Well, that was refreshing.
A few hours ago, the new US administration made their first public input into the UNFCCC process! It was yet another pleasurable reminder that G.W. Bush is gone, and that his legacy is slowly dying.
Todd Stern, the new, much-celebrated, US Special Envoy on Climate Change, opened his speech with a message that he transmitted ‘direct from President Obama’:
“We’re very glad we’re back. We want to make up for lost time, and we are seized with the urgency of the task before us.”
This was received with a rapturous, enthusiastic round of applause – the sound of hope ringing in the room.
“You will not here anyone on this very skilled US team cast doubt upon the science of global climate change,” said Stern, again demonstrating how substantive a shift occurred on November 4. Every climate campaigner in the room, when reflecting back to the dark days of climate scepticism in the US administration, seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at that moment.
Stern even said that ‘the US acknowledges their responsibility as the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases’. Another big step forward. Another sign of hope. With all this hope, it would have been so easy to get carried away.
Thankfully though, Tuvalu, an AOSIS member, brought the room back town to earth after America spoke, warning us to take the words of the US with a grain of salt:
“It is beholden on me as a representative of the most vulnerable country in the world to speak out. We welcome the United States remarks… but we hope the rhetoric is matched by reality.”
With this in mind, I’d like to offer some advice to US activists – don’t pause your campaigning to celebrate the government’s rhetoric. Let’s not be stupid about this. Don’t ‘give them time’ without criticism, naively hoping that they’ll do the right thing, translating good words into real action. If you don’t push them, hard, then you won’t be rewarded. We learned this the hard way in Australia, after the election of Kevin Rudd, November 24 2007. Let me tell a story to illustrate…
Consider the parallels with the current ‘Obama situation’:
One week after his election, our new PM Kevin Rudd publicly ratified the Kyoto protocol, as his first act of government. It was publicly acclaimed as great leadership. The nation celebrated. I was proud to be Australian again. However, in 20-20 hindsight, it wasn’t anything more than a symbolic act, and it certainly wasn’t ‘international leadership’ – it didn’t step out ahead of the pack and lead, it just brought Australia into the ‘Kyoto club’ that they had been out of for so long. Our praise of the government’s action went on for a little too long.
Following ratification, the Rudd government announced a year-long plan of reports, drafts and papers, which now seems to have been designed to placate the Australian environment movement, create the illusion of progress, and distract us from ‘the big picture’. The Garnaut interim report, draft report and review; the green paper and then the white paper on emissions trading, the targets. Australia’s targets were originally scheduled to be announced well before Poznan, but were instead delayed until the day after COP14 closed – and then they were only 5-15% below 2000 levels – a total disaster.
The ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’ – government-speak for Australian emissions trading – is now so poorly designed and gives out so much compensation to polluters, that the climate movement in Australia is now saying that it must be scrapped in its current form. One year after the ‘inspiration’ of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong have demonstrated that in fact, they are still laggards, not leaders on climate.
And all this because many of us in the climate movement naively trusted them, placing our hope in government to bring us the solutions that we wanted, and ‘giving them the space’ to make progress through the bureaucracy. It didn’t work.
America – don’t make the same mistake. Don’t trust Obama to save your nation’s climate policies without serious pushing from the people. You of all nations know that healthy public criticism is what makes democracy great.
I am personally extremely concerned – especially after today’s press conference in Bonn of American climate NGOs - about the polite restraint within the NGO sector from criticism of the new administration.
Isn’t it clear to the US movement that Obama’s target of 1990 by 2020 is entirely inadequate, and needs to be shifted? Even the old, conservative IPCC science says ‘at least 25-40% below 1990 levels’ is what is required by 2020. Al Gore’s ‘We’ campaign is talking about 100% renewable energy by 2020. That sort of thing is visionary, and that is where government policy needs to go.
In Todd Stern’s presentation in plenary today, he referred to the possibility of agreeing on a global reduction target of ‘more than 15% by 2020′. Sorry, America, but that’s the wrong answer. The global target needs to be at least 40% by 2020. 15% is strongly likely lead to runaway climate change, and destroy our future. Not good enough, Obama.
Additionally, they new administration is still focused on the ‘economic growth’ paradigm, and on ‘capitalising’ on the solutions to climate change – which is a long way from the total paradigm-shift that many in civil society are now calling for, as an opportunity emerging from the financial crisis. Also, Obama is persisting with Bush’s ‘Major Economies’ process – having renamed it from the ‘Major Economies Meeting’, or ‘MEM’ to the ‘MEF’ instead. That’s ‘F’ for ‘Forum’. By including 16 ‘major economies’ in parallel talks to the UN climate process, they are effectively removing the voices of the smaller, poorer, and more climate-vulnerable nations from their discussions. It is not morally correct.
