The Politics of Climate Change (29 page)

In 1997, at Kyoto in Japan, after tortuous negotiations, an agreement was drawn up by which the developed countries would cut their emissions by an average of 5.2 per cent relative to 1990 levels by the period 2008–12. The Kyoto Protocol was set up in such a way that it could come into force without complete consensus. The rule set up for the Protocol to become part of international law was that developed countries, accounting for at least 55 per cent of total emissions from the industrial states, would have to sign up. Russia, which accounted for 17 per cent of 1990 emissions, initially stated its opposition to Kyoto, but eventually ratified towards the end of 2004.

The administration of George W. Bush, inclined towards climate change scepticism anyway, and influenced strongly by industrial lobbies, was worried that China might achieve a competitive advantage over the US, given that the developing countries were not required to make any cuts. Bush believed that if the US were to take more steps to combat global warming, even in the context of the Kyoto agreements with other nations going along, the country might damage its international competitiveness. As the world's dominant economy, the cost of taking steps to cope with climate change – since the US would have had to agree to substantial emissions reductions – might have affected the wider world economy too.

Apart from the US and Australia, all the other industrial countries, and a large majority of countries in the rest of the world, put their names to Kyoto.

The US pressurized Russia not to participate. The Russians were initially not inclined to do so anyway. One of President Putin's economic advisers, Andrei Illarionov, claimed that Kyoto would destroy the world economy ‘like an international Auschwitz'.
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However, Russia at that point wanted EU support for its bid to join the World Trade Organization, while the EU, the leading force in climate change negotiations, needed Russian participation in Kyoto to salvage the whole thing. So, in effect, a bargain was struck.

An additional factor was that by the early 2000s Russian emissions were much lower than they had been in 1990, because of the contraction of the economy and the collapse of some of the large state-owned industrial companies. The EU countries realized that this situation could help with the carbon trading scheme that had just been established. Russia's emission ‘reductions' would be available to help ease EU member–states' problems with meeting their own emissions targets. An unfortunate outcome of the whole episode was that Russia was legitimated to carry on squandering energy domestically without thought to environmental damage.

The result of compromise, the targets agreed at Kyoto bear little relationship to what is required to make a serious impact upon global warming. They were too low and contained all kinds of anomalies. Take the case of Australia, which came out of the negotiations with the agreement that its emissions could actually be increased rather than cut. Like the Americans, the Australians initially wanted only voluntary reductions. They then argued that Australia is a special case, because it is a net energy producer with a very large transport-dependent sector. They also pointed to reductions in deforestation that had been made before 1990. Given the need to persuade Australia to sign, the country got what it was asking for (although it later opted out anyway, signing up only in 2008 after a change of government).

Because the Kyoto agreements were not adopted until 2004, most countries were slow in making any progress at all towards reaching even the modest targets that had been set. The EU has been by far the most forceful advocate of proposals to limit emissions, but even its record is wanting. Quite a few EU states have met their Kyoto targets, and some have
well exceeded them. However, a large part of the reason is the impact of recession, mentioned earlier. And of course Kyoto did not include the developing countries at all – even though these are now major contributors to world emissions in absolute terms.

The Kyoto Protocol initiated the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows industrial countries to get credits to put towards their Kyoto targets by funding clean energy projects in developing states. The scheme took off slowly, since few countries were willing to act until Kyoto had finally been ratified. Some 850 projects had been approved by the middle of 2009, most of them located in the four biggest developing countries: China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
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The CDM is not quite the win–win framework it seems, since it allows developed countries to relax their own emissions reduction efforts.

It is uncertain how far the CDM has actually helped to introduce renewable energy projects into the developing countries. Marginal projects dominate, such as the containment of industrial gases by bolting on filters to already existing pipes. It has been said that perhaps half the reductions claimed are the result of ‘accounting tricks' and are empty of content. In one case, the projects in a specific country were all concerned with emissions of HFC-23, a by-product of the manufacture of refrigerants. The total cost of the parts amounted to $70 million, while the value of the subsidy provided through the CDM was some $1 billion. Emissions reductions were achieved, but in a cumbersome and highly inefficient way, with much of the money being swallowed up as a result of corrupt practices.
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Not much has been done to focus the CDM more effectively, mainly because of the political stakes involved. Environmentalists are reluctant to criticize the only means that exists for directly helping the developing countries. As just pointed out, the EU needs the credit mechanism to help meet its targets. The developing countries, or some of them, especially China, the leading recipient, do get investment. A report from the World Bank estimates that the CDM has stimulated investments of $59 billion since it was first established.

Figure 8.1  Registered Kyoto projects up to 2007

Source:
‘Europe's Dirty Secret: Why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme Isn't Working',
Open Europe
, August 2007, p. 29, graph 5

A further round of climate change negotiations carried on under the auspices of the UN was held in Bali in 2007. Some 12,000 delegates attended. Following arduous discussions, the president of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar, announced: ‘We have finally achieved the breakthrough the world has been waiting for: the Bali roadmap!'
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The roadmap was designed as a new negotiation process to replace Kyoto.

