The Age of Global Warming: A History (26 page)

Estrada had been involved in climate change negotiations since attending the Geneva World Climate Conference in 1990. He consciously applied the approaches used by his predecessors to forge consensus: Ripert in consulting privately with delegations on every issue to understand their thinking; Tommy Koh of Singapore, who chaired the preparatory committee for the Rio summit and addressed delegations by their first names, making emotional appeals at plenary sessions; and Merkel’s devotion to constructive compromise.
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The chair needed to possess an instinct for the sense of the room; to know when to press forward and when to wait.
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And he needed determination. ‘You have to be optimistic.  Particularly in Kyoto, I was paid to be optimistic … the Chairman has to be perseverant, persistent, otherwise you are lost.’
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Estrada was supported by the convention secretariat, headed by the Maltese Michael Zammit Cutajar for its first eleven years.  Zammit Cutajar began his career in UNCTAD, providing a further link with Prebisch, who was his first boss. When questioned about the position of the climate change secretariat in the negotiations, Zammit Cutajar would recall what Prebisch used to say:

‘As a secretariat we are objective, but we cannot be indifferent to development. We cannot be neutral. We are fighting for development.’ So when people try to block the [climate change] process, we can admire their negotiating skill, but we cannot be indifferent ... We have a commitment.
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Although the commitment to tackle global warming was seen through the prism of Prebisch’s economics and the development needs of the South, the chair and secretariat did not permit their commitment to be about promoting the interests of the South. At one point, in Kyoto, Estrada accused Brazil of coming to the conference ‘with an open hand’, triggering a walk out by the Brazilian ambassador.
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He opposed the Clean Development Mechanism, which was designed to pump money from North to South. When Saudi Arabia and Kuwait challenged one of his decisions, he rounded on them. ‘From the very beginning … a group of countries was trying to stop the process … I will do everything to overcome those countries … I am not going to be [held] hostage.’
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OPEC wouldn’t risk a walk out and Estrada knew he had the votes.

This was not the case for the G77 plus China on the issue that bound them together: individually and collectively its members would be held totally immune from the costs of policies designed to tackle global warming. President Clinton tried; Estrada had more success – but nothing could break the solidarity of the South. 

After the 1994 mid-term elections, the Clinton administration requested that the negotiations be slowed down. At COP2 in July 1996, with Clinton cruising to re-election, the Clinton administration called for an international agreement on binding targets to be met with the maximum flexibility. It also put its name to a ministerial declaration led by Canada, which stated the continued rise of greenhouse gas concentrations ‘will lead to dangerous interference with the climate system’.
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It was an important moment. The convention had been adopted on the precautionary principle. The ministerial declaration replaced the modal auxiliary ‘might’ with the future tense ‘will’. The convention’s objective is to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, but it did not define what should be considered dangerous. Now the politicians had. Because delegations from Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela disagreed (and Russia’s Yuri Izrael continued to dispute that global warming would be harmful), the COP noted, but did not adopt, the declaration.
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The Kyoto conference had to resolve three sets of issues. The first was the level of emissions cuts for Annex I countries. This pitted the US and the EU against each other, a nervous Japan on the sidelines, worried about the burden on its economy, but as host not wanting to cause the conference to fail. The second set revolved around the flexibility of those targets and timetables and the means by which they should be achieved. This was another battle between the US and the EU, joined by a deeply suspicious South, that saw flexibility as a means by which Annex I countries could evade their responsibilities by cutting emissions of poorer countries rather than their own. The third was the extent to which non-Annex I parties should indicate willingness to assume some form of obligation to limit carbon dioxide emissions at some point in the future.

The stage for the confrontation on the first of these was set in June 1997 at the Denver G8 summit, the only one hosted by Bill Clinton. On his return to Washington, Clinton told Taylor Branch, his oral historian, how the Europeans, including Tony Blair and Helmut Kohl, had ganged up on him. ‘They upbraided him, said the president, even though they had no idea how they would meet their standards,’ Branch recorded.
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Blair had been elected less than two months earlier on a manifesto which included the pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions by twenty per cent by 2010 (a target the Labour government missed by fifty per cent).
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More painful was Kohl – ‘almost like a blood brother’, according to Branch. It had been eighteen years since a German chancellor had attacked an American president, but their respective positions had changed one hundred and eighty degrees since Helmut Schmidt had taken on Jimmy Carter in Tokyo in 1979. Then it was a realist German expressing his scorn for an American president’s crusade against imported oil. In the intervening years, German politics had been transformed by the rise of the Greens. 

