at once tougher and more inclusive than its predecessor.
There are three essential elements to such a bargain: deep cuts in the CO2 emissions of rich countries alongside curbs on the carbon-intensity of growth in rising economies; a financial transfer arrangement to mitigate the cost to poorer nations of a shift to a low-carbon economy; and a commitment to embed national targets in a binding international treaty.
By this measure, failure at Copenhagen is indeed pre-ordained. It is also easy enough to see why the US will get the blame. For all the US president’s rhetorical commitment to combat global warming, Barack Obama’s administration is not yet ready to sign up to any of these three vital ingredients.
I detect a hint of I-told-you-so smugness about some of the gloomy advance commentary on Copenhagen. It is almost as if climate change campaigners are relieved that the US has lived up to its let-the-planet-go-to-hell stereotype. The process has been derailed, a spokesman for Greenpeace said the other day, because, predictably enough, Washington had bowed to “Big Carbon”.
As it happens, I sympathise with the impatience. The world badly needs to fix a carbon price if governments and businesses are to take the measures needed to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. The political and the economic incentives to reduce CO2 emissions depend on establishing an agreed global framework. The longer negotiations drag on, the greater the risk of permanent prevarication. The fate of the Doha trade talks provides a salutary warning.
The all-or-nothing approach to Copenhagen, however, carries its own dangers. The two big enemies of action on climate change have always been denial and despair. The deniers will be forever with us, however compelling the scientific evidence. There are still people, after all, who will argue that the link between smoking and cancer is not fully proven. And for now, the global warming sceptics have found in the economic recession a powerful political pressure point for inaction.
The other threat, though, comes from an approach that encourages despair. Frighten people too much and you end up persuading them there is nothing to be done. Global warming may be real enough, they conclude, but it is all too difficult; even if they make sacrifices, others will duck out of their commitments.
Climate campaigners’ act-now-or- fry-tomorrow hyperbole – we must all get out of our cars, close the airports, clean our teeth in the dark and turn off the air conditioning this instant – encourages just this response. Warnings of flood, famine, drought and mass extinction merge into an overwhelming sense of futility. We cannot do everything, so why bother doing anything?
There is a real danger, of course, that if Copenhagen does not live up to the Bali billing, the world’s political leaders will gradually back away even from more modest measures to slow the warming of the Earth. Given the condition of their economies, many of them need only the flimsiest of excuses to avoid confronting their voters with higher energy prices.
Yet from talking to officials preparing for next month’s summit, I have the impression that things are not quite as bad as they might seem. While severely irritated at the US stance, European officials say it is more about timing than substance.
To sign up to an international deal, Mr Obama must first secure domestic legislation for a carbon cap-and-trade regime. Thus far the president has been investing all his political capital in health reform. Cap-and-trade must wait until early next year. Even then, there will doubtless be some awkward compromises needed to get the legislation through. But Mr Obama is on the right side of the argument.
There have been some encouraging signs too of compromise in the emerging world. The rising nations remain insistent, and rightly so, that they must not be expected to pick up the bill for the carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the west during the past 200 years. But China and Brazil have shown themselves willing to contemplate significant curbs on the carbon-intensity of their future growth. Even obdurate India has begun to look less of an outlier.
Behind these shifts lies the self-interest that flows from an appreciation of one of the central unfairnesses of climate change. If the west bears most of the responsibility for global warming, the effects will be felt more quickly and acutely in the emerging world. China and India need only to look at the impact on their water supplies of melting Himalayan ice caps to understand that simply blaming the US for the problem does them little good.
None of this means that governments are set to come up with a convincing package to stop the planet from overheating. Political will aside, there are big question marks over technology. Everyone seems to be betting the ranch on cost-effective technology to clean up coal. What happens if carbon capture and storage turns out to be less of a panacea than now imagined?
An agreement to share the burdens of tackling climate change (and incidentally, the opportunities promised by a switch to low-carbon growth) requires a reconciliation of national and mutual interests reaching well beyond anything seen previously. The eventual outcome of the UN negotiations will make or break efforts to construct a new international order.
All the more reason why the delegates in Copenhagen should move as far as they can towards a deal. The target should be a political agreement between rich and rising nations – above all between the US and China – robust enough to deliver a binding agreement during 2010. Call it a successful failure.
philip.stephens@ft.com