Chapter 7
Politics of climate change
Introduction
The most logical approach to the climate change problem is to significantly cut GHG emissions. At the Paris climate meeting in 2015, world leaders agreed that global temperature increase should be kept below 2˚C, with an aspirational target of 1.5˚C. Despite this agreement global carbon emissions have continued to rise every year. The only exception was 2020 when the global lockdown prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic dropped emissions by about 7%. Ceasing almost all flying and car journeys around the world had a small impact on our total GHG pollution. In fact global carbon emissions for 2020 with a global pandemic were the same as 2006. This was because there was very little change to energy production during the pandemic; but there have been calls around the world from business and civil society that the post-pandemic recovery must be a low-carbon one.
Climate change negotiations
The UNFCCC was created at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 to negotiate a worldwide agreement for reducing GHGs and limit the impact of climate change. The UNFCCC officially came into force on 21 March 1994. As of March 2014, it has 196 parties. Enshrined within the UNFCCC are a number of principles, including agreement by consensus of all parties, and differential responsibilities. The latter is because the UNFCCC acknowledges that different countries have emitted different amounts of GHGs and therefore need to make greater or lesser efforts to reduce their emissions (Figure 33). For example, in the USA each person on average emits ten times more CO2 than a person in India. To represent this formally at the negotiations two different groups of parties have been recognized: Annex I countries, which include all the developed countries; and non-Annex I, which include the less developed and rapidly developing countries. Annex I was subsequently divided when some countries argued that their economies were in transition. As a result, the richest countries were placed in an additional category, Annex II. The UNFCCC pays heed to the principle of contraction and convergence: the idea is that every country must reduce its emissions and that all countries must converge on net zero emissions. The net zero emission target emerged from the important IPCC 1.5˚C global warming report published in 2018, which clearly showed that to achieve 1.5˚C there had to be zero carbon emissions by about 2050 and then negative carbon emissions for the rest of the century.
33. Carbon dioxide emissions per capita by country and population.
Kyoto 1997
Since the UNFCCC was set up, the nations of the world, ‘the parties’, have been meeting annually at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to move negotiations forward. Only five years after the UNFCCC was created at COP3 on 13 December 1997, the first international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was drawn up. This stated the general principles for a worldwide treaty on cutting GHG emissions and, more specifically, that all developed nations would aim to cut their emissions by 5.2% on their 1990 levels by 2008–12. The Kyoto Protocol was ratified and signed in Bonn on 23 July 2001, making it a legal treaty. The USA, under the leadership of President Bush, withdrew from the climate negotiations in March 2001 and so did not sign the Kyoto Protocol at the Bonn meeting. With the USA producing about one-quarter of the world’s CO2 pollution, this was a big blow for the treaty. Moreover, the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol were reduced during the Bonn meeting to make sure that Japan, Canada, and Australia would join. Australia finally made the Kyoto Protocol legally binding in December 2007.
The treaty did not include developing countries. This was to balance out the historic legacy of emissions by developed countries. It was then assumed that developing countries would join the post-2012 agreement. The Kyoto Protocol came into force on 16 February 2005, after Russia ratified the treaty, thereby meeting the requirement that at least fifty-five countries, representing more than 55% of the global emissions, should have signed.
Copenhagen 2009
There were huge expectations of COP15 (Copenhagen) in 2009, despite coming a year after the global financial crash. New quantitative commitments were expected to ensure a post-2012 agreement to seamlessly move on from the Kyoto Protocol. Barack Obama had just become president of the USA. The EU had prepared an unconditional 20% reduction of emissions by 2020 on a 1990 baseline and a conditional target rising to 30% if other developed countries adopted binding targets. Most other developed countries had something to offer. Norway was willing to reduce emissions by 40% and Japan by 25% from a 1990 baseline. Even the USA offered a 17% reduction on a 2005 baseline, which was an equivalent drop of 4% on a 1990 baseline. But the Copenhagen conference went horribly wrong. First the Danish government had completely underestimated the interest in the conference and provided a venue that was too small. So in the second week, when all the high-powered country ministers and their support arrived, there was not enough room, meaning that many NGOs were denied access to the negotiations. Second, it was clear that the negotiators were not ready for the arrival of the ministers and that there was no agreement. This led to the leaking of the ‘The Danish Text’, subtitled ‘The Copenhagen Agreement’, and the proposed measures to keep average global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. It started an argument between developed and developing nations as it was brand new text that had just appeared in the middle of the conference. Developing countries accused the developed countries of working behind closed doors and making an agreement that suited them without seeking consent from the developing nations. Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, chairman of the G77, said, ‘It’s an incredibly imbalanced text intended to subvert, absolutely and completely, 2 years of negotiations. It does not recognize the proposals and the voice of developing countries.’
