Climate of no trust
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Protestors outside the UN Convention Center in Bangkok
Just before I came to Bangkok to cover the UN climate negotiations, I was in Chitral in Palistan, visiting a village that had been devastated by flooding caused by glacier melt. These mountain farmers, who have not contributed to climate change, are paying a very high price for rising temperatures. If climate justice existed, shouldn’t the developed countries who have contributed the most to global warming pay its victims, concentrated in the developing world?
It seems simple enough in the mountains, but when you walk the corridors of the insulated UN Convention Center in Bangkok, it all gets very murky and distrustful. Those who should pay don’t want to pay that much and those who ought to cut their emissions are backtracking. The developed world now wants emerging economies like China to commit to cuts as well. But developing countries, led by China in the G-77 negotiating bloc, don’t want to commit to binding targets, arguing that it is the rich countries that have caused the “historic” emissions which have led to rising temperatures!
“The Annex 1 countries (industrialized nations) are stalling and there is no breakthrough. No one is willing to move on targets. Everyone is waiting for everyone else to move”, a member of the Pakistan negotiating team told me. “But at least we are getting into negotiating mode”. Pakistan sent a competent team to Bangkok, led by Farrukh Iqbal Khan, director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a Columbia graduate.
There are two negotiating tracks in Bangkok. One is the preserve of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Co-operative Action, which includes the USA, and the other is the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol, which excludes the USA (because it refused to ratify the Protocol). The G-77 countries want these two tracks to remain separate, since the industrialized countries (minus the USA) have already made firm commitments on reducing emissions in the Protocol (its first commitment period will expire in 2012) and they want them to adopt new reduction targets for the five years from 2012. However, now there is talk of the developed countries wanting to do away with the entire Protocol. “I think the developed countries would like a single track of negotiations because then there would be openings for the G-77 countries to take on binding targets as well”, the Pakistani negotiator explained.
In the hallways there was talk of “killing the Protocol” and at the last G-77 press conference the tone was bitter. “They (the developed countries) are blocking progress in Bangkok. They are insisting on talking about how to dismantle the protocol”, said Ambassador Yu Qing-tai of China, who addressed the press conference along with the current chair of the G-77 countries (from Sudan). They said the only positive signals were coming from Japan.
Japan’s new Prime Minister is eager for change. President Obama has also promised to create a new “energy economy” in the US. At a press conference by a network of climate action NGOs here, the Americans were very upbeat. “Congress can act in time [to pass the new energy bill] and we can get a deal in Copenhagen. President Obama has made bold statements and is willing to do something”, one said. But Copenhagen is still a month away. By then the negotiators hope to have refined the pages and pages of text which will form the basis of the final UN climate change treaty.
A Greenpeace representative explained: “There are two basic problems. The text is too long, and it is unstructured. And there are no finance and mitigation targets by the developed countries as yet”. But Greenpeace acknowledges that some work has been done and some text has been cut. The negotiators have to work harder if the basic treaty is to be ready by Copenhagen – but a lack of political commitment by the developed world was increasingly evident in Bangkok. “The European Union has not done its homework… It is slowing down the negotiations” said my Greenpeace interviewee. “We have everything on the table – it can be done, but will it be done?”
The Pakistani lead negotiator, Farrukh Khan, put it this way in a public statement: “It is like we are sitting in a car and the driver is constantly putting holes in a tire to flatten it and asking the passengers like me to plug the holes. This is not the way to move forward”. So who exactly is sabotaging the car’s tires – the Bangkok talks? Is it the US or the EU – and if it is the EU, then which country is taking the lead?
I never knew a UN conference could be so full of intrigue – but there you have it. Copenhagen could signal the beginning of an entirely new world. A strong treaty would mean the price of oil falling and billions being pumped into alternative energy and more efficient cars, appliances, buildings and so on. “It could mean a wholesale transformation of the way we produce and use energy”, said an energy expert here. This would benefit both developed countries (smaller energy bills) and the developing world (less pollution). The treaty could also see developing countries being paid to conserve their old forests and a whole new market in carbon trading, where rich countries could offset their carbon emissions by paying to clean up industries in high growth regions like Asia.
The sum needed to achieve a real and lasting difference to limit climate change would come to US$160 billion, Greenpeace says. And how much have rich countries paid so far? A couple of million dollars. They spent much more than that bailing out their banks. The developed world needs to act now and gain the trust of the developing world, and later in Copenhagen. In the long run, everybody would win, and nobody would have to be a victim.
