IN WHICH WE FORGE A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE AMID A GATHERING STORM
ONCE WE’RE OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO, THE WOMAN BESIDE me gets out of her seat, climbs over my legs, grabs a bag out of the overhead luggage compartment and heads off to the toilet. About fifteen minutes later she is back. She has shed her sweater and jeans, and is now wearing a pink tank top and black yoga pants. As she climbs back over me, the word BABE, printed in glittering silver across her rump, flashes before my eyes. She flops into her window seat and smooths dyed-black hair out of her eyes. Up to this point I have paid scant attention to her. But the BABE sparks my interest. I steal a glance and catch the telltale signs of her war against aging. The stretched skin, the excessive moisturizing, the sharpened jaw-line. No doubt there are hidden scars, but I can’t see them; that would take closer inspection. She’s got to be in her mid-forties, but she’s traveling back to her twenties. And why not? Why leave well enough alone when you have at your fingertips the power of a time machine?
We begin our descent. There’s the usual routine of garbage collection, seats in the upright position, belts fastened, wheels down, and then the slight shiver of a smooth landing. Earlier in the day we stepped out of a world of cold and into this tube. Four hours later we spill out into a world of warmth. The sunseekers quickly drain away into small white shuttle buses that chauffeur them to the various resort hotels scattered in palm clusters all along the coast. I’m booked into the Ocean Coral and Turquesa resort, south of Cancún on the Mayan Riviera, near the tiny fishing village of Puerto Morelos. Because I’m not a packaged tourist, I have to grab a cab.
Twenty minutes later, I’m in the Ocean Coral and Turquesa’s lobby of soft beige Yucatán marble where a light sea breeze welcomes me. The eternal sound of ocean waves washes through the entrance. Birds call. It all seems like paradise until you find out it’s a soundtrack piped through speakers hidden in fake rocks.
The reception clerk, dressed in a tidy tan uniform, takes my passport and credit card details and wraps a gold strap around my right wrist. For the next ten days this band is my ticket to unlimited meals, drinks and cocktails in the resort’s eleven restaurants and bars, plus access to four swimming pools, a spa, and of course crystal white sand beaches and a turquoise sea. All for less than $800. Forty years ago, Cancún and the Mayan Riviera was a sandbar and mango swamp. Take away the cheap jet fuel that brings the tourists and this place would fold like a tent. The Mayans would retreat back to their villages in the Yucatán interior. The mangos would reclaim their territory. And the alluring photographs of beautiful women under swaying palm trees would disappear from the advertising landscape of the industrialized world.
It is here in this sun-splashed holiday haven that the world will try for the sixteenth time to come up with an international treaty ambitious enough to meet the increasingly terrifying challenges of climate change, such as stopping the sea from flooding my Mayan resort. The chosen meeting place is just up the road from my hotel. It’s a five-star, peach-colored resort called the Moon Palace. Until now it’s been known as a honeymoon haven.
The journey to Cancún began six months earlier in Bonn, Germany, home to the UNFCCC and a half-dozen other UN environmental agencies. It was here that delegates met for the first time since Copenhagen to begin repairing the wreckage and getting the talks back on track. At least that was the stated desire. Given the jagged pattern of advance and retreat as the game plays out, it’s impossible to know the true intentions of each one of the 192 countries involved in the negotiations.
In Bonn, the charged atmosphere of Copenhagen had melted away, leaving behind exhaustion and confusion. Delegates arrived still wrapped in the fog of forgotten purpose. “The confusion is, where is this going in the end?” a senior European Union delegate told me. “Is this leading to a treaty, and what does it look like? What about the Kyoto Protocol? What is happening in the United States? I think what you see is that there is a big realization that very little has happened in terms of shifting positions of countries since Copenhagen. Positions haven’t changed. It is funny, because you still hear on the floor people saying, ‘Oh yeah, a legally binding agreement.’ Then at the same time you also hear people saying in bilateral discussions, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ ”
A year earlier the narrative had been the epic march to Copenhagen, where world leaders would finally construct the deal that would rally the world around a single global treaty powerful enough to steer us clear of the risks posed by man-made climate change. For whatever reason—chronic distrust, arrogance, selfishness—that story became a tragicomedy. The political failure of Copenhagen put the entire multilateral process on trial. For this reason the Cancún meeting was pivotal. Without substantial progress, the nascent carbon markets would collapse. The cure for a global ailment would then fall to individual countries, cities and regions, whose success would be uneven at best. Meanwhile, with each new day, the climate picture worsened on all fronts. Time was running out.
Signals coming from the United States House and Senate were increasingly negative, confirming the Copenhagen warnings of Senator James Mountain (Jim) Inhofe that America would never sign a climate treaty. Too many American lawmakers appeared almost giddy with delight at the failure of Copenhagen.
For many developing and poor countries, the problem is American intransigence. “It’s that sort of debate in which the U.S. is saying, ‘We will comply the way we decide to comply. We will do whatever we decide to do whichever way we decide to do it,’ ” a vice-chairman of the Kyoto Protocol working group said.
I asked him in Bonn what would happen if America was taken out of the equation—if America was simply expelled from the talks.
“Then the whole thing would be much easier, of course. Then you wouldn’t even need two tracks, given that the Americans are not part of Kyoto.”
As talks continued in Bonn and then moved to Tianjin, China, and finally to Cancún, the topic of the United States and what the talks would be like without the U.S.A. at the table was openly discussed in the corridors. The belief was that the Americans, knowing they could never get a climate change treaty through the Senate, were too constricted by domestic politics to negotiate anything more than the lowest common denominator; in a consensus process, they were leading everyone in a race to the bottom. The hallway strategy was that if the Americans were isolated, they would come back to the table with more agreeable proposals.
