Copenhagen climate agreement faces hurdles
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Perhaps nothing illustrates the challenges of government efforts to curb global warming more than the chain of events that unfolded this week on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Those efforts were meant, in part, to reassure international leaders preparing for a major climate summit in Copenhagen next month that the United States is serious about emissions cuts. Environmentalists welcomed them as such.
But even as the Senate committee prepared to vote, climate negotiators were publicly lowering expectations for the Copenhagen summit – citing, in large part, the United States’ inability to pass a climate bill into law before the talks begin. The bottom line is this: Neither Congress and the Obama administration nor the negotiators appear likely to finish their climate work by the end of the year.
Instead, analysts here and abroad say, it looks like the Copenhagen negotiators will attempt to settle for something less than a legally binding climate treaty. Perhaps, for instance, a political declaration that includes specific, nation-by-nation targets for emissions cuts and a fixed deadline for turning that declaration into a binding treaty.
Negotiators conceded as much in Barcelona, Spain, this week, as they met for the final time, formally, before Copenhagen.
“I sense that people are getting into a more realistic place about what we can reasonably accomplish in Copenhagen,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who attended the Barcelona meeting.
Or, as Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the United Kingdom’s climate security envoy, put it in an interview this week: ‘It’s quite apparent that the very high target we’re looking for, the legally binding targets we’re looking for in Copenhagen, will elude us. There’s still an opportunity for us to get political targets.’
Even the scaled-back goal in Copenhagen could depend on negotiators’ read of prospects in the Senate, where the climate bill is stalled behind healthcare – and perhaps financial regulation overhaul – and still must clear several other committees before Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brings a final bill to the floor. The bill’s fate rests in the hands of a not-small collection of swing Republicans and Midwest and Rust Belt Democrats, who are working with the White House to see if any climate plan can collect the necessary votes.
Among the issues at play are the depth and speed of the emissions cuts, the support for nuclear power development and whether liberals will consent to increased offshore oil drilling as part of an energy and climate package.
There’s also a persistent concern, particularly in manufacturing states, over the potential for U.S. job losses if the United States adopts emissions cuts – and take on higher energy costs as a result -- while emerging nations such as China and India do not.
A global climate treaty could assuage those concerns. But Chinese and Indian leaders, among others, are reluctant to sign on without a concrete American commitment. And by the way, several developing nations have already dismissed as inadequate the proposal that by all accounts is the deepest-emission-cut scenario possible for a U.S. climate bill: 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. Those nations could hold up a treaty, too.
-- Jim Tankersley