Climate Talks Heat Up in Advance of Obama's Arrival
By Kent Garber
The Copenhagen climate talks, which began last week and conclude Friday, are probably as much about ego management as about climate change. More than 190 countries are attending; each nation has its own ambitions and sense of importance and identity on the global stage, and no one wants to go home a loser.
“There is a lot of energy, anxiety, concern, paranoia–pick your word–going around the hall,” says Alden Meyer, policy director for the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, speaking from Copenhagen. “It’s actually very intense.”
This is the tempest President Obama and other world leaders will enter when they arrive in Copenhagen this week. Their goal is to agree on a new treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades and keep climate change in check. But that will require some compromises. For the past two years, negotiators from many countries have been working diligently to make Copenhagen a success. But for all their efforts, a huge amount of work remains to be done, and vast divides between countries must be spanned, all with less than a week to go.
In his Nobel Prize speech last Thursday in Oslo, Obama seemed to acknowledge as much. “The world must come together to confront climate change,” he said. “There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, famine, and mass displacement that will fuel more conflict for decades.”
But doing something, at this point, is more than just a matter of willpower or good intentions.
As a new negotiating text released last week shows, it’s also a matter of politics, money, and security. Industrialized and developing countries will have to agree on how much they’re willing to cut emissions, and how quickly, and rich nations will have to decide how much they’re willing to give poor countries to protect the latter from the impacts of climate change.
This sizing up of attitudes is vigorously underway in the halls of Copenhagen’s Bella Center, where the talks are taking place. Like most heads of state, President Obama is not expected in Copenhagen until December 18, for the final day. But negotiators are already on the ground, poring over drafts of possible agreements, at the very least trying to narrow down the options that world leaders will have to choose from once they arrive.
Tempers are running high. Someone leaked a copy of an unofficial draft climate proposal to the British newspaper the Guardian that seemed to show the United States, Britain, and several others conspiring to boost their bargaining positions and force developing countries to do more to combat climate change. The draft was quickly slammed by developing countries, although attendees say that some of the countries that were complaining the loudest already knew what was in it. As Ivan Koutsarov, an analyst for IHS Global Insight who is following the talks, says, developing countries “picked it up as a PR tool” to try to make some of the big industrialized countries look uncooperative.
“The past two to three days have been a roller coaster,” says Meyer, “and we expect more of that” as pressure builds in the next few days.
The American presence will continue to grow with as more Obama cabinet officials and members of Congress arrive and that means the debates over some of the top issues will grow, too. Todd Stern, the top U.S. negotiator and a special envoy for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arrived last week and quickly found himself in a tit-for-tat with China’s top climate official, Su Wei. According to reports, Wei challenged the United States and other developed nations to be more aggressive in reducing their emissions. Stern responded by saying that China must also do more.
The two biggest issues that will shape the debate and the outcome of the talks, says Nick Berning of the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth, are emissions targets and money. There’s a general agreement that rich Western countries like the United States should make the deepest emissions cuts and provide the most money to poor nations already struggling from climate change, because they’re responsible for most of the emissions in the atmosphere. “It’s really not fair to ask poor countries to bear the burden for solving a problem they didn’t create,” Berning says from Copenhagen. But there’s also a belief that developing countries, even as they continue to grow and try to bring people out of poverty, should be doing their part. That’s where Stern was coming from with his comments to Wei. Meanwhile, poor countries are asking rich nations to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to help them adapt to climate change. Western countries say they plan to assist them. What’s unclear, and what Obama and other leaders will have to navigate, is whether there’s enough room for compromise that can lead to lasting agreement.
