Mark Hertsgaard's Blog

Video: Tougher Cap and Trade Legislation (GRITtv, 14mins)

2010-04-21T21:13:47Z

Nation Environmental Correspondent Mark Hertsgaard sits down with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders to talk about the environmental movement and the current climate legislation. Flanders is pessimistic that the current bill will actually reduce emissions. Hertsgaard agrees that the loopholes in the bill will make it difficult to actually cap emissions: “Cap and trade could work if you get tough legislation but that is a very big if in the United States of America,” Hertsgaard says.

Mass alert: wake up!

2010-01-21T09:32:06Z

I won’t say I predicted it, but I had a hunch that Tuesday’s U.S.
Senate election in Massachusetts might go badly for the Democrats and
the White House.

I happened to spend a few days in western Mass a week before the
election, speaking for the Dowmel Lecture Series about the Copenhagen
climate summit and what comes next. I had taken Amtrak up from New
York City, a beautiful two hour ride along an often-frozen Hudson
river. I was then fetched from the train station and driven an hour
east to the charming town of Stockbridge, in the heart of the
Berkshires, a region known for its glorious summers, ample cultural
offerings and generally liberal politics. As we passed through lovely
rolling hills and farmland, I kept seeing lawn signs with the name
Brown on them. I hadn’t followed the Massachusetts raise close enough
to know, so I asked my companions who Brown was.

“Oh, he’s the Republican running to take over Teddy Kennedy’s old
seat,” the husband replied.

“Looks like he’s got some support,” I ventured.

“Well, maybe,” the wife said. “We’ve been hearing about polls saying
that the race is tightening. That’s okay, it reminds us to call
people and get them out to vote next Tuesday.”

You all know what happened next. Scott Brown, the Republican
challenger, took 52 percent of the vote, against 47 percent for the
Democrat, Martha Coakley. This, despite the fact that Massachusetts
has long been the most reliably Democratic state in the Union, and
despite the fact that President Obama made a last-minute trip to
Massachusetts to try to salvage Coakley’s faltering campaign.

So what’s it all mean?

Coakley did herself no favors as a candidate–she hammered the final
nail in her coffin a few days before the election, when she mindlessly
claimed that Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling was a Yankees
fan–but I suspect the real problem goes deeper, and straight to the
White House.

As I said at a brown-bag lunch at OSI on Tuesday, the White House has
lost control of the narrative of the Obama presidency. Obama–surely
the most naturally gifted communicator who has occupied the Oval
Office since at least Ronald Reagan–and his aides have somehow
allowed their opponents to define the terms and direction of the
national political conversation. Through their own strategic choices,
Obama and his staff have let his presidency be painted as taking the
side of the much-hated bankers over the common person. On health
care, Obama is now seen as favoring higher taxes over better care. On
climate change, the White House and Democrats are in danger of losing
the congressional vote on climate legislation because they have failed
to make the case that tackling climate change will actually save, not
ruin, our economy.

The common thread through all of this is: Obama and his staff have
abandoned the political principles and organizing strategies that got
them elected in favor of cozying up to the powerful interests and
inside-the-Beltway thinking that Obama the candidate derided. The
American people, no dummies, have responded by turning increasingly
critical of and impatient with the White House.

But maybe something good will come out of this. If Obama and his
advisers draw the right lessons from the Massachusetts debacle, if
they return to first principles and make a point of siding with the
people over the powerful, they might still recover in time to avoid a
route in this fall’s congressional elections. There is some evidence
this about-face is under consideration. At the end of last week, the
president finally signaled he was going to take on the banks.
Announcing the administration’s plan to impose a fee on banks to
recover $170 billion in federal subsidies that saved the banks from
bankruptcy, Obama delivered a pretty good sound bite: “We want our
money back.”

He’ll have to go much further than that, though. Many of the people
who voted for Obama in November 2008 have been left feeling
disillusioned by his first year in office. This was not the kind of
change we were promised. One of his supporters recently posted an
angry blog, listing one issue after another where president Obama
violated what candidate Obama had promised: Afghanistan, Iraq, the
economy, health care, climate change. The supporter, after noting
that he had contributed a couple hundred dollars to Obama’s campaign–
a large sum for a grassroots activist–then concluded by saying, “I
want my money back.”

