IPS Blog

The 2012 UN climate negotiations are not expected to be a breakthrough moment in solving the unfolding ecological crisis, but these talks will set the course for a future deal that countries have agreed will enter into force by 2020.

What’s at stake is more than a little overwhelming.

Global warming has to be kept to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures if we want to avert climate disaster. Scientists say that means we can send 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Meanwhile fossil fuel companies are planning to burn enough oil, coal and gas to release 2,795 gigatons.

And the impacts of a warming planet are already hitting home. Because of sea level rise the island nation of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean is in negotiations to resettle its entire population in Fiji. And in the United States we’ve just experienced a summer of record-busting heat waves followed by a super-storm the likes of which meteorologists have literally never before seen.

From where I sit in Doha, however, any agreement to avoid predicted extremes in weather, economic disruption and loss of life that will accompany global warming looks a long way off.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the experts group that provides the climate convention with the latest science — global greenhouse gas emissions would have to peak and start coming down by 2015. That’s right — in three years. Then, by 2050, the nations of the world would need to halve their overall climate pollution.

For the United States that translates into something like a 50 percent reduction by 2020 and deeper than 80 percent cuts by 2050 — a quasi-political calculation based on our responsibility as far and away the greatest contributor to climate change and one of the economies most capable of adapting.

Delivering serious emissions cuts won’t be easy for any country. Re-orienting a nation’s infrastructure to be climate smart — from energy to food to manufacturing to transportation — won’t be cheap.

Not surprisingly, no country wants to be the only one — or one of only a few — that is obliged to overhaul its entire economy to be low-carbon and climate resilient. It would put them at a distinct competitive disadvantage, at least at first (of course, every dollar spent on prevention saves three in disaster cleanup later).

And so the two largest economies and biggest polluters on the planet — the United States and China — have somewhat cleverly staked out positions that set them on the dangerous path of Mutually Assured Inaction. Neither of them will act on climate until the other does — but neither of them really wants to anyway.

The U.S. climate team said in no uncertain terms before leaving Washington DC for Doha that a second Obama term doesn’t translate into a shift away from blocking a climate deal that big countries like China are not legally bound by.

Lead negotiator Jonathon Pershing has repeatedly insisted that he can’t bring home a deal he can’t sell to Congress — and unfortunately Congress is still in the pocket of polluters (look no further for evidence than a recent letter to President Obama from 18 Senators who accepted more than $11 million from dirty energy companies urging him to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and unlock the Canadian tar sands).

At the end of the first week of negotiations, with a fair and effective climate deal looking out of reach, it’s hard to see how developing countries — or civil society — can compel the industrial world to take bold action and live up to their responsibilities.

It’s 2:30pm in Durban, South Africa, and I’m rushing back and forth from meeting to meeting in the convention center waiting for the final plenaries of the UN climate negotiations to start.

There’s a particular arc to the climate negotiations I’ve noticed – at least in the last five that I’ve attended. The first week is a lot of meetings with government delegations to discuss the issues we’ve been following all year, meetings with our colleagues to figure out our strategy for getting what we want out of the climate talks. NGOs release their reports, advocacy groups try to crank out suggestions for countries’ to introduce in the official negotiating sessions. There are lots of side events, panel discussion, receptions with free wine and eats.

In the second week there’s a bit of a lull, the doors on government meetings swing shut on most conversations and we’re left waiting outside meeting room doors trying get a scrap of paper here and a snippet of intelligence from a friendly government there. 

By midway through the second week the high level ministers start arriving. Security gets tighter. Actions by youth, indigenous people, activist groups pop up here and there and are quickly shut down by the UN secretariat. Generally there are marches ‘outside’ that very few on the ‘inside’ even hear about (the exception was, of course, the demonstration by hundreds of thousands of people in Copenhagen in 2009).

By the time you reach the end of the second week, there’s a palpable sense of frenzy in the air. People are running back and forth in the halls waiting for some thing to happen. Anything.

But you wait.

And you wait. And you wait. And you wait. 

Eventually, after all the deals have been struck behind close doors, poor countries have sold their future for a handful of magic beans, and the US is duly satisfied that nothing agreed upon will upset its position at the top of the economic food chain, the negotiations resume.

Then governments make statements, deliberate various versions of draft decisions, and release a significant amount of hot air until around 2am. In a final crescendo, countries start lining up like well behaved infantry ready to get behind any solution that brings an end to the talks so they can get the hell out of here and go to bed.