The United States, however, had gone to ground. Gone was the exceptional bravado of 2009, when Todd Stern and Hillary Clinton had wagged their fingers at everyone and blamed China for Copenhagen’s failure—an attack strategy that proved remarkably successful. That game plan, however, would work only once. Faith in the United States’ ability to back up its words with domestic legislation had been lost. So the Americans turned silent and invisible. In the run-up to Cancún, Stern was nowhere to be seen and his second, Jonathan Pershing, was mute. It was hard if not impossible to take aim at them when nobody could find them. Behind the scenes, the United States worked closely with the Mexicans to make Cancún the conference of the unambitious.
But the United States was not the only hurdle. Its fellow members of the so-called “Umbrella Group”—Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation and Ukraine—were equally stubborn in their lack of commitment to significant GHG reductions. In all cases their stated priority was maintaining strong economic growth. Their foot-dragging was no doubt anchored in the belief that they are among the countries where climate change will have the least-negative effects, although that is strictly relative.
The peer-reviewed Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010,1 released just prior to Cancún, reinforced this belief. The monitor rates a country’s vulnerability to the four main impacts of climate change: health, weather, habitation and the economy. The vulnerability rating ranges from low, which is graphically represented by a small green dot, to acute, a large blood-red dot. Moderate to severe vulnerabilities are shaded in various hues of yellow.
Pages devoted to African countries are blood-red. The same is true of most of Asia. Pages devoted to Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America run green and light yellow, indicating moderate to low negative impacts. Australia may suffer increased drought—already a problem—and a degree of habitat loss, but the dots never turn red and negative impacts won’t upset its economy until after 2030. There is a similar prognosis for Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Japan and Ukraine. Of the Umbrella Group, only the United States is headed into blood-red territory. The study projects it will suffer acute habitat loss after 2030. Low-lying states such as Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas will be flooded, as will their coastal communities. Desertification will spread in the West.
In other words, at least until 2030, these umbrella countries may be inconvenienced by climate change to various degrees, but they believe their wealth will allow them to adapt to the changes in order to reduce their impact.2 In contrast, almost all of Africa, most of Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, as well as all small island states will suffer dramatic consequences. These countries have neither the financial muscle nor the technology to deal with the impacts of climate change, and by 2030 large areas will begin to become unlivable. About thirty to forty states of the United Nations will disappear. This picture, however, does not move the Umbrella Group. Faced with a danger that appears remote, it is easy to be complacent.
Canada, in particular, speaks of climate change as if it’s a good thing—bringing it longer growing seasons and opening its northern regions to agriculture and resource exploitation. Going into Cancún, Canada won the temperature rise jackpot. The World Meteorological Organization said that over the past few years the country had experienced the highest jump in temperatures—on average three degrees Celsius—in the world. Mean temperature rises of three degrees Celsius or more above normal were found throughout the eastern Canadian Arctic and subarctic.3 “Temperatures averaged over Canada have been the highest on record,” the WMO stated.
Canada did not bother to send an official climate ambassador to Bonn after its chief negotiator, Michael Martin, was promoted to deputy secretary to the cabinet. Not until early autumn did Canada appoint his replacement. The country also refused to donate money to the Copenhagen Accord fast-track financing to help poor and vulnerable nations adapt to climate change. It said it would only loan money to the fund.
Meanwhile, Canada’s diplomatic efforts on climate change were geared primarily to lobbying foreign governments not to impose environmental barriers that would hurt Canada’s tar sands exports. These included joining an attempt—unsuccessful—to kill California’s low-carbon fuel standard and to repeal U.S. restrictions on the use of dirty fuels by the U.S. military and other government agencies. Canada also campaigned—again unsuccessfully—against Europe’s Fuel Quality Directive, which is designed to reduce emissions by promoting the burning of cleaner fuels and thereby help the continent reach its 20 percent reduction goal by 2020.4
Then, one month before the Cancún negotiations, Prime Minister Stephen Harper allowed an unelected Senate to kill a private member’s climate change bill that had been approved by Canada’s House of Commons on its third reading. The bill would have required Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and set a 2050 target of 80 percent. In other words, it required that Canada shape its legislation according to the science of climate change. The voice of the people had spoken. The voice of the appointed Conservative senators silenced it.
Canada, like Australia, had become delusional. Its path to this psychiatric disorder was particularly tragic because its vision had once been lucid.
In April 1990, Canada’s Parliament held a series of hearings into climate change during which prominent scientists and senior civil servants testified about the dangers of inaction. Dr. Digby McLaren, a geologist and former director of the Geological Survey of Canada as well as president of the Royal Society of Canada and co-author of Planet Under Stress: The Challenge of Global Change, argued that mankind had become so powerful a biological force that it was destabilizing the planet. He told politicians that human activity was compromising the earth’s life-support system. “Such behavior surely implies an incapacity to recognize that we live inside a sealed room with limited air and limited resources.” Many other scientists, economists and technical experts discussed related issues, such as sustainable development. They testified, for instance, that it would be easy to reduce Canada’s emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2005 and still maintain a robust economy, as one of the government’s own studies had already demonstrated. The debate ultimately questioned the too-often unquestioned belief that the absence of economic growth means collapse. The fact that this discussion occurred at all and in a parliamentary forum was truly historical. It demonstrated a political will to address the pressing issue of global pollution and climate change. Out of these discussions, Canada and its provinces began not only to develop new environmental policies but also to contemplate new ways of managing its economy.