Article: The Copenhagen Disaccord

2010-01-12T21:42:45Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for The Nation

We have entered the post-Copenhagen era of climate politics—but just what that means is still very much undecided. The summit was widely regarded as humanity’s last good chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. It plainly fell short of that goal …

The full article is available at my website: http://www.markhertsgaard.com/articles/246

The Ugly Truth About Obama’s “Copenhagen Accord”

2009-12-24T16:10:26Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for VANITYFAIR.com

Well, so much for Hopenhagen.

Organizers of the U.N. climate summit had proposed that upbeat respelling of the Danish capital when negotiations began two weeks ago, and one saw it everywhere in Copenhagen: in metro station advertisements, activist press releases and newspaper headlines. But the cheery new name did not survive the talks themselves. In the end, Hopenhagen became Nopenhagen.

Boarding the plane home on Saturday after the summit’s collapse, my eye was caught by a large wall photo of Barack Obama. Something about it wasn’t right, though. Bleary-eyed after an exceptionally late night of covering the dueling press conferences of the summit’s final hours, it took me a moment to see what was off. Only when I read the accompanying text did I notice that this Obama had a head of lightly gray hair. Barack Obama 2020, the text said, followed by a quote: “I’m Sorry. We Could Have Stopped Catastrophic Climate Change … We Didn’t.”

Sponsored by Greenpeace, the Obama ad—and similar ones featuring the faces of Chinese president Hu Jintao, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other leaders—had been erected prior to Copenhagen as an exhortation to reach an ambitious and binding agreement there. Now, the ads read less like an exhortation than a prophecy.

Despite what you may have heard, the Copenhagen summit did not reach an agreement to tackle climate change. What it produced instead was merely a side deal, put together on Friday evening by a handful of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas-emitting nations, including the United States and China, the two climate superpowers. This side deal was then very grudgingly endorsed late Friday night by the European Union and other rich industrial nations, and accepted even more reluctantly on Saturday by many, but by no means all, developing nations. International opinion was so divided, and the side deal so unpopular, that the full summit explicitly declined to approve it on Saturday afternoon. Rather, it voted merely to “take note” of it.

No surprise, really: the side deal was in substance all but toothless, and the U.S. and other world powers imposed it at the last minute in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. In a brief press conference before returning to Washington, Obama hailed the deal as an “unprecedented breakthrough,” but his own words undercut that claim. What was agreed, the president explained, was not a legally binding accord but a mere “political declaration” that he acknowledged fell well short of what climate science required. “There is much further to go,” he said.

According to many news reports, the side deal pledges to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial level in which our civilization developed and to which the earth’s ecosystems have adapted. Would that this were true. In fact, the deal merely “recognize[s] the scientific view” that the increase should be kept to 2C.

Worse, the deal does little to bring this result about. It neither enumerates nor prescribes binding limits on the emissions that drive global warming; it merely commits both developed and developing nations to “take action” to “achiev[e] the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible….” Emissions reductions will remain purely voluntary, and failing to achieve them will result in no penalties.

It “is not hard to guess” why binding targets on emissions reductions were not mandated, Brazil’s ambassador of climate change, Sergio Barbosa Serra, told reporters late Friday night. “Targets,” he explained, “are supposed to come in the second period of the Kyoto protocol”—that is, beginning in 2012—and neither the U.S. nor China are or want to be signatories to Kyoto. The original formulation of the side deal included calls for rich industrial nations to reduce their emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 and for global emissions—in other words, including emissions from China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies—to fall 50 percent by 2050. But the final three-page text dropped these stipulations, said Serra.

Contrary to the White House spin, ambassador Serra did not deny that the side deal was a major disappointment. The outcome in Copenhagen, he said, was “certainly not what we expected…. But if we [the government of Brazil] had not been involved as intensively as we were, we wouldn’t even have gotten this far.”

There is plenty of blame to go around. The Obama administration’s refusal to offer more than 4 percent emissions cuts by 2020 was seen by many other countries, rich and poor alike, as evidence that the U.S. under Obama was not that different than it had been under George W. Bush. The claim that Obama’s hands are tied by Congress was likewise challenged; after all, three days before the Copenhagen summit began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had affirmed its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions regardless of what Congress did.