Schmidt was a hard-headed pragmatist. His definition of a successful leader was to prevent his country being overrun by war or by need and hunger. Schmidt’s call for a NATO response to the Soviet Union stationing of SS-20 nuclear missiles helped fuel the rise of anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany. In 1978 and 1979, massive, sometimes violent, demonstrations against nuclear power and nuclear weapons made the extra-parliamentary Left the voice of radical environmentalism that until then had mainly been the province of old and neo-Nazis. In October 1980, the Green Party was formed to bring the radicals into the parliamentary system for the first time in post-war Germany. The rise of the Greens was a gift to Kohl and the CDU, who used the Greens against the SPD to split the centre-left. At the same time, the CDU had to develop pro-environmental positions to prevent losing conservative voters to the Greens. 

In July, the US Senate fired its warning shot across Clinton’s bows on the third strategic issue by passing the Byrd-Hagel resolution. According to co-sponsor Chuck Hagel, there was not a single senator who had not been concerned about what might come out of Kyoto and worried that the president was going too far.
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Three months later, Clinton announced the instructions he was giving American negotiators in a speech at the National Geographic Society. The US would commit to stabilising emissions at 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
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Although he talked of achieving meaningful reductions ‘here in America’, that goal was contradicted by Clinton’s second goal – flexible mechanisms including emissions trading and ‘joint implementation’, whereby firms could invest in projects in other countries and receive credits for those reductions at home. On bringing non-Annex I countries in to the net, Clinton could hardly have been clearer: ‘The United States will not assume binding obligations unless key developing nations meaningfully participate in this effort.’
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Less than a month before the Kyoto conference was due to begin, Tim Wirth announced he was quitting. His place was taken by Stuart Eizenstat, who, at short notice, flew in from Switzerland where he had been negotiating the restitution of Nazi gold. Where Wirth’s time in Congress had made him a somewhat divisive figure, Eizenstat was highly regarded by Democrats and Republicans. Clinton could hardly have made a better received appointment.

If the Kyoto conference had only been about flexibility mechanisms, the outcome would have been an unqualified success for the Clinton administration. US negotiators gained every one of their main objectives. America wouldn’t have to cut its own emissions if it could buy other countries’ excess emissions – the Russian Federation having enough ‘hot air’ to satisfy American needs, or so the thinking went. (It was never likely that the US Congress would approve a law which resulted in American businesses and consumers sending billions of dollars to Russia for its hot air.) It was on the third of Clinton’s three objectives that no ground was given nor taken at Kyoto. 

Rio had been a signing ceremony. The Kyoto COP3, which started on 1st December 1997, was a real time negotiating conference with cameras present at the final climatic session. NGOs came, but their purpose was to influence the negotiators and raise the stakes for failure. Scientists also played their customary Cassandra role. 1997 was expected to be the Earth’s warmest year on record, they said. ‘We are beginning to see the fingerprint of man’s impact on the climate,’ a scientist from Britain’s Hadley Centre told the media.
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Not everyone was impressed.
Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer reminded his readers of a leading climate scientist, Stephen Schneider, who was now arguing that it was ‘journalistically irresponsible’ to present both sides of the debate. Twenty-five years previously, Schneider had been arguing that the real threat was global cooling. Then, he had dismissed fears about global warming by claiming that a doubling of carbon dioxide would produce a temperature change of less than one degree centigrade.
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A congressional delegation was in Kyoto to provide oversight. ‘This is not a conference about environment,’ Hagel told a local newspaper. ‘This is a conference about economics,’ one with an underlying agenda of wealth transfer. ‘I’ve never seen so many silly people,’ the senator added.
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Senator Liebermann was challenged by a Chinese delegate: ‘Do you expect us to keep our people poor? Is that what you want?’ To which the senator, a future sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation, replied, ‘We can’t ask our people in the US to accept the burdens associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, if at the same time, the developing nations accept no responsibility.’
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Senator Kerry took a more emollient approach. America must tell the Third World: ‘The mistakes we made should not be repeated and we’re willing to help you grow in thoughtful ways. So please, when you get cars, think about unleaded gasoline and emissions controls, about the virtues of mass transit and trains.’
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There had been an end of June deadline for countries to submit proposals for consideration.  Out of more than two hundred pages, Estrada distilled a twenty-five-page draft protocol, closing minor issues but leaving open the large contentious ones. He then challenged the Annex I countries to put their cards on the table. 