In the background, however, was the emergence of the tar sands development into a dominant economic force and the beginning of an equally powerful and fiercely uncompromising political constituency designed to protect its growth. Within ten years this constituency ruled Alberta politics. It soon took control of the federal Progressive Conservative Party, changing its name to simply the Conservative Party. Within sixteen years it had seized power in Ottawa and controlled Canadian politics. It had all the hallmarks of far-right conservatism. But its Conservative Party affiliation was a mere convenience. In the end, it was simply the politics of the tar sands. By Cancún, any hope of a new, cleaner world had long since vanished from the Canadian political landscape. Canada had entered an age of denial.
U.S. ambassador David Jacobson spotted it in a meeting he had on November 5, 2009, with Canada’s then environment minister, Jim Prentice. In a subsequent cable to Washington, Jacobson appeared to make fun of Prentice, intimating that he was delusional. He noted that Prentice expressed surprise at the international opposition to the tar sands, admitting that his government “failed to grasp the magnitude of the situation.” Prentice then talked about his “love for the outdoors” and how he considered himself “conservationist minded.”5
As Cancún approached, the tar sands’ political constituency was international. The sands had become an integral part of U.S. energy policy in the short and long term. British, French, Italian, Chinese and Norwegian oil companies had invested or were investing billions of dollars in the sands. Canada had like-minded allies.
The same national and international political base had emerged to support Australian coal. Despite increasing homeland evidence of catastrophic climate change, Australian politics remained in a state of denial. Four months before Cancún, a Royal Commission in the state of Victoria issued a report on the bushfires that on February 7, 2009, had caused “one of Australia’s worst natural disasters.”6 For the first time on record, temperatures in Melbourne had been above 43 degrees Celsius for three consecutive days, peaking at 46.4 degrees. More than three hundred grass and forest fires broke out across the state. Fanned by a fierce windstorm, they destroyed whole communities and killed 173 people, many of whom died trying to save their homes. The commission estimated the final damage at about AU$4 billion. The report warned that Australians should expect more such events. “It would be a mistake to treat Black Saturday [when four hundred bushfires were recorded] as a ‘one-off’ event. With populations at the rural-urban interface growing and the impact of climate change, the risks associated with bushfire are likely to increase.”7
Once again, Australia’s government took no action. Its emissions had increased 31.4 percent over 1990 levels by 2008—well above its Kyoto commitment of an 8 percent increase.8 Its Copenhagen Accord 2020 target, which is not binding, was a meager 5 percent reduction on 2000 levels, with a promise to increase its reductions to as much as 25 percent if other nations made equivalent commitments. “The world is acting on climate change, with over thirty countries including the major nations of the European Union and Japan operating or implementing emissions trading schemes like Australia’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme,” Senator Penny Wong said when the country announced its target in January 2010. Her words were pure fantasy. The proposed reduction scheme has never been implemented. (Neither has Japan’s.) In other words, Australia had no plan to reduce its emissions. Happy that its role as spokesperson for the Umbrella Group lent it a major voice in international climate talks, Australia remained obsessed with expanding coal exports to China. Australian coal would continue to help drive the engines of China’s export economy, which is primarily responsible for the accelerating growth in global greenhouse gases.
Australia soon paid the price for its conceit. After the Cancún conference, record-breaking torrential rains struck northeastern Australia, flooding an area the size of Germany and France combined, including the regions’ coal mines, whose freight lines were cut off. Queensland state treasurer Andrew Fraser called the economic losses a “disaster of biblical proportions.” The government estimated the damages at 0.5 percent of the nation’s GDP. However, a ten-year drought with record-high temperatures and bushfires, followed by catastrophic floods, taught Australian politicians nothing about the risks of climate change.
Elsewhere in the world, resource-based countries were equally blithe. Middle East oil states, despite flash floods, eroding coastlines, scorching temperatures, blinding sandstorms and increasing water scarcity, held firm on their opposition to a climate change agreement.
As Cancún approached, the great march of countries pretending to seek a global solution to climate change continued. Only Europe seemed to have held on to its determination to forge a transition to a clean economy and lead the world in emission reductions. It was the only large emitter to translate its 20 percent Copenhagen commitment into law, and it claimed it had the numbers to show that a country could meet its targets and still enjoy economic growth.
The recession of 2008 had reduced demand for energy in Europe, and had led to an 11.8 percent drop in 2009 emissions, making the EU’s 20 percent target by 2020 less onerous.9 Still, by the EU’s own admission, that target was not high enough to keep the global mean temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.10 Europe was determined to reach 30 percent by 2020, though its business community opposed this higher target unless the Americans agreed to similar cuts, a faint hope if ever there was one. The European Union’s reports showed that to keep temperature rises below two degrees, the developed countries would have to reduce emissions up to 90 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Developing countries—primarily India and China—would have to commit to at least a 15 percent reduction from business as usual. So a European target of at least 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 was an absolute necessity if Europe was to lead the way.
Europe had assessed the cost and discovered it was surprisingly low. The total cost of a 30 percent reduction was 0.54 percent of GDP.11 This amounted to about 70 billion euros per annum by 2020, a small fraction of the estimated US$3.1 trillion (or 5.5 percent of global GDP)12 twenty countries spent rescuing themselves from the 2008 economic collapse. Increasing the target to 30 percent would amount to an annual cost equal to about 0.2 percent of the EU GDP by 2020. The EU estimates that the conversion to clean energy would save 40 billion euros by 2020 in reduced oil and gas imports. Health benefits and reduced costs in air quality pollution equipment would amount to savings of another 6.5 to 11.5 billion euros. According to the International Energy Agency, each year of delay in investment in clean energy will increase the global cost of emission reductions by about US$500 billion.13 What’s more, as climate change harms forests (primarily through storms and insect infestations), the likelihood that they will be able to bear a heavier burden as carbon sinks seems less plausible.
