by Steve Herz

Last week, a full day after it was scheduled to end, this year’s United Nations climate negotiations finally ground to an anticlimactic and dispiriting conclusion.

Despite the near round-the-clock endgame and down-to-the-wire drama, negotiators from more than 194 member countries ultimately had precious little to show for their efforts. Yes, they managed to ensure that the Kyoto Protocol would continue for another term. And they tied up some loose ends from previous meetings and made some incremental progress on emerging issues. But on the core issue affecting the fate of the planet — the need to rapidly reduce emissions to have any hope of keeping climate change to manageable levels — progress was nowhere to be found. They moved the process forward, but the problem rages on.

In one sense, this exceedingly modest outcome was no surprise. From the outset, we were warned that this was just an “implementation” or “transitional” meeting; the big issues were not to be discussed. This is because at last year’s meeting in Durban, the Parties decided on a three year schedule to negotiate an overarching agreement, and nothing in the climate negotiations happens until the last possible moment. The Durban timetable all but assured that incrementalism and procrastination would rule the day in Doha.

But in another sense, this summer vacation approach to the negotiations was utterly incomprehensible. The urgent need for action was there for all to see. Many delegates came with vivid, heart-rendering accounts of how climate change was already impacting their countries in ways their governments could not address. Not least, President Obama’s negotiating team could point to this summer’s searing, unprecedented drought in the Midwest, forest infernos in the Rockies, and of course, the over $70 billion worth of devastation inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.

If these calamities weren’t a clear enough call to action, informed delegates arrived in Doha with three new hair-on-fire reports in their briefcases that put these impacts in larger context. In November, the global consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the International Energy Agency both issued papers showing that nothing short of heroic efforts will be necessary to reduce emissions enough to keep global temperature rise below the 3.6°F that most climate scientists believe is the outer bound of “safe” warming. Without such efforts, we’ll likely see 7.2°F – 10.8°F of warming by the end of this century. The World Bank followed these assessments with its blockbuster Turn Down the Heat report, which described in appalling detail what a 7.2°F warmer world would actually be like. It’s truly scary stuff.

Just as disappointing as the outcome in Doha was the role of the United States in bringing it about. When President Obama first took office, there were great expectations that he would bring about a new era American climate leadership. Instead, the US negotiating posture too often has been characterized by a reluctance to expend real political capital, a hypersensitivity to Congressional extremism, and an unwillingness to lead by example.

Still, there were good reasons to hope that Doha might be the place where the President would begin to fashion a more creative and ambitious negotiating strategy. After all, hadn’t President Obama just handily won reelection over an (opportunistically) denialist opponent, and in the flush of victory, affirmed his intent to address the climate crisis in his Second Administration? Didn’t superstorm Sandy just drive home the intolerable human costs of a significantly warmer planet in the starkest terms possible? With the election safely behind him and the devastation of Sandy laid out before him, was there ever a fiercer urgency than now?

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America's climate envoy, Todd Stern

by Andrew Light, Rebecca Lefton, Adam James, Gwynne Taraska, and Katie Valentine

After a 48-hour marathon negotiating session, largely held behind closed doors, this year’s UN climate negotiations Qatar ended at approximately 9:45pm Saturday Doha time.  Like last year’s Durban climate summit, three distinct negotiating streams produced three overlapping but independent agreements

The Kyoto Protocol was reauthorized for another seven years, albeit with fewer countries signing on, so now covering some 12 or 15 percent of global emissions.  The negotiating track created in 2007 on “Long-term Cooperative Action,” that produced the Copenhagen Accords and the Cancun Agreements, which include voluntary commitments covering 80 percent of global emissions, concluded.  And the new track on the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action,” designed to conclude a new treaty in 2015 that aims to be applicable to all parties and cover 100 percent of global emissions took its first steps toward its primary mission.

Responses to the meeting’s outcome have been varied, but, as with most of these climate summits it is largely considered far from adequate to address the growing climate crisis.  EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard called it a “modest step toward a global climate deal.”

But these criticisms seem overwrought. It’s not that critics of the meeting are wrong to want faster international action on climate change. We all should.  It’s just pointless to imagine this body working much faster than it is designed to do. This is especially true now.

