If you've spent the week following every change of direction in the political winds about the likely outcome of the forthcoming UN climate summit, you'll have seen more twisting than the average Chubby Checker song.
Extending borrowing from the arts and entertainment world: "To bind or not to bind" has been the week's big question - but seeing as we've discussed this elsewhere, I'll put it to one side for the moment - while "Hey Johnny - what are you disagreeing about?" "Whaddya got?" would be a popular pick for the most apt exchange.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention, made a couple of strong and - taken together - highly indicative statements at a news conference during the week.
The first:
"There is no doubt in my mind that (Copenhagen) will yield a success; almost every day now, we see new commitments and pledges from both industrialised and developing countries."
The second: that the list of countries putting emission targets forward:
"must of course include the United States."
For environment groups, for developing countries, and now for the UN's top climate official, the US holds the key more than any other country to the chances of signing off any kind of agreement in Copenhagen.
For years, under George W Bush, the US was cited as the main obstacle to further deals on limiting climate change.
Now, under a president who emanated change and engagement and all sorts of other radically different vibes during his election campaign, the US is widely seen just one year on as still the major obstacle to a further deal on limiting climate change.
As a non-US citizen, I can't help wondering how that feels inside the country; comments much appreciated.
It's still not clear whether the US will come forward with targets or money or any firm pledges by Copenhagen. Chief negotiator Todd Stern said during the week that it was something that Barack Obama's administration wanted to do, without falling into the Kyoto trap of promising something that it would not be able to deliver.
"What we are looking at is whether we feel that we can put down a number that would be provisional in effect, contingent on getting our legislation done. Our inclination is to try to do that, but we want to be smart about it."
The US may have the will, but it won't have the bill - the Boxer-Kerry legislation, that is, seeking to impose caps on emissions economy-wide.
Senators said this week that it won't come into the Senate before spring - at the earliest.
This timeline makes things very awkward for those who - like Mr de Boer - would like to have a new deal signed and sealed halfway through next year.
If issues such as healthcare reform delay the Boxer-Kerry bill beyond the spring, the US may still not have anything approved by all arms of its governments to put before the international community by the middle of the year.
A bipartisan group of senators is looking at whether something radically downscaled in ambition would stand a better chance of progress - something that would cap only emissions from power plants and maybe heavy industry.
This would of course have a smaller effect on emissions. It would also lead to the Senate passing a very different bill from the one that went through the House of Representatives in July, meaning the process of reconciling them could take longer afterwards... and so on.
There's a chicken-and-egg-style aspect to all this. The lower expectations are for Copenhagen, the less pressure any senators will feel to push forward.
That's an issue emerging in Australia during the week, where lawmakers appear to be in the final stages of debating legislation that would reduce emissions by 5-15% below 2000 levels by 2020.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is desperate to get the measure through the Senate. But it has been blocked once before; and now Eric Abetz, deputy leader of the Liberal/National opposition party in the upper house, observes:
"Given how Copenhagen seems to be collapsing, there doesn't seem to be any real need to rush".
Following on from the recent upping of lobbying by religious groups, an unusual new player entered the arena during the week in Australia - the United Firefighters Union, who told politicians that they were endangering lives and property if they held up the bill.
As with religious groups, I'm not sure how much influence the men with hoses will have - but if I were standing in the path of one of the forest fires that have caused so much damage in Australia in recent years, I think I'd listen to them.
Those in favour of a strong new deal received some succour during the week from pledges by Russia and South Korea on tackling emissions.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev indicated a new target of keeping emissions 25% lower in 2020 than they were in 1990 - strengthened from the previous figure of 10-15%.
The new target still permits a real-world rise in emissions as they're now about 37% below 1990 levels, having plunged when Communist-era industry collapsed in the early 1990s - but it's stronger than before.
More strikingly, South Korea - one of the most developed of the nations that are not quite developed enough to be asked to take on an actual cut in emissions - pledged to make one anyway.
There had been suggestions (including on this blog) that President Hu Jintao of China might reveal an analogous target during Barack Obama's visit - but nothing materialised, for reasons about which we can only speculate, but (speculating here) are presumably connected to the Obama administration's non-offering of targets on money and mitigation.
Still more heart will be taken from India's just-announced plan for a thousand-fold expansion in solar power over the next 12 years - a plan that will presumably mean building fewer coal-fired power stations.
Meanwhile, lots of the discourse around legally-binding agreements and politically binding deals and so on has gone on without much reference to the fact that some countries might simply not sign anything in Copenhagen that falls below their minimum expectations.
"We should not allow any country to turn a political failure into a media success," the Marshall Islands' UN Ambassador Phillip Muller said mid-week.
Would small-island developing states and the least developed nations of Africa withhold their signatures if they felt that only a fig leaf were being proffered in Copenhagen?
We don't really know the final negotiations positions of any countries and blocs, but it has to be a possibility, I suggest, that might concentrate minds in the west.
Also concentrating minds, perhaps, will be a new analysis of emissions trends released during the week in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
Remember that G8 pledge to hold warming to 2C? According to the Global Carbon Project, current emissions trends are taking the world in the direction of 5-6C: a world of rising sea levels, drought across much of the tropics and drastically declining agricultural yields.
Perhaps someone somewhere will think of having a global treaty to sort all that out. Oh - hang on a minute...
As always, if you think I've missed something important in this weekly round-up, please post a comment.
Update 2309: Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.
No comments:
Post a Comment