The Age of Global Warming: A History (49 page)

American negotiators came to Copenhagen determined to apply the lessons from the failure of Kyoto. They didn’t want an agreement they couldn’t get through the Senate and warned that Obama wasn’t going to arrive in Copenhagen and act as a
deus ex machina
, as Gore had done. ‘We don’t want to promise something we don’t have,’ chief negotiator Todd Stern told reporters.
[29]

Congressional Democrats were as supportive to the American position in Copenhagen as they had been hostile at Bali, despite it being identical. ‘The concerns that kept us out of Kyoto back in 1997 are still with us today,’ Senator Kerry told the conference. ‘To pass a bill, we must be able to assure a senator from Ohio that steelworkers in his state won’t lose their jobs to India and China because those countries are not participating in a way that is measurable, reportable and verifiable.’
[30]
  

Gore made the same point. Obligations applied to one part of the world but not to another part could heighten people’s fears about their economic circumstances. ‘I would ask for an understanding of the difficulty that goes for elected officials.’
[31]

On the other hand, divisions within the EU were more visible. Britain and France wanted to raise the EU’s offer to a thirty per cent cut. ‘Because of the economic recession, a thirty per cent cut is much more like a twenty per cent cut two years ago,’ Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, explained from Brussels.
[32]
At least the recession was helping save the planet. Speaking for coal-dependent central and eastern European states, Poland’s Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, minister for European affairs, was having nothing of it. ‘The conditions for that are non-existent.’
[33]

Arrayed on the other side were the G77 plus China, along with the usual assortment of NGOs.  Sudan, China’s principal ally in Africa, spoke for the bloc. Its core was formed by Brazil, South Africa, India and China – the BASIC nations, the last two constituting the bloc’s inner core. 

Before the conference, China announced that it would cut its carbon-intensity by forty to forty-five per cent in 2020 compared to 2005, a move which unsettled India. At a November meeting in Beijing, the BASIC group reiterated its non-negotiable position. A relieved Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, expressed confidence that China would not ‘ditch us’. Should industrialised countries seek to override them, the BASIC four would stage a collective walk-out.
[34]

Both sides knew the other’s strategy. The aim of the US was to peel off as many members of the G77 as possible and leave China isolated. Its big bazooka was the third part of the Founex formula: money, huge amounts of it, targeted at the African nations.

Halfway through the conference, China’s vice foreign minister, He Yafei, told the
Financial Times
that China would not be the fall guy if there were a fiasco. ‘I know people will say if there is no deal that China is to blame,’ he said. ‘This is a trick played by the developed countries.’
[35]

The rest of what went on at Copenhagen was noise. It was fractious, at times farcical – the largest gathering of world leaders outside the UN in New York – but such were the tensions between them, no team photo.

There was the usual PR hoopla of climate conferences, but more so. The Nepalese Cabinet was helicoptered to a remote plateau in the Himalayas. They took part in a traditional Sherpa prayer ceremony before approving the speech that Nepal’s PM would deliver in Copenhagen. Sonoma County, California, despatched a seven-person delegation at a cost of $225,000. ‘This is a Disneyland for policy wonks,’ exclaimed Gary Gero of the Los Angeles-based Climate Action Reserve.
[36]

Coca Cola was the most visible brand in Copenhagen, its logo and ‘Hopenhagen’ splashed across city billboards. More than forty thousand people came, but the lines to enter the conference were a lot longer than at Disney. On the first day, a snag in credentialing left more than a thousand delegates shivering outside the fifteen-thousand-capacity Bella Center for nine hours. Less remarked was the bitter cold. Climate change conferences were irony-free zones when it came to adverse weather events like heavy snowfall.

‘Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen,’ economist Paul Krugman wrote in the
New York Times
.
[37]
So was the White House. Pointing to signs of progress toward a ‘meaningful’ agreement, the president’s trip was rescheduled to the end of the conference.
[38]
Gordon Brown wrote that Copenhagen was poised to achieve ‘a profound historical transformation: reversing the road we have travelled for 200 years’.
[39]
Quite why it should make sense to turn the clock back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brown didn’t say.

It was different on the ground. The COP’s opening was pushed off balance by the furore of the Climategate emails. ‘It’s an eleventh-hour smear campaign,’ Hockey Stick author Michael Mann said, adding, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong; I have nothing to hide.’
[40]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s James Overland complained: ‘It has sucked up all the oxygen.’ IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele agreed: ‘We are spending lots of useless time discussing this.’
[41]

Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad al-Sabban called for an independent inquiry. The ‘level of trust’ had been shaken, ‘especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that … is going to mean sacrifices for our economies’.
[42]
The IPCC’s Pachauri went on the offensive. ‘The only debate is who is behind it, I think we should catch the culprits.’ Climategate was an attempt to tarnish the IPCC. ‘The Fourth Assessment Report is completely objective, totally unbiased and solid in its scientific assessment,’ Pachauri claimed.
[43]
  

Striking a markedly less belligerent note, the UN’s Yvo de Boer conceded the emails looked ‘very bad’ and were fuelling scepticism, but media scrutiny was not unwelcome:

It’s very good that what is happening is being scrutinised in the media because this process has to be based on solid science. If quality and integrity is being questioned, that has to be examined.
[44]

Pachauri’s bravado didn’t last. As well as the inquiry mandated by the Dutch Parliament, Pachauri and Ban Ki-moon subsequently asked the InterAcademy Council to investigate the IPCC.