The EU’s main concern about adopting a 30 percent target by 2020 is what it calls “carbon leakage,” where companies take advantage of low-cost production in countries that have weak clean-energy laws to undercut European products. To counter this, the EU is considering tariffs or other instruments to increase the cost of imports and level the playing field. The EU believes this will force other countries to adopt low-carbon policies equivalent to the EU’s. It’s a card the EU intended to play at Cancún.
Entering into the Cancún negotiations, the recession in Europe still posed economic challenges to its low-carbon programs because of reduced corporate profits and diversions of money to bail out member states. The 85 billion euros the EU had just paid to Ireland was a case in point. Yet European countries generally refused to be diverted from their joint and national goals of clean economies, and believed that the transition to green technologies would be the main driver of global economic growth. It was determined to be the leader.
Great Britain’s Climate Change Act, for example, sets a reduction target of 34 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. It plans an 80 percent reduction by 2050 and has created a new Department of Energy and Climate Change to manage the transition to a clean economy. Most of the effort will be in moving away from coal-fired power plants and erecting offshore windmills. “It’s something the science is telling us to do and it’s also frankly what our economic interests are telling us to do, because we want to develop these industries very rapidly,” Chris Huhne, the U.K.’s secretary of energy and climate change, told me in Cancún.
Offsets, however, play a big part in Europe’s emission reduction plans. This form of carbon bartering allows industrialized countries to finance cheaper emission reduction projects in developing countries under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The industrialized countries can then offset the alleged saving in GHGs against their emission targets at home. Most of this money has gone to projects in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, where emissions nevertheless continue to rise. Europe, however, can claim that it is cutting its emissions. Emission trading schemes are estimated to be responsible for up to half of Europe’s claimed carbon reductions.
On a multitude of fronts, loopholes and inefficiency have corrupted the system. According to a study by Germany’s Oko Institute, since 2005 Germany’s nuclear power companies have made 39 billion euros in windfall profits by trading carbon credits that have been allocated to them free of charge.14
Also of questionable efficiency are the several billion euros that have been spent on CDM projects allowing developed countries to invest in climate-friendly projects in developing countries and claim the emission reductions as their own. More than a billion dollars was invested in CDM projects to reduce the greenhouse gas HFC 23. An EU study shows that it would have cost only about $100 million in direct investment to capture and destroy these gases in all of these projects.
“The CDMs are perverted,” Jo Leinen, president of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, told me. He also noted that there are 11 billion tons of offset certificates—called Assigned Amount Units—held by countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic that have not been used. This is equivalent to a third of the world’s annual GHG emissions. These offsets have the impact of lowering the price of carbon credits. And if they are cashed in, they will give the false impression of an 11-billion-ton reduction in GHG emissions.
Europe’s efforts, however, cannot be dismissed out of hand because of verification problems and loopholes in emission trading schemes, which it has plans to rectify. By Cancún, Europe was moving forward with or without—and it was mostly without—the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized and emerging world was refusing to acknowledge the danger ahead in any real terms. This threatened to render all of Europe’s efforts useless.
Eighteen years after the UNFCCC was signed in Rio de Janeiro, negotiators were facing the unpleasant truth that all the pledges made so far to reduce greenhouse gas emissions had not come anywhere near to meeting the 2-degrees-Celsius goal. In fact, the targets pledged in the Copenhagen Accord put the world on a path to at least 3.5 degrees Celsius according to the International Energy Agency.
At Cancún, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) issued a report stating that humanity’s inaction means there is a 40-percent gap between emission reduction pledges and the 2-degrees-Celsius target. That means we must cut another six billion metric tons of carbon each year by 2020, which is more than the total emissions of all the world’s cars, buses and trucks in 2005. But, says the UNEP hopefully, “tackling climate change is still manageable if leadership is shown.”
Not only were the Copenhagen Accord’s emission reduction pledges proving empty, but also the promised US$30 billion in fast-track financing to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries adapt to climate change had pretty well vanished. The money was supposed to be spent between 2010 and 2012. But by Cancún no mechanism had been worked out to distribute the money and in fact none of it had been handed out in 2010. As much as 50 percent was now in the form of loans and not the grants that had been promised. Industrialized countries, pleading poverty, had refused to commit to a third of the total, and the rest was to be diverted from other aid programs.
The fast-track financing had been a carrot designed to lure developing countries into signing an agreement they otherwise would not have accepted. The fact that by the end of 2010 the money had still not shown up threatened to erode whatever was left of the trust between rich and poor countries.
“So far the fast-start finance has neither been fast nor has it started, and there has hardly been any finance,” Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, said in the first week of negotiations in Cancún. He added a note of warning: “Fast-track finance was an essential part of the Copenhagen Accord. If the current lackadaisical approach to fast-start financing continues, you are not going to create the conditions conducive to cooperative action. These negotiations are built on trust. There is a climate for negotiations and that climate does get eviscerated when one of the foundations of the accord, which is fast-start finance, is simply not visible.”
Bad faith continued to corrupt the negotiating process. Trust was thin on the ground. But one fact grabbed everyone’s attention: Even though the recession had caused a slight drop in energy consumption and emissions in Western industrialized countries, global emissions had continued to rise, largely because of India and China. Nearing the end of 2010, emissions were on track to reach record levels. The atmospheric space was becoming a tighter fit. Two years earlier, the atmospheric CO2 content had reached slightly more than 384 parts per million. When the Cancún conference opened at the beginning of December 2010, it was nearing 390. The CO2 molecules that keep our world in the Goldilocks zone were no longer merely creeping up the numerical scale; they were beginning a rapid climb and were now 40 percent higher than preindustrial levels (arbitrarily set at the year 1750).15 Equally worrying was the sudden rise in methane molecules in the atmosphere due to permafrost melting in the Arctic. The North Pole was releasing its methane content in ever-increasing amounts.
