The Kyoto Protocol initiated the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows industrial countries to get credits to put towards their Kyoto targets by funding clean energy projects in developing states. The scheme took off slowly, since few countries were willing to act until Kyoto had finally been ratified. Some 850 projects had been approved by the middle of 2009, most of them located in the four biggest developing countries: China, India, Brazil and South Africa.2 The CDM is not quite the win–win framework it seems, since it allows developed countries to relax their own emissions reduction efforts.
It is uncertain how far the CDM has actually helped to introduce renewable energy projects into the developing countries. Marginal projects dominate, such as the containment of industrial gases by bolting on filters to already existing pipes. It has been said that perhaps half the reductions claimed are the result of ‘accounting tricks’ and are empty of content. In one case, the projects in a specific country were all concerned with emissions of HFC-23, a by-product of the manufacture of refrigerants. The total cost of the parts amounted to $70 million, while the value of the subsidy provided through the CDM was some $1 billion. Emissions reductions were achieved, but in a cumbersome and highly inefficient way, with much of the money being swallowed up as a result of corrupt practices.3
Not much has been done to focus the CDM more effectively, mainly because of the political stakes involved. Environmentalists are reluctant to criticize the only means that exists for directly helping the developing countries. As just pointed out, the EU needs the credit mechanism to help meet its targets. The developing countries, or some of them, especially China, the leading recipient, do get investment. A report from the World Bank estimates that the CDM has stimulated investments of $59 billion since it was first established.
Figure 8.1 Registered Kyoto projects up to 2007
Source: ‘Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme Isn’t Working’, Open Europe, August 2007, p. 29, graph 5
Further negotiations
A further round of climate change negotiations carried on under the auspices of the UN was held in Bali in 2007. Some 12,000 delegates attended. Following arduous discussions, the president of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar, announced: ‘We have finally achieved the breakthrough the world has been waiting for: the Bali roadmap!’4 The roadmap was designed as a new negotiation process to replace Kyoto.
However, probably the best one can say about Bali is that the negotiations did not collapse. The roadmap was little more than a vague sketch. The agreements did not contain a single specific commitment. They offered no recognition of the problems inherent in the Kyoto framework, or any acknowledgement of the minimal impact it has had on world emissions. As one commentator put it: ‘If this is success, give me failure.’5
The roadmap arrived at in such a tortuous way in Bali was supposed to supply a framework for the UN-brokered negotiations that took place in Copenhagen in December 2009. There were other developments over the months leading up to Copenhagen too. Following the election of President Obama, the US re-engaged in UN climate negotiations. The new leadership breathed fresh life into the Major Economies Forum – a grouping of the 17 largest economies originally convened under the Bush administration – and brought climate change within its remit. Australia and Japan, which under previous conservative governments had resisted significant carbon reduction targets, pledged to reduce their emissions by 25 per cent over a 2000 base and a 1990 base respectively. President Obama pledged that the US would reduce emissions by 17 per cent over 2005 levels by 2020 and by more than 80 per cent by 2050.6
The large developing countries also made significant moves. In November 2009 the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, committed his country to a goal of reducing its energy intensity by 40–45 per cent by 2020. Shortly afterwards the Indian government followed suit, introducing a carbon intensity target of 20–25 per cent reduction by the same date. At about the same time the US and China endorsed a Memorandum of Understanding, designed to promote cooperation on energy and climate change policy. The EU also held summit meetings with the Chinese and the Indian leadership in November, proclaiming the importance of reaching concrete outcomes in Copenhagen and agreeing to act together to help achieve this.
On the basis of the developments noted above, many commentators at the time were optimistic about the chances of success. Indeed, many political leaders were too, since they flocked to Copenhagen in large numbers, something that had not happened at previous UN summits. More than 40,000 delegates attended the meetings, while some 5,000 journalists were there to cover the event. There were 122 prime ministers or presidents, the largest number ever assembled together save at the UN headquarters in New York.7
However, not only did attendees at Copenhagen fail to reach agreement on any binding carbon reductions; the whole process was chaotic and disjointed. President Obama arrived only on the last day of the negotiations. On meeting him, Hillary Clinton commented: ‘Mr President, this is the worst meeting I’ve ever been to since the eighth grade student council.’8 The main reason concerned the disagreements that existed between states, especially between the developed and developing countries. However, these conflicts were compounded by strategic mistakes made by the Danish hosts, and by disagreements over tactics within the Danish government.
The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was a supporter of the climate change sceptic Bjørn Lomborg. He and the environment minister, Connie Hedegaard, who was much more committed to the project of securing widespread carbon reductions, did not see eye to eye. Prior to the meetings themselves, Anders Rasmussen left office to become the Secretary-General of NATO and another Rasmussen, Lars Lokke, the vice-chairman of the governing party, took over. At the same time, the conflicts within the Danish government worsened. Hedegaard was committed to the UN negotiating process, which those in the prime minister’s office thought too slow-moving.
