The Age of Global Warming: A History (48 page)

31

Showdown in Copenhagen

If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children ...  this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...

Barack Obama, 3
rd
June 2008
[1]

President Obama, acting the way he did, definitely eliminated any differences between him and the Bush presidency.

Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan on behalf of the G77, 19
th
December 2009
[2]

According to the Met Office, 2008 was the tenth warmest of the last one hundred and fifty-eight years. As recently as the 1970s or 1980s, globally 2008 would have been considered warm, observed climate scientist Myles Allen of Oxford University, ‘but a scorcher for our Victorian ancestors’.
[3]

Evidently the Victorians were made of sterner stuff. Without global warming, many parts of the world would have experienced arctic conditions. 2008 began with China’s worst winter for half a century. Heavy snow closed the Chinese steel industry and killed one hundred and twenty-nine people. For the first time in living memory, snow settled in Baghdad. 

For Britain and other parts of Northern Europe, the summer was marked by the lack of direct sunshine and South America was experiencing a particularly cold winter. Australian skiers had one of their best seasons, with snow depths around twice the previous ski season. In the spring, it snowed in sub-tropical southern Brazil – ‘If snow is rare, to get accumulation is astonishing,’ the Metsul Brazilian weather centre reported – and in October, Sydney had early summer snow.
[4]
As Parliament debated the Climate Change Act, London had its first October snowfall since 1934. The tenth warmest year on record closed with freak snow storms in Southern California and up to eight inches of snow fell in Las Vegas, a record for the most snow in the month of December since official records began in 1937.
[5]

Disbelief about the exceptional warmth of 2008 extended to American consumers, who bought record numbers of snow blowers. Sales of the machines were up ‘high double digits’ over the previous year, one chain reported, particularly among the heavier-duty big-ticket models, spurred by December weather that broke more than two thousand snowfall records.
[6]

‘When climate scientists like me explain to people what we do for a living we are increasingly asked whether we “believe in climate change,”’ Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s head of climate change advice, wrote in February 2009.
[7]
To Pope’s dismay, a November 2008 poll for
The Times
found that only forty-one per cent of those surveyed accepted as an established fact that global warming was taking place and was largely man-made. Only twenty-eight per cent believed that global warming was happening and that it was ‘far and away the most serious problem we face as a country and internationally’. Awareness of the scale of the problem resulted in people taking refuge in denial, Pope explained.
[8]
  

On a pre-inaugural whistle-stop tour in January 2009, Barack Obama spoke of the dangers of a planet ‘warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil’.
[9]
A poll suggested the view was held by a minority of his fellow citizens. Forty-one per cent of Americans blamed global warming on human activity, compared to forty-four per cent who thought long-term planetary trends were the cause. The numbers were a sharp reversal from a similar Rasmussen poll taken in July 2006, when forty-seven percent blamed global warming on human activity compared to thirty-four percent who viewed long-term planetary trends as the culprit.
[10]
A Pew poll suggested that Americans did not view global warming as a priority, the issue coming twentieth out of twenty (down from eighteenth in a January 2007 poll).
[11]

In July 2009, President Obama joined other leaders for his first G8 summit. The venue had been switched to L’Aquila in central Italy after it had been struck by a severe earthquake. Since the previous G8, a financial earthquake had hit the global economy. Now the financial crisis was yoked together with climate change and the elimination of poverty in an all-encompassing mega-crisis, the G8 leaders stating their determination to tackle these ‘interlinked challenges’ with what they hopefully called a ‘green recovery’.
[12]
‘A shift towards green growth will provide an important contribution to the economic and financial crisis recovery,’ the G8 claimed.
[13]

Recognising the ‘broad scientific view’ that the average global temperature should not rise more than 2
o
C above pre-industrial levels, the G8 wanted ‘to share’ the goal of cutting global emissions by at least fifty per cent by 2050. Global emissions would have to peak ‘as soon as possible’. It would imply that developed countries would have to cut their emissions by eighty per cent or more.
[14]
  

On the summit’s second day, a meeting of the Major Economies Forum indicated limited willingness to share the G8’s self-imposed burden. Affirming the 2
o
C goal, the Major Economies leaders – which included Brazil, China, India and South Africa – agreed on work to ‘identify a plan for substantially reducing global emissions’ by 2050. However, its declaration avoided reference to any emissions reduction target.
[15]