As we have been arguing for the past year, the 194 parties to the UN climate convention unanimously decided last year to set themselves on a path which would not produce a major breakthrough in the negotiations for another three years.  It should come as no surprise that the outcome of this meeting was relatively modest.  We conclude here as we have before:  The intrinsic difficulties in the UN climate process demand that we continue to look for other opportunities for faster climate action in the near term while we slowly build up the institutions created in the past four years out of these annual climate meetings.

Kyoto Protocol Enters Stage Two

The Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally binding agreement on emissions reductions, was set to expire at the end of December.  On Saturday, the protocol was extended.  A second commitment period will begin on January 1, 2013 and end December 31, 2020.  This period will bridge the gap between the end of the first commitment period and the beginning of the next legally binding climate agreement, to be created in the Durban Platform track, which is set to be finished in 2015 and take effect in 2020.

Unlike the Durban track treaty, which is to be universally binding, the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol establishes obligatory emissions cuts for only the European Union and a handful of industrialized countries, including Australia, Norway, and Switzerland.  Japan, Russia, Canada, and New Zealand, which participated in the first period of the protocol, opted out of the second period.  The second period does not cover the United States, which signed but did not ratify the original protocol, and it does not bind developing countries, such as China and India.  The United States and China are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters.

The transition to the new commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol was not however without controversy.  As these relatively straightforward negotiations were concluding, Oleg Shamanov of the Russian Federation charged that the president of the conference, H.E. Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, Deputy Prime Minister of Qatar, used the “strength of voice and gavel” to smother objections and push through an agreement.  Al-Attiyah may become legendary for his thunderous declarations of “I hear no objection! It is decided!” at the end of the meeting in announcing each accepted agreement despite the fact that Shamanov claimed to have been audibly objecting on behalf of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belarus the whole time.

Shamanov seemed more frustrated about being disregarded than he was about the outcome of the negotiations.  The Russian Federation’s area of concern, however, was the carryover of surplus “assigned amount units” (AAUs) from the end of the first period of the protocol to the new second period.  These are permits assigned for allowable emissions that were not redeemed during the first period of the protocol and which now can be sold to countries in the second period as a way of offsetting their required emission reductions under the protocol.  Surplus AAUs (sometimes called “hot air”) are held predominantly by Russia and other eastern European countries, whose economies collapsed after the fall of Communism resulting in credits for carbon emissions which they never produced, but which would have been allowable for them to produce given an assessment of the size of their economy before the protocol went into effect.  Russia insisted that unused permits be transferred to the second period.

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by Rebecca Lefton and Andrew Light

This year’s UN climate negotiations have once again deadlocked.  Negotiators and observers in the hall are concerned that this meeting could end with no outcome, much like the long-stalled Doha trade negotiations.  We’re tracking the major sticking points in the three tracks of the meeting and make recommendations on how to move forward.  Those interested can tune in here, and look for which sessions are going on live in plenary room one or two.

Kyoto Protocol

Going into this meeting, it appeared that t the creation of the second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol would be a major area of contention.  But while there are some lingering disagreements on some of the points of controversy that were anticipated before Doha, most of the text agreeing to a second commitment period of the protocol is very close to approval.  As we have argued, the most important part of this agreement will be ensuring that the Clean Development Mechanism continue so it can be used for whatever new agreement is created under the new track of the Durban Platform.  The emissions reductions that will come out of the extension of the protocol will be marginal from a global perspective, because it will remain the case that developing countries that are parties to the agreement will not be bound to reduce their emissions in a second commitment period.  In that respect, some of the lingering questions over whether the protocol will be extended for five or seven years do not matter as much.

One thing to look out for, in case the meeting does end in a deadlock, is whether the president of the meeting (which is, as always, a representative from the host country) decides to try to move it forward without the other two tracks.  At this point the decision has been made to move all three tracks forward in one combined package.  If that happens though, then even if the Kyoto track is ready to go, it could get sidelined by disagreement over one of the other tracks.  This would delay implementation of a second period of the protocol and create a gap between the end of the first commitment period (which expires at the end of this month) and the beginning of the second period.  In this eventuality we would recommend splitting up the tracks, if that is at all possible.