So what should the movement do about this? While it’s great that Obama is not Bush, and we should smile about that – let’s not allow this to create an illusion that the new administration is somehow a ‘leader’ on climate. Because they certainly aren’t. The real leadership is from the most vulnerable nations – AOSIS and LDCs. And it is with them that our solidarity and focus should lie.
Strengthening the US climate movement is crucial. The next four decades to 2050 will be a people-led but government-supported sustainability revolution. The USA, even after today’s progress, still doesn’t support the growing movement. The government is still a block to action.
If Obama’s reputation as ‘a movement man’ – a man who listens to the people – has any substance to it, then the path to removing their block and replacing it with support is clear.
As the climate movement, we need to not pause, but to keep criticising, encouraging and pushing the USA in the right direction, in negotiations and in the public sphere, until their political walls give way.
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For more Bonn coverage on IGHIH, click these links :
1. The pre-sessionals (Friday 27th)
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Some observations:
Almost every major emitter now has some form of emissions reduction policy in the air. Japan and Mexico talk about 50% cuts by 2050. India vows not to exceed developed-world emissions. South Africa intends to peak in the 2020s, China projects it will peak in the 2030s.
It seems likely to me that Copenhagen will ratify this status quo – whatever individual nations feel capable of accomplishing – and will concentrate on auxiliary measures like carbon market integration, carbon credits for reforestation, energy R&D collaboration, technology transfer, and adaptation finance.
At some point it will become clear what sort of long-range CO2 concentration all those national targets add up to. Almost certainly it will be something above 450 ppm.
Targets of 350 ppm or less do now have advocates at these negotiations – namely, the most affected countries – but these are also the countries contributing the least to the problem.
My personal plan for getting to below 350 is as follows.
1) *Make zero-emissions economic development for this 350 bloc a conceptual focus.* If you add up all the LDCs and the members of AOSIS, you get somewhere over 50 states, with a combined population of hundreds of millions, but making a very small contribution to the world’s emissions. In a sense they encapsulate the world’s predicament: how can a large population get out of poverty without fossil fuels and deforestation? As Deepa Gupta said in a recent post, people, societies, and regions that are poor often have other forms of wealth. Nonetheless, those millions of people are striving for a better life, and it is in everyone’s interest that they should get there without exacerbating the climate problem, and those societies are beginning to take that goal on board as well (thus the Maldives’ intention to become carbon-neutral). By now people are interested in climate solutions coming from anywhere on Earth, and are similarly willing to share them widely; but I think those of us outside the “350 bloc” should pay particular attention to climate solutions (both innovative and conservative) coming from those countries, and to opportunities for collaboration. The LDCs and the island states can be a source of solutions, for the world.
2) *Work out the consequences of a zero-emissions policy for the major emitters, especially in energy and transport sectors, and get these scenarios into the discussion.* The current targets are weak because reductions have a cost, not just for the fossil-fuel industries but for everyone who currently relies upon them. While economics is certainly in need of a rethink, it is a mistake to rely solely on moral arguments or on the concept of an environmental emergency and to neglect the dour task of tallying up quantitative costs and benefits. If it looks like doing without coal is going to knock a few points off the GDP of your country, don’t avoid the issue; try to find out exactly how bad the problem is. I did this in a rough way for Anna’s home state of Queensland, here. At this stage, such estimates are more important as an exploration of possibility than as a formulation of policy; it’s not “we must sacrifice 5% of GDP in order to do our part” – though for some places it may come to that – but more like, “we can do it and it costs *at most* 5% of GDP”. (The readiness to bear a big cost must remain part of the discourse, but there should also be an openness to finding cheaper ways, or even ways that produce a net gain.) It will be a sign of progress when the policy discussion regularly considers the zero-emission option, but it won’t happen until a price-tag can be (tentatively) attached.
3) *Campaign for Copenhagen to institutionalize the possibility and desirability of deeper and faster emissions cuts than are initially envisaged.* As I said above, the various national trajectories as currently envisioned will almost certainly add up to a long-range concentration above 450ppm (and certainly above 350ppm). I think there is no chance that today’s targets for 2050 or even 2020 will remain fixed; by the time we get to 2020, everyone will be aiming for much greater reductions than were proposed in 2009. The governments of 2009 are unlikely to change their declared targets in 2009, and the governments of 2020 are likely to be much more ambitious; what is the rational way to deal with this situation? It would be easy enough to add some words to the treaty stating the desire of all parties to be as ambitious as possible in their future reductions, but that’s rather weak. Kyoto has proceeded in five-year commitment periods; if Copenhagen adopts this model, perhaps every five years there could be particular attention to the tightening-up of proposed emissions trajectories. I’m not really sure what’s best, I don’t know enough about the mechanism that Copenhagen is going to create, but as it is almost guaranteed that Copenhagen’s targets won’t be good enough and that there will be a strong reaction to this from many quarters, it will be desirable to build into the system avenues for constructive action by those who want better targets.