NGO's call for greater US involvement

On Tuesday the over a dozen environmental organizations sent an open letter to the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling out the Obama administration for not living up to what he promised prior to taking office. Despite the economic free-fall since moving into the White House, President Obama has been criticized openly since the Copenhagen talks for not being aggressive enough in pushing for an international solution as well as not using the bully pulpit of the presidency to offer more leadership even if US commitments are restricted by what Congress will tolerate.

An excerpt from the letter states:

In November, 2008, President-elect Obama gave an inspiring video address to the Bi-Partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, California. He said that "Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change,” and pledged that “once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

Three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress. U.S. positions on two major issues – the mandate for future negotiations and climate finance – threaten to impede in Durban the global cooperation so desperately needed to address the threat of climate change.

A carbon-neutral experiment

This year is different for Mark and I in that we are experimenting with a (mostly) carbon-neutral experience. In 2009, we both traveled to Copenhagen. Last year I was in Mexico while Mark blogged from Columbia. This year we are both stateside and attending the climate talks on a virtual basis.

The obvious advantages to this is the fact that we are not traveling around the world to attend the meetings in person. The net result is a savings in fuel and real costs as well. It also takes it's own mental toll to be constantly on the move and eating not much more than granola and almonds for two weeks straight. I look forward to eating real meals and being able to tuck my daughter into bed at night.

Having attended the talks for a couple of years we are in a pretty good position to be able to interpret what we are seeing and hearing via the live webcasts. Things make much more sense to me now than they did that first year in Copenhagen. In that sense, I anticipate there will be little content lost due to our virtual attendance.

Kicking the Can

In the Opening Plenary of the latest round of climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, South Africa's president Jacob Zuma reiterated an increasingly ineffectual plea:

"For most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death."

While few who understand the problem doubt the truth of this statement, the power it has to motivate political action has ebbed significantly in the years since Copenhagen. For many delegations the sense of urgency has all but disappeared. For both the European Union and the United States, success in Durban will be primarily defined by setting into motion some of the agreements made in principle last year in Cancun. In effect, this is settling on wallpaper before the house is built.

What can we expect from Durban?

Where did Hope and Ambition go?... not the middle way

COP17 opens today in Durban: it's amazing to see how quickly expectations for serious progress through the UN process have fallen - from the precipice of an ambitious treaty to being drowned in the bathtub. Two years ago in Copenhagen there was a strong sense that world political leadership would have to see the writing on the wall, step up to the plate and agree to a treaty; certainly (it was thought) that these leaders would not arrive to simply preside over failure. In hindsight, it's clear that they were there to deliver eulogies.

By last year's meeting in Cancun, some hopes lingered that talks might be rescued, but now even those with the rosiest tints in their glasses are depressed and the cynics seem vindicated. What happened?

The US role is central, and the path President Obama has taken is indicative of the failings. Back in Copenhagen, Obama was still fairly fresh from winning election by promising Hope and Change, and was optimistic that Congress would support greenhouse gas legislation. He arrived sporting the Nobel Peace Prize from the previous week; surely, we had emerged from decades of stalemate and quagmire!? Flash forward to 2011 - after innumerable drone attacks and with military spending rising as inexorably as CO2 levels - the title "Nobel Peace Laureate" is rarely applied if not forgotten, a symbol of misguided hope. Obama's pursuit of a 'sensible' and practical middle way on all other fronts has led to similar ends: lame reforms of the health insurance system, hollow Wall Street reforms, brinksmanship over debt ceilings...in other words, Washington business as usual.

Jevons Paradox

Can energy efficiency be bad for the environment?  How can electric cars and LED lighting result in higher rates of overall energy usage when they are meant to have the exact opposite effect?  This is the crux of the Jevons Paradox which indicates it is going to be even harder than previously thought for society to reduce the overall amount of energy usage (and therefore CO2 emissions).  

William Stanley Jevons was a British economist who argued way back in 1865 in his book The Coal Question that energy efficiencies designed to save or reduce the amount of fuel used tend to have the paradoxical effect of increasing energy consumption in the long-term. Jevons noted that the introduction of James Watt's innovative steam engine resulted in each individual engine using less coal. A good thing. But because each individual engine used less coal, they were more cost-effective to use. This resulted in steam engines being rapidly employed in a wide range of industries where they had previously not been used. In the long-run, Watt's development of the steam engine led to a dramatic increase in the overall amount of coal being burned because steam engines were now all over the place.

Cancún Abridged

Last year in Copenhagen, despite high expectations for a political solution to control international levels of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), negotiations broke down and produced a weak general statement referred to as the Copenhagen Accord. On November 29, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reconvened for the 16th time representatives from 193 countries to try again, this time in Cancún, Mexico. In all, over 11,000 people participated in the two week conference that was part high-level diplomatic negotiation, trade show, grass-roots appeals, and media circus. Among them were five observers representing the AAG. In the end, the Cancún Agreement formalized much of what was spelled out more broadly in the Copenhagen Accord a year earlier including national pledges for GHGe reductions from the world’s most developed economies, the creation of a Green Climate Fund to aid developing nations hit hardest by changing conditions, and provisions for the world’s rich to pay poorer countries to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). The fate of the Kyoto Protocol remains unclear and has been deferred to next year’s meeting of the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa.

Multilateralism and the UN: the Ghost of Copenhagen

Normally, today would be considered the one day during the two week period of negotiations where no formal business is conducted.  Normally, this would be an intermission where all parties involved would gather their collective breath for the final push expected to come next week for an agreement - whatever that agreement will look like.  So it was unusual and unexpected to wake up this morning and find a formal COP plenary scheduled for 11am. 

Repeating one of the themes of the discussions yesterday, one of the main issues the President of the negotiations addressed was the fact that there are to be no secret negotiations taking place in private that would bypass all the current discussions being held.  As she stated for at least the fourth time in 24 hours, "there is no hidden text and no secret negotiations".  The representative of the G77 (a group of developing countries) indicated that they will support the President in this process of negotiation as long as "there are no shadow ministerial process" taking place. 

Viewpoint of the Developing Countries

During my time in Copenhagen, I spoke to many delegates from developing country parties. The viewpoint from them is that the Developed country owes a debt to the developing country. They see any money from Copenhagen is part of a reparation and is not development or aid money. While the developed world is to blame for the situation that we find the globe in from the last 200 years of pollution, future growth in greenhouse gases will originate from the developing world. This issue has been the major fault line causing divisions and stopped major progress from happen in Copenhagen.