Long-Term Cooperative Action

The track on “Long Term Cooperative Action” (or “LCA”) was created in 2007 in Bali and became the vehicle that created the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and the 2010 Cancun Agreements.  We have long supported this development as the best outcome that could have come out of the Copenhagen meeting, where most of the major emitters were not yet prepared to negotiate, sign, or ratify a new top-down, legally binding agreement like the Kyoto Protocol that most had hoped would emerge.  The result has been an agreement that captures over 80 percent of global emissions, rather than the 15 percent captured by the remaining parties in the Kyoto Protocol who are legally bound to reduce their emissions, as a series of unilateral voluntary commitments for mitigation to 2020.  Given that this track was slated for ending this year, we’ve been working on a column for the main CAP website to go up next week outlining the successes of this track.

Unfortunately though, the LCA track is the sticking point in Doha.  As we had anticipated, there was a risk that parties would try to pack more into it at the very end, and that’s apparently what has happened.

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China's chief climate negotiator, Su Wei

by Melanie Hart

From many perspectives, China is a global powerhouse. China is the world’s second largest economy in terms of gross domestic product, the world’s largest energy consumer, and a global leader in renewable energy investment. China is also the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

It is no surprise, then, that when it comes to global climate change negotiations, such as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change conference currently taking place in Doha, Qatar, many nations are looking for China to step up and play a role more in line with its global economic and emissions status.

From a U.S. perspective, that means demanding that China play by the same rules in a future climate treaty that will be developed between now and 2015, rather than treating it as a developing country on par with Chad or the Congo. Some parties want a new treaty to require legally-binding emission reductions for all (though not the same amount for all parties). Thus far, China has refused to endorse this kind of legal framework, and instead is sticking to the interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which creates a firewall between the obligations of developed and developing countries. This puts the United States and other developed nations in one bucket, puts China in a separate bucket along with the poorest countries in the world, and allows the latter to make only voluntary commitments to reduce their emissions (as opposed to the mandatory commitments requested of the developed countries).

The United States has no problem allowing still-developing economies to make less-ambitious emission-reduction commitments. What the United States and other developed nations take issue with is allowing those countries to make commitments that are less binding at the international level than what is expected of developed countries. China, an upper-middle income country according to the World Bank, has a standing voluntary climate commitment under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to reduce carbon intensity by 40 percent to 45 percent (based on 2005 levels) by 2020. The first phase of that commitment has been incorporated into China’s five-year economic plan and ratified by China’s National People’s Congress, so that commitment is legally binding in a domestic sense.

Unfortunately, those types of commitments from China are not enough to get the rest of the world to sign on to a new global climate treaty. Developed countries in particular want China to upgrade this commitment in two ways:

• Switch from an emission-intensity reduction target (reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP) to an absolute reduction target;
• Commit to that target via the same form of international mechanism that will be expected to bind all countries equally, regardless of development status.

Negotiators have stated that the United States is unlikely to sign on to a new climate treaty until China commits to that treaty in the same way that everyone else does. But there is plenty keeping China from making a legally binding international commitment if that is what it takes to fulfill this expectation.

Whereas the global community generally views China as an economic powerhouse with plenty of room to maneuver on climate issues, the view from Beijing is vastly different. From China’s perspective, the past 30 years of rapid economic growth in no way guarantees that they will be able to easily traverse the middle-income trap and actually make it up into the ranks of higher-income economies. Chinese leaders have a deep fear that instead of transitioning smoothly from lower-income to upper-income status, their economy could follow the path of Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines and fall into a period of economic stagnation. China’s sluggish growth throughout 2012 clearly illustrates that the country is not immune to an economic slowdown, and it is important to remember that any major slump brings with it a very high risk that the Chinese Communist Party will lose public support and be forced to forfeit its authoritarian political power.

