Getting the world's richest and poorest nations to cut a deal on climate control that both sides can live with has never been easy. This was evident again when Sudanese ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Dia Ping who represents 130 countries in a bloc called the Group of 77 and China flatly called a preliminary draft of a policy document on climate control at the Copenhagen climate conference racist and imperialist.
Ping's strident name call is overblown and hyperbole. But his troubling point that industrial production and expansion has driven Western economic plenty isn't. And that to change the game and impose restrictions on industrial growth at the expense of poor nations seems unfair, especially if rich nations aren't willing to dole out the billions that they promised to aid the poor nations combat grinding poverty and boost economic growth.
Ping's blast at the rich nations for dragging their feet on aid to the poor nations is hardly new. Third World leaders have long charged that clamping tight caps on carbon emissions will make it almost impossible for the poorest nations to catch up with the West. By every measure of economic well-being, employment, technology, industry, and national GDP, the imbalance between the haves and have not nations is staggering. When the poor nations demand monies from the rich nations as the price for cutting a deal on climate control they are assailed as obstructionist, selfish, and fatalist on combating global warming and pollution. Third World leaders agree that global warming is a danger. It threatens their water supplies, forests, crops, rivers, and the seas that border their nations. The decades of colonial rule, economic exploitation, the systematic gut of their resources, and crushing debt, have stripped these nations of the resources to combat the threat.
The conflict over how best to balance climate control measures with Third World economic uplift exploded in bitter exchanges at a preliminary conference in Bangkok, Thailand in October. Third World delegates accused the rich nations of trying to wiggle out of their commitment to provide nearly $100 billion to a global donor's fund to aid poor nations promote economic development and growth. The European Union initially pledged to pump $15 billion into the fund by 2020. The Copenhagen conference has an added sense of urgency since the Kyoto Protocol Accords on climate control run out in 2012. Kyoto established the basis for a global warming control agreement.
The US and China are the world's two biggest carbon emitters. Yet they have not contributed a dime to the global fund so far. The Bush administration opposed Kyoto. Bush claimed that the treaty was unfair as its legally-binding provisions for curbing carbon emissions apply only to rich economies, not developing countries. But Bush was deeply influenced by the drumbeat conservative attacks on global warming as a hoax and part of the liberal agenda to retard US industrial growth. The Obama administration is under heavy pressure to reverse Bush policy on Kyoto and drastically cut greenhouse emissions as well as to contribute billions to the global fund for the poor nations.
While China does not slough off the global warming threat, it's still a developing nation, and has a huge vested interest in watering down any effort to place restrictions on emissions from its expanding plants and factories. China so far has opposed the effort to place a "peak" year on capping carbon emissions.
The charge of imperialism and racism aside poor nations will push the US Europe, and Japan hard at the Copenhagen conference not only to come up with ways to clean up the air that they pollute and heated up the planet with but also to strike an accord that does not do further damage to the tottering economies of the poorest of poor nations. They rich industrial nations did the damage to the earth and the economies of poor nations. The burden is on them to undue it. They must fulfill their pledge to shell out the money that they promised to boost poor nations. That's literally the price to make Copenhagen a true success for the planet.
Cash is the key to unlocking the grand climate bargain between the rich and poor world, as was apparent even before the brokering had got under way in Copenhagen. At the end of the first week of talking, this reality has become even starker, for a whole host of reasons.
For one thing, the first world is resisting moving things forward through the power of its own example. The European Council yesterday failed to make any immediate advance on its original offer of a 20% emissions reduction. This despite Gordon Brown's hope that Europe might soon firm up its more tentative talk of a 30% cut. In the absence of action, money will have to do even more of the talking. The indicative offers from developing countries are rather more encouraging – the environmental consultancy Ecofys suggests they are broadly in line with what the scientists demand – but these offers come with financial strings attached, making assistance still more important. Developing countries reject the rich world's tendency to brand such funds as aid, regarding them as reparations incurred by the globe's north for creating a problem which will do most damage in the south. The strength of the feelings showed, when a top negotiator on behalf of the poor countries dubbed Mr Brown worse than a climate-change denier for having squandered all the money on the banks.
It was thus a significant moment when the European Union put some real money on the table yesterday, even if it was not nearly enough in order to seal the deal. The first hurdle is to prove that the €7.2bn pledged over three years is genuine new money, and not – as so often happens when the west trumpets its virtue – the relabelling of existing funds. The second hurdle is persuading Japan and America to match the cash. Even after both obstacles are cleared, however, the bigger challenge will remain. Namely, establishing a funding stream that can be credibly banked on to increase its flow when the climate crisis tightens its grip.
Mr Brown, together with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, yesterday signalled this was understood by proposing a so-called Tobin tax on financial transactions to provide reliable transnational revenues for climate assistance. Paying the planet while throwing sand in the wheels of freewheeling finance is precisely the sort of imaginative leap that the moment demands. But asking the IMF to review the idea is a very long way from making anything practical happen. While the US treasury continues to oppose it, a new global tax is not going to happen. Either America must soften its stance, or it must devise its own means to raise the money. As so often before, an anxious world is warily casting eyes in the direction of Washington.
