Something is (About to be) Rotten in the State of Denmark

With the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen only days away, observers around the world are talking less about seeing a firm emissions control treaty, with targets, come out of the meeting than a political agreement to aim for hefty reductions in the future.

This is, to say the least, disappointing. An international agreement on GHG emission reductions would, at long last, force governments to put a price on carbon, which would lead to more robust investment in clean energy solutions. These could include both utility-scale and distributed solar, as well as passive solar and energy efficiency measures. But to kick the problem down the road for another year or more would be to waste a rare opportunity, in which no fewer than 192 countries—more than 60 of which will be represented by their leaders—could have made tangible progress on international climate policy. Some twelve years after launching the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s leaders might have given us more.

Obstacles

Connie Hedegaard, Chair of the UN conference, sees the biggest obstacles to agreement in terms of the failure of the US Senate to pass a climate bill and of EU governments to agree on helping developing countries. She also believes that American businesses will lose as much if not more than anyone if those obstacles prove insurmountable.

That’s an understandable position; already, China practically has a monopoly in solar panel production, and Europe is well ahead of the US in wind energy deployment. Failure to produce substantive progress in Copenhagen will mean that those forces in American business that have opposed climate legislation—mainly in the power and fuel sectors—will be given the gift of another year in which to conduct business-as-usual while the rest of the world consolidates its competitive position.

But while there will be no last-minute change of heart or priorities in Congress—the Senate’s energy/climate bill is now officially comatose until late winter or spring—we now know that President Obama will attend the Copenhagen conference to announce an actual target for U.S. emissions reductions ‘in the range of’ 17% of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. He has also made agreements with the leadership of China and India for cooperation on climate action. It remains to be seen whether this will have an effect on those Congresspersons who still feel that global warming concerns are the product of an international conspiracy of climatologists seeking job security.

It’s also rumored that the triple-headed force of senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman, who are trying to create a new energy/climate bill that will appeal to all parties including the Executive Branch, will announce the overall shape of their bill-in-progress before the international conference. This, of course, will have no more force of law than the current Kerry-Boxer bill, the marking-up of which was actually boycotted by Republican members of the Senate committee that created it; it may, however, lend weight to U.S. negotiators in Copenhagen trying to convince the world that we are actually going to do something—anything—about climate change.

On the Spot in Denmark

Certainly the US negotiators can use all the help they can get. The last time they appeared before this audience, in 2007 in Bali, they were publicly booed by their scientific colleagues. And it’s probably not unreasonable for the world to look for leadership from a country that boasts its largest single economy and that was, until 2006, its biggest polluter. But even with Obama’s announcement (since it will be nugatory without Congressional action), leadership on climate issues, to date, has come from everywhere but the US. The European Union has promised to reduce its emissions by 20% by 2020, and will raise that figure to 30% if an international agreement is reached this year. China has published a 5-year plan for reductions, India and Brazil have published their own proposals, and Indonesia has pledged a cut in emissions growth of 40%. With each new commitment from our global neighbors, our own paralysis of action isolates us further.

And even before the conference starts, the US delegation has been put on the defensive. The draft treaty text that has been developed ahead of the conference includes a provision in which developed countries would finance a huge insurance program that would benefit poor countries most at risk from rising sea levels. Negotiators from the US and some European countries have been accused of trying to dilute the provision, fearful that it would be tantamount to admitting liability for a history of pollution.

To be a US negotiator in such circumstances must be akin to being an ant under a magnifying glass. Whenever a concession is made to dirty power interests in the climate bill debate here, whenever a committee member cites discredited sources to pervert the course of a hearing, whenever a senator selectively quotes a hijacked e-mail to convince us that climate change is a massive hoax engineered by scientists, the heat focused on you from representatives of nearly two hundred other countries must be somewhere between uncomfortable and unbearable.

If you are one such negotiator, it’s tough to know how to respond. It’s thought in Washington circles that whatever bill the US Congress is able to cobble together won’t become law for some six months, by which time a large chunk of Congress will be thoroughly distracted by upcoming elections. So even if the Copenhagen delegates end their conference with rousing choruses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Kumbaya’, it doesn’t mean that U.S. congresspersons, six months before election day next year, will be charged with the same spirit of global unity. Thus one wonders how realistic Senator Kerry is being when he says: “What I am looking for is a binding and real political agreement where the world comes together in Copenhagen with an agreement for fixed reductions that are measurable, verifiable and reportable. Then you set either a June or July date or the Mexico date in December next year and work on the language in that year.”

Hold on to that thought, and let’s revisit it in a year’s time.

The Blame Game

Most environmental groups blame western politicians for not making climate change enough of a priority. “Copenhagen is one of the most important meetings in human history, but the politicians seem determined to blow it,” says Joss Garman of Greenpeace. And while there’s plenty of blame to spread around all the industrialized democracies, that magnifying glass keeps getting refocused on the USA.

“So much can blamed on the Big Carbon special interests driving Washington,” says Garman. “If Europe doesn’t stand up to America to save this deal, there could be grave implications for millions across the world.”

The US’s role is so critical, in fact, that it’s been our recalcitrance that has largely prevented the UN from making progress since Bali. “Getting clarity from the U.S. on what their commitment is going to be is going to be crucially important,” says Kim Carstensen of the World Wildlife Federation.

You might think that our role as planetary whipping-boy in the climate community is somewhat unfair, but the realities of our electoral political system, rolled in with the way it’s financed and how it’s reported in the media, really do make what should be conceptually simple decisions for the long-term good almost impossible to make. So we can read opinion poll results that tell us that a large majority of Americans want action on climate change and would be willing to make some level of sacrifice to achieve it, but our lawmakers are driven by imperatives that may ignore those results and actually be inimical to our long-term good. And while this is true to some extent of all parliamentary or congressional democracies, it’s reached such a pitch in American public life that our government has become dysfunctional in all but the least contentious, lowest impact and shortest term legislation. Is politics too important to be left to the politicians?

An Overdue Miracle

If a miracle should occur in the Danish capital in December with a signed, binding international agreement on climate change, what would that mean for us? In a nutshell, it would mean that carbon would at last have been given a price commensurate with all its externalities. This could be the market signal that investors have long awaited to put money into projects such as large-scale solar farms; that utilities have expected as justification for transitioning to cleaner energy sources; and that state and local governments can use to back up funding and rebate programs that will bring rooftop solar within the reach of most of us.

It would indeed be a miracle, but don’t we deserve one by now?