The EU’s opening position had been a flat fifteen per cent cut. In March the EU re-allocated this among themselves under the ‘EU bubble’, in the process weakening their credibility in pressing for a flat rate for everyone else, although John Gummer believes it was perfectly reasonable for the world to view the EU as a single economy. Indeed he describes his support of the EU bubble as his proudest moment as a minister of the British crown. It meant Britain would have to do more so Ireland could do less, as some recompense for eight hundred years of oppression.
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On the third day of the COP, the US indicated that it might introduce a small symbolic cut to take its target below 1990 levels. Three days later, Estrada proposed a ten per cent cut for the EU, five per cent for the US and two and a half per cent for Japan. The EU objected, saying the three should have the same target.
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On 8
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December, Gore arrived. ‘A one day cosmetic trip that would not make up for years of neglect by the Clinton administration,’ Philip Clapp, a former aide to Tim Wirth and president of the National Environmental Trust, called it.
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Environmental groups chanted ‘read your book’ outside rooms where Gore was meeting.
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Gore’s decision to go had been made only two weeks before. Although he had spent months wavering, he insisted that political calculation had not entered into his reasons for making the trip. Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and long-time opponent of tough emissions curbs, thought otherwise. Dingell warned that Gore’s performance at Kyoto ‘could affect many things, including his nomination and election’.
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Harlan Watson, a senior congressional aide, had first known Gore in the early 1980s, when he had been a congressman. He had always been struck by how bright, quick and extraordinarily articulate Gore was. A different man was on stage in Kyoto, hesitant and looking around for prompts. Perhaps it was jet lag.
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Then Gore dropped his bombshell. In remarks added thirty minutes beforehand, the vice president said that after meeting the US negotiating team and speaking with President Clinton by phone, ‘I am instructing our delegation right now to show increased negotiating flexibility if a comprehensive plan can be put in place.’
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The message was clear. The Clinton administration would do whatever it took to avoid being isolated. ‘We were taken aback,’ recalled Watson.
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The congressional delegation had been completely frozen out; it hadn’t been helpful not to know what its own government was doing, Hagel later recounted.
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Perhaps the American negotiating team didn’t know what was happening either. Watson remembers Eizenstat looking as surprised as everyone else.
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Estrada made a new proposal of eight, five, and four and a half per cent reductions for the EU, the US and Japan respectively.
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Two days later on 10
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December, at around midnight in Washington, Eizenstat called the White House to say they were close to agreement. Eight, seven, six would clinch the deal. At 2am Washington time, Gore telephoned Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. After reminding him how far the EU, the US and Japan had come, he laid it on the line. The last thing anyone wanted was for people to say that the thing that prevented a deal was the host country not moving a final percentage point.
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And that’s where the three main Annex I parties ended up, although during the conference’s closing moments Australia got its cap raised from plus five to plus ten per cent.
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On flexibility, the US scored a string of wins; a five-year commitment period from 2008 to 2012, joint implementation and generous accounting for forest sinks. Emissions trading was strongly opposed by the G77 plus China. From their perspective (and to some in the EU), it was wrong to have a mechanism to enable America to cut other countries’ emissions to avoid cutting its own. It provoked a confrontation between China and the US, drawing a rebuke from Estrada. ‘It might be better if we have no agreement,’ he said. ‘I invite you to reflect.’

During the pause, Chinese and American negotiators stood nose-to-nose, snarling at each other in a pre-dawn showdown.
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The conference had been due to end on 10
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December, but at four in the morning the following day Estrada announced he was deleting an OECD text on emissions trading, putting in its place a new article permitting trading but stating it must be supplemented by domestic action. Estrada banged his gavel. Emissions trading was in the Protocol.   

The US also got a bonus that wasn’t in its original list. Three days before the June deadline for proposals for Kyoto, Brazil tabled a complex plan to allocate greenhouse gas emission commitments based on countries’ historic contributions to the increase in global temperatures. Although none of it was adopted, the G77 plus China used the hook of a Clean Development Fund to be financed by fines levied on Annex I countries for non-compliance. In November, Brazilian and American negotiators realised that paying a fine for non-compliance was functionally identical to buying a licence to remain compliant without the stigma. The US had found another flexibility mechanism. Even better, it could in principle extend emissions trading to the whole world.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) turned out to be one of the most controversial parts of the Kyoto Protocol. After the conference, the Clinton administration argued that the CDM represented a ‘down payment’ on developing countries’ future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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In reality, it was nothing of the sort. ‘Though I facilitated approval of this proposal, I did not like it,’ Estrada wrote in 1998. ‘I do not understand how commitments can be implemented jointly if only one of the parties involved is committed to limit or reduce emissions and the other party is free from the quantitative [restrictions].’
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The hypothesis that mitigation costs are lower in developing countries is true only if market distortions are adjusted, Estrada argued, otherwise everything is cheaper in developing countries – a disparity that has been the root cause of every colonisation since the time of the Greeks.
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