The result was a twin-track strategy. The leaders of the developing countries were outraged at a document which was leaked as ‘secret’ to the Guardian newspaper, but which had in fact been in circulation for some while. Denmark was seen to be supporting only the interests of the developed nations, thus further accentuating the divisions that already existed. The whole process of negotiation dissolved into disorder.
The Danish prime minister decided to review and recast his unilateral strategy, this time bringing at least the larger of the developing countries on board. A three-page document summarizing some of the main aspirations of the negotiations was prepared. After Barack Obama arrived, a group of 26 leaders started drafting a revised text. Differences between the US and China at that point constituted one of the main sources of disagreement. Obama was trying to see Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader, but Wen seemed to be avoiding him. Obama also wanted to see the leaders of Brazil, India and South Africa, whose delegations appeared to be stalling things. Eventually all five leaders did meet, and agreed a deal between themselves – which became known as the Copenhagen Accord.
There then followed a further set of acrimonious discussions about the document, involving the original group of 26 and other countries. The most that the states present were prepared to do was to ‘take note’ of the Accord, which specified that participating nations were invited on a voluntary basis to report national carbon reduction and targets and plans to the UN.
What happened at Copenhagen came as a shock to the EU countries. The EU had seen itself as being in the vanguard of climate change policy, and its representatives initially expected to play a leading role in Copenhagen. Not a single EU country figured in the discussions of the five states that agreed upon the outline of the Accord. Several European leaders played a significant part in the group of 26, but they were not there at the crunch.
Far from being the detailed, comprehensive and binding framework originally envisaged, the Accord was essentially a short statement of intent, no more than three pages long. It emphasized the need for ‘deep cuts’ i
n emissions to hold the rise in global average temperatures to 2ºC and recognized that climate change is ‘one of the greatest challenges of our time’. The Accord stressed the need to reverse deforestation and to provide for resources coming from the richer countries to help states in the developing world struggling with the problem. The industrial countries in addition accepted the goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations cut carbon emissions.
The meetings in Copenhagen were a failure in terms of the ambitions that originally drove them. Yet in some ways the Accord actually represented an advance over the Kyoto-style approach. For the first time, it involved the large emerging economies – China, India and Brazil – in a very central role. The states that signed up to the Accord mostly did not just specify targets for 2020, but also set out plans, in varying levels of detail, to show how these targets would be achieved. A methodology for verifying the statistics provided by countries was agreed, previously a particular sticking point. By March 2010, more than 100 countries had signed up to the Accord, accounting for over 80 per cent of world greenhouse gas emissions. Of these, 72 had set out national plans for how emissions reductions would be achieved.
The next round of UN meetings was held in Cancun, Mexico, the successor event to Copenhagen, in December 2010. Expectations at Copenhagen had been high; for Cancun they were the opposite. Few heads of state attended and it was widely suggested beforehand that the chances of making any substantial progress were negligible.
In fact, the outcome was largely positive. The Mexican hosts had done their homework. They had spent months studying the tactical errors made at Copenhagen and were determined to avoid them this time. Since expectations were in any case so low, even relatively modest successes looked impressive. The motivation to keep the show on the road was strong enough to prevent groups of states that were unhappy about how negotiations were proceeding to stop short of undermining the whole enterprise. When a set of agreements was in fact reached on Saturday 11 December, it was greeted with thunderous applause and cheering.
Essentially, the Cancun agreements consolidated the Accord and adopted a reworked version of it as official UN policy. The agreements committed a wide range of countries to targets and actions to reduce emissions by 2020. All the major emitters were involved. The 2ºC target, mentioned in the Accord, was for the first time adopted officially by the UN. The procedures for the monitoring and verification of emissions outlined in the Accord were strengthened. An independent panel of assessors will be responsible for ensuring accuracy of reporting. The fund proposed in the Accord to assist the poorer countries was formally endorsed, together with the ambition of raising $100 billion annually by 2020. In spite of protests from some of the developing nations, the World Bank was named as interim trustee of the fund. The initiative on deforestation – which in fact antedated the Accord, although it was referred to in it (Reduced Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD) – was given more flesh. Finally, a continuing role for the CDM was endorsed, although little detail was provided as to in what guise.