The other climate superpower was no better. China dragged its feet throughout the summit, resisting calls to accept even long-term limits on its emissions and pressuring poor and vulnerable nations to toe its diplomatic line or risk the loss of development aid. It was China that vetoed the 50- and 80-percent emissions cuts, Ed Milliband, the climate secretary of Great Britain, charges today in an opinion piece in The Guardian in which he calls for the U.N. process to be reformed to prevent such blocking tactics in the future.

The one semi-bright spot in the side deal concerned finance. The treaty currently governing international climate action, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, obliges rich industrial nations—whose past greenhouse-gas emissions are what caused global warming in the first place—to provide aid to the poor nations that are and increasingly will be the hardest hit by sea-level rise, drought, and other effects of climate change. The side deal includes a guarantee of $30 billion over the next three years in climate aid; furthermore, it endorses a goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020. No doubt, $100 billion a year is a serious amount of money, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented when first proposing this sum at the summit last Thursday. Still, it falls short of what even the World Bank, an institution dominated by rich countries, has estimated is necessary to relocate vulnerable communities, safeguard dwindling water supplies, and otherwise protect people and economies from the intensifying impacts of rising temperatures.

Nor is it clear how much of this envisioned $100 billion will actually materialize. The text of the side deal refers to both public and private funds, as well as “alternative sources of finance.” This phrasing suggests that governments hope to persuade investors to join them in assisting the poor, presumably through money raised from cap-and-trade and other forms of carbon markets. Good luck with that; the record on carbon markets so far is not terribly encouraging.

Like the White House, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tried to put the best face on what happened in Copenhagen, calling the side deal an “essential beginning.” The problem is, Copenhagen was supposed to be a conclusion, not a beginning. As Richard Black, the excellent environment correspondent for the BBC, has observed, the landmark U.N. climate conference in “Bali in 2007 was the ‘first step’; come to that, [the Earth Summit] Rio in 1992 was the ‘first step.”

I watched in Rio as the world’s heads of state pledged to do what was necessary “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] climate change.” In the 17 years since, our understanding of climate change has progressed enormously. Alas, we now know that the early studies dramatically underestimated how sensitive the earth’s climate system was—how easily the increase in temperatures known as global warming could trigger the stronger and more frequent droughts, storms, and other impacts known as climate change.

In Rio, scientists warned that if global emissions were not soon cut, dangerous climate change could occur by 2100. But climate change ended up arriving 100 years sooner than projected, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documented in its Fourth Assessment Report, in 2007. And because of the inertia of Earth’s climate system—the physical fact that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades and longer—our planet is now locked in to another 50 years at least of rising temperatures and the impacts they bring, no matter how quickly we might reduce our emissions.

None of this is any secret. The basic science has been explained again and again, not just by the I.P.C.C. but the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., the Royal Society in Britain, and their counterparts throughout the world. Political leaders, in their rhetoric, have claimed to grasp the gravity of the situation and the need for bold reforms. But actions speak louder than words, and Copenhagen was a travesty of slight actions and broken promises. And though the survival of our children compels us to find one, the road ahead is, for now, difficult to discern.

Copenhagen: Obama’s Speech Flops, Summit in Crisis

2010-08-05T20:08:42Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for VANITYFAIR.com

He came, he saw, he disappointed.

As President Barack Obama arrived in Copenhagen on Friday morning for the last day of the U.N. climate summit, all eyes were upon him. Only Obama, the argument went, had the power and prestige to break the deadlock at this summit, widely regarded as humanity’s last good chance to preserve a livable climate. But hopes that the president would bring something new to Copenhagen, that the U.S. position would move closer to what science says is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, were dashed by the president’s surprisingly lackluster remarks.

Looking tired from his overnight flight from Washington, Obama told his fellow heads of state and government, “I did not come here to talk. I came here to act.” But Obama’s speech for the most part merely restated what has long been the U.S. position: a mere 4 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, when science says reductions of at least 25 to 40 percent are necessary.

Obama did not put it this way, of course. He said that the U.S. will cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020, in line with the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House of Representatives over the summer. But the U.S. has moved the goalposts. By employing a baseline of 2005, rather than the international scientific standard of 1990, Washington makes its proposed emissions cuts look much larger than they actually are. It’s like promising to kick a 50-yard field goal from the 30 yard line.

“Speaking about 17 percent cuts by 2020—to present it that way was, I’m afraid, dishonest,” said Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International.

