Future prospects for climate repair

A man walks past smoke coming from cooling towers of a power plant in Yingtan, in China's Jiangxi province, Nov. 26. (CNS/ Reuters)

Analysis

A historic U.N. world climate conference ended Dec. 19 with only a nonbinding “Copenhagen Accord” to show for two weeks of debate and frustration. It was a deal short on concrete steps against global warming but signaling perhaps a new start for rich-poor cooperation on climate change.

Will Copenhagen’s near collapse and halfhearted outcome help or hinder the effort to repair our climate?

The agreement brokered by President Barack Obama with China and others in last-minute hours of diplomacy sets up the first significant program of climate aid to poorer nations. Although it urges deeper cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it does nothing to demand them. That will now be subject to continuing talks this year.

U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer assessed the results for reporters. It’s “an impressive accord,” he said of the three-page document. “But it’s not an accord that is legally binding, not an accord that pins down industrialized countries to targets.”

Food aid groups, environmentalists and a handful of developing countries were unconvinced that much progress had been made.

“The deal is a triumph of spin over substance. It recognizes the need to keep warming below 2 degrees but does not commit to do so. It kicks back the big decisions on emissions cuts,” said Jeremy Hobbs of Oxfam International, a group that works with developing countries.

Some world leaders welcomed the Copenhagen Accord. Despite its lack of targets to curb emissions, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders agree to defend the new climate deal.

“This breakthrough lays the foundation for international action in the years to come,” Chancellor Merkel told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag. “Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order, nothing more but also nothing less. Those who are only putting Copenhagen down are helping those who want to blockade rather than move forward,” the chancellor added.

Comments displaying disappointment were plentiful from the world’s Catholic aid agencies.

Caritas Internationalis, a consortium of Catholic relief agencies, and CIDSE, an alliance of Catholic development agencies, denounced the Copenhagen Accord as “a weak and morally reprehensible deal which will spell disaster for millions of the world’s poorest people.”

Safia Abbi of Cordaid Kenya, a Catholic development and aid agency, said, “I’m angry at the world leaders. I feel they have the power to act, but they are not acting.”

James Hansen, director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, didn’t go at all. In a recent interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!” he said: “I’m actually quite pleased with what happened at Copenhagen, because now we have basically a blank slate. We have China and the United States talking to each other, and it’s absolutely essential. Those are the two big players that have to come to an agreement. But it has to be an honest agreement, one which addresses the basic problem. And that is that fossil fuels are the cheapest source of energy on the planet. And unless we address that and put a price on the emissions, we can’t solve the problem.”

Hansen advocates putting a price on carbon emissions so that the cost of fossil fuel use rises and the alternatives -- energy efficiency, renewable energies, nuclear power -- then begin to be cost-competitive.

Was the Copenhagen Accord strong enough to start a virtuous cycle of nations upping their clean-energy commitments? Or will the profound distrust that brought this conference to the brink of disaster remain the dominant motif of international climate diplomacy?

Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, who attended the conference, said: “As a Danish prince once said, that is the question, but we won’t know the answer for a while. Will the initial pledges of financing for climate solutions in the world’s poorest nations translate into ongoing, creative and reliable financing for climate justice? It will be months, perhaps years, before we find out.

“But there are important, if more modest, lessons that we can learn from Copenhagen. The hopeful thing about the speeches given by the leaders of the major carbon-emitting nations was the firmness with which almost all of them reiterated their unilateral commitment to making significant, if inadequate, cuts in emissions. Nations still think locally rather than globally. We need to start virtuous cycles. A source of hope is that once nations start on a low-carbon pathway, it becomes self-reinforcing. It’s getting started on the pathway that’s hard.”

Pope believes the world needs to first pick the low-hanging fruit, the very easiest steps that can mitigate climate change.

“In conflict diplomacy there’s a well-established approach to these kinds of collective-action problems based on distrust: Find some low-risk, win-win steps that will enable all parties to show good faith, and start doing them quickly. Fortunately, climate diplomacy has an extraordinary number of such opportunities,” he said.

“If the Copenhagen Accord is to serve as the basis for something more robust and meaningful -- something that builds on individual national commitments to create a collective, global transformation -- then we need to take these easy steps and demonstrate that we all, truly, are beginning to understand that a low-carbon future is in our own best interest.”

Watch the NCR Ecology channel and the NCR Today group blog for updates on the Copenhagen climate conference.

[Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.]