Some people are inspired by deadlines to conclude projects, while others see deadlines as a barrier to further progress. With barely five months until the UNFCCC climate summit in Copenhagen, climate action proponents hope that this UN-set deadline for a new global climate deal will inspire developed and developing economies to find a way to break the deadlock between them, but the lack of progress at last month’s G8 summit suggests considerably more time will be needed, time that the UN and the environmental lobby say is not available.
Four years ago, British prime minister Tony Blair placed climate change at the top of the Gleneagles G8 summit agenda, a position it has occupied in successive summits including the latest G8 gathering in Italy last month. Yet all of the summits since 2005 have produced little substantive progress toward a new post Kyoto global agreement. And based on the Italian discussions, only blind optimists could possibly believe a new global agreement can be achieved by the year-end.
Ahead of the gathering in L’Aquila, the Italian city that symbolises April’s devastating earthquake, the optimistic chatter from policymakers in Europe suggested a long-term agreement on emission cuts would be sanctioned, while UK prime minister Gordon Brown privately hoped his ‘Road to Copenhagen’ manifesto, which calls for annual climate funding of $100bn, would at least generate some debate on climate financing for the developing economies. Unfortunately, the end result bore no relation to Europe’s and Brown’s clearly unfounded optimism.
The Major Economies Forum (MEF) on energy and climate, comprising both the G8 and G5, espoused the standard ‘tough on climate change, tough on the causes of climate change’ mantra that is regularly rolled out ahead of these summits, but the words sounded particularly hollow in the absence of any action plan or roadmap resulting from the discussions.
On emission reductions the MEF statement merely said, ‘we will work between now and Copenhagen… to identify a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050’ while on financing the MEF communiqué was even more woolly, stating, ‘financial resources for mitigation and adaptation will need to be scaled up urgently and substantially, and should involve mobilising resources to support developing countries.’
If plaudits were given for identifying the emission and finance challenges faced then the summit would have been a resounding success, but these challenges were laid out at the Gleneagles summit. The L’Aquila summit was meant to plot a roadmap with actions to address these challenges, not to restate them.
Most of the media headlines have focused on the MEF’s ‘commitment’ to substantial long-term emission reductions, and are rightly critical of both the absence of any medium-term interim (ie 2020) reduction targets and the lack of consensus on the benchmark year on which future emission reductions will be set. Yet there is a growing body of opinion that an emission target mentality that is supported by both cap-and-trade and offset schemes is more likely to aggravate, not mitigate, climate change. What is needed, they argue, is funding for clean energy technology.
The MEF concurs with the need for funding, and even called it an ‘urgent’ consideration, so why did the MEF defer any decision on funding until the US-hosted G20 summit in September?
A joint paper by the Mackinder Programme at the London School of Economics and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford observes that the carbon intensity of the global economy increased from 0.27 tonnes for every additional $1000 of GDP between 1990 and 2000 to 0.53 tonnes between 2001 and 2006. The paper rightly argues that the near doubling of the carbon intensity in the period when the developed economy (with the notable exception of the US) has been focused on emission reduction shows that if nation states want to cut emissions they must take a direct approach to decarbonising their industries and patterns of consumpton rather than the current indirect approach via manipulation of the economy.
The problem with current climate policy debate is that it is too focused on the consequence, ie emissions, and not the cause, ie energy usage. And until a robust policy is put in place to decarbonise energy through clean technologies and efficiencies there will be less climate value in setting ever more challenging emission reduction targets.
As Simon Retallack, head of climate change at the Institute of Public Policy Research, correctly observed: ‘The log-jam between developed and developing countries on setting targets to reduce emissions won’t be broken unless leaders agree to collaborate on developing new, clean technology and work out how to pay for the energy revolution that’s going to be necessary.’
Without money and technology on the discussion table the deadlock between developed and developing economies will unlikely be broken. The MEF said it will ‘dramatically increase and co-ordinate public sector investments in research, development and demonstration of these [clean] technologies, with a view to doubling such investments by 2015,’ but where are the numbers to back up this fine rhetoric?
At the turn of the year, in the midst of the recession, the major economies concurred that the economic conditions provided the ideal platform to design and construct a new green economy. But while the green vision is now in place, the necessary actions and roadmaps are not, with even the UK government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan proving to be more aspirational than action-creating.
The inconvenient truth is that the developed economies have allowed themselves to become blinkered by aspirational long-term emission reduction targets and trading schemes that do not work. Just look at the current price of carbon as determined by the EU trading scheme. At r14/t it is hardly a sound economic endorsement for investment in clean energy technology.
But still all the pre-Copenhagen hype relates to targets and trading. A recent report from Point Carbon predicted that if the Waxman-Markey bill is passed in the US Senate before the Copenhagen summit, a likelihood it puts at more than 50%, then the probability of a global deal increases considerably and, conversely, if the bill does not pass then Point Carbon predicts that the Copenhagen summit will not become what the EU would call a ‘satisfactory agreement.’
For as long as the climate debate centres on the need for targets and trade there is little prospect of reaching a sustainable global agreement. The developed economies caused the current climate concerns but have proved that by focusing on the climate consequences (ie emissions) they cannot be relied upon to provide a robust climate mitigation solution. That responsibility increasingly lies with the rapidly developing BRIC economies led by China and India who have correctly argued that the only sustainable approach, both for the climate and economy, is through decarbonisation. And it is time the governments of the developed economies listened with open ears.
Jeremy Wilcox
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