E3G

Fog of War

By Tom Burke

The intent of such slippery use of language is to manage the headlines not to change the outcome. There will be a lot more of it as we get closer to Copenhagen without resolving the real problems with getting a legally binding treaty in December. The central problem boils down to finding a way for the United States to re-enter the global regime without wrecking it in the process.

Neither the rest of the industrialised world, nor the developing world, is willing to make further emissions reductions commitments until they know what the US will put on the table. Since these commitments are what drive the whole regime, there is an understandable unwillingness to agree all the other issues until they are known.

“It is one thing to agree to play extra time, quite another to ask for a replay. To accept a political declaration in Copenhagen ... would be to give up establishing a climate regime with any prospect of staying below 2 degrees. It would be asking for a replay that might never happen.”

It is the fading prospect of the passage of US domestic legislation to underpin US reduction commitments before December which has undermined confidence that a treaty can be agreed in Copenhagen. In effect, no US commitments, no deal. The world, and the US negotiators, are sensibly wary of repeating the Kyoto experience where the US signed up to international obligations it later had to repudiate in the face of Congressional opposition.

In itself, this is not an insurmountable problem. The US is serious in its desire to rejoin the global climate regime. The rest of the world is equally anxious that it should do so. There is a well established device in international negotiations of ‘stopping the clock’ to avoid an otherwise available agreement being lost by running out of time.

If the US cannot pass its legislation by June 2010, it is very unlikely to be able to pass it in 2010, if at all. This defines for how long the clock must be stopped. Anything longer and we will be on the road to never-never land. In formal terms, that means that the negotiations in December would be adjourned not concluded.

This is the key point. It is one thing to agree to play extra time, quite another to ask for a replay. To accept a political declaration in Copenhagen that does not contain an unambiguous commitment to agreeing a ratifiable treaty by a specific date before June 2010 would be to give up establishing a climate regime with any prospect of staying below 2 degrees. It would be asking for a replay that might never happen.

If a political declaration is all that can be agreed in December it must be a postponement, not a cancellation. If it is to be a postponement that does not morph insidiously into a cancellation it must agree to a specific date by which a ratifiable treaty will be finalised. If you cannot find that date, it is not there. If it is not there, you have more fog, not a deal that will avoid dangerous climate change.

*This briefing is published with the permission of ENDS magazine. It will appear in a forthcoming special supplement on climate change to be published towards the end of November 2009

Tom Burke is a Founding Director of E3G and a Visiting Professor at Imperial and University Colleges, London.