These atmospheric GHG increases corresponded with a record global mean temperature increase in 2010,16 which, according to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization, was one of the three warmest years recorded since 1850. The ten-year period beginning in 2001 was the warmest since the beginning of instrumental records. The decade was about half a degree Celsius higher than the annual average between 1961 and 1990, which is an extraordinary hike. Corresponding to this temperature rise were record numbers of extreme weather events.
Massive floods swamped Pakistan; murderous mudslides swallowed villagers in China; unseasonal monsoons flooded areas of south Asia; rainfall 152 percent above normal flooded northeastern Australia; drought led to record-low water levels in the northwestern Amazon basin; sandstorms killed crops in the Middle East. Scientists confirmed the accelerated melting of the world’s mountain glaciers as well as the great Arctic ice fields and ice sheets in Canada and Greenland. Satellites and ocean monitoring showed sea levels rising slowly because of glacial melting and the expanding thermal effect of warmer waters. The scorecard was not promising.
By the time negotiators arrived in Cancún on November 29, the deteriorating state of mankind’s planet was no longer a distant risk debated by scientists. It was here and now and on every diplomat’s lips. Scientists may shy away from blaming a specific event on global warming, but extreme weather and strange seasonal anomalies had traced a worrisome and now-familiar pattern over the face of the last decade. Heading into the Cancún negotiations, these events spoke volumes.
Huhne was blunt. “The pattern of these events and frequency of these events is due to climate change,” he told the conference. He claimed the U.K. had paid out 4.5 billion pounds for flood damage in 2010 alone, compared with only 1.5 billion pounds in the previous ten years. This is why the U.K.’s Hadley Centre had combined with several other climate institutions to create what they call the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change Program (AVOID). Advanced climate models showed that we probably have delayed too long to avoid serious damage from climate change. To give us a 90 percent chance of limiting temperature growth to below 2 degrees Celsius, AVOID’s advanced climate models showed we would have to stop immediately all global emissions and we would probably have to employ “some geo-engineering intervention.” For a 50 percent chance, we would have to reduce emissions at least 6 percent each year. Delaying action also means it will take longer to experience the benefits of emission reductions.
Scientists were getting panicky. A post-Copenhagen study by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom concluded that delays in reaching a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were such that there is “virtually no chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.”17 For these scientists, the window of opportunity had closed. Current reduction commitments make it likely we will reach 3 or 4 degrees Celsius by 2100. Increases of this magnitude would wipe out farming in sub-Saharan Africa; raise sea levels between 0.5 and 2.0 meters, putting millions of people at risk; reduce water levels in all river basins in Africa, India, the eastern United States and southern Europe, most of which already experience some drop in levels;18 and kill off coral reefs (the incubators of marine life) and large parts of the Amazon forest. The time available for adaptation will be reduced and the cost will be much higher than the US$100-billion annual Green Fund suggested in the Copenhagen Accord.
Meanwhile, time was running out on the world’s only international treaty to reduce carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period was due to expire at the end of 2012 and support among industrialized nations for a second commitment period was weak. When I caught up to the now-former UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer at an energy conference in Montréal three months before Cancún, he said that given the present pace of negotiations, it could take ten years to secure a new global climate treaty.
Approaching Cancún, the annual rollout of scientific data didn’t look good. And the political scene was equally disturbing. The climate change ledger was weighted heavily in favor of those who for decades had preached business as usual. Fools ruled.
With the pace of climate change accelerating, one would expect the politicians to sally forth to the Mayan Riviera with a new sense of urgency. But that’s not what happened. Instead, they retreated into a luxurious Mexican bunker surrounded by thick lines of security. Gunboats patrolled the ocean and Mexican federales and the army manned roadblocks along the main highways leading into Cancún and the Moon Palace. Protesters could not get anywhere near the resort. And the science was relegated to the status of a trade show housed in a massive warehouse several kilometers away from the main event. The delegates were playing the maracas while the world burned.
The Mexican government emphasized a step-by-step approach towards a global agreement. Expect no treaty to be signed in Cancún, the Mexican secretary of foreign affairs, Patricia Espinosa, cautioned. Success would come in the form of small victories that eventually—perhaps in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, or perhaps later (who knew?)—could be fashioned into a legally binding global commitment. There was a time when negotiations were about reducing carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. At Cancún, the ultimate goal was saving the multilateral process itself.
But even this ambition had to absorb a blow of seismic proportion when, at the opening of the conference, Japan dropped a bombshell. “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto Protocol on any condition or under any circumstances,” the country’s chief negotiator, Akira Yamada, told the conference. Under no circumstances, in other words, would the world’s third-largest economy commit to reducing its emissions after 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.
This rang the death knell for the world’s only legally binding global agreement to address the challenges of climate change. Japan had intimated as much before, but never in such categorical terms.
“We know that developing countries insist on this commitment period,” Akira Yamada said. “But it’s not a fair or effective way to tackle climate change globally. The Kyoto Protocol only covers 27 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases. We need the participation of all parties. It is as if we are in a soccer stadium and Annex 1 [industrialized nations except the United States] countries are the players and everybody else including the United States are the spectators. Just watching. We want all these major emitters to go down to the playing field and play together.”
Canada, Russia and Australia rushed to support Japan. Europe remained supportive of Kyoto but with conditions. “We are willing to go into a second commitment period, but without the major emitters then you have no solution for the climate change conundrum,” EU negotiator Peter Wittoeck said.
