The UN Summit on Climate Change is just now in session in New York to discuss the future climate agreement that is expected from the Copenhagen Conference this coming December. Our Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen has said that we will perish, if the matters in the Copenhagen Conference do not proceed according to the EU plan. According to Vanhanen, there should be no plan B.
I am perturbed by his statement, as it exhibits quite an amount of ignorance of the complexity of the climate change policy, as well as of the variety of different alternatives.
As you see, it would now be very desirable to look for different options for the basis of a climate change agreement and a totally different type of approach than the Kyoto model presents.
The Kyoto Protocol has been proven to be inefficient, as the economy’s carbon-intensity hasn’t decreased in the countries, which ratified it. The Kyoto goals of the first period were only reached by chance thanks to the economic recession and nobody should be so naive as to count this as an achievement of the climate agreement.
Therefore to continue on the same basis is a risky business, and hence a plan B is very desirable. We need something stronger here. It is only good that, for example, the US and Japan are now trying to find more efficient means.
The science magazine Nature published an article, which expressly recommends a plan B. This would mean a lightening of the global negotiations so that agreements that are too binding could be omitted and, respectively, more efficient means would be applied by fewer actors. In this way, we could avoid a no-win situation in the UN climate change negotiations. These lightened negotiations could be merely held among the most significant emitters and not among the entire band of 200 UN countries. The former experience has definitively shown that the negotiations are in danger of becoming a “legal zombie”.
What will then happen in Copenhagen? As I have been present many times at COP meetings, I dare to present my prediction out loud, to which we may go back after December.
Although the Copenhagen Conference may end in some kind of failure, the official communiqués will be palliated: “one step was taken forward”, “difficult climate talks rescued by…”. And in any case, years will be needed after the conference to adjust the possibly somewhat lenient final result to the level as practical measures.
Some will talk about the Copenhagen final result as a “success”, even though it would be a “total failure”. “Some” refers here to those Europeans who have wanted to change the EU’s emission reduction goal of 20% to a stricter goal of 30%. In this context, these people wish to remove all kinds of special treatments concerning the industries exposed to carbon-leakage, such as free emission allowances for industries exposed to global competition; the grounds being such statements as “well, we now have a global agreement and fair play”.
At the same time the US senate has initiated its own legislative discussion on climate change. The climate change act of the US seems to be much more lenient than the version approved by the House of Representatives last summer. The US admits that, most probably, the senate will not be able to get the climate act on the table prior to the Copenhagen Conference. On the other hand, the US’s principal negotiator on climate issues has said that it is not so essential to get the climate act through before the Copenhagen Conference, although Todd Stern encouraged the congress to quickly approve the act in time.
One interesting detail is that Stern gave an estimation in the hearing of the House of Representatives at the beginning of September. The UN negotiation track has, according to Stern, proceeded poorly, whereas the forum of the world’s larger economies moved ahead.
As seems likely, plan B might be needed.