And then that’s it. We go back to our hotels exhausted wondering why our governments won’t take the climate crisis seriously enough to do anything meaningful to stop it. We try to convince ourselves that there are ‘hooks’ all over the decision taken that will help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions either at home or multilaterally, or that there’s way to use the final outcome to raise some money for those communities who are already reeling from drought, floods, landslides, heat waves, wild fires, and sea level rise.

So that’s where I am right now. Sitting on the floor, tied to an electrical outlet to power my computer, waiting for the plenary doors to open, and wondering if my government – or any of the other governments present here – will do anything of consequence to make sure our future is one of ecological stability instead of planetary chaos.

As UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, go into their final week, IPS got a quick update from Janet Redman, co-director of IPS’s Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, who is in Durban at talks.

Janet spoke to us from the corner of a crowded conference room at the summit about the current state of the negotiations:

Interviewer: It’s recently been announced that 2010 saw the most dramatic upswing in greenhouse gas output on record. How are folks in Durban reacting to this?

Janet Redman: Greenhouse gas emissions rose between 2009 and 2010 by a record-breaking 6 percent in one year. There’s a real sense of urgency here in Durban because of the news that emissions are growing at such an alarming rate.

But unfortunately that sense of urgency is not translating to action by the biggest historical polluters here.

In particular, what’s happened this week is a blame game that’s now shifted to the big developing countries. Developing economies still have incredibly high rates of poverty, even in countries that are considered “emerging economies” such as India and China. The EU and the U.S. are pegging the potential failure to reach a climate deal here in Durban on those two countries.

But we don’t need a new deal – or what some are calling a new mandate. What we really need out of this next week is to see countries agree to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, and to see a completion of the Bali action plan, which was a set of commitments and obligations that developing countries said they would take on with the support of developed countries and a commitment by the United States to take actions comparable to those of other wealthy northern countries. This was the compromise world leaders struck because the U.S. said it would never, ever sign the Kyoto Protocol.

The big news is that if developed countries are willing to agree to fulfill their own obligations that already exist in the convention and in this Bali action plan, then developing countries are considering negotiating internationally-binding activities that could take effect in 2020. That’s a pretty big deal. So basically, China’s already doing more than the U.S. is on renewable energy, but they’re even saying, we’re willing to take on binding commitments in the near future, as long as you show us good faith that you’re willing to do what you said you would do in Bali in 2007.

Interviewer: It sounds like there’s a lot of discussion on just renewing what’s already been agreed upon. Do you think that renewing or approving these already-negotiated terms would be enough?

JR: Well, in some sense it’s a first step toward a bigger change. One of the things that we’re hearing here is a call for a new mandate. I think that’s a real mistake because there are two existing mandates right now.

Again, the Kyoto Protocol is one mandate, and the Bali action plan is another mandate. The convention has set that up very clearly, so the idea of asking for a new mandate here in Durban actually undermines existing commitments that are science-based that have been agreed to already in the past 20 years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was established.

So I think having movement on agreements would be enough to set the negotiations on a really positive track for subsequent periods after the second period of the Kyoto Protocol, but also on a positive track in terms of implementing the convention which of course is what this is all about.

Interviewer: There’s been discussion on possible threats to climate financing for developing countries. Are there any further observations that you’d like to share about that?

JR: Last week we were really concerned about the U.S. obstructing talks on opening the doors of the Green Climate Fund. As of earlier today, it looks like almost every country is satisfied with moving forward on the Fund, and building the Board that will put more meat on the bones of the GCF over the next year.

What’s still incredibly frightening is the blatant cooptation of the Green Climate Fund by the private sector, with unabashed support from the U.S. and the UK. If the financial sector and multinational corporations have direct access to the Fund and can bypass sovereign national governments, then we have a real potential for serious problems with democratic control, transparency, the application of social and environmental safeguards and basic standards, and the Fund’s effectiveness in achieving climate goals.

Finally, even if we get the Fund here in Durban it may be nothing more than an empty shell. The U.S. is still blocking a conversation on long term finance – both the scale that should be delivered on and the sources of where that money should come from. A text released last night did mention innovative sources of finance, but an outcome here in Durban needs to be much more specific about how countries will make that real. One thing they can do right now is commit to a work plan for implementing some of the leading proposals, such as a financial transaction tax.  

Interviewer: Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to me, Janet!

JR: Thank you!

A major flashpoint at the UN Climate summit in Durban is how nations in the global north should deliver the money that they're supposed to give countries in the global south to support efforts to deal with climate change.