Any renewal of Kyoto would have to bind everyone, but particularly the United States, China and India, to some kind of emission reductions. The new reality was that China was now the largest carbon emitter on the planet and India’s emissions were the world’s fastest growing. The uncontrolled emissions of these countries would inevitably cancel out the reductions of industrialized countries, making the entire process counterproductive.
At any other conference, Japan’s announcement would have driven developed and developing countries into two separate camps who would then pound each other with accusations of bad faith. But at Cancún this didn’t happen. The reason was simple: They were not there to make momentous decisions. They were there to highlight areas of common ground and leave the rest to another day. A decision on the Kyoto Protocol and its post-2012 emission reduction pledges could wait until next year. They were there to keep the process rolling.
Every major climate change conference has a key word or phrase. In Copenhagen it was “ambitious.” In Cancún the word was “balance.”
Rich and poor countries acknowledged the importance of “balance.” When U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern arrived in Cancún, he used the word five times in this context in a brief opening statement to the media. “The key to an agreement here is that we get balance across the issues. I think there is an agreement to be had. I am quite sure of that actually. I’m not sure whether we will actually get it. That question hangs in the balance. But it is easy enough to see what the outlines of an agreement would look like and on the subject of balance, I think it is critical that there be genuine balance … If we can get that balance across all of the key issues we will unlock the door to an agreement.”
The EU used it three times: “What we need is a balanced package of decisions, a package of decisions that will be balanced within these two negotiating tracks under the convention and under the Kyoto Protocol and a package that is balanced within each of these negotiating tracks covering all the elements of the Bali road map that was set out in 2007.”
Initially, balance meant that everybody has to play a role in combating climate change no matter how rich or poor. It meant assuring that cuts in one country are not canceled out by increases in another. It meant that every country must pledge to reduce emissions in a transparent manner that can be monitored and verified by international inspection to ensure trust. Later, however, balance took on a different meaning. It meant everybody gets what they want without having to commit to anything substantial—at least for now.
“Balance” was the brainchild of the United States. It suited its purposes. America was still little more than a spectator in this process. Its commitment in the Copenhagen Accord of a 17-percent reduction by 2020 was not legally binding. It had failed to pass any legislation to back up that pledge. Instead, it relied on the imposition of EPA regulations to force reductions. Stern promised Cancún that President Obama was looking at a “combination of regulations and legislation” to meet its Copenhagen Accord target. “There is more than one way to skin a cat,” he said.
But would this American way be acceptable to the rest of the world? I found South Africa’s chief negotiator, Alf Wills, typing a report to his minister while sitting next to the hot tub in the South African suite. He said nobody believes the U.S. regulatory path is credible because a new government could reverse it. What’s more, he said, the “EPA regulations are not good enough because Congress can easily cut the budget.” Unfortunately, Wills said, “The United States has nothing else to offer.”
In the lead-up to Cancún, the Americans and Europeans held a series of meetings to discuss a joint strategy. The discussions reveal how meek the process had become. On January 27, 2010, U.S. deputy national security adviser Michael Froman and U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing had met in Brussels with Connie Hedegaard and several other senior officials at the European Commission. The meeting is described in two U.S. State Department cables released by Wikileaks. Pershing emphasized the importance of persuading countries to adopt the Copenhagen Accord because “there is no plan B for negotiation of a different agreement.”19 He went on to express doubt as to whether India and China would honor the language of the accord regarding monitoring, reporting and verification. They discussed a British desire to include loan guarantees as part of the fast-track financing. But Hedegaard said: “Thirty billion dollars had been promised; it cannot be lent.” Pershing replied, “Donors have to balance the political need to provide real financing with the practical constraints of tight budgets.” The fast-track financing was quickly melting away.
Then the conversation turned to Cancún. The parties plotted their strategy. The cables revealed the underlying competitive approach to climate change diplomacy that has defeated progress in the talks. Froman and Hedegaard agreed that the European Union would muzzle its criticism of the United States and the two would work closely together to devise a strategy to “build up the fledgling Copenhagen Accord.”20 Froman claimed Copenhagen was an example “where both sides misread each other’s negotiating bottom lines.” He stressed that the EU model of “one-upmanship” did not work on the U.S. administration and the two sides needed to coordinate their efforts to bring the rest of the world onside and to isolate uncooperative countries. Froman noted that the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) worked closely together to “impede U.S./EU initiatives and [play] the U.S. and EU off against each other.” He added that “the U.S. and EU need to learn from this coordination … and work much more closely and effectively together ourselves, to better handle third country obstructionism and avoid future train wrecks on climate.” In return, Hedegaard assured Froman the EU “was muting its criticism of the U.S. to be constructive.”
In preparation for Cancún, the EU and the United States agreed to work together to rally the G77, Mexico, the BASIC countries and the small island states to their side. Hedegaard noted that “unhelpful countries such as Venezuela or Bolivia” would have to be dealt with, and she added that the EU is a “big donor to these countries.” Froman replied, “We will need to neutralize, co-opt or marginalize these and others such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador.”
The discussion then turned to the main goal of Cancún. Hedegaard said, “We must have universal acknowledgment that the world cannot afford failure to reach a binding agreement,” and all countries had to agree to commit to 2020 targets. She told Froman that “it is vital to show economic benefits and potential job creation from bilateral cooperation on climate and clean-energy technologies, to build public support for our efforts.” She promised to provide him with EU studies on the economic benefits of going green.
Froman said that the threat of carbon border taxes could bring China onside. He said the key to success at Cancún was to “avoid a damaging replay of our division.”
