Early in Monday's high-level United Nations meeting on climate
change, officials proudly told reporters that the summit, which brought together
leaders and ministers from over 150 nations to discuss global warming, would be
carbon neutral. The greenhouse-gas effect of the 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide
produced to hold the meeting and to fly U.N. staff and participants to New York
would be offset by a $15,800 investment in a small-scale hydroelectric project
in Honduras.
Tuesday, Sep. 25, 2007
By BRYAN WALSH found at time.com
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (left) speaks at
the United Nations during a High Level event on Climate Change.
photo (l. to r.): Don Emmert / AFP / Getty; AP
Thus, in terms of its ecological impact on the world's climate, it would be as
if the summit had never happened at all.
It's hard not to conclude that the summit's political effect may be just as
nonexistent. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon gave what was by his
mild-mannered standards an impassioned speech calling for rapid action on
climate change, and world leader after world leader rose to the lectern to
emphasize the danger of global warming. "Today, the time for doubt has
passed," Ban said in his opening address. "The time for action is
now."
But at the end of the one-day session, the delegates hadn't come much closer
to achieving the next meaningful step in the battle against climate change:
negotiating a more complete successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at
the end of 2012. Though political awareness of the need to grapple with climate
change was clearly at an all-time high scores of national leaders don't
suddenly convene at the U.N. without a decent reason the global political
will to actually do something still seems lacking. It's now 20 years since the
issue of climate change was first raised in the U.N.'s General Assembly chamber
by the island nation of Malta, 15 years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
and 10 since after the Kyoto Protocol was drafted and many governments speak
as if they'd just discovered global warming. Other concerns remain more
pressing, including the war in Iraq a fact that was made apparent when
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahadinejad (who skipped the climate meeting) gave his
speech at Columbia University in the afternoon, drawing crowds of delegates
around nearby televisions. The essential deadlock that has held up stronger
international action on climate change striking an acceptable balance of
responsibilities between developed and developing countries remains
unbroken, and there was little evidence that would change before the next major
U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, at the end of the year.
That was in no small part due to the absence of one national leader in
particular: U.S. President George W. Bush, who chose not to address the U.N.
meeting, though he did attend a dinner for leaders at Ban's request. (Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice spoke instead, emphasizing the importance of
investment in clean energy technologies, over specific limits for greenhouse
gases.) But Bush will be at a climate change summit of his own at the end of the
week. The White House invited major carbon emitters including developing
giants China and India to Washington to discuss long-term goals on climate
action. Both U.N. and Administration officials insist the two summits would be
complementary, not competitive, but since the White House continues to insist on
mostly voluntary action to cut carbon emissions, and the U.N. process is based
on Kyoto-style mandatory cuts, contradiction seems inevitable. "People are
concerned because [the White House] does have a history of going its own
way," Gro Harlem Brundtland, a U.N. special envoy on climate change, told
TIME. "But the U.N. process is absolutely the way we have to go. Climate
change affects every nation."
But even if President Bush's meeting is meant to derail the U.N. conference
and the very fact of the summit raises hopes that the long-time climate
skeptic may be thawing the U.N. process could easily stall on its own. The
Kyoto Protocol required emission cuts from developed countries that ratified the
treaty, but not from developing countries, including fast-growing emitters like
India and China. That double standard was the stated reason the U.S. refused to
ratify Kyoto, and it needs to be fixed in the next round of climate
negotiations. But there was little said in New York Monday to indicate that a
solution would be found soon. Developing countries insist with much
justification that they can't be expected to constrain their growing economies
to slow carbon emissions, but it's difficult to see how citizens in developed
countries and not just in the SUV-loving United States will accept
strict limits while their economic competitors in India and China are allowed
free rein. Nor is there much time to figure it out. "We only have two years
to reach an agreement on post-Kyoto, and only three years to prepare the
ground," says Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations
Environment Programme. "It's down to the wire."
Beating the diplomatic buzzer will require innovation, and there were
glimpses of the necessary creativity on Monday. Representatives from the Carbon
Disclosure Project, a non-profit connected to hundreds of institutional
investors controlling $41 trillion in assets, reported that major corporations
have begun to increasingly act on climate change outpacing many governments.
Indonesia, the third-biggest carbon emitter after the U.S. and China, hosted a
side meeting of rainforest nations, where they called for forest protections to
be a larger part of Kyoto's successor agreement when negotiations start in Bali.
(Deforestation is responsible roughly 20% of global carbon emissions.)
"There is no better chance than in Bali to act decisively," Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told delegates at the close of the summit.
But the most inspiring words came from a prominent American politician who did
show up at the U.N.: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The green-hued
Republican, who backed a 2006 California law to reduce state greenhouse gas
emissions 25% by 2020 exactly the sort of mandatory cut President Bush
refuses to consider told delegates that the time for debate was finished.
"The consequences of global climate change are so pressing, it doesn't
matter who was responsible for the past," he said. "What matters is
who is answerable for the future. And that is all of us." Pointing to
California's success in creating two vital new industries computers and
biotech and the entrepreneurial energy unleashed in the rapidly growing
developing world, Schwarzenegger contended that humanity could innovate its way
out of the climate change deadlock. That might be a bit simplistic, but when
Schwarzenegger called for "action, action, action, action" it was hard
to argue with him.
~ Black & Decker