Page 1 of 2 China, US lead merry dance in Cancun
By Peter Lee
The climate change crisis is about a comma. It is also about a lack of global
leadership by the United States and China.
The latest round of climate talks, now ending in the Mexican beach resort of
Cancun, is trudging along towards the usual dispiriting conclusion. Beneath the
blame-shifting and posturing, there is actually a shared understanding between
many of the world's developed and developing economic powerhouses that the
Kyoto Treaty is virtually dead - although many countries are loath to take the
politically brutal step of admitting it.
Supposedly, Kyoto - the international agreement to keep carbon emissions down -
is being replaced by a fairer mechanism called the Long-term Cooperative
Agreement, or LCA. Actually, it is
being replaced by awareness that the easiest way to deal with global warming is
insulation; the kind of insulation that is best provided by a thick, reassuring
pile of money.
The richer, economically more vigorous countries will invest in measures that
protect them from the deleterious effects of global warming and even allow them
to profit from it.
The poorer and more vulnerable nations will have less recourse to the United
Nations and its ideas of global equity; they will have to find ways to leverage
their diplomatic and economic utility to the richer nations if they want help
with their climate change problems.
Japan provided a jolt of excitement to the proceedings in Mexico - the
successor conference to the spectacular diplomatic train wreck of the
Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in 2009 - with its announcement that it
would not sign on to an extension of the Kyoto Treaty when it expires in 2012
unless the BASIC block (primarily China and India) signed on to binding
emissions targets.
Japan is an unlikely bomb-thrower in international venues. It has adopted a
"plague on both their houses" attitude toward the two major non-participants in
Kyoto, the US and China, as justification for scrapping the treaty.
However, it seems more likely Japan is probably acting as a proxy for the
United States and for the developed countries that are profoundly dissatisfied
with the Kyoto-mandated division of Annex I nations (European countries and
Japan, with binding emissions reduction targets) and the Annex II nations
(China, India, Brazil, et al, with no hard targets).
The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, so it has limited
diplomatic or moral standing to call for the protocol's overthrow. The EU had
its shot at Copenhagen, when it circulated a widely vilified draft document
calling for a post-Kyoto reordering of the climate change process. It is now
apparently resigned to Kyoto's continuation. Canada repudiated its Kyoto
targets when Stephen Harper took power last year. That leaves Japan, Australia,
and Russia to take the lead.
Apparently Japan - which is locked into an increasingly zero-sum economic
struggle with China - was most willing to step up.
China, on the other hand, has been on its best behavior at Cancun. The Beijing
leadership remembers how it was excoriated, somewhat unfairly, for the virtual
collapse of the Copenhagen conference.
At Cancun, it brought friendly faces, glossy brochures, and a willingness to
say the right things - up to a point. In a widely-quoted (and somewhat garbled)
article, Reuters reported:
China on Monday offered for the first time
to submit its voluntary carbon emissions target to a binding UN resolution..."
China's target would still be voluntary, stressed China's chief negotiator Xie
Zhenhua, a distinction from developed nation targets under Kyoto: "Developing
countries can ... make their own voluntary emissions commitments and these
should be under the Convention."
The November 29 to December 10 talks in Cancun are split over how to harden
existing pledges made at last year's Copenhagen summit, which ended in a brief,
non-binding agreement.
China's offer to make its existing, domestic pledge to slow growth in carbon
emissions binding under a UN resolution is a compromise it hopes will encourage
developed countries to continue the existing Kyoto Protocol.
"We can create a resolution and that resolution can be binding on China," said
Huang Huikang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's envoy for climate change talks.
"Under the [UN Climate] Convention, we can even have a legally binding
decision. We can discuss the specific form. We can make our efforts a part of
international efforts.
"We're willing to compromise, we're willing to play a positive and constructive
role, but on this issue [Kyoto] there's no room for compromise." [1]
The US sneered: "We've seen quotes from some people saying this can be a
game-changer," Todd Stern, the lead US envoy at the UN talks in Cancun, said at
a briefing. "I'd love it to be a game-changer, but as far as I'm concerned,
this is business as usual." [2]
One has the definite impression that some Annex I countries plus the United
States sent Japan out to drive a stake through the heart of Kyoto, lest it be
revived by an ostentatious show of Chinese reasonableness.
US climate diplomacy is less than edifying. In its most practical aspect, it
seems designed primarily to ensure that China and India are unable to
successfully advance initiatives that might contribute to Kyoto's continued
viability.
The famous comma referred to above was inserted by the George W Bush
administration - normally not deeply engaged with questions of punctuation or
climate change - into a seemingly innocuous phrase of the "Bali Roadmap", which
was intended to help lead Kyoto out of its Annex I vs Annex II cul-de-sac.
India's Economic Times reported:
The Bali paragraph says treaty talks
should yield "nationally appropriate" actions by developing countries to curb
emissions "in the context of sustainable development, supported and enabled by
technology, financing and capacity-building, in a measurable, reportable and
verifiable manner."
The comma after "building" was dropped and then reinserted at the Bush
administration's insistence. Delegates from the US argued for the comma to be
inserted so that "actions" by developing countries and not just support from
industrialized nations, would be measurable, reportable and verifiable, or MRV
in UN jargon. [3]
MRV, especially the V for Verification part,
is at the heart of climate change squabbles between China and the United
States.
The United States professes anxiety that, without third-party verification of
China's climate change mitigation efforts, China might be tempted to cheat. If
China's opportunities for misbehavior are not explicitly and forcefully
foreclosed, the argument goes, the possibility of getting meaningful climate
change legislation through the US Congress is impossible.
