go back to Copenhagen, a little recap of what happended there

I am not trying to be nostalgia here by looking back what is now history. I went to check the Down to Earth issue on Copenhagen, reminded by a friend from Center for Science and Environment in India, where I interned last summer. I even met a co-worker then at the summit, which I'd never expected. I am fond of the sarcastic and still sharp and sober nature of their articles, even thought CSE to me is always romantic and idealistic (they probably won't put it that way).

Most people consider Copenhagen a failure. I think so too. But I also believe failure still means one step toward *success* (in relative terms always, I am a notorious Sophist in Socrates' word I just realize). I came up with a metaphor that descries the individual reflection on COP 15. I am a dandelion seed carrying with me however much enthusiasm, hope and sarcasm (does not appear to you, doesn't it? Well I keep it to myself). The seed was germinated, elevated and bloomed fully right at the beginning of the conference, when negotiations seemed to going and side events panel speakers all exciting about what they have done in the past in fighting climate change. And then it suddenly, but not without weather forecast, got smashed and blown away by the seaside wind in Copenhagen. The bits and pieces went all about. One piece of the new me residing in one of the fuzzy fragments, with my ever-lasting ever-optimistic ever-idealistic seed of hope, landed in a new place, ready to come out again in the spring. Yet it is the practical matters, after all, that keep the romantic me going. Practical matters at present refer to what I have observed and learned from folks all over the world working in the practical field of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Okay, my metaphor stops here for now. Here is what the Down to Earth colleagues portrait what happened during the last two days of the now history COP 15.

At Copenhagen, unfortunately, industrialized countries sabotaged all possibilities of progress. They had something else in mind. When the COP-15 (Conference of Parties) started, negotiators were barely closer to a deal than they had been in Bali.

If anything there had been regression during the last one year of negotiations.

But failure was not an option. One hundred and ten heads of state were flying to Copenhagen to sign a declaration; they could not all return with their pens unused. More than that, the Nobel prize-winning US president had to emerge as a dealmaker. So in the final 48 hours, negotiators—who had laboured for years for a comprehensive deal—were brushed aside; heads of state, ministers and their top advisers took over.

Leaders started making deals in secret, in the middle of the night, in backrooms, on the fly. Carrots were offered; sticks were wielded. In the end, industrialized countries, with the last-minute complicity of India and China, penned an alarmingly weak deal—the so-called Copenhagen Accord—that appears designed to undermine the negotiations to date. Certain basic rules seem to have been changed forever. Under the captaincy of the US, historical responsibility of the developed world in creating the climate crisis has been erased. The differentiation between rich and poor countries is gone. The rich world does not want to reduce emissions, but is trying hard to stunt the development of the poor world.

The Copenhagen Accord was not officially endorsed. A few developing countries vocally opposed the document and the drafting process. But the accord—rather than any of the documents drafted through two years of multilateral negotiations—emerged as Copenhagen’s only substantive outcome. It could well become the new starting point for future negotiations. This will be disastrous for the developing world.

Requiem For A Crowded Planet—Guardian.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/21/requiem-for-a-crowded-planet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

recommended to me from a friend at Center for Science and Environment, New Delhi. It is a rather clear-headed comment on the outcome, I think. How many more rounds of talks can we wait?

a Mexico women in the far left, heading away from the Bella Center where the sun set, heading home for Mexico?

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 21st December 2009

The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) assured the delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancun, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.

When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out “in Mexico one year from now.”(1) Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?

De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. “The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO. … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don’t, then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic.”(2)

We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.

Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We currently enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.

A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places than can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was four degrees centigrade. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.

Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production “is very likely to decrease above about 3C”(3). The panel uses the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability of above 90%(4). Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of three or more degrees by the end of the century.

Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century - probably less than a metre - is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was around 1.3 degrees higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun. A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today’s(5). Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won’t have a country any more.

As people are displaced from their homes by drought and sea level rise, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts: sudden droughts and storm surges.

This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to two degrees but to 1.5. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”(6).

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama. The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation; either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

The British and American governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It’s true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome he wanted.

Why would Obama do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people - the kind who read the Guardian every day - have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions onto the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero.

Is this music not to your taste sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Yvo de Boer, 19th December 2009. http://unfccc.int/2860.php

2. From transcript of video interview for the Guardian’s “Monbiot Meets” series. You can watch the edited discussion here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/08/monbiot-yvo-de-boer-climate

3. IPCC, 2007. Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate change. Table 19.1. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf

4. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/supporting-material/uncertainty-guidance-note.pdf

5. Robert E. Kopp et al, 17th December 2009. Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage. Nature Vol 462, pp863-868. doi:10.1038/nature08686

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/20/copenhagen-obama-brown-climate

China-US youth joint press release

Dec. 21:

I could not find the actual word by word document of what we said, but UNFCCC has the recording here:

http://www7.cop15.meta-fusion.com/kongresse/cop15/templ/create_sse.php?id_kongressmain=1&theme=unfccc&id_kongresssession=2524

In fact, for anyone interested in all the press release, side events and open negotiation meetings, you can find it on UNFCCC's website. They are of good quality, presentation slides provided as well. I'd highly recommend skipping through the side events as I found them more pragmatic, promising and informative than the actual negotiations. These side events focus on the groundwork that has been done by various actors under the Kyoto Protocol in addressing climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Left: Holly Jones, we had a great conversation together as we were seated in the same small group at the US-Chinese youth dinner workshop. We were also interviewed together by a freelance journalist writing a story for Wall Street Journal about college students participating in COP 15.

Right: You Zhang, a high school student in Beijing, aged 16, the youngest in our team, but not necessarily the smallest~

Left: our team manager, Holly Chang, a San Francisco born Chinese American, CEO of Goldbridges, a nonprofit organizations dedicated in bridging outside philanthropist/nonprofit organizations with local Chinese grassroots nonprofits.

Right: Ben Wessel, a leader of the SustainUS American youth delegation.

Two our of team photographers shooting each other. Me in blue. A journalist from China Daily asking question. I forgot the content, you can find it toward the end of the press release.

We were supposed to release a joint statement declaring our shared stance to our leaders in pushing for a FAB agreement at Copenhagen. Yet we never delivered, just like our expectation to COP. We could have released way earlier, but there was some disagreement with the US counterparts at the time. And the towards the end of negotiation, we found ourselves in dilemma as whether we should do it at all--when Hillary announced 100 bn USD promise, on condition that China agree to MRV (ie. providing measurable, reportable and verifiable emission reduction data and open to international examination). Hillary totally turned the table against China at the last moment, leaving the choice for China to either loose its face and save the deal or save its face loose the deal (this is a rather obvious question for many of us but for many present leaders in China, face is more important than anything else). We were afraid any statement we have could be used against the Chinese government (eg. even the Chinese youth is pressuring its own government, which put the whole team in some kind of jeopardy, or were bribed by the US government, etc.). We were aware that we did not have this sort of brand opportunity to publicize and manifest our hope for a shared understanding and future, minimizing the cultural and political barriers. We made decision to step out of the muddy water and seek some other chance to deliver the statement.

I have the draft statement but I am sure if I should post it here. Anyone interested could ask me for it and any inputs will be appreciated.

I'd highly recommend this blog if you are interested in more COP 15 and green economy issues in general related to China http://greenleapforward.com/