It's not chump change. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs says it will cost developing countries upwards of $1 trillion every year to address climate change in the coming years.

Many negotiators want the UN to open the doors of the Green Climate Fund created at last year's summit in Cancun. They're also debating the scale and sources of long-term finance. The U.S. government is blocking both conversations.

Instead, Washington wants the private sector to take a leading role, and for tricks like carbon trading to leverage public money by raising big bucks in the financial market. This might sound good, but it would just add another roulette wheel to the casino economy that plunged the world into the worst recession since the 1930s.

Therefore, civil society groups and developing–country governments have demanded that the Green Climate Fund not serve as yet another game room for financial speculators to gamble with public dollars. A growing movement for innovative sources of climate finance — including a tiny tax on financial transactions — has shown that money is available for global public goods like climate change programs.

Now we just have to mobilize the political will of rich countries to share the wealth. With European countries adopting austerity measures, and a U.S. Congress that barely believes that the climate is changing, that'll be an uphill, but necessary, struggle.

Will the next two weeks of climate negotiations unleash a violent storm that makes our planet uninhabitable? Or can governments come together to keep our future safe?

As the second day of climate talks are winding down, storm clouds are building again.

Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, is observing the United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa. www.ips-dc.org
Join the global call for climate justice by participating in 1,000 Durbans in conjunction with the December 3^rd Day of Action on Climate Justice.

This week in the German city of Bonn, climate activists turned up the heat on government officials attending the UN climate talks, calling for a tiny tax on financial speculation to help pay for the fight against global warming.

The action in the streets outside the talks, in which youth sporting green Robin Hood caps asked negotiators on their way into the meeting to put money falling from the pockets of high-rolling financiers into the Green Climate Fund, mirrored demands being made inside the summit for a financial transaction tax (FTT), also called a financial speculation tax or Robin Hood Tax. These actions are part of a growing international campaign. In a press conference during the first week of climate talks, Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon called on countries to adopt an FTT to “generate real funds immediately.” The money is desperately needed in developing countries to adapt to a warming world and for poor-but-growing nations to reduce their own carbon emissions by investing in clean energy.

The UN pegs the price tag for developing country adaptation and greenhouse gas mitigation at around $500 to $600 billion each year in the coming decades. Failure to cut carbon pollution quickly will push costs even higher.

At a press conference in Bonn that brought together labor, youth, environment and development groups from around the world Tetteh Hormeku of the Africa Trade Network called for an FTT, a tax that economists estimate could raise up to $600 billion per annum for the just transition to sustainable economies. “In short,” Hormeku said, “we have to raise the scale of our ambition… of our finances to match the reality of the challenge that we face.”

“We are here today to urge the governments of the world to do the right thing; to impose a financial transactions tax and make the appropriate investments in a greener, cleaner economy,” added Bob Baugh, Chair of the AFL-CIO energy and environment task force and executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council. “It is time that the financial institutions, whose reckless actions brought the economic crisis that much of the world is in today, step up and do their part; and make a positive contribution to a cleaner planet and good jobs.”

Meanwhile, the French national assembly passed a resolution supporting a Europe-wide financial transaction tax by a margin of 477 to 2. Statements made by parliamentarians and French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for some of the revenue raised to go to climate change programs.

Sarkozy has promised to make FTTs a centerpiece of the G20 meeting in France in November. On June 15, the Brazilian parliament unanimously adopted a similar resolution calling for the Brazilian government to support a broad-based FTT. In the Bundestag, German lawmakers recently held a debate on the form and function of an FTT, and all of that country’s political parties expressed their support for the idea to the EU tax commissioner.

A global day of action has been called for June 22nd to demonstrate the breadth and depth of global public support for a tax on financial speculation and to build pressure on France, Germany and other European countries to move forward in implementing an FTT. In the United States, National Nurses United and other labor allies will descend on Wall Street demanding high-rolling financiers pay their fair share for the public goods and services that are on the chopping block due to budget short falls.

The Obama administration has not supported a tax on speculation (although several bills have been introduced in Congress), and could do severe damage to the momentum for an FTT in Europe if it sends discouraging signals. Already the U.S. has repeated several times in the Bonn round of climate negotiations that it doesn’t want to talk about innovative sources of climate finance like the FTT.

Climate activists have a message for Obama and his band of merry men at the State and Treasury Departments – If you can’t lead, at least stay out of the way!