Within that context, Chinese leaders are not yet willing to take on international climate commitments that could reduce their flexibility to keep the economy growing. That does not mean there is no room for negotiation. It does mean, however, that in the near term China will continue approaching international climate negotiations with more caution than leadership. The negotiators now meeting in Doha will need to keep this in mind as they spend the next three years hashing out the terms of a new treaty with the ambition that it be equally “applicable to all,” in the terms of the Durban Platform.

Rising energy demand and consumption in China

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by Andrew Light and Gwynne Taraska

Those who have followed the international climate negotiations over the last few years have had good reason to expect that this year’s UN climate summit in Qatar would be comparatively more quiet. The primary reason is straightforward. Last year, the 194 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change decided in Durban to set themselves on a three year path to create a new climate agreement “applicable to all parties” to be finalized by 2015 and enter into force by 2020.

In the already difficult arena of these negotiations, where every party has an effective veto, a three-year time table for a treaty greatly slows things down, as parties carefully float test balloons for ideas and bits of language and gauge reactions.  It can be frustrating to watch from the outside given the gravity of the situation at hand — just as frustrating as watching the paralysis of the U.S. Senate in the face of the filibuster rule — but no party has the power to force a more timely agreement once this clock has been set. The last time something like this happened in this forum, in the 2008 Poznan meeting between the 2007 start of the run-up to Copenhagen and the actual summit in 2009, the result was a staid affair as appropriately dreary as the Polish winter. There was no motivation to push decisions to the brink until the scheduled showdown.

So far, this year’s meeting has followed this predictable pattern except for one noteworthy exception: a steady stream of largely unsubstantiated accusations that the U.S. is somehow blocking progress at a meeting where almost nothing is moving forward except for debates about the future of the Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. does not participate in.

A more extreme example happened this week in Doha at a press conference titled  “What Obama Must Do Immediately.” The questions leveled by the participants were reasonable.  Will Hurricane Sandy change the dynamic of climate policy in the U.S., especially when polling now indicates that 70 percent of the American people think climate change is happening?  How will the U.S. fulfill its pledge to reduce its emissions 17 percent by 2020?  Will the U.S. continue its funding for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries now that the $30 billion fast start period between 2009 and 2012 has ended?  And how will the U.S. contribute to the goal of sourcing the new Green Climate Fund, which aims to deliver a significant portion of the promised $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020?

But what struck us as unreasonable, if not a distraction from the hard work that is actually before this body right now, was the repetition of charges that the U.S. is actually doing nothing on climate change now and is determined to shirk any responsibility whatsoever in the global struggle over climate change.  The high point, or low point, depending on one’s perspective, was a call by Greenpeace International’s Kumi Naidoo for President Obama to order America’s lead negotiators back to Washington. While Naidoo opined that without a different mandate these negotiators are only “producing more hot air” in the climate talks, the call for recalling them is likely some of the hottest air yet seen in Doha.

The 17% Target

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by Gwynne Taraska

The UN climate talks currently taking place in Doha will decide the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the world’s only legally binding climate treaty.  Although the protocol’s impact on global emissions has been limited, it is still necessary to keep the policy infrastructure associated with it intact.  CAP has been following the future of the protocol at Doha and outlines below the key issues and probable outcomes at the meeting.

First and second periods
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change aims to effect emissions reductions that will keep global warming within a 2°C increase over pre-industrial levels.  The Kyoto Protocol is among its tools.  The first period of the Kyoto Protocol (KP1), which set binding targets for emissions reductions for 37 industrialized nations and the EU, will end this year.  A main goal of the current meeting of the parties to the UNFCCC is therefore to implement a second period of the Kyoto Protocol (KP2), which will serve as a bridge between KP1 and the international treaty that will emerge from the Durban Platform and take effect in 2020.

Participants and bystanders
Countries including Australia, Norway, Liechtenstein, Croatia, Ukraine, Iceland, and Switzerland have committed to binding targets in a second period of the protocol.  The EU has committed as well.  Australia, for example, has pledged to reduce its emissions at least .5% by 2020, and the EU has pledged to reduce its emissions at least 20% by 2020 (both from the base year 1990).  Although Japan, Russia, Canada, and New Zealand were signatories of KP1 (Canada later announced that it would never attempt to meet its agreed upon target), they are declining to participate in KP2.  In addition, KP2 will not include the US, which signed but never sought to ratify the treaty in the Senate.

