Rising hopes for a meaningful outcome at the Copenhagen climate talks have received a further boost with the news that Barack Obama and Indian leader Manmohan Singh will attend the 192-nation conference in its vital last days.
The US president now says he will go to Copenhagen on the last day rather than during this first week of talks as was his previous commitment. The Indian prime minister is now reported to have agreed to go to Copenhagen at its climax in Mid-December, joining around 100 heads of government who have confirmed attendance. Leaders from all the big emitter nations will now be there on both sides of the climate politics divide - the developed and developing nations. However, China is at this stage sending its number two, prime minister Wen Jiabao, rather than the president, Hu Jintao. Populous India’s presence is significant, being the second biggest source of emissions in developing world and, like China’s, growing fast.
The latest commitments of Obama and Singh raise the prospect that the intractable issues in negotiations over the past two years may be resolved in a political agreement by the end of the conference. It has been clear for some time that the sticking points in a new climate agreement – 2020 emissions targets for developed countries, curbs on emissions growth for fast-developing countries and funding to help all developing nations tackle emissions and adapt to climate change – can only be solved at the highest level.
This makes the last four days of the UN conference the critical time for progress when the politicians arrive from all over the world. Environment ministers will begin talks in earnest on December 15 to be followed by the entry of their national leaders on the last day, December 18. The last day of the talks now promises to be a powerful leaders summit devoted to climate change.
Many observers still have doubts over whether the deadlock over targets and burden-sharing of the past two years and longer can be resolved at Copenhagen. But if it can’t be done under the global spotlight of the meeting that has been so anticipated for that purpose, and by the most powerful forum of decision-makers that can be assembled, then its hard to see how it can be done at all for some time. It is also clear that leaders would not come if they thought there was going to be failure.
"Time is up. Over the next two weeks governments have to deliver," UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said yesterday. “I hope that as part of the negotiating process [Obama] comes with an ambitious American target … and strong financial support to reach out to developing countries,” de Boer said.
The big problem that can’t be moved, however, is that President Obama’s hands are politically tied on offering a more ambitious target to the modest one now on the table, the weakest of the developed nations. Whatever the White House does on climate change ideally needs to be sanctioned by Congress. This has left Obama unable to offer anything more than is being considered in cap and trade bill currently being drafted in the Senate. But it’s no coincidence that the federal Environment Protection Agency has now moved to finalise its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases on the eve of the UN conference. This ruling allows the US government to regulate carbon emissions through existing EPA laws without new laws from Congress. This won’t be Obama’s preferred option but it at least helps demonstrate to other nations in Copenhagen the new US commitment to meaningful action to cut emissions.
Obama does have more room to move on funding levels for climate assistance to poorer nations and over the weekend committed to paying the US’s “fair share" of what will be billions a year.
Already, expectations for a fully-detailed treaty have been let go and the focus is now on a political agreement over the broad nature of a global deal. But if leaders can come up with such a deal that attends to the major issues, then Copenhagen will have been a success. And it will exceed the sagging expectations of just a month ago.
UK prime minister Gordon Brown, one of the first to say he would go to Copenhagen, says any political deal would have to be quickly turned into a binding treaty to prevent it unravelling. “Our aim is a comprehensive and global agreement which is then converted to an internationally legally binding treaty in no more than six months”, Brown wrote for the Guardian/Observer newspaper group.
Bloomberg, Guardian, Times of India, Associated Press 6/12/09
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