Big players hold out against binding deals on carbon footprints

DURBAN LETTER: Despite figures showing greenhouse gases had reached an all-time high, the US repeatedly blocked progress on a range of issues

GOD BE with the days when the US was represented at climate change negotiations by iguana-like Texas oilman Harlan Watson and Paula Dobriansky, a svelte but razor-sharp Bush babe who resembled one of those "perfectly emaciated social X-rays" in Tom Wolfe's novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Everyone knew that they couldn’t give a fig about global warming and were only doing the bidding of George W Bush and Dick Cheney back in the White House – blocking anything that could compromise the economic interests of the US, and wilting only at the Bali conference in 2007 when they reluctantly went along with its “roadmap”.

This was all meant to change when Barack Obama took over in January 2009, pledging to “lead the world” on climate change after eight arid years of the Bush administration. And the people he appointed to key positions all seemed admirably well-qualified and, more importantly, well-disposed to making progress.

Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, helped to negotiate the Kyoto protocol in 1997 (spurned by Bush in 2001), while his deputy, Dr Jonathan Pershing, served as climate and energy director at the Washington-based World Resources Institute and was previously a climate specialist in the US State Department.

Pershing is a walking abacus with an unnerving ability to rattle off figures, while the hawkish Stern appears to be devoid of emotion apart from the flash of an occasional smile. Their agenda is not dissimilar to what went before – to play for time, stick with voluntary pledges and hold out against a legally binding deal.

In Durban, the US repeatedly blocked progress on a range of issues even in the face of figures showing that greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time record level of 30.6 gigatonnes last year, with warnings that they have to peak soon if we are to have any chance of capping global warming to 2 degrees.

The latest Climate Action Tracker, compiled by the Potsdam Institute, projected that it could reach 3.5 degrees by 2100, making the world as we know it unrecognisable: “To put it bluntly, the longer we wait, the less options we will have, the more it will cost, the less likely we are to be able to stay below global warming of 2 degrees,” it warned.

In a hard-hitting address at the opening of the conference’s “high-level segment” on Tuesday, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon told ministers representing 130 countries: “Without exaggeration, we can say the future of our planet is at stake – people’s lives, the health of the global economy, the very survival of some nations.”

But Ban was not optimistic about the outcome. “Let me speak plainly. We must be realistic about the expectations for a breakthrough in Durban. We know the reasons: grave economic troubles in many countries, abiding political differences, conflicting priorities and strategies for responding to climate change.”

As a result, “the ultimate goal of a comprehensive binding climate change agreement may be beyond our reach, for now,” he said. Xie Xinhua’s announcement that China would be prepared to sign up for such a deal at some stage was dismissed by Stern, who didn’t think “there has been any change at all in the Chinese position”.

The US stance reflects a number of factors, not least the difficulties facing Obama in seeking re-election next year, the defeat of his climate and energy legislation, the patchy results achieved by his renewable energy stimulus package and the virulent campaign by climate change denialists on Fox News, radio stations and the internet.

This campaign continues unabated despite 2011 being one of the worst years on record for extreme weather events in the US, with a record 14 “billion-dollar disasters” including tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves that killed 675 people so far this year and gave Americans their hottest summer since the Dust Bowl of 1936.

Eileen Claussen, who negotiated for the US at climate talks during the Clinton era and now heads a Washington think-tank, said: “We need to move past asking whether extreme weather is caused by climate change and start figuring out how to protect ourselves in a future when these events become both more severe and more common.”

The impacts have been much more severe elsewhere, especially in Africa. Former president Mary Robinson, who was present to greet the Caravan of Hope when it arrived in Durban from Burundi at the weekend, rightly noted that there was “no denial in Africa” about the reality of climate change, but rather a “huge sense of urgency”.

Durban was dubbed “the African CoP” (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992), and the continent’s smallholders, who have been hard hit by global warming – not forgetting those suffering from famine in the Horn of Africa – were expecting that it would produce results.

A unique feature of CoP-17 was the convening of a daily “indaba”, Zulu for a “gathering of people, infused with wisdom” and “ubuntu” – interpreted as “I am what I am because of who we are”. Indeed, conference chairwoman Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s foreign minister, believes it “laid the foundation” for a deal.

But most of what happened was “climate poker”, with the biggest players – the US, China and India, which together account for more than half of global emissions – holding out against anything that would bind them to reduce their carbon footprints any time soon. Obama could lead us out of this last-chance saloon, but don’t bet on it.