Issues
A number of questions about KP2 need to be addressed during the meeting, such as a) whether the duration of KP2 should be five or eight years, b) whether developed countries that are not signatories should be permitted to participate in the protocol’s market-based mechanisms, and c) whether countries should be permitted to transfer emissions credits from the first to the second period.  Blocs of countries including the Alliance of Small Island States, Least Developed Countries, and the African Group, which represent “100 countries and 1.4 billion people who are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” released a statement on 26 November arguing that the duration of KP2 should be five years, so as to make the targets more ambitious.  It also argued that credit carryover should be curtailed and that only parties to the protocol should be permitted to participate in the carbon market it creates.  Artur Runge-Metzger, representing the EU in a press briefing on 28 November, summarized the position of developing countries on the last point:   “You cannot just enjoy the nice things from the Kyoto Protocol but not commit with the legally binding emission reduction budget for the period 2013-2020.”

For and against KP2
The Kyoto Protocol is of course inadequate in isolation as a defense against climate change.

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by Rebecca Lefton and Andrew Light

The next high-level gathering of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change started this week in Doha, Qatar, and will continue until December 7. In this column we provide an overview of the upcoming talks and discuss what the results of U.S. elections may mean for the Obama administration’s positions during these negotiations.

What to watch for in Doha

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Doha will continue the progress made to date toward advancing a series of tracks toward a comprehensive international climate agreement. While none of these tracks alone is sufficient to address global climate change, taken together they have gotten us closer than ever to a comprehensive international solution. The biggest items on the three primary tracks of the Doha agenda are:

• The closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action
• Agreement on a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol
• Advancement of a work plan for the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action

Closing of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action

During the 2011 climate talks in Durban, South Africa, parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed that the Long-term Cooperative Action should conclude in Doha. The action, which began in 2007 in order to implement the Bali Action Plan agreed to under the Bush administration, gave rise to the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun Agreements.

Though many throughout the world hoping for a binding international treaty viewed Copenhagen as a disappointment, it was never likely that the 2009 U.N. climate change conference could have ended in a binding agreement. The United States would not have signed onto an agreement that did not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gases, leaving out major emitters such as India and China—now the largest emitter in the world, the country’s per-capita emissions are on par with the European Union’s emissions. China even objected in Copenhagen to developed countries articulating their own 2050 emission-reduction targets in a formal agreement, presumably because it would mean that rapidly developing countries would be responsible for the remainder of required emissions reductions to achieve some level of climate safety.

But for all its criticisms, Copenhagen was groundbreaking. For the first time countries at all stages of development agreed to put forward pledges for national actions to address global warming by 2020. Over the past three years, 141 countries, including all the major emitters in the developed and developing world—which are responsible for more than 80 percent of global emissions—have made voluntary mitigation pledges. This was an important step forward, given that until then the only articulated pledges for reductions were made by developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol, which now account for less than 15 percent of global emissions.

Perhaps most importantly, the Long-term Cooperative Action allowed a pathway for a bottom-up approach, bringing pledges from both developed and developing countries to the table. The bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down architecture, allows for varying commitments by country. This is significant because it recognizes the different capacities and levels of development of each country. The question is: How do we ensure that the sum of parties’ commitments will keep us on a pathway where it is still possible to hold temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by the end of the century? This is now the agreed-upon goal of the U.N. process.

Many analyses warn that there is a gap between the total emissions reductions from parties’ pledges under the Copenhagen Accord and where we need to be to meet the 2 degrees Celsius goal by 2020. The current framework allows for parties to start where they are now and assess progress to see what must be done to meet that goal. The pledges—along with agreements on transparency, technology, forestry, and finance—were enshrined in Cancun during the 2010 U.N. climate conference. Parties agreed to report on progress of their unilateral commitments, and the following year in Durban, countries agreed to regular regional reviews beginning in 2013. Work on how to overcome this gap will now move to the new track under the Durban Platform.

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