Poor Prospects for New Climate Meeting
By JOHN M. BRODER and ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: October 7, 2010
WASHINGTON — With wounds still raw from the chaotic United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen last December, negotiators are making final preparations for next month’s meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in a surly mood and with little hope for progress.
Chinatopix, via Associated Press
Workers near a coal-fired power plant in China, where some nations want deep emissions cuts.
There is no chance of completing a binding global treaty to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases, few if any heads of state are planning to attend, and there are no major new initiatives on the agenda. Copenhagen was crippled by an excess of expectation. Cancún is suffering from the opposite.
Delegates in Tianjin, China, at the last formal meeting before the Cancún conference opens Nov. 29, are hung up over the same issues that caused the collapse of the Copenhagen meeting. Even some of the baby steps in the weak agreement that emerged from last year’s meeting, a slender document known as the Copenhagen Accord, have been reopened, to the dismay of officials who thought they had been settled.
Agreement on critical issues like short-term financial aid for vulnerable countries and monitoring and reporting of emissions by major economies appears even farther away than it was at the end of the Copenhagen meeting. At Copenhagen, wealthy countries pledged to raise $100 billion over the next decade to help the developing world respond to climate change, with $30 billion in “fast start” financing available by 2012. But that money has barely started to flow, and many developing nations are pressing rich countries to raise the ante, an unlikely prospect.
“What is frustrating in these negotiations is to see countries not using that as the basis but relitigating things that we resolved over the course of the Copenhagen negotiations,” said Jonathan Pershing, the deputy United States envoy for climate change, who is attending the Tianjin meeting.
The conflict is following the familiar lines that led to the crackup in Copenhagen. Wealthy countries are insisting on deep and verifiable cuts in emissions from major developing countries like China and India, while the poorer nations are asking the rich countries to do more to reduce their own pollution and come up with more money to help the rest of the world adapt to the changes wrought by a century of unchecked carbon gases from the industrialized world.
Developing-country negotiators continually chide American officials for the failure of the United States to enact any sort of comprehensive climate and energy legislation.
China’s top global warming negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, complained in Tianjin on Wednesday that developed nations were not living up to their own commitments while demanding more from the poorer countries. “The commitments made so far are far from what we expected,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying. “We hope they can make dramatic reductions.”
So, after 16 years of annual climate treaty negotiations, negotiators heading for this meeting, the 16th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “conference of the parties” or COP-16, are hoping not for progress but merely to avoid going backward.
“What we will be working to secure is that we should not start backsliding,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s minister for climate action.
What is important this year, she said, is to “secure some momentum” with agreements on less contentious topics like how to preserve the world’s forests and to renew the commitments made in the voluntary Copenhagen Accord.
The mood could hardly be more different than it was just a year ago when more than 100 heads of state rearranged Christmas schedules to attend the Copenhagen conference, where some had anticipated the adoption of an international climate treaty that would commit richer countries to reduce their emissions and provide poorer countries with financial and technical help to face the impact of climate change. Instead, the meetings spectacularly fell apart under the glare of spotlights and with high-profile friction between rich and poor nations.
No such drama is on the program this year.
Todd Stern, the chief American climate negotiator, acknowledged that some countries were trying to pull back from promises made in Copenhagen. He insisted that the Obama administration stood by its international commitment to reduce emissions by 17 percent by 2020 despite the lack of action in Congress. Still, he added, “What’s important is not to have expectations that are not realistic. We are committed to making the U.N.F.C.C.C. process work. But it is a difficult process.”
After the Copenhagen meeting, Mr. Stern and others raised questions about whether the United Nations was the forum for dealing with such issues. They have quietly explored options involving far fewer countries and tackling the difficult pieces of a climate deal separately rather than as one grand package. But no one is quite ready to pull the plug on the global talks — yet.
Many diplomats who have long been involved in the process talk about Cancún as a meeting needed for “healing” and “reassurance” to countries that had lost faith in the treaty process.
“It’s very important that you get back on the bicycle and get it moving and that it doesn’t fall over again,” said John Ashton, Britain’s special representative for climate change. “We have to make progress on a few fronts without overreaching: we won’t be able to get over the finishing line at Cancún. The task there is to rebuild momentum and confidence.”
Still, he and others maintain that some of the principles in the Copenhagen Accord are significant. “I was disappointed by the utter chaos that surrounded the end of the meeting — you could write a half dozen Ph.D.’s about what happened there,” said Yvo DeBoer, the United Nations official who ran the Copenhagen meeting and now works as a business consultant for the consulting firm KPMG. “But we have $100 million in finance. Major emitters came up with targets. We had 130 heads of states in attendance to show they take this seriously.”
While Obama administration officials are reaffirming the president’s 17 percent emissions target, they are not sure how to get there.
“I would have loved to have legislation done now so I’d have something to show,” Mr. Stern said in an interview. “There is legislation, regulation, research and development, a whole suite of actions we are taking to reduce emissions. We’ll get there. This is the first year of a 10-year effort.”
Mr. Stern said that countries had to understand that the United States was not the only country having trouble finding the political will to act on climate change.
“Add to this reality that here, as in so many areas of public life, it is far easier — far easier — to stop something from happening than to get something done,” he said in a speech this year in Washington, “and you start to appreciate the degree of difficulty presented by climate negotiations.”
John M. Broder reported from Washington, and Elisabeth Rosenthal from New York and Lisbon.
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