I’ve just arrived in Cancun, where the 16th meeting of the Conference to the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is in full, acryonymized swing. It’s already clear that the mood in Cancun—like the weather—will be quite different from the chaotic atmosphere at the U.N. talks in Copenhagen last year. There are far fewer people here, considerably less attention and significantly lowered expectations—which paradoxically, may help negotiators actually get something meaningful done. The first week or so of the negotiations we’re marked by unusually conciliatory public statements from tough negotiators—including China, which said on Monday that it would be willing to allow some form of international review for all of its national climate and energy actions, moving closer to a key U.S. demand.
Of course, the endless debate over the future of the Kyoto Protocol—which I wrote about last week—could wreck everything. At the same time the U.S. has been stridently saying that it wants an agreement at Cancun that shows progress on all fronts—emissions reductions, technology transfers, adaptation, verification, financing and forest preservation—or it wants nothing. “You can’t always get the perfect,” Stern said in a press conference on December 3. “But to say that because you don’t get the home run you won’t play ball, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” (Given that baseball isn’t exactly the most well-known sport in major carbon emitters like China or India—let alone Europe—lets hope Stern can come up with more culturally relevant sports metaphors when he’s doing the actual work of negotiating.)
But the U.S. might really be mistaken in its insistence on an all or nothing approach to Cancun—not the least because the collapse of support for climate action back home doesn’t exactly put Washington in a strong bargaining position. The only way for a meaningful global climate action regime to come into might be through evolution. That’s the measured conclusion from a paper that came out yesterday from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a centrist think tank that has long followed domestic and global climate action. (Download a copy here.) Eliot Diringer of Pew and Daniel Bodansky of Arizona State University’s School of Law traced the history of a range of international regimes—from the European Union itself to the World Trade Organization—and found that they tend to grow over time, not in a single big bang. Diringer and Bodansky write:
A comprehensive and binding global agreement has strong virtues, and should be the ultimate goal, but that in working toward that end, parties should focus their efforts for now on concrete, incremental steps both within and outside the UNFCCC.
The UNFCCC—which was initially negotiated back in 1991-92—did undergo a period of evolution, as countries came to grips with the mechanisms for taking on climate change. But the regime also experienced its own “big bang” in the form of the Kyoto Protocol, which divided the world into developed countries (taking on carbon cutting commitments) and developing countries (participating in global climate programs but not taking on any commitments.) Since Kyoto was signed in 1997 (including by then-Vice President Al Gore, despite ample evidence that there was little political support in the U.S. for the Protocol), that division has become entrenched. In the years that have followed climate talks have virtually stalled, and the hopes that a change in the occupancy of the White House would break the deadlock have obviously been dashed. Again from Diringer and Bodansky:
Part of the explanation for the current stalemate may be that the regime tried to deepen too quickly along the legal dimension—not in relation to the problems urgency, but ahead of what the political traffic would bear. Arguably, the leap was too ambitious for a relatively young regime, which had not had time for trust to develop. A continued drive for binding commitments in the near term could produce a string of failures, and risk undermining the credibility and relevance of the UNFCCC process in the eyes of parties and observers alike.
An evolutionary path forward, however, could allow negotiators to focus on the short-term, concrete actions that could build trust in a global regime, which punting the tough questions—how exactly do we divide up the atmosphere—for later. Essentially this would mean following the “pledge and review” method resurrected in the Copenhagen Accord, which would allow individual nations to take climate actions on their own while opening the results for international scrutiny. Build trust, and then get serious.
One drawback to an evolutionary approach is that it leaves the future of the Kyoto Protocol up in the air—and since the first commitment period for the pact ends in 2012, it can’t exactly be punted very far. Diringer and Bodansky suggest allowing elements of the Kyoto Protocol—like the Clean Development Mechanism, which funds carbon-cutting projects in the developing world—to keep going past 2012, while countries under Kyoto might choose to voluntarily take on further targets. (Of course, Japan said last week that it would categorically refuse to take on new Kyoto targets unless the pact was broadened, so that might be a non-starter.)
There would also be room for climate actions taken outside the UNFCCC. That’s already happening—the Obama Administration runs the Major Economies Forum, which brings together the world’s biggest carbon emitters, and the G-20 and G-8 have recently taken on climate change and energy in a more substantial way. Even better, though, the Montreal Protocol—which curbed ozone-depleting chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons—could be expanded to take on other greenhouse gases, while international groups like the Arctic Council could tackle black carbon and soot, which also warm the atmosphere.
At the same time, no one sees this as an ideal approach. As Diringer and Bodansky write:
Given the urgency of addressing climate change, there is no guarantee that this process will reduce emissions quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change. If a more rapid process were possible, it would be worth pursuing. The paper does not argue that an evolutionary approach is best; rather, it concludes that, at present an evolutionary process is politically the most promising way forward.
As one of my old editors liked to say, usually right around when an issue was being closed: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The very urgency of climate change demands workable solutions for today, not tomorrow—something the U.S. should remember.