We didn’t expect much from the first week of the global warming conference in Copenhagen. Countries need to do a little posturing before getting down to the hard work, which is supposed to start on Monday. But the belligerent talk from China seemed to go well beyond the usual positioning.
The best hope is that the talks will produce an interim understanding under which industrialized countries would commit to fairly precise targets for reduced emissions, and others, like China, to broader but measurable goals. The industrial countries would be expected to help poorer countries shift to less-polluting forms of energy.
That would set the stage for a legally binding deal in 2010. But there is no chance of even an interim agreement without the enthusiastic participation of China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China’s absence would give other developing countries — and the United States Senate — an excuse to do less than needed.
Beijing’s recent pledge to slow the growth in emissions seemed like a positive shift in attitude. Then on Tuesday, in a surprising show of defensiveness, China’s top negotiator, Su Wei, said the greatest burden rested with the industrialized countries and jumped on the United States, Japan and the European Union for not being aggressive enough. Another Chinese official urged Washington to do “some deep soul-searching” and improve its proposal.
Todd Stern, the chief American negotiator, responded correctly: With emissions in many industrialized countries peaking or declining, just about all of the growth in greenhouse gases is expected to come from the developing world between now and 2030, half from China. Rich nations must still reduce emissions sharply, Mr. Stern said, but “there is no way to solve this problem by giving the major developing countries a pass.”
China has also been demanding that rich nations contribute hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help poor countries address the threat of climate change. Again Mr. Stern was blunt. Washington is prepared to help those who need it, but given China’s huge reserves and revved-up economy, he said he could not envision “public funds, certainly not from the United States, going to China.”
The most positive development has been a pledge by the European Union to contribute $10.5 billion over the next three years to help poorer countries deal with climate change. The United States has said that it will make a contribution but has not said how big it will be.
Transparency is another difficult issue that must be resolved, at least in principle, this week. There is no point in setting targets, or threatening penalties for noncompliance, unless countries are required to report emissions accurately. Transparency has never been one of Beijing’s virtues, and emerging countries generally need aid to create sophisticated monitoring systems.
Copenhagen’s broadest challenge is finding an equitable way to distribute the burden of confronting climate change. Despite some differences, the industrialized nations have pretty much agreed to trim their emissions by 15 percent to 20 percent from 2005 levels in the next 10 years, and by 80 percent by midcentury. And all seem to be willing to make expensive investments to get there. President Obama will need help from Congress, no sure thing.
A host of developing countries — including India, Brazil, Indonesia — have put broad goals on the table, though in some cases they seem more aspirational than real. But the bottom line is that the hope for a meaningful deal is vanishingly small if China doesn’t sign on.
World leaders and VIPs began pouring into Copenhagen Monday morning for the city's long-awaited climate summit, arriving in style in a fleet of gas-guzzling limos and luxury cars.
Most delegates to the climate change conference haven't exactly been hoofing their way to Denmark's capital, swarming the city's airport with 140 private jets, 1,200 hired limousines and a carbon footprint the size of a small country.
Video shot on the scene Monday shows squads of new arrivals at the green gathering pulling up in BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, sleek Volvos and plush Jaguars. A bus reserved for the delegates rode along empty outside the conference center.
The head of Copenhagen's biggest limo company says her business usually has a dozen cars on the road. But during the conference — which has been billed as the last best chance to save the environment — she'll have 200 vehicles churning out fumes, the Daily Telegraph reported.
"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," Majken Friss Jorgensen told the newspaper. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."
France alone has ordered 42 vehicles, she said, and the auto supply in Denmark is very quickly drying up. To make up for shortages, Jorgensen and her competitors are bringing in lines of limos from as far away as Germany and Sweden.
"We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand," she said, adding that just five cars in her fleet will be environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles, which are almost impossible to procure in tax-heavy Denmark.
Once the estimated 30,000 delegates, activists, protesters and members of the press arrive this week and next, they'll find a sumptuous and steeply priced spread awaiting them.
Expensive hotels are sold out, and the conference organizers have been busy laying 560 miles of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet, according to the Times of London
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The conference center hosting the meetings has set up four "climate kitchens" to cook healthy, organic meals for attendees, but they aren't coming cheap.
Visitors ordering the regular meal will get finger sandwiches, a quiche, some cheese and dessert, but those going "deluxe" get a mini croissant, canape with smoked salmon, mini pizzas, fancy cheese and some pineapple in chocolate — all for an estimated $40 a person.
The whole conference rings up at just under $215 million, according to a report from the U.K.-based Taxpayers' Alliance, which argued that even though delegates to the climate conference don't expect to emerge with any signed commitments, they're still doing potential damage by making their two-week visit.
Conference organizers have gone the whole nine yards seeking to offset the Copenhagen carbon crunch (the U.N. estimates an output of 41,000 tons of gas), using energy-efficient lights, powering the proceedings with a giant wind turbine, and offering visitors recycled materials instead of wasteful plastic water bottles. They've also purchased carbon offsets to help manage the output from their 12-day affair.
But Matthew Sinclair, the research director for the Taxpayers' Alliance, said their presence means that "a huge amount of money is going to be spent on the summit, and thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emitted to get there, just to give the delegates a good photo opportunity."