The final blow to getting an agreement on binding targets came from the USA. Barack Obama arrived only two days before the end of the conference; he convened a meeting between the USA and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China), excluding other UN nations, and he created the Copenhagen Accord. The Copenhagen Accord recognized the scientific case for keeping temperature rises below 2°C, but did not contain a baseline for this target, nor the commitments to reduce emissions that would be necessary to achieve the target. Earlier proposals that would have aimed to limit temperature rises to 1.5°C and cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 were dropped. The agreement made was non-binding and countries had until January 2010 to provide their own voluntary targets. It was also made clear that any country that signed up to the Copenhagen Accord was also stepping out of the Kyoto Protocol. Hence the USA was able to move away from the binding targets of the Kyoto Protocol, which should have been enforced until 2012, and fostered a weak voluntary commitment approach. The Bolivian delegation summed up the way the Copenhagen Accord was reached: ‘anti-democratic, anti-transparent and unacceptable’. The legal status of the Copenhagen Accord was also unclear, since it was only ‘noted’ by the parties, not agreed, as only 122, subsequently rising to 139 countries, agreed to it.
Trust in the UNFCCC negotiations took another blow when in January 2014 it was revealed that the US government negotiators had information during the conference obtained by eavesdropping on meetings of other conference delegations. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed how the US National Security Agency (NSA) had monitored communications between countries before and during the conference. The leaked documents show that the NSA provided US delegates with advance details of the Danish plan to ‘rescue’ the talks should they founder, and also of China’s efforts before the conference to coordinate its position with that of India.
Paris 2015
The failure of COP15 in Copenhagen, and its voluntary commitments, cast a long shadow over the successive COP meetings, further darkened by the revelation by Wikileaks that US aid funding to Bolivia and Ecuador was reduced because of their opposition to the Copenhagen Accord. It took over five years for the negotiations to recover from the mess created by Barack Obama and the US negotiators. At COP16 in Cancun and COP17 in Durban, the UNFCCC negotiations were slowly put back on track with the aim of obtaining legally binding targets. Significant progress was made in the REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, including safeguards for local people), which is discussed later in this chapter. It was, however, at COP18 in Doha in December 2012 that a second commitment period starting on 1 January 2013 was agreed, which was to last eight years. This ensured that all Kyoto mechanisms and accounting rules remained intact for this period and parties could review their commitments with a view to increasing them. All this laid the foundations for a future global climate agreement, which was achieved at COP21 in Paris in 2015 (Figure 34).
34. Potential future global warming based on different carbon emissions.
The climate negotiations in Paris 2015 were a huge success primarily because the French hosts understood the grand game of international negotiation and used every trick in the book to get countries to work together to achieve an agreement signed by all. The agreement states that the parties are required to hold temperatures to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’. The Paris conference was a high-stakes game of geopolitical poker. Surprisingly, the least powerful countries did much better than expected. The climate talks were subject to a series of shifting alliances going beyond the usual income-rich Northern countries and income-poor countries of the Global South. Central to this was first the US‒Chinese diplomacy, as both agreed to limit emissions. Second, a new grouping of countries called the Climate Vulnerable Forum forced the 1.5°C target higher up the political agenda, so much so that it is mentioned in the key aims of the agreement. Political support from the Paris Agreement allowed the IPCC to write the seminal 1.5˚C global warming report, which was published in 2018. This report documented the significant increase in impact between a 1.5˚C and a 2.0˚C world. It also documented how a 1.5˚C world could be achieved—which, as noted above, requires net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and then for carbon to be taken out of the atmosphere for the rest of the century (Figure 35). The quicker the world gets to net zero, the less carbon needs to be extracted from the atmosphere between 2050 and 2100. The Paris Agreement was just the start of the process, because taking into account all the country pledges and assuming they will be fulfilled, the world would still warm by about 3˚C (Figure 34).
35. Achieving a 1.5˚C world.
In 2017, the Paris Agreement had a major setback. President Trump declared he was taking the USA out of the agreement, as he believed it was unfair and biased towards developing countries. In accordance with Article 28 of the Paris Agreement, a country cannot give notice of withdrawal from the agreement before three years of its start date in the relevant country. So, the earliest possible effective withdrawal date by the USA was 4 November 2020—one day after the 2020 US presidential election. One of the first acts of the newly elected President Biden was to re-engage the USA in the Paris Agreement.