Obama was apparently trying to strike a balance between what the outside world wants to hear and what the U.S. Congress will accept. The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House by a mere seven votes, and similar legislation faces a difficult battle in the Senate. What’s more, any treaty signed in Copenhagen or later could be blocked by a mere 34 votes in the Senate. Since Republicans have 40 Senate seats and most of them are adamantly opposed to taking serious action against climate change, Obama faces a conundrum.

But this political calculation—shared not only by the White House and leading congressional Democrats but also many big environmental groups—overlooks the big club Obama has at his disposal: the newly affirmed authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that E.P.A. had this authority if greenhouse gases were deemed to pose a threat to public health and welfare. The E.P.A. so ruled on December 4, just days before the Copenhagen summit began.

“Contrary to what we keep hearing from Washington, Obama’s hands are not tied by the tragically weak cap-and-trade bills being debated in Congress,” said Kassie Siegel, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “His administration already has the legal tools to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters, consistent with what science demands, through the Clean Air Act. The next step is for E.P.A. to issue pollution-reduction rules for vehicles, smokestacks, and other polluters, and to set a science-based national pollution cap for greenhouse gases.”

“But this thing is not over yet,” Naidoo emphasized about the Copenhagen summit. “At this point in the Kyoto talks [in 1997, when the world’s nations approved the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate change], everyone in the hallways was saying, ‘It’s over, there’s no hope of reaching an agreement.’ But in fact governments did reach an agreement in Kyoto. They stayed and worked until the early hours of the morning, and that’s what leaders will do today if they believe all their rhetoric about climate change threatening mass extinctions, droughts, and other catastrophic impacts.”

Obama’s speech was all the more important given the fact—so little understood in the United States—that the U.S. is by far the world’s leading climate polluter. Yes, China now emits slightly more “greenhouse gases on an annual basis. But annual is not the most relevant measure. Because the U.S. (like its fellow industrial nations in Europe, Japan, and Australia) has been burning coal, driving vehicles, felling forests, and plowing farmland for many more years than China has, it has put far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on a cumulative basis than China has. It is these cumulative emissions that drive global warming, because carbon dioxide in particular stays in the atmosphere for centuries.

“I don’t think the speech will be very well received by China, among others,” said Richard Klein, an I.P.C.C. climate scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute. “There is such a thing as historical responsibility. [President Obama] has a way with words that works for the media, for the general public, but it doesn’t work for seasoned negotiators who know the ins and outs of these issues and who won’t be reassured that this is a different U.S. from what we’ve seen over the last eight years.”

And so it was when Chinese premier Wen Jiabao gave his plenary speech. In addressing climate change, Wen said, the world must not “turn a blind eye to historical responsibilities … and different levels of development”—diplomatic code for the position shared by China, India, and other emerging and developing countries that the rich industrial nations make make the largest emissions cuts, soonest.

The dangers of the continuing stalemate in Copenahgen were powerfully illustrated yesterday by documents leaked yesterday by the U.N. conference secretariat here. The documents showed that the proposed emissions cuts currently on offer in Copenhagen—not only from the U.S. but all countries—come nowhere to preventing catastrophic climate change. According to the leaked document, which the secretariat confirmed is authentic, the current proposals will lead to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) of temperature rise over the pre-industrial level in which civilization developed. Obama and other leaders of the Group of 8 rich industrial nations agreed in July to limit temperature rise to 2 Celsius, and even that is hardly a safe level. “It will mean 100 feet of sea level rise,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the chief climate adviser to the German government, said of the 2 degree limit. “True, this will be over the next thousand years, but that amounts to ten feet per century and this will be all but irreversible. A 2C temperature rise will also mean the loss of the Himalayan glaciers and coral reefs. What really makes for sleepless nights is the possibility that [2C] will … trigger runaway global warming.”

“In the face of leaked U.N. documents showing that this agreement is a sham, we were hoping for some movement from the president,” said author Bill McKibben of the activist group 350.org. “Instead, his response was take it or leave it. One hundred other nations are not making reasonable demands because they want to make the president’s life harder. It’s because they would like their countries to actually survive the century.”

But it ain’t over yet here in Copenhagen. Negotiations, including reported meetings between and among Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and other heads of state and government, are scheduled to continue throughout the day and perhaps into the evening. “We can get this done today,” Obama said in his speech. But what “this” will be remains the question, for all of us.