The EU and the U.S.A. were strange bedfellows, worlds apart in their commitment to carbon reductions and clean energy. Europe had always been a leader, the United States a facilitator one moment and a troublemaker the next. But the results of their friendship pact were clear. At Cancún, the United States was no longer an issue. Nor were China and India and the rest of the G77 unrelenting critics of the process and the poor climate records of the industrialized countries. Stern had spent a day and a half in China in October with environment minister Xie Zhenhua in what he called “very intensive and good conversations.” He also met several times with Xie outside China, and the two had a video meeting one week prior to Cancún. These negotiations resulted in China and India agreeing to a package deal that included some form of emission reduction targets and a truncated form of international monitoring, reporting and verification. But when it came down to putting real numbers on the table, none of these countries wanted to participate. Leave that for next year.
With India and China onside, the rest of the G77 followed. Many of the countries that had vigorously opposed the Copenhagen Accord, including Sudan, Venezuela, Tuvalu, Ecuador and Nicaragua, fell silent.
Bolivia, the strongest advocate of a 1.5-Celsius target, found itself isolated. Before Cancún, the United States cut off funding to that country and Bolivia expelled the U.S. ambassador. President Evo Morales came to Cancún preaching his message of Mother Earth as a deity and capitalism and globalization as her defilers. He alleged that the United States and European countries had bribed the other countries by threatening to cut off their financial aid. It wasn’t the first time developing countries had complained about bribery. The response from Norway’s environment minister had been to issue another threat: “If you want to accuse us of bribery, then we can eliminate any cause for accusation of bribery by eliminating the money.”
American and European delegates quietly spread the word that the Bolivian leader was motivated solely by a desire to enhance his own and his country’s global stature. Several European delegates volunteered that back home in Bolivia Morales was handing out mining leases like candy and without environmental restraints. Prior to his Cancún visit he had been in Japan, where he was negotiating financing to build an open-pit lithium mine and highly toxic processing plants.21
Behind the rhetoric of Morales’s message was the fact that climate change was hitting Bolivia hard. Even the U.S. embassy in La Paz conceded that Bolivia is “already suffering real damage from the effects of global warming.”22 Its water resources were dwindling and mountain snow cover was disappearing. Morales saw no point in agreeing to a treaty that would allow the global mean temperature to rise any more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Higher would mean certain death for his country and many others as well, he claimed, adding that the most recent science supported his position.
But in Mexico, Morales found no supporters. The major players stuck to 2 degrees Celsius. If the process were to prove legitimate, then everybody would have to rally around the number 2. Bolivia remained isolated.
In the delegates’ zeal to show the world that the United Nations process worked, they left the two most fundamental issues of the negotiations—emission reduction targets and the legal framework or frameworks that would anchor these commitments—undecided.
Developing countries were still adamant that the Kyoto Protocol be retained for the simple reason that it was the only existing international agreement on climate change; years might pass before any replacement became legally binding. But with Japan, Russia, Canada and Australia refusing to participate in a second commitment period and the EU wavering in favor of one treaty, the two sides were stalemated. The solution was to create a third document that would link the Kyoto Protocol and the parallel treaty on Long-term Cooperative Action. This document would act as a common receptacle for emission reduction pledges. The actual emission pledges would ultimately be worked out at the 2011 conference in Durban, South Africa—or later.
Climate negotiations are a spiderweb of interwoven threads where one pull sends the whole thing quivering. During the last few days at Cancún, delegates split up into five ministerial working groups on the main issues of mitigation, adaptation, finance, forest preservation and carbon markets. Each country disclosed areas of compromise and areas where it would hold firm. The outcome was separate LTCA and Kyoto Protocol documents essentially containing something for everybody but commitments from nobody.
The agreements simply supplied the basis for more negotiations. The document on the renewal of the Kyoto Protocol was a mere two pages in which the parties agreed to complete the work of drawing up a post-2012 Kyoto agreement “as soon as possible.” The agreement also “urges [parties] to raise the level of ambition of the emission reductions to be achieved by them.” Linked to this agreement was the actual negotiating text, which still numbered seventy-two pages of options. In other words, it had not changed much since Copenhagen. The parties couldn’t even decide on the format for the table showing each industrialized country’s commitments. Nor could they decide the level of emission reductions or the length of the next commitment period.
The Cancún agreement on Long-term Cooperative Action was more substantial. The parties agreed to try to keep the global mean temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. This marked the first time this limit had been agreed upon in a United Nations document. But they did not lay out how it would be accomplished. The 29-page document also included verification and reporting requirements for emission cuts in developing countries as well as the US$30-billion fast-start financing scheme for 2010 to 2012 to help poor countries adapt to climate change. It created a US$100-billion annual Green Fund to begin in 2020, also to help poor countries adapt and reduce their emissions. It set up research centers to help the transfer of clean-energy technologies to poor countries. And it outlined the principles for forestry management and the preservation of carbon sinks as well as compensation for countries that preserve their rain forests.
This all sounds good until you realize that the LTCA document was designed only to provide a basis for further negotiations. When it came to real cuts in emissions, the document “emphasized” the need for developing countries to take the lead in making “deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions,” but it didn’t oblige them to do it. Nor did it define “deep cuts.” In fact, it affirmed that the overriding priority for developing countries was economic growth. The document even acknowledged that their emissions would grow as they created jobs to eradicate poverty. “Social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing country Parties, and … the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs.” In other words, the agreement gave China, India, Brazil and any other country determined to grow its economy a blank check to spew whatever emissions it deemed necessary for economic growth and poverty eradication. When you consider that the poverty in countries such as China and India is largely of their own making, it is difficult to understand why they would get a free ride. Their poverty is intimately linked to overpopulation and poor governance, for which these countries alone are responsible.
