About Social Media Today
The news about the upcoming climate conference/food fight/whatever in Copenhagen continues to reach new levels of weirdness.
I’m doing my best to stay away from news about Copenhagen, simply because anyone who cares to can find more on it than he or she could possibly want, and I (usually) feel I don’t have anything new to add. But the latest round up things to darken the port of my newsreader has prompted me to break my self-imposed restriction.
Africa agrees on secret climate damages demand:
African leaders agreed on Tuesday on how much cash to demand from the rich world to compensate for the impact of climate change on the continent but kept the figure secret ahead of next month’s Copenhagen talks.
The United Nations summit in Denmark will try to agree on how to counter climate change and come up with a post-Kyoto treaty protocol to curb emissions.
“We have set a minimum beyond which we will not go,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who will represent Africa at the talks, told reporters. “But I am not in a position to tell you what that minimum figure will be.”
Exhaustive preparatory talks since 2007 have failed to solve splits between rich and poor countries or find extra funds to help developing nations to pay for expensive technology to ensure they do not over pollute as their economies grow.
“There are many calculations including up to the $100 billion (a year) mark that has been set by some experts. We will be very flexible,” Meles said.
Poor nations want rich countries to cut emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. But some in the West complain that such cuts are not realistic, especially so soon after the global economic downturn.
So far, promises by the rich fall short, at cuts of about 11 to 15 percent.
THREATENED WALKOUT
Fearing that the talks may fail, Denmark last week said it would ask world leaders to come for the final two days of the December 7-18 conference to push for a deal at the meeting, originally meant for environment ministers.
Meles — who has threatened a walkout of the 52 African nations he will represent — said his priorities at the talks would be to ensure carbon emissions are reduced and to secure a fair yearly compensation amount for Africa.
There are only two possibilities here:
First, the overall tone and use of the word “demand” came from the journalists covering this story, and not the principle players. If that’s the case, then the countries involved need to speak up as loudly and clearly as possible, and make it clear that they’re not “demanding” anything.
Second, if the reporting is accurate in this detail, then the countries involved need to switch tactics and walk back from what they’ve already said.
Whether these African countries are in any position to “demand” anything is one issue, and how they should be talking to the world is something else entirely. Few things would make voters in some countries I won’t name (but the most prominent example’s initials are U.S.) resist an agreement and financial aid to any other country quicker than the kind of statements and apparent willingness to play hardball as implied by the above article.
For their own sake, as well as that of the entire world, every country needs to ditch its preconceptions and political baggage and work toward the only goal that matters, getting a good, verifiable agreement that results in the quickest CO2 emissions reductions we can manage.
A delay of a global agreement to fight climate change would have a “human cost” as well as an economic one, says the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, to The Guardian.
If the Copenhagen climate conference fails to deliver a meaningful agreement, there is an “extremely high” risk that the talks will drift into a deadlock, says Steiner.
A delay will increase the risks of harming the planet and the economic costs of dealing with climate change, warns Steiner.
“There is a moral hazard in any attempt to further delay action on climate change,” he says to the Guardian. “Political leaders in Copenhagen will have to explain in a credible way to the two to three billion people who are living on the frontline of climate change why they could not reach a deal.”
“I believe that a deal [in Copenhagen] is still do-able. But any delay has real cost implications in economic, social and human terms and those implications must be at the forefront of the people’s minds as they go to Copenhagen,” he says.
The problem, of course, is that far too many of the politicians involved have constituencies won’t like what I and most other enviros would consider a “good” agreement.
Observers: Risk of longtime stalemate:
The climate negotiations on a legally binding treaty to combat global warming may go on for years and years – like the Doha negotiations on liberating global trade that after eight years of talks have still not come to a conclusion.
A longtime stalemate of climate negotiations is the risk, since world leaders have given up on reaching the December 2009 deadline for a legally binding treaty – set in 2007 at the UN climate change conference on Bali, observers warn.
“It raises the specter of having a stalemate on the legally binding part lingering for years to come,” says Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists to Reuters. He says Copenhagen must set a firm deadline for negotiating a treaty text.
“The fear is that you get a deal in Copenhagen and an unclear process going forward which could lead to a Doha situation,” says Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF environmental group’s global climate initiative, according to Reuters.
The United Nations has rejected any Doha comparison, pointing to unprecedented support from world leaders for a climate deal.
Head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, Yvo de Boer, has suggested a mid-2010 deadline to tie down all legal points. He wants to keep momentum from the December Copenhagen UN climate conference that now aims at a politically binding agreement, according to the Danish host of the conference, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
A mid-2010 deadline could mean closure of a deal, before the US mid-term elections might disturb the process, states Reuters.
Note the part about the US mid-terms. Ouch.
As I’ve said before, I’m not overly concerned about whether we get a good agreement next month or in another six months. My big worry is that we get either a ridiculously bad agreement or endless wrangling, as suggested above, and no agreement at all.
And speaking of politics colliding with reality…
US bids for bilateral climate change deals with China and India:
The Obama administration is hoping to win new commitments to fight global warming from China and India in back-to-back summits next month, the Guardian has learned, including the first Indian emissions trading scheme.
The US hopes the new commitments will breathe life into the moribund negotiations to seal a global treaty on climate change in Copenhagen in December, by setting out what action each country will take. But many observers say such bilateral deals also risk seriously weakening any Copenhagen agreement by allowing the idea of a global limit on greenhouse gas emissions to be abandoned.
The US’s twin diplomatic push will see Barack Obama meeting China’s president Hu Jintao in Beijing on November 16-17 before playing host to India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh at the White House on November 24. The visits appear timed to provide a much-needed boost to a proposed law to reduce US emissions now before the Senate, as well as to the Copenhagen talks.
This one makes me very nervous. Once the largest emitters start cutting bi-lateral deals, I think it will significantly hurt, not help, the chances for reaching a good, worldwide agreement.
Maybe I’m just being cynical; clearly President Obama and his team have judgment that’s a few orders of magnitude better than mine about such issues.
Visit Lou's Graphs Page.
Link to original post
