Gasbag US and China leave us in a world of trouble

Charles Clover

Jeez, what a way to run a planet. Anyone who was at Copenhagen has got to wonder whether this chaotic meeting of 130 world leaders and 40,000 hangers-on really was the way to solve the problems of atmospheric pollution, or any other global problem come to that, and whether the ghastly fudge of a so-called agreement that occurred on Friday night when the ambition slipped out of the talks could have been avoided.
Let us not forget, Copenhagen was the result of two years’ negotiations originally meant to replace the Kyoto protocol with a new legally binding treaty that would keep the world from warming by more than 2C. Then, suddenly, by sleight of diplomatic hand a few months back, it became a meeting to agree the terms of a treaty that would be signed six months on, after the United States Senate had obligingly ratified the pledges made by President Barack Obama last week.
The trouble is, once they got to Copenhagen, nobody seems to have remembered the script, and what has emerged is a turkey, just in time for Christmas.
As President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil put it, this was more like a trade union negotiation than a meeting to save the world from imminent disaster. The momentum that should have come into the talks with the arrival of Obama was lost because of his lacklustre speech, which was critical of China and obviously designed not to provoke the Senate. It all got sticky again. And now there will be recriminations stretching into the new year.
So who is to blame for the desperate lack of ambition of the agreement in Copenhagen, when there appeared at one time to be many useful offers on the table? The obvious target will be the United Nations organisers or the Danish presidency of the conference. Many non-governmental organisations were accredited to the conference and then told to go away again, for instance. The Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, didn’t help by taking over the conference presidency halfway from Connie Hedegaard, whom delegates had begun to trust. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon failed to whip up the enthusiasm he did at Bali when he exhorted delegates to put aside their national interests for the planet’s sake.
Much as it is fun to belabour the UN, it wasn’t its fault this time. World leaders were ultimately unable to put their national interests aside and the common good got lost: that’s the simple truth. The conference had come tantalisingly close to a proper deal, they failed to seal it.
The leadership of the early 21st century hasn’t yet recognised that the ways of the 20th century won’t work for the new kinds of problems faced by mankind. There are many more major players today, the world’s population will be pushing towards 9 billion by the middle of the century, and China is the world’s biggest polluter. In this multilateral world there are massive shared problems — food security, ocean acidification and overfishing as well as climate change — which require intense co-operation. It’s a new world and you can’t fix the deals the way the big players used to.
What were the Americans, normally the shrewdest negotiators, playing at? Obama made a speech that had no magic to persuade other parties of America’s good faith. It lacked a rousing exhortation to the Senate to endorse even the significant 17% cuts in emissions the US is offering by 2020 with much deeper cuts to come after that.
The Americans criticised the Chinese for not allowing their emissions to be internationally verified — without offering anything in return. Yet the Chinese pursued their national interest with a ruthlessness that was truly chilling. And then Washington forgot to placate a developing world which can’t forget that the US — the second-biggest polluter in the world — actually signed a treaty to freeze its emissions as long ago as 1992. If you are late to the party then you need to bring a big present.
To succeed in these talks, Obama probably needed to have his battle with the Senate before he came to Copenhagen. He failed to do so, because healthcare was his priority. Now the US has gone out of its way to issue a joint statement with four other countries on a separate track, rather than with the 193 attending. The president may have been right to walk away from what the Chinese were offering, but all the same, a lot of this could have been foreseen. To their credit, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband tried hard to get a deal, but the biggest players weren’t having any. Diplomatic disasters don’t come much bigger than this.
Obama must hate Copenhagen. The last time he came here he lost Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. This time, with so poor a negotiating hand, he shouldn’t have come.
Not all of this is — as they say — the end of the world. But no one should be under any illusion that Copenhagen puts the world on course to avert potentially dangerous climate change by cutting carbon emissions. That failure may already have doomed the coral reefs and triggered vast problems for the world’s poor. The window for an agreement that does keep the rise in global average temperatures below 2C will close in a year or so. All the work will have to be done again. Soon. All because a handful of world leaders forgot which century they were in.