CEOs of Western corporations flocked to Copenhagen. ‘Not one single Indian CEO is here, and do you know why? Because they do not consider Copenhagen to be the most important event in one hundred years,’ a participant observed. De Boer was blunt. ‘Basically you’re not playing any role in a serious way.’
[45]
  

Five thousand miles away, Exxon Mobil demonstrated its seriousness – a $41 billion deal to acquire shale gas and fracking corporation XTO Energy. It was the largest energy sector transaction in four years and Exxon’s largest since it bought Mobil Corp in 1999. ‘This is not a near-term decision,’ said CEO Rex Tillerson. ‘This is about the next ten, twenty, thirty years.’ Combined with XTO’s holdings, Exxon Mobil would control about eight million acres of land on top of unconventional natural gas.
[46]

The quantum expansion of natural gas reserves unlocked by fracking gas shale presents the prospect of cheap, abundant energy. No one in Copenhagen seemed to notice. ‘As politicians dither and debate,’ the
Daily Telegraph
’s Damian Reece wrote, ‘the market has taken another decisive step in dictating where the world’s energy dollars are invested, whether campaigners like it or not.’
[47]
For those professionally engaged in worrying about global warming, shale gas was not part of the plan. It wasn’t ‘clean’ energy. Of the three paths to large-scale emission reductions, the collapse in Soviet communism was unrepeatable and the 2008–2009 global recession undesirable. Only Britain’s dash-to-gas – replacing coal with gas-fired power stations – required no government subsidies or artificial price support.

No big climate conference could do without Al Gore or the Prince of Wales. Both were in Copenhagen. Prince Charles garnered the better press with his plea to slow down tropical deforestation. ‘The quickest and most cost-effective way to buy time in the battle against catastrophic climate change is to find a way to make the trees worth more alive than dead,’ he told the conference.
[48]
  

Although not entirely eschewing the histrionics of his Bali performance (‘the future of our civilisation is threatened as never before’), Gore was low key. His role was subsidiary, more of a John the Baptist preparing the way for He who would be flying in on Air Force One. Even so, Gore managed to land himself in hot water over his Arctic ice prediction. The date for the ‘possibility’ of an ice-free Arctic ocean ‘for a short period in summer’ had been pushed back to ‘perhaps as early as 2015’ (at Bali, the forecast had been as early as 2012 to 2014).
[49]
This time, Gore was swiftly rebutted. Wieslaw Maslowski, a climatologist at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that it misrepresented the information he’d given Gore’s office. ‘Why would you take anything Al Gore said seriously?’ MIT’s Richard Lindzen asked. All Gore had done was extrapolate from 2007, when there was a big retreat in the sea ice, and got zero, Lindzen explained.
[50]

Kyoto took place towards the end of a decade of rising temperatures. Coming near the end of a trendless temperature chart, Copenhagen was more of a challenge. The Met Office did the next best thing. 2010 was ‘more likely than not’ to be the world’s warmest year on record and man-made climate change would be a factor. ‘If 2010 turns out to be the hottest year on record it might go some way to exploding the myth, spread by the climate conspiracy theorists, that we’re experiencing global cooling,’ Greenpeace’s Ben Stewart said. ‘In reality the world is getting hotter, possibly a lot hotter, and humans are causing it.’
[51]

The trio of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Bolivia’s Evo Morales entertained the conference with their denunciations of capitalism as the cause of climate change. ‘When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die,’ declared Mugabe, the octogenarian Marxist who had destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy. ‘A ghost is stalking the streets of Copenhagen’ Chavez told the conference. ‘Capitalism is that ghost,’ provoking wild applause from the representatives of civil society, aka the environmental NGOs, who seemed not to know that the collapse of Soviet communism accomplished more for the environment than any other event in history.
[52]

The violence of some of the language in the conference hall was reflected outside. Three hundred youths shrouded in black threw bricks and smashed windows as around thirty thousand people demonstrated in central Copenhagen. Police made nine hundred and sixty-eight arrests.
[53]
 

NGOs stoked the anger with inflammatory rhetoric. ‘Each year three hundred thousand people are dying because of climate change,’ Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace said at a rally.
[54]
But they had little purchase over the governments of India, China and others in the developing world. So the story they spun at the end of Copenhagen – widely taken up by the media – was to blame the rich nations for blocking progress. ‘Rich countries have condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life,’ stormed Nnimmo Basey of Friends of the Earth. ‘The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations.’
[55]
 

As a description of the showdown at Copenhagen, it was pure NGO fantasy. Nor was Copenhagen a confrontation between capitalism and socialism. It was a battle between the West that had signed on to the environmentalist agenda and the largest emerging economies asserting their right to a prosperous future.

It mostly took place away from the media behind closed doors. From time to time, the clash spilled out into the open. It didn’t need a code-breaker to decipher the positions of the main protagonists, which were clearly signalled in speeches in the conference hall. 

There was a clear victor. Equally clearly, there was a side that lost more comprehensively than at any international conference in modern history where the outcome had not been decided beforehand by force of arms.

*
  The third part of the Founex formula related to money. The principle was uncontroversial, but there were always disputes over the amount, who would get it and who would control it.