A full two months have now passed since the world’s leaders snuck out the back door of Denmark, tails between their legs, with nothing more than the much-maligned “Copenhagen Accord” to show for their efforts.
Despite the Hopenhagen hype, enormous rallies around the world demanding a legally binding treaty, the participation of over 100 world leaders and two weeks spent in an over-crowded conference centre with almost no sleep or edible food, the talks produced nothing more than a flimsy political agreement.
According to analysis by Climate Interactive Researchers, if fully implemented, the pledges contained in the Copenhagen Accord would see a 3.9 degree rise in global temperature — not the desired two degrees.
So is it any wonder Yvo de Boer, the glum faced executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), today announced his plans to retire and head to the world of accounting instead?
As Crikey’s correspondent at the talks, I saw de Boer in action and think it would be unduly harsh to attribute too much blame for Copenhagen’s failure to his leadership skills.
The conference did descend into logistical chaos, with so many onlookers granted accreditation that the queue to enter the conference almost stretched into Sweden by the final days.
However de Boer’s flaws pale into insignificance compared to the US Senate’s refusal to pass Obama’s cap and trade bill, blocking tactics by China and India, a naïve push by the European Union and Japan to kill the Kyoto Treaty and grandstanding by African nations. Horses, water etc etc.
De Boer worked around the clock during Copenhagen, not only trying to bang world leaders’ heads together but also to explain the extraordinarily complex negotiations to the world’s media. In the blizzard of white noise produced at the talks – with “overthrow capitalism now!” greenies vying for media attention with Monkton and his merry band of sceptics – de Boer often stood out as a beacon of common sense.
A tough task awaits his successor, with the next major international climate summit down to take place in November in Cancun, Mexico. (Yes, that is the Cancun of Spring Break fame, the city that attracts some 20,000 US college students each year for wet T-shirt competitions, random hook ups and sunbaking):
Choosing a famous party town as the place to negotiate the successor to the Kyoto Protocol may seem a recipe for disaster — who knows how many superficially-dour climate change negotiators have a karaoke star in them waiting to emerge? — but Cancun does have some things going for it.
So many visitors flooded into Copenhagen that many delegates and journalists – this humble journalist included – had to book into hotel rooms in Sweden. Unlike the Danish capital, Cancun is used to coping with a huge influx of visitors and boasts ample hotels to accommodate visiting delegates, environmentalists and journalists.
And while sceptically-inclined commentators made hay with the fact it was snowing in Scandinavia in winter (!), Cancun is a tropical paradise all year round.
The Obama Administration’s failure to get his “cap and trade” legislation passed before Copenhagen was a key sticking point at the talks. Chances of the bill being passed before Cancun — or, indeed, ever — are looking decidedly shaky after the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof Senate majority following their recent Massachusetts loss.
Obama has instead turned to increased investment in nuclear energy as a way to bring carbon emissions down.
Erwin Jackson, of the independent Climate Institute, told Crikey that getting the job done in Cancun will be tough – but not impossible.
“Copenhagen has created a false perception that global action on climate change has stopped,” Jackson said. “China is on track to beat the targets it has announced. South Korea will introduce an emissions trading scheme this year, although it has no international obligations to do so. Last year global investment in renewable energy outstripped investment in fossil fuels for the first time.”
For Cancun to succeed where Copenhagen failed, the UNFCCC will first need to advertise for a new executive secretary: applicants lacking masochistic tendencies need not apply.
It is a global problem, so perhaps national solutions were doomed to fail. However there have got to be many global organisations able to apply pressure from different directions.
For example, international lawyers can frame International Law before it gets endorsed. The mere existence of an International Law on Climate Crimes, even if initially toothless, may be sufficient to influence planners who advise governments on say, infrastructure. No one wants to find themselves facing a court whose judgement reaches across national borders.
Right, let’s stop faffing around, shall we?
“According to analysis by Climate Interactive Researchers, if fully implemented, the pledges contained in the Copenhagen Accord would see a 3.9 degree rise in global temperature — not the desired two degrees.”
British climate cult high priest Prof. Kevin Anderson said that 4 degrees of warmng will likely wipe out 8.5 billion people in a few decades time, leaving 500 million survivors clinging to the Arctic Circle in Spitzbergen.
No wonder people are whimpering after Lord Planckton of Krill. Anderson makes His Nuttiness look sane.
And what does Dopenhagen Wong do in The SMH yesterday? Insults everyone who has the slightest doubt about Armageddon…we’re quacks, knaves, fools etc.
Looks like Australia is still reading yesterday’s news!
Always the problem with being lockstep with any new fad?
Does anybody know which part of global warming policy is in fastest free fall — the economics, the politics or the science? The politics seemed to be winning the race yesterday. It appears that at least five major U.S. corporations have pulled out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a mix of business and green groups lobbying Washington for climate legislation. High on USCAP’s agenda is a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions and enthusiasm is waning.
It is being argued that the withdrawal of BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar from USCAP is another sign that cap and trade, which would allow corporations to buy and sell emissions credits, is losing ground politically. Another political sign that a major climate bill containing a cap-and-trade regime is unlikely came recently when President Barack Obama announced he might be willing to carve out the cap-and-trade elements from climate legislation as a separate bill. Some have speculated that a stand-alone tax carbon plan surrounded with a corporate trading system would be political dynamite for the adminstration, as it will be in this country, and that cap-and-trade will never see daylight.
Two other companies, Xerox and March Inc., are also reported to have left USCAP. Cap and trade is also fading from the political agenda at the Western Climate Initiative, a U.S.-Canada association of states and provinces set up a few years ago to bring cap-and-trade to the North American economy.
All this is being driven by breakdowns in the science behind global warming theory and in the global resolve to respond. The failure of Copenhagen to reach agreement reflected the two main problems. If the science is perceived to be shaky, and the global economic situation is shaky, if follows that the politics will head in the same direction. Three main problems actually…China wasn’t buying and India never intended to.
If that isn’t enough for the agents behind cap and trade and ETS, De Telegraaf, the Netherlands’ largest daily newspaper, has totally vindicated the country’s most prominent global warming denier in a major article entitled “Henk Tennekes – He was right after all.”
Tennekes was the director of the Netherlands Meteorological Institute, KNMI, until the early 1990s, when his skepticism of the climate science coming out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change led to his forced resignation.
The paper has done a 180 and now says his arguments have been totally vindicated which only means the mind control is wearing off in Holland and science rather than voodoo is re-emerging after a long slumber.
Matthew, the conference didn’t fail ‘despite’ the fact that 100 world leaders were present, it failed ‘because’ of that. The same will be true of the next one. Getting 100 world leaders to agree to place a tax on energy is Mission Impossible.
I don’t begrudge de borer for failure at Copenhagen. It was always going to fail without a massive public campaign before, during, and after.
I expect the same principal to hold true for Australia, that is, real action on climate change (significantly reducing Co2 emissions) won’t happen until there is massive sustained public action from Australians (or possibly if the US magically acts on climate change.).