Speaking on behalf of the G8, Silvio Berlusconi stated that ‘the active agreement of all major emitting countries through quantitative mitigation action was regarded by the G8 as an indispensable condition to tackling climate change’.
[16]
Nonetheless, the G8 praised the Forum’s ‘constructive contribution’ and looked forward to a global, wide-ranging and ambitious post-2012 agreement in Copenhagen.
[17]
 

As in 2007 and the lead up to Bali, there was a steady drum-beat to the COP in December. In September, Ban Ki-moon hosted a climate change summit at the UN attended by more than a hundred world leaders. None was as dedicated as Britain’s Gordon Brown, one of the first leaders to say he would be attending the COP.

In October, Brown hosted a meeting of leaders’ representatives of the Major Economies Forum at Lancaster House. There were less than fifty days to reach an agreement and avoid catastrophe, Brown declared. ‘In just twenty-five years the glaciers in the Himalayas, which provide water for three quarters of a billion people could disappear entirely,’ Brown told them, recycling a discredited IPCC claim.
[18]
‘Failure to avoid the worst effects of climate change could lead to global GDP being up to twenty per cent lower than it would otherwise be,’ Brown said, repeating the most alarmist claim of the Stern Review, one that had collapsed under critical scrutiny, ‘[a]nd that is an economic cost greater than the losses caused by two world wars and the Great Depression.’
[19]
Developed countries had to come forward with offers of finance, Brown said. He had been working on a $100 billion per year package in ‘predictable public and private funding by 2020’.
[20]

There was a fragility that hadn’t been apparent two years earlier. It was evidenced in the shrill reaction to the fall-out from the release of the Climategate emails in November. Writing in
The Times
, former chancellor Nigel Lawson slammed the integrity of the scientific evidence deployed by the IPCC to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions. ‘The reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished,’ Lawson wrote.
[21]

Climate secretary Ed Miliband branded Lawson and other sceptics ‘climate saboteurs’. He accused them of being ‘dangerous and deceitful’ for misusing data and misleading people in an attempt to derail the Copenhagen conference.
[22]
Brown then weighed in. ‘With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics,’ Brown told the
Guardian
. ‘We know the science. We know what we must do.’
[23]

It was delusory to believe a small group of climate sceptics might sway governments’ assessment of their national interest and swing the outcome at Copenhagen. The bluster betrayed insecurity. The air was coming out of the balloon.

Still more dramatic were political developments in Australia. At Bali, Kevin Rudd had been the COP hero. By a single vote in a 1
st
December party caucus ballot, the opposition Liberals ditched Malcolm Turnbull and his policy of cooperating with Labor to pass Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. In came Tony Abbott. Two months before, Abbott had described climate change as ‘absolute crap’ – something the newly elected leader now described as ‘a bit of hyperbole’.
[24]
The next day, the Australian Senate voted down the ETS for the second time. If Rudd had the courage of his convictions on the ETS, he could have called a double dissolution and fought an election on climate change. He blinked. Rudd’s hold on power was slipping, a victim of climate change. 

Copenhagen provoked millennial expectations among some of the committed. Tom Burke, NGO leader, government adviser, corporate environmental guru and academic extraordinaire, boldly declared 2009 the most important year in human history.
[25]
The World Council of Churches asked churches around the world to ring their bells on the Sunday midway through the conference. Bill McKibben, a leading environmental activist and Sunday school teacher, spoke of the special role of churches. ‘Where I live, in the United States, before we had radio when somebody’s house caught fire, we rang the church bells so that everybody would know and come out to do something about it,’ McKibben explained. ‘Well, something’s on fire now.’
[26]

In Britain, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Bahá’í, Jain and Zoroastrian faith leaders put their names to a joint statement overseen by Ed Miliband and filmed by the Foreign Office for worldwide distribution. Tackling the causes of global warming was an unequivocal moral imperative, the statement declared.
[27]
  

