Most heavyweight emitters of C02 could “agree to a roadmap leading nowhere, but not a roadmap leading to a legally-binding deal”
THERE’S A telling phrase in property circles to measure the commitment of participants to a project that could have been based on the Great Irish Breakfast : “the hen is involved, but the pig is committed”.
And so it was in Durban between countries that really want to take urgent action on climate change and those that don’t.
The EU was to the fore in demanding a credible “roadmap” for negotiations on a comprehensive, legally-binding agreement to be concluded in 2015 “at the latest”, so that it could come into effect in 2020 when existing – and inadequate – voluntary pledges to cut emissions under the Copenhagen Accord run out.
Europe also managed to forge a “coalition of the willing” with the Alliance of Small Island States, which fear they could be wiped off the map by global warming, and the least developed countries group, many of them in Africa, to put pressure on the US, China and India, the big emitters that opposed an ambitious deal.
Last Friday evening the BBC quoted a “seasoned observer of the UN process” as saying of the draft text then being discussed, which didn’t even mention 2020: “Buy 10 years’ delay in action for the US, China, India and Brazil, and risk making the most vulnerable countries ‘road kill’ on the big emitters’ highway to the future.”
A shaming point was reached on Wednesday when US envoy Todd Stern’s speech to the plenary session was interrupted by a 21-year-old American college student, Abigail Borah, who said Stern had forfeited the right to speak on behalf of the US because it had “delayed ambition for far too long”, adding “2020 is too late to wait!”.
Dozens of delegates in the plenary hall gave her an enthusiastic round of applause.
They knew, as everyone did, that the US was not going to sign up for anything in Durban that would lead to a legally-binding agreement to cut its emissions; indeed, this is still one of the main obstacles to a comprehensive, rules-based deal.
The US could “agree to a roadmap leading nowhere, but not a roadmap leading to a legally-binding deal”, an EU source told Reuters.
Anything that smacked of a serious commitment would be unsaleable back home because of the toxic “political dynamics” in Washington, where Republicans are both sceptical and hostile.
There is insecurity, even paranoia, among Americans about China gaining a competitive advantage over the US.
Once definitively a “developing country”, China is now the world’s second largest economy – producing many of the goods we all buy and use – and it has already outstripped the US as the number one carbon emitter.
Yet China’s annual emissions, at 5.3 tonnes per capita, are less than a third of those of the US (17.5 tonnes) and even lower than Ireland’s 9.8 tonnes, according to World Bank figures for 2008.
In the case of India, another major emerging economy, per capita emissions for its 1.17 billion people are as minuscule as 1.4 tonnes.
So it’s no wonder that the head of India’s delegation in Durban, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan, took a “relatively tough stance”, as EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said. At its heart was the equitable concept that countries have “common but differentiated responsibilities” to deal with global warming.
The stern-faced Natarajan, who became one of the pivotal figures at the conference, noted that most people in India “continue to struggle with the challenge of eking out their livelihoods, meeting their basic needs, and cannot be expected to be legally bound to reduce their emissions when they make no emissions at all”.
Martin Khor, director of the South Centre “think-tank”, said the US demand that “China must be treated like me, India must be treated like me” was simply unfair.
“India is a low-income developing country, ranked 132 in per capita emissions, while China is a middle-income developing country .”
They’ve both come late to belching out emissions, compared to Europe, the US, Japan and other developed countries.
And while both China and India accept that there is a climate crisis and a yawning “gigatonne gap” that needs to be closed, they insisted that it was the responsibility of developed countries to take action on this first.
Stern said at the outset that laying down such conditions no longer made any sense because it was “premised on that kind of division between developed and developing countries”, dating back to the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “and the world has changed dramatically since then”.
The EU would agree.
As Hedegaard said, “we tried to chart a pathway to change something that hasn’t been changed in many, many years – the division of the world into two camps that was decided in the last century, in 1992 and 1997 – and that we all commit, in a legally-binding form, based on common but differentiated responsibilities”.
The EU’s 27 member states and like-minded developed countries such as Norway and Switzerland have now pledged to renew the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, but it would only cover about 15 per cent of global emissions.
That’s why setting a mandate to achieve a much wider international agreement was regarded by the EU as so critical.
Whatever about its drawbacks, preserving the “architecture” of Kyoto, with mandatory requirements for targets to be met, was seen as a sine qua non by the EU and most developing countries, including China and India, not least because it didn’t apply to them.
The EU also has its own targets for an emissions cut of 20 per cent by 2020.
The US, on the other hand, has only pledged to reduce its emissions by 17 per cent (with 2005 as a base year) by 2020, which experts say equates to a cut of just 3 per cent on benchmark 1990 levels.
And with President Barack Obama’s climate and energy package failing to win approval in the US Congress, even this may not be achieved.