The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference ended in failure today. Never mind the predictable rhetoric from several leaders who welcomed the tepid accord signed after two weeks of intense, acrimonious and chaotic negotiations. They include President Obama who called it "an important breakthrough," British Prime Minister Brown who saw it as "a vital first step," and the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon who hailed it as "an important beginning." But even they could not fully hide their disappointment. Such is the confusion that the very status of the accord is in doubt since it was not formally approved as the delegates only agreed to "take note" of the agreement in a desperate bid to save the talks and the preceding two year negotiations from total collapse.
At two-and-half pages, the Copenhagen Accord is unusually thin by the standards of UN accords, which is an eloquent testimony in itself to its vacuity. The original plan was for the Copenhagen conference to produce a comprehensive successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international deal on climate change that would be legally binding for all nations. Instead, the Accord confines itself to "recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius," and to "take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity." The developing countries came to Copenhagen expecting a $100 billion annual funding package to help them with climate change and clean technology. They left with promises of $30 billion annually in 2010-2012, and $100 billion by 2020 "in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation." Don't hold your breath that the funds will materialize or consist of new money.
Hardly had the ink dried on the accord, when critics began to point out its glaring shortfalls: that it is not legally binding and does not specify any global emission targets and timelines including when it might be turned into a legally-binding treaty. Even by the dismal standards of international accords, which more often than not are observed in the breach than compliance, this is pitiful and environmental campaigners have reacted furiously.
While 193 nations were represented at the conference, Copenhagen was dominated by, as is so tragically common in such deliberations, a small cabal of powerful nations led by the United States from which the vast majority of the world's countries were excluded. The latter reacted angrily when some of the secret backroom deals came to light including a leaked UN report that seemed to permit a devastating climate rise of up to 3 degrees Celsius. This is the fundamental problem of global forums like Copenhagen, where decisions affecting the world and humanity are supposed to be made: they are profoundly undemocratic. Not surprisingly, representatives from the disenfranchised nations and the army of NGOs tend to come out of these jamborees often severely disappointed and outraged.
Copenhagen has been no different. Lumumba Di-Aping, chairman of the Group of 77 of 130 developing countries accused the developed countries of "asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries." Andy Atkins of Friends of the Earth declared, "This toothless declaration that the US is spinning as a success is a sham - this agreement won't stop a two degree rise in temperature, and as it stands condemns millions of the world's poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates." Nelson Muffuh of Christian Aid lamented, "We hoped that sanity would prevail but powerful nations didn't come to negotiate. They came to play hardball. Lives will be lost as a result. Already more than 300,000 people a year die as a result of climate change."
The road to Copenhagen was paved with good intentions and urgent imperatives. Before the conference, the major powers including the European Union, United States, China and India announced reductions in carbon emissions and made the appropriate promises of their commitment to serious negotiations. Environmental activists ardently hoped for some tangible success, that the protracted process of healing the environment, of curtailing our disastrous despoliation of nature, would begin in earnest.
But it was not to be. The journey to and from Copenhagen was littered with the enduring and indignant realities of a deeply divided world in which the global good always plays second fiddle to parochial national, class and generational interests. The conference was fraught with yawning divides and bitter recriminations from the beginning to the very end.
On the eve of the conference, there was the manufactured uproar about the very science of human-driven climate change. It erupted when the denialists, who prefer to think of themselves as "climate realitsts", got hold of hacked email files from a leading British climate research institute containing 13 years of correspondence among some of the world's leading climate scientists. Although the controversy generated more heat than light, and did not dent growing scientific evidence and consensus about the climate perils facing the world from greenhouse gases, it reflected and reinforced persistent public doubts about global warming as an imminent threat as pollsters have found in the United States and Britain. It provided comic relief to the deadly serious drama concerning our increasingly fragile planet's future. But this perennial sparring between the scientists and skeptics of climate change was essentially a sideshow.
Also evident were the divisions among the developed countries themselves, in Europe and between Europe and the United States, as well within countries as economic nationalism rises on the wreckage of the Great Recession. European countries are on different tracks to meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and the development of renewable energy. Overall, the European Union is far ahead of the United States in its commitments to reducing carbon emissions, which remains the leading global environmental laggard notwithstanding the election of President Obama and the conversion of elite American opinion to environmentalism. Interestingly, while some U.S. leaders and commentators have welcomed the failure of the Copenhagen conference for its unrealistic and costly expectations, Senator John Kerry who was in Copenhagen to assure the world of American resolve to pass meaningful environmental legislation believes "History will record Copenhagen as the moment when America went from laggard to leader."
Even among the Africans there were divisions. Some were envious of South Africa's inclusion among the major developing countries at the center of the negotiations. Many felt betrayed by Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi who seemed too eager to sacrifice the continent and make concessions. The Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance roundly condemned him and called for his ouster as Coordinator of African Heads of State and Governments on Climate Change if he did not rescind the unholy appeal he had made with President Sakorzy of France watering down the African position.