Two days before the conference, more than twenty of Britain’s church leaders painted their hands blue and called for an ambitious deal in Copenhagen. Addressing an ecumenical service in Westminster City Hall, the Archbishop of Canterbury provided some perspective. ‘It looks in the last few decades particularly and perhaps the last few millennia as if the human race has on the whole not been very good news for the rest of creation,’ Rowan Williams told the congregation.
[28]

From the spiritual to the temporal, Copenhagen would test the willingness of developing countries to accept the idea that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would boost their economies. If the notion of a green recovery was widely believed, countries would be falling over themselves to outbid each other with offers to cut their emissions. In the event, although President Obama talked the talk, only the EU walked the walk, offering to up their twenty per cent emissions cut to thirty per cent if others followed. None did.

The environmentalist agenda made inroads in developing nations. Unlike the West, especially Western Europe, economic considerations were paramount. The refusal of developing countries to subscribe claims about the benefits of ‘green growth’ set the scene for a confrontation between Western environmentalism and the Third World’s growth ambitions. Copenhagen thus brought the series of UN environmental conferences full circle. 

Separated by thirty-seven years, Stockholm and Copenhagen shared similar symbolic actions. Nixon’s EPA announced its DDT ban and Obama’s EPA issued its finding that carbon dioxide was dangerous. There is the role of environmental NGOs; introduced by Maurice Strong at Stockholm as messaging propagators, but drastically curtailed in Copenhagen’s Bella Center as the conference teetered on the brink of chaos.

Then there are the roles of India and China. For Strong, both were crucial. He had courted Indira Gandhi, who delivered the conference keynote address. Did her warning that the welfare of men came before the preservation of beasts still reflect developing country attitudes? Copenhagen would provide the answer.

In 1972, China was groping to find its place in the world. Strong had coached its delegation so the Stockholm Declaration could be adopted by consensus. In 2009, China was the world’s second largest economy. Its diplomats were confident and highly proficient in navigating their way around the climate change negotiations. At Copenhagen’s climactic moment, China fielded a mid-level official in face-to-face negotiations with the president and other world leaders which determined the outcome.

The accommodation between environmentalism and the developing world – hammered out in the Founex formula by Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward in 1971 – was based on a non-binding aspiration by developing countries not to emulate the developed world’s path of industrialisation. If their development path deviated from the one preferred by environmentalists – Barbara Ward and Fritz Schumacher in the 1970s and their successors such as Al Gore and Prince Charles today – each developing country could decide for itself its trade-off between economic growth and environmental objectives.
*
  

The Founex formulation was not written into the international climate change agreements, but it permeated their every pore. There are innumerable references to ‘sustainable development’ from the preamble of the 1992 convention to the critical paragraph 1 (b) (ii) of the Bali Action Plan on nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing countries ‘in the context of sustainable development.’

Although the use of the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ became
de rigueur
in the West by companies and governments, for developing countries, the meaning of sustainable development is about environmental policies not constraining human needs and aspirations and the Brundtland Report giving overriding priority to the world’s poor. The texts do not define what is meant by sustainable development, but it is clear from them that the concept chiefly applies to developing countries. There is no mention, for example, of sustainable development in the corresponding paragraph 1 (b) (i) of the Bali Action Plan with respect to developed country parties.

For the West to prevail at Copenhagen, the large emerging economies, principally China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea, would have to agree to at least one of two propositions: first, that they no longer considered themselves to be poor or developing nations; second, that the threat posed to them by global warming was so grave that it overrode the condition accepted by Strong to gain Third World participation at the Stockholm conference – that environmental protection would not fetter their development ambitions.

This made the Copenhagen conference unlike its predecessors and something international conferences try and avoid. The logic of global warming – the harm caused by an extra tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the same irrespective of how it got there or who put it there – and the economic priorities of developing countries made confrontation inescapable. It permitted only a binary outcome. One side would win; the other would lose. 

The alignment of the main blocs at Copenhagen was also different. In Rio, Kyoto and Bali, the US and the EU had clashed. For the first time, they pitched camp on the same ground. There was EU grumbling about the scale of the US cut – four per cent below their 1990 levels by 2020 compared to the EU’s twenty per cent. But both believed a credible agreement had to involve the major emitting nations.