The outcome of Cancun met with widespread approval, and from disparate groups. A spokesman for OXFAM observed: ‘The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine. The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them – crucially moving the world closer to the global deal that eluded the Copenhagen summit.’ Chris Huhne, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, was even more positive: ‘This is a turning point in the long-running saga of international climate change negotiations. We’ve got a deal here which, if I had to mark it, I would have said 8 out of 10. It’s way beyond what we were expecting only a few weeks ago and, indeed, way beyond what we were expecting at the beginning of the week.’9
Not everyone agreed, however. Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, compared the international negotiations to astrology. The talks meander on – now for more than 20 years – and their very continuity is perceived as a success. Targets are set and plans made, but with little or no practical consequences in terms of what they are supposed to achieve – namely, containing the impact of climate change:
In the meantime, every molecule of carbon dioxide emitted simply adds to all those emitted over the past century, inexorably increasing the level of warming and consequently the scope and scale of the impacts. This should be a challenging and increasingly uncomfortable message for all concerned. Instead, climate negotiations continue to be informed by the astrological view, where, through either ignorance or a desire to save face, it is assumed the problem will be the same next year as this. The science, however, tells a very different story; next year the problem will have become worse – as it has done each and every day we have failed to reduce emissions since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.10
Anderson is right. There is a dislocation between the snail-like pace of the international negotiations and the implacable nature of climate change, given the continuing advance of carbon emissions globally. This is not a reason to abandon the attempt, of course, since some sort of universal, or quasi-universal, framework for carbon reductions would undoubtedly be of great value. But it does strongly imply that we have to look elsewhere for the radicalism demanded in the short term, as indeed I have argued throughout this book. Moreover, the negotiations thus far put a great deal more emphasis upon the ‘what’ of emissions reductions – how much and by when – than upon the ‘how’ of the means whereby they may be achieved.
The role of the EU
The European Union first set out an integrated strategy for dealing with climate change issues at summit meetings in Cardiff and Vienna in 1998. The objective at that time was to discuss common modes of response on the part of the member–states and to assist them in meeting Kyoto targets. Climate change became one of the priorities in the 6th Framework Programme for Research, lasting from 2002 to 2006. The EU from the beginning recognized its obligations to help poorer countries, not just to concentrate upon its component nations. It has also emphasized that climate change policy must march in tandem with that concerning energy.
In January 2007 the European Commission announced an upgraded strategy to combat global warming. The core proposal was that the EU would cut its emissions by 20 per cent by 2020; that cut would rise to 30 per cent if and when the other industrial countries came on board. Renewable energy would form 20 per cent of the energy mix by then, with (controversially) a binding minimum 10 per cent use of biofuels in motor transport.
For the next 10 years, the developing countries, the Commission proposed, should make every effort to lower their emissions and should start to reduce them in absolute terms from 2020/5. The European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), on which more below, was envisaged as a crucial means of allowing the EU countries to meet their commitments – the Commission anticipated at that point that means may be found to link different trading schemes into a single worldwide one.
In early 2008 the Commission put forward a new directive, setting out a framework for the EU in terms of the 2020 targets that member–states would be expected to achieve. The directive recognized that they start from different positions as far as renewable energy is concerned. Moreover, some have made much greater efforts than others in the past to get their emissions down. Differences in GDP and GDP growth are also taken into account. Member–states that have a relatively low GDP and need high economic growth will be able to increase their greenhouse gas emissions compared to the baseline year of 2005.
Only the 10 per cent target for the use of biofuels was set as a constant across the EU. The Commission recognized the criticisms that have been made of biofuels, but argued that it is possible to produce them without incurring environmental damage, and proposed that stringent criteria would be deployed to ensure that this was so. Most, however, will have to be imported.
Several leading scientists, as well as numerous NGOs, expressed their doubts about biofuels and criticized the EU�
��s plan. They argued that it is a mistake to introduce quotas for biofuels before their effects have been fully assessed. The chief scientific adviser to the British government, John Beddington, commented that rising demand for biofuels in the US delivered a ‘major shock’ to world agriculture, producing elevated world food prices. Moreover, if biofuel production were to come at the expense of further deforestation, the outcome would be ‘profoundly stupid’.11
Some major countries at the time, including France and Germany, initially expressed concern over their emissions reductions targets. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, at one point argued that France should not be set targets at all because the widespread use of nuclear power has already lowered its emissions levels. Business leaders from various states were critical of the EU acting on its own in relation to climate change. Higher energy costs, they said, would make European companies less competitive in the wider world and lead them to decamp elsewhere. German industrialists were especially worried about the competitiveness of their car, chemicals and steel industries. One in every seven jobs in Germany depends in some way upon the car industry.
The Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, admitted the validity of these concerns. ‘We all know’, he stated, ‘that there are sectors where the cost of cutting emissions could have a real impact on their competitiveness against companies in countries that do nothing.’12 There is no point in Europe setting up demanding regulations if the result is simply that production shifts to countries where there is an emissions free-for-all. International agreements, Barroso argued, would be one way to handle the difficulty, but if these cannot be reached, then the EU should look at compensation for the energy industries. Others have suggested a mechanism such as a carbon tax on imports. Nevertheless, in current proposals such ideas have been left on hold.
The Politics of Climate Change Page 22