Copenhagen: Obama to Meet With Chinese Premier Wen

2009-12-18T08:10:26Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for The Nation Blogs

The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao will meet one-on-one with President Barack Obama soon in Copenhagen to try to reach agreement on a new international climate treaty, according to He Yafei, the vice chairman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

“Yes, I believe so,” responded He in the hallways of Copenhagen’s Bella Center, when he was asked if Wen and Obama, the heads of government of the world’s two climate superpowers, would meet to resolve outstanding differences.

Wen, whose country is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases on an annual basis, arrived in Copenhagen yesterday for the UN climate summit. Obama, whose country is the world’s largest emitter on a cumulative basis, is due to arrive in time for the summit’s concluding sessions on Friday, December 18. Together, the two countries are responsible for 42 percent of the world’s annual emissions, making their actions crucial to the effort to combat global warming.

In a major break from past climate change diplomacy, Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao agreed in Beijing in November that both nations would limit their future emissions–the first the two climate superpowers had made that promise to the international community–and also that they would work together for a successful outcome to the Copenhagen summit.

But as the summit approaches its final 24 hours, the difference between the proposals on the table and established climate science remains vast. A document leaked this afternoon from the United Nations agency organizing the summit, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated the the proposals currently on offer will lead to an estimated global temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, well beyond what scientists believe is safe and what virtually all governments assembled here rhetorically support. The governments of the US and other members of the Group of 8 rich industrial countries pledged in July 2009 to limit global temperatures to 2 Celsius. More than 100 nations, mainly the poor and island states that are most vulnerable to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change, have called on the Copenhagen summit to endorse a goal of 1.5Celsius.

“Anything more than that, and we’ve had it,” said Mohammed Nasheed, the president of Maldives.

At a press conference this afternoon in Copenhagen, He said that, according to Premier Wen, the final text of the agreement under discussion in Copenhagen could include a limit of 2C as a “long-term,” aspirational goal. But “to make it a balanced approach,” He added, the text should make it clear that the fight against poverty is to remain the top priority for developing countries.

Responding to an American demand for transparent verification of China’s promised future emissions cuts, He said that China was ready to engage in “dialogue and co-operation that is not intrusive, that does not infringe on China’s sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, at a press conference held immediately before China’s, a leading US Member of Congress on climate issues, Henry Waxman of California, the co-sponsor of the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House of Representatives over the summer, contradicted mainstream science by repeatedly asserting that the emissions reductions the Obama administration has pledged are “completely consistent” with the 2C limit.

“The targets we set out in our legislation, and that the President has articulated–a 17% cut in emissions by 2020 and an 85% reduction by 2050–are consistent with what the science says is needed to prevent the [world from crossing] tipping points and the dire consequences that would bring,” Waxman told the press conference. Crucially, these proposed cuts on the part of the US, which await action by the US Senate, are based on a 2005 baseline. When compared to the 1990 baseline that is the international standard, the proposed US cuts amount to a mere 4 percent by 2020.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other leading scientific bodies around the world have concluded that reductions of 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 are necessary to give the world a meaningful chance to limit temperature rise to 2 C.

“That is the determination we have made,” Waxman responded in the hallway after the press conference when asked about the contradiction between his statement and the prevailing scientific consensus. “Many environmental organizations have said that [our goals] are consistent [with 2 C]. And as Congressman Markey just said, I think we may actually end up doing much more than is projected once we get going. The important thing is to get started.”

“We’re trying to find a way to work together for the betterment of the planet,” Pelosi told the press conference. Noting that she had visited China in May and been “very impressed” by its progress in solar and other alternative forms of energy, Pelosi indicated that China’s recent pledge to reduce the energy intensity of its economy 45 percent by 2020 was a sign of progress. “China is still a net emitter, but without these [alternative energy] measures, things would be much worse.”

Earlier in the day, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US would “work toward” the provision of $100 billion in aid to developing countries to help them shift to low-carbon energy and to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and that the US would pay “its fair share.” But Clinton gave no further details about how much of the $100 billion would come from the US, how much would be new money rather than a reshuffling of existing commitments and how much of it might come from private sector investments.