However, probably the best one can say about Bali is that the negotiations did not collapse. The roadmap was little more than a vague sketch. The agreements did not contain a single specific commitment. They offered no recognition of the problems inherent in the Kyoto framework, or any acknowledgement of the minimal impact it has had on world emissions. As one commentator put it: ‘If this is success, give me failure.'
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The roadmap arrived at in such a tortuous way in Bali was
supposed to supply a framework for the UN-brokered negotiations that took place in Copenhagen in December 2009. There were other developments over the months leading up to Copenhagen too. Following the election of President Obama, the US re-engaged in UN climate negotiations. The new leadership breathed fresh life into the Major Economies Forum – a grouping of the 17 largest economies originally convened under the Bush administration – and brought climate change within its remit. Australia and Japan, which under previous conservative governments had resisted significant carbon reduction targets, pledged to reduce their emissions by 25 per cent over a 2000 base and a 1990 base respectively. President Obama pledged that the US would reduce emissions by 17 per cent over 2005 levels by 2020 and by more than 80 per cent by 2050.
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The large developing countries also made significant moves. In November 2009 the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, committed his country to a goal of reducing its energy intensity by 40–45 per cent by 2020. Shortly afterwards the Indian government followed suit, introducing a carbon intensity target of 20–25 per cent reduction by the same date. At about the same time the US and China endorsed a Memorandum of Understanding, designed to promote cooperation on energy and climate change policy. The EU also held summit meetings with the Chinese and the Indian leadership in November, proclaiming the importance of reaching concrete outcomes in Copenhagen and agreeing to act together to help achieve this.

On the basis of the developments noted above, many commentators at the time were optimistic about the chances of success. Indeed, many political leaders were too, since they flocked to Copenhagen in large numbers, something that had not happened at previous UN summits. More than 40,000 delegates attended the meetings, while some 5,000 journalists were there to cover the event. There were 122 prime ministers or presidents, the largest number ever assembled together save at the UN headquarters in New York.
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However, not only did attendees at Copenhagen fail to reach agreement on any binding carbon reductions; the whole process was chaotic and disjointed. President Obama arrived only on the last day of the negotiations. On meeting
him, Hillary Clinton commented: ‘Mr President, this is the worst meeting I've ever been to since the eighth grade student council.'
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The main reason concerned the disagreements that existed between states, especially between the developed and developing countries. However, these conflicts were compounded by strategic mistakes made by the Danish hosts, and by disagreements over tactics within the Danish government.

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was a supporter of the climate change sceptic Bjørn Lomborg. He and the environment minister, Connie Hedegaard, who was much more committed to the project of securing widespread carbon reductions, did not see eye to eye. Prior to the meetings themselves, Anders Rasmussen left office to become the Secretary-General of NATO and another Rasmussen, Lars Lokke, the vice-chairman of the governing party, took over. At the same time, the conflicts within the Danish government worsened. Hedegaard was committed to the UN negotiating process, which those in the prime minister's office thought too slow-moving.

The result was a twin-track strategy. The leaders of the developing countries were outraged at a document which was leaked as ‘secret' to the
Guardian
newspaper, but which had in fact been in circulation for some while. Denmark was seen to be supporting only the interests of the developed nations, thus further accentuating the divisions that already existed. The whole process of negotiation dissolved into disorder.

The Danish prime minister decided to review and recast his unilateral strategy, this time bringing at least the larger of the developing countries on board. A three-page document summarizing some of the main aspirations of the negotiations was prepared. After Barack Obama arrived, a group of 26 leaders started drafting a revised text. Differences between the US and China at that point constituted one of the main sources of disagreement. Obama was trying to see Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader, but Wen seemed to be avoiding him. Obama also wanted to see the leaders of Brazil, India and South Africa, whose delegations appeared to be stalling things. Eventually all five leaders did meet, and agreed a deal between themselves – which became known as the Copenhagen Accord.

There then followed a further set of acrimonious discussions about the document, involving the original group of 26 and other countries. The most that the states present were prepared to do was to ‘take note' of the Accord, which specified that participating nations were invited on a voluntary basis to report national carbon reduction and targets and plans to the UN.

What happened at Copenhagen came as a shock to the EU countries. The EU had seen itself as being in the vanguard of climate change policy, and its representatives initially expected to play a leading role in Copenhagen. Not a single EU country figured in the discussions of the five states that agreed upon the outline of the Accord. Several European leaders played a significant part in the group of 26, but they were not there at the crunch.

Far from being the detailed, comprehensive and binding framework originally envisaged, the Accord was essentially a short statement of intent, no more than three pages long. It emphasized the need for ‘deep cuts' in emissions to hold the rise in global average temperatures to 2ºC and recognized that climate change is ‘one of the greatest challenges of our time'. The Accord stressed the need to reverse deforestation and to provide for resources coming from the richer countries to help states in the developing world struggling with the problem. The industrial countries in addition accepted the goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations cut carbon emissions.

The meetings in Copenhagen were a failure in terms of the ambitions that originally drove them. Yet in some ways the Accord actually represented an advance over the Kyoto-style approach. For the first time, it involved the large emerging economies – China, India and Brazil – in a very central role. The states that signed up to the Accord mostly did not just specify targets for 2020, but also set out plans, in varying levels of detail, to show how these targets would be achieved. A methodology for verifying the statistics provided by countries was agreed, previously a particular sticking point. By March 2010, more than 100 countries had signed up to the Accord, accounting for over 80 per cent of world greenhouse gas emissions. Of these, 72 had set out national plans for how emissions reductions would be achieved.