The two agreements essentially kept the multilateral process going, one step at a time. Tragically, however, these steps were being taken on a treadmill. The parties simply agreed on two draft negotiating texts, hoping that further negotiations leading up to and at the South African conference in December 2011 would result in legally binding treaties. As the first paragraph of the LTCA agreement states: “Nothing in this decision shall prejudge prospects for, or the content of, a legally binding outcome in the future.” In other words, everything was still up for grabs. Yet for public consumption, the Cancún decisions were tagged by delegates as a major breakthrough.
I knew that an agreement was close on the morning of the final day when I met up with Sudan’s Lumumba. I asked him if he still believed that no agreement was better than agreeing to the two-degree benchmark. He told me my question was wrong. The right question is why are delegates ready to vote for an agreement to limit mean temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius when they know that millions of people in more than 100 countries will be adversely affected. Why is it that “the meek always have to sacrifice or to be the sacrificial lamb?” But then he went on to say that he supported an agreement that would set 2 degrees Celsius today but provide for a review in 2015 for a 1.5 Celsius ceiling. A year ago he would never have agreed to this incremental approach. Now, on the last day of Cancún, he was onside. After the final vote he told me why.
“There are three reasons. First of all, on the procedural side, Mexico has done a great job. I mean resuscitating multilateralism, really doing what is right in terms of engagement of all etc., even if it is not perfect. They have done a great job and you have to give it to their political direction and true belief in multilateralism, their diplomatic ability and their ability to bring in multiple nations to start to really draft this. The second reason is very obvious, is that it is a provisional step forward. It is not legally binding. It is a basis for negotiating … The other reason why I do believe that it is an important document from my perspective, for the first time there is a very clear reference to the fundamental right of safeguarding human life, and that is the reference to Resolution 10–4 of the Human Rights Council. As you remember, in my thinking these negotiations are about two things: safeguarding life of humanity and equitable sharing of atmospheric space and right to development.”
Cancún managed to give the impression that it had fostered a democratic, all-inclusive, consensus-gathering process. After twenty years of climate change negotiations, that was considered progress.
Once again, the package was pulled together after a twelve-hour marathon meeting that included twelve major countries and representatives of various national groupings. Chaired by Ambassador Luis Alfonso De Alba, Mexico’s special representative for climate change, the meeting hashed out the final documents based on what the five ministerial groups had concluded. The Cancún agreements basically ended up with something for everybody and sent each country home with its own loot bag. In that sense it was, as Stern later said, a “balanced package of decisions.”
Before the final votes, conference president Patricia Espinosa called the agreements “truly a renewal of the spirit that can work in the political world to come together in the best interests of humanity.”
Bolivia disagreed. It was the only one.
Its UN ambassador, Pablo Solón, said he refused to sign “a document that means a significant increase in the average temperature that will put more human lives in a situation close to death … Two degrees Celsius is not acceptable … For countries like Bolivia who have snow on their peaks, it would mean the loss of this water. We have already lost one-third of this snow. There’s a 50 percent possibility of having irreversible climate change. It is essential we work towards a goal that island states would not be threatened and that none of the states would disappear.” But he was drowned out in a flash flood of enthusiasm.
I watched as a Saudi Arabian delegate tried to persuade Colombia to come to Solón’s support. But the Colombian delegate remained silent.
If there was any turning in favor of Bolivia, Grenada’s ambassador, Dessima Williams, put an end to it when she warned against holding out for the perfect agreement. “The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. We can still say that we left Cancún with something that we can work with.”
Pablo Solón was not looking for a perfect deal, however. He was looking for a deal that protected his country.
The agreement committed the United States to nothing. Stern said, “It is not perfect, nothing like this ever is. It did not do everything we wanted, but it is very good from our point of view. It is a big step forward. What we have is a text that, while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward.”
China’s head of delegation couldn’t have been more succinct: “We’re basically satisfied.”
The main driver behind the Cancún agreements was the worry that failure to demonstrate progress would mark the end of the United Nations process. It was a misplaced concern. If failure to show progress was the grave marker of multilateralism, these talks should have been buried years ago.
The true yardstick for these negotiations is the amount of carbon gushing out of our collective smokestacks. Despite decades of nattering, we continue to increase these emissions at a record pace. Cancún did not offer any hope that this trend will be reversed. Quite the opposite. The conference seemed to strengthen it, even institutionalize it. In a world smothered in lies, Cancún bamboozled with the best.
By the time Patricia Espinosa’s light tap of the gavel ends COP 16, the sun has risen over Cancún. I gaze at the happy faces of the delegates all congratulating themselves on their great triumph. I watch as several Australian delegates hover around Stern, smiling and laughing in that kind of nervous, self-conscious way that some people have when they’re trying to be friendly with their boss. And I think that the politics of the possible has reached a new low.
I leave the hall and catch a bus that takes me out of the Moon Palace for good. I then catch a second bus back to my hotel and go to bed. I wake in the early afternoon, slip on my bathing suit and go to the beach.
A pretty young woman who is French but was a sort of mercenary delegate for a Pacific island country is stretched out on a plastic deck chair, a bottle of beer stuck in the sand beside her. I linger over her beauty for a few long seconds and then walk into the ocean for a quick swim. I play volleyball with several members of the World Wildlife Fund. That evening I join friends for a meal of sushi. Nobody wants to talk about the convention.
The next morning I fly back to Montréal, mixed in with a load of tanned Canadians. Before the plane lands, we pull out our heavy coats and sweaters.