The new president faces additional challenges because over the four years of the Trump presidency nearly a hundred environmental rules and regulations have been rescinded or are in the process of being removed. These included rolling back the Obama administration’s fuel efficiency and emission standards for vehicles; reductions in their coal-emission standards for coal-fired power plants; and the weakening of the efficient lighting regulation, meaning less efficient light bulbs could still be purchased after 2020.
President Trump approved two controversial oil pipelines (Keystone XL and Dakota Access), allowed drilling in nearly all US waters, opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, creating a huge expansion of oil and gas exploration. In 2021 President Biden rescinded all these executive orders, re-engaged the US in the Paris Agreement, invested heavily in low carbon technology and infrastructure and pledged to reduce the US carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and net zero carbon by 2050.
Glasgow 2021
The UK and Italy were supposed to co-host COP26 in Glasgow at the end of 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic, the resultant lockdowns, and the major impact on both Italy and Britain meant that this pivotal meeting was postponed until November 2021. This meeting is critical because it is the third meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA3) and is the first global stocktake outlined in the Paris Agreement. COP26 will review the progress made since the Paris 2015 agreement and encourage greater commitments and pledges from countries to cut their GHG emissions. Importantly, this will be the first COP meeting where a net zero carbon-emission target will be the primary global ambition, and the discussion will be about how fast this can be achieved and which countries will lead.
Already a number of countries have pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, including Bhutan, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, the EU, Fiji, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, the UK, USA, and Uruguay. In addition, China has declared it will be net zero by 2060. COP26 also marks re-engagement with the USA.
Is the UNFCCC process flawed?
Various flaws have been pointed out in the approach of the UNFCCC. Here are some of the major ones.
Not going far enough. The first perceived flaw in the UNFCCC procedure is that despite 25 years of negotiations it has failed to deliver any lasting agreement. As mentioned above, the current Paris Agreement, if all the pledges are honoured, still causes global warming of at least 3˚C (Figure 34) and the associated impacts described in Table 4.
No enforcement. The fundamental problem with international agreements and treaties is that there are no real means of enforcement. This was one of the arguments that the USA used when proposing the Copenhagen Accord, suggesting that even binding targets must in effect be voluntary as countries decide whether or not to comply. This is why policies and laws are required at a regional level, as in the EU, and at a national level, such as in the UK with its Climate Change Act. The only way to translate international treaties into a reality is through regional and national laws. This multi-level governance is also required to stop gaming of particular systems.
Green colonialism. Many social and political scientists have raised philosophical and ethical doubts about climate negotiations as a whole. The main concern is that they reflect a version of colonialism, since rich developed countries are seen to be dictating to poorer countries how and when they should develop. For many years countries such as India and China have resisted calls to cut their emissions, stating that it would damage their development and attempts to alleviate poverty. Others have supported measures such the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows developed countries to pay for emission reductions in a developing country so that it counts towards their national reduction target. They also provide a development dividend, moving money from the rich to the poorer countries. But 80% of the CDM project credits were allocated to China, Brazil, India, and Korea, the richest developing countries, so funding did not reach the world’s poorest. Also, 60% of the CDM carbon credits have been purchased by the UK and the Netherlands, resulting in a very skewed financial exchange.
Nation versus sector approach. The UNFCCC approach has another problem, which is embedded in the concept of the nation-state and is a major issue in a global capitalist world with supposedly free trade. For example, if the USA through the Paris Agreement wanted to reduce carbon emissions from heavy industry, it could impose a carbon tax on steel and concrete production. If other countries in the world do not have this restriction, their products become cheaper, even including the cost of transportation by ship, air, or road to the USA, all of which would lead to the emission of more CO2 overall. So global economics can undermine any national attempts to do the right thing and reduce their emissions. An alternative approach would be for global agreements to be made at a sector level. For example, there could be a global agreement on how much carbon can be emitted per ton of steel or concrete produced. All countries could then agree only to buy steel or concrete produced in this low-emission way, which would make for a fairer trading scheme, with countries not losing out as a result of changes within their industries to lower GHG emissions. The problems are, of course, how to police such a scheme across so many different industrial sectors.
