Next few weeks vital for Copenhagen accord, says US climate change envoy
Suzanne Goldenberg
The next few weeks will be critical in deciding whether the Copenhagen accord succeeds in halting global warming, America’s top climate change envoy said today.
“We have an accord that is lumbering down the runway, and we need it to get enough speed so it can take off,” Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, told an investor meeting at the United Nations in his first public remarks after the Copenhagen summit. “We need to get this up and running.”
He said the next year would be critical in fleshing out the details of an accord that – because of the chaos and acrimony surrounding the talks – was only 12 paragraphs long. The first test arrives on 31 January when industrialised countries and the major developing nations make their formal commitments to act on carbon emissions.
Stern said the Obama administration would be working with other countries to try and agree on the institutional structures that will turn the goals of the accord into reality. These include the establishment of a $100bn a year climate fund, action to protect the world’s forests, and monitoring of countries’ action plans.
He said the accord – though weak – remained the best path to an international treaty that would have the full weight of international law. But, like his deputy Jonathan Pershing, Stern indicated the US would not yield full ownership of the negotiation process to the United Nations.
“Our goal is very simply to design a regime that is going to have the capability to actually help us solve the problem,” he said. “One of the frustrations in dealing on the international level is that a lot of focus can be paid to debating whether a particular idea is consistent or not consistent with such-and-such an article of a previous agreement. A lot of attention can be paid to proposals or positions that are not very well tethered to reality. We all need to be focused on setting up a structure, and setting up a regime that can solve this problem.”
The frustration of the US and other developed nations with the UN process became clear well ahead of Copenhagen. In the weeks ahead of the summit, the Danes, together with a group of about 30 countries began trying to negotiate a more limited agreement – outside the scope of the UN.
That effort – exposed in the first days of the summit by the Danish text leaked to the Guardian – ultimately backfired, Stern admitted. “That led to a huge uproar, and accusations against the Danish presidency that they had been conducting a secret effort without consulting others,” he said. “This had the intent and certainly the effect of undermining the credibility of Denmark.”
However, Stern also indicated that the Obama administration had come to power a year ago with doubts about yielding the primary control of climate change negotiations to the UN. “We came in with quite a strong view that we needed to set up a stronger group of countries as well as operating in the larger multilateral arena,” he said. “For that reason we took the set of countries that President Bush had initiated, rechristened it and gave it a different mission.”
In Stern’s view, the summit had already been compromised by a lack of real progress of negotiations conducted within the formal UN structure. “The reality is that the formal negotiating process simply had not made significant progress on the key issues”, including setting emissions targets, mobilising a climate fund, technology transfer, and transparency, he said.
He echoed Pershing, , who yesterday suggested the summit had been perilously close to failure in its final hours. “We came within a hair’s breadth of collapse,” Stern said.