The real faultlines that preceded and overwhelmed Copenhagen revolved, as is the case in much of what happens in the global political economy, round the divergent interests of the rich and the poor countries. The disagreements were many centering on degrees of responsibility and restitution for climate change. The poor nations wanted the rich nations who are historically responsible for the grievous damage done to the global commons to undertake deep cuts in their carbon emissions and pay for cleaning up the environment as well as help finance environmentally clean technologies among the developing countries.
The economic and ethical case for the developing countries is compelling. They bear little of the responsibility for climate change induced by carbon-intensive industrialization of the last two centuries, yet they are already bearing and will continue to bear its heaviest costs in lost livelihoods and lives. The large developing countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa resent the pressure from the increasingly post-industrial western nations for parity in economic decarbonization at the very moment when their countries are enjoying rapid development.
The smaller and poorer nations find themselves uncomfortably squeezed between these dueling elephants from the global North and the global South. The islands and coastal ones among them--about three dozen--literally fear disappearing into the sea if temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade. For that not to happen global emissions need to be cut by a whopping 85 percent by midcentury.
To be sure, there are other divides within both the North and the South and that cut across them. For example, those between the oil producing countries and those investing heavily in clean technologies. It is not surprising that Saudi Arabia has been lukewarm to climate science and a climate agreement. Together with a few other oil producing countries, it unsuccessfully pressed for compensation to offset any decline in oil export revenues due to reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
The role of China in the Copenhagen conference shows the North-South divide is porous and shifting. Some have blamed China's refusal for fixed and verifiable emission targets at Copenhagen for the failure of the conference. China's position that countries of the global North adhere to the principles of the Kyoto Protocol and make the deepest cuts was supported by Africa and much of the global South. But these countries also expected China to take a much bolder leadership role in cutting its own emissions now that it is the world's largest polluter, a dubious distinction it recently inherited from the United States. This is an indication that China can no longer shirk its global environmental responsibilities by hiding behind the convenient ruse that it is still a developing country.
The G77 squarely blamed President Obama "for locking the poor into permanent poverty by refusing to reduce US emissions further." Thus, it was Obama's and the United States' global stature not China's that was badly bruised at Copenhagen. The President's speech at the conference was regarded as lackluster and the U.S. 17% emissions reduction target over 2005 levels by 2020 was widely derided. Copenhagen might come to be seen as the place where the world's brief infatuation with Obama's America was finally buried. In the words of the chief negotiator for the G77, "Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush."
The collapse of Copenhagen climate talks reflects the profound shifts that are taking place in the global system. While the small and poor developing countries including many in Africa will be the main losers if no comprehensive climate deal is resurrected from the ashes of Copenhagen in the forthcoming climate conferences beginning with Mexico which takes over the presidency of the UN climate talks next year, in the immediate term Copenhagen points to the inability of the developed countries to ram their historic and hegemonic will on the developing countries. Global power is no longer an assured monopoly of the rich and few, of the west over the rest.
It is instructive that the accord was hammered, in a day of high drama, by the leaders of the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Actually, the deal was brokered among the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) with the U.S. joining at the last minute although the American press has given much of the credit to President Obama's belated participation (some reports say he broke into the BASIC meeting). The negotiations of Copenhagen underscored the contestation between the G2, the United States and China, whose relationship, to quote one commentator, "remains stormy and complex, constructive and adversarial." This is a harbinger of the post-Euroamerican world.
Also, from the failures of Copenhagen environmental movements and especially the youth might be reinvigorated to shake their national governments from the dangerous complacency of timidity and the wider public from the illusions that human ingenuity will prevail and solve the problems of climate change without drastic changes to our abusive exploitation of nature and the environment. Should this happen, then indeed all is not lost. At any rate, we cannot afford to abandon hope, to turn disappointment into despair, for that is to surrender our agency as human beings wedded in webs of mutuality with past generations who were custodians of the earth before us and future generations for whom we are caretakers of the earth. But we must learn from the problems and mistakes of Copenhagen. As we rightly condemn the leaders who failed us at Copenhagen, we must continue to prod them to do right.
A couple of nights ago, while driving to dinner a colleague of mine, a theologian, noted the 18th century was for the liberation of man, the 19th for the liberation of enslaved people, the 20th for the liberation of women, and the 21st will be for the liberation of nature. And a professor of neuroscience goes so far as to claim that "Copenhagen may mark a turning point in human nature, when the global village acquired a global mind" in terms of environmental consciousness. I hope my colleague and the neuroscientist are both right for the sake of our beloved but increasingly endangered little planet and the survival of our own species.
First written December 19, 2009