Carbon trading
Many politicians have advocated using either regional or global carbon trading schemes. The most successful system of carbon trading is ‘cap and trade’, whereby politicians set a cap, a maximum total of pollution allowed, and a trading system is then set up so that different industries can trade credits. It is acknowledged that the various industries can clean up at varying rates and costs, and this trading system allows the most cost-effective approach to be found. This type of system was successful in the USA in reducing air pollution by trading sulfur dioxide and N2O emissions. The US Clean Air Act of 1990 required electrical utilities to lower their emissions of these pollutants by 8.5 million tonnes compared with 1980 levels. Initial estimates in 1989 suggested it would cost $7.4 billion; a report in 1998 based on actual compliance data suggested it had cost less than $1 billion.
Currently over 13% of global carbon emissions are covered by national or regional carbon trading schemes. These include schemes in the USA, Canada, China, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and the EU. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the largest and longest running carbon trading scheme. It covers more than 11,000 installations with a net energy use of 20 megawatts, and includes electricity generation, ferrous metal production, cement production, refineries, pulp, paper, and glass manufacturing. The ETS covers thirty-one countries, consisting of all twenty-eight EU member states plus Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. The ETS covers half the EU’s CO2 emissions and 40% of its total GHG emissions. Under the ‘cap and trade’ principle, a cap is set on the total amount of GHGs that can be emitted by installations in each country. ‘Allowances’ for emissions are then auctioned off or allocated for free, and can subsequently be traded. Installations must monitor and report their CO2 emissions, ensuring they hand in enough allowances to the authorities to cover their emissions. If emissions exceed what is permitted by its allowances, an installation must purchase allowances from others. Conversely, if an installation has performed well at reducing its emissions, it can sell its leftover credits. This allows the system to find the most cost-effective ways of reducing emissions without significant government intervention. The ETS has been arranged in four phases, 2005–7, 2008–12, 2013–20, and 2021–30. In each phase the total number of credits available has been reduced and the number of sectors and industries included has been increased; this ratchet approach has been used to drive emissions down as quickly as possible. In 2020, it was estimated that the EU ETS had reduced CO2 emissions by more than 1 billion tonnes between 2008 and 2016, in other words 3.8% of total EU-wide emissions. The EU ETS has, however, been criticized because the emission caps have not been strict enough, leading to a very low-carbon price. In the UK, the addition of a ‘carbon price floor’, or a minimum government-set carbon price, has been essential in removing coal from the energy mix.
REDD+
The idea of developing an instrument on deforestation within the climate change negotiations was first suggested at COP11 (2005) in Montreal and was referred to as RED (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation). The UN REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme was agreed in principle at COP13 (2007) in Bali. This has been subsequently refined as REDD+, the ‘+’ representing safeguards to protect local people and safeguards to the local ecosystem and biodiversity. REDD+ (or REDD-plus) is visualized as a win-win solution that can protect forests and ecosystems, promote reforestation, and protect and compensate forest dwellers from and for lost income from exploiting their forested land. Each REDD+ project has to be submitted for verification to ensure it does provide win-win outcomes before it can go ahead and be funded.
At COP19 in 2013 REDD was developed further and the ‘Warsaw Framework for REDD-plus’ was agreed which included how to monitor, measure, report, and verify forest changes and credits. The remaining outstanding decisions on REDD+ were completed at COP21 in Paris in 2015, including how to report on the safeguards using non-market approaches, and how to account for non-carbon benefits. So by 2015 the UNFCCC rulebook on REDD+ was completed. All countries have been encouraged to implement and support REDD+, which is in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement. This was part of the broader article that specified that all countries should take action to protect and enhance their GHG sinks and stores such as forests.
In 2009, US intransigence and the impact of the global financial crash meant that the Copenhagen climate negotiation failed to agree on any successor to the Kyoto Protocol. It took six years to get the climate negotiations back on track with the success of COP21 and the signing of the Paris Agreement. In 2020, COP26 in Glasgow was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but unlike with the global financial crash, the global pandemic did not derail the climate negotiation. Instead, around the world, more and more companies, organizations, and individuals called for a better, healthier, and safer world after the pandemic. This was because the world saw that there could be a different relationship between government, industry, and civil society—a relationship where the health and wellbeing of citizens is put before the economic gains of a country or small minority of individuals. In addition, the new narrative of global ‘net zero carbon’ emissions by 2050 is very powerful—it changes the discussion from how much we can reduce emissions to when we will get rid of them altogether. The challenge is huge because in less than 30 years we have to shift from emitting over 40 billion tonnes of CO2 per year to zero (Figure 36). The Paris Agreement pulls no punches and makes it clear that if we are to stabilize climate change even at 2˚C then we require the complete transformation of energy generation, industry, infrastructure, and individual behaviours around the world. In fact, we need to use every single solution we have to tackle climate change.
36. Country carbon dioxide emissions in percentages.