China, on the other hand, professes anxiety that third-party MRV will (a)
compromise Chinese sovereignty by giving a potentially hostile organization the
opportunity to inject itself into China's climate change activities in an
adversarial way (think of the IAEA under Amano vs Iran), and (b) turn China's
voluntary targets into de facto mandatory targets by (c) providing a pretext
for China-bashers to institute punitive import duties on Chinese goods if
Chinese efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions are not considered up to
snuff.
On balance, the Chinese arguments are more persuasive.
Right-wing intransigence, not China's imputed tendency to fudge data, is the
apparently immovable and permanent obstacle to US domestic climate change
legislation. Using norm-based multilateral initiatives to create problems for
China, on the other hand, is apparently an irresistible attraction to US
diplomats and legislators on issues as diverse as Iran, North Korea, and the
South China Sea, and could presumably be deployed on the issue of China's
carbon-spewing behavior.
At Cancun, in what was apparently an effort to placate the United States and
avoid standing unambiguously with China (as it did post-Copenhagen), India's
representative, Jairam Ramesh, floated the idea of a modified unintrusive MRV
he called ICA - International Consultation and Analysis - and a qualified
commitment to internationally monitored hard emission targets. The Times of
India tells us:
The UPA had committed to Parliament that India would
not take on any international legally binding commitments to reduce greenhouse
emissions. It was also part of the Cabinet decision drawing a clear red line
against such a move.
Last Thursday, Cabinet approved a proposal, mooted by Ramesh, diluting the
line. It stated, "India will not take any international legally binding
agreement, (at the moment)." This opened the window for Ramesh to shift India's
position with his statement, suggesting that while India would not take on
commitments right now, it could do so in the future. [4]
Whether
China agrees with the Times of India that this is a "tectonic shift" is open to
question. Under suitable circumstances, India's positions are probably
acceptable to China.
As the West stumbles and China and India soar through the global recession, the
free ride for Annex II countries is no longer defensible as a matter of
principle.
As for the MRV gap between the United States and China, it is apparently more a
matter of politics and negotiating posture, primarily on the side of the United
States, rather than rooted in the mundane details of data collection, analysis,
reporting, and review.
The US and China have held continual meetings on MRV and it appears that there
isn't too much practical difference between the two sides.
The Guardian reported a WikiLeaks cable with this exchange between the EU's top
climate change official and the lead US negotiator:
[Connie] Hedegaard
asks why the US did not agree with China and India on what she saw as
acceptable measures to police future emissions cuts. "The question is whether
they will honour that language," the cable quotes [Jonathan] Pershing as
saying. [5]
The New York Times reported on December 8 that the
Chinese are willing to reach an agreement, but the US is insisting on certain
adversarial MRV elements that China, almost inevitably, finds unacceptable:
Those
familiar with China's position say the government is eager to agree to certain
principles - like that an international monitoring system should not be
punitive or impinge on national sovereignty. But it doesn't want an expert
panel to rigorously truth-squad its methods or numbers, or allow other
countries to submit questions about the reports. America, meanwhile, won't
approve agreements on avoiding deforestation, adaptation, technology transfer
and other programs worth billions of dollars until it gets specific agreements
from China on elements like having an expert review panel. [6]
In an interesting contrast to Copenhagen, Western reporting does not
automatically cast China as the heavy on MRV. Just the opposite, in fact.
More from the New York Times:
Yet while the United States is casting
China as the linchpin of the negotiations, there is anger aplenty at America
inside the Moon Palace resort where talks are being held. Many say the United
States is demanding compromise from others while bringing nothing to the
negotiating table itself.
"I'm actually more concerned about the US's transparency," said Jennifer
Morgan, who heads the World Resources Institute's climate and energy program.
One leading US analyst said every time countries make progress on an issue, the
United States reminds countries that it might all mean nothing unless China
agrees to transparency rules.
"The US is the problem here," the analyst said. "Everybody is so pissed off.
Here we are with nothing back home, and acting like bullies."
Even
if India is warily sidling away from the preferred Chinese negotiating stance
on MRV, Ramesh has not yet taken the truly explosive step of abandoning Kyoto.
For the time being, at least, both India and China are still insisting on a
continuation of the Kyoto regime; Ramesh called that demand "non-negotiable".
China and India were responding to the latest effort of the anti-Kyoto
hardliners: advancing the alternative structure-in-embryo of the Long-term
Cooperative Agreement, an inclusive venue for ancillary issues that they hope
to repackage as an emissions agreement that eliminates the Annex I/Annex II
structure.
This approach is strongly resisted by China and India; the other brothers in
the BASIC acronym, Brazil and South Africa, are apparently less militant on the
issue.
Not only would LCA revoke China and India's Annex II free-rider privileges.
By leveling the playing field, LCA would shift the focus - acknowledged by
Kyoto - from the historical culpability of the West for pumping the majority of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. Most probably, this end-of-history approach would seek to saddle
China - in 2010 the biggest greenhouse gas emitter and one of the world's most
vigorous economy - with reduction obligations that China would consider
excessive.
As part of the relentless campaign to kill Kyoto and create favorable
conditions for LCA, the Western industrialized nations have exploited the split
between the smaller, less-developed nations threatened by climate change, and
the big BASIC countries that care more about per capita GDP growth than sea
level in the Maldives, hoping to completely fracture the image of extensive
Kyoto consensus and thereby hasten its demise.
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