A Thrilling Day In Copenhagen

2009-12-17T07:07:54Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for VANITYFAIR.com

Bright yellow with black letters, the first placards I saw at the massive climate rally in Copenhagen on Saturday said, Bla Bla Bla—Action Now! and Nature Doesn’t Compromise. Handed out free to all comers by Greenpeace, they bobbed up and down in a sea of humanity that was gathered beneath the austerely beautiful, neo-baroque palace housing Denmark’s parliament. But the placards also crystallized the vast gap between what science requires and what—so far—the world’s governments have been talking about doing here at the Copenhagen climate summit.

Despite a wind-chill index below freezing, the crowd in Parliament Square numbered in the many tens of thousands. Organizers claimed 100,000; a police spokesperson told me they did not have an exact figure, “but there were many.” Judging by the diversity of faces and accents, the majority of demonstrators seemed to have come from abroad—not just the rest of Europe but Asia, Africa, and North and South America—although there was also a sizable contingent of Danes, including supermodel Helena Christensen, who addressed the rally on behalf of the humanitarian group Oxfam and, she said, of people she had recently photographed in the mountains of Peru (her mother’s homeland) who are suffering from drought, thanks to the melting of mountain glaciers.

“We have one question for the political leaders of the world,” Kumi Naidoo, international executive director of Greenpeace International, told the rally. “If you can find not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars to bail out the banks, the bankers, and their bonuses, how is it that you cannot find the money to bail out the planet, the poor, and our children?”

Coming at the mid-point of the U.N.-sponsored climate talks, the Copenhagen demonstration was part of a worldwide day of actions—some 3,000 events in virtually every country on Earth, according to organizers—which were intended to send a message to President Obama, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and the hundred or so other heads of state and government due to arrive here later this week. “Everyone here knows exactly what they want,” said author and activist Bill McKibben of 350.org, one of the chief organizers of the global day of action, as he scanned the huge crowd in Copenhagen. “They aren’t anti-something. They’re for a fair, binding, ambitious agreement that reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.”

The mood throughout the day was good-humored, noisy, and peaceful, including during the four-mile march across town to the Bella Center complex, where delegates from some 190 nations have spent the last seven days haggling, and mainly disagreeing, over elements of a new climate treaty. Pushing a stroller holding Sally, her 18-month-old daughter, Copenhagen native Kanya Rorbech said that, as a new mother, she had felt compelled to march. “I just passed a banner that said, Life Has Just Begun, and it almost made me cry,” said the 33-year-old Rorbech. “You see things in a different way when you become a parent. It’s no longer just a matter of how you live your own life. You have to take care of other people as well.”

By the way, don’t be misled by the many media reports emphasizing “hundreds of arrests” in Copenhagen. It’s true that a tiny fringe of troublemakers infiltrated the tail end of the march. Donning black face masks, they broke a couple of windows in Copenhagen’s former stock exchange, now the headquarters of the Danish Foreign Ministry. But the members of the self-proclaimed “Black Bloc” had nothing to do with the larger march—most demonstrators weren’t even aware they were around—and at the first sign of trouble the Black Bloc members were surrounded by police, who eventually arrested some 900 of them.

The security presence in Copenhagen is massive and ubiquitous, though not aggressive or threatening. With the city about to host one of the largest gatherings of heads of government in history, authorities are taking no chances. Security is especially tight around the Bella Center, and appears to include forces brought in from other countries. Walking around the back of the complex after the march terminated there late Saturday afternoon, I passed one group of security officers speaking to each other in French and a second conversing in either Spanish or Italian.

After all, Copenhagen is planet central this week. As Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, told the demonstration’s concluding rally outside the Bella Center, “The future of the world is being decided here over the next few days.”

“The tension over this coming week will be between leaders wanting to sign a weak deal in order to claim they accomplished something, and getting them to sign a deal that delivers what the planet really needs,” said McKibben. On Friday, the chairmen of the U.N. conference released a draft treaty calling on rich industrial countries to cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels. The European Union and Japan have pledged targets at the low end of that range, but the Obama administration, facing stiff resistance in Congress, especially among Republicans who dispute that man-made global warming even exists, has proposed cuts of less than 5 percent. The administration disguises this paltry amount by moving the goalposts: in line with the Waxman-Markey climate legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and a similar measure awaiting action in the Senate, Obama has promised cuts of 17 percent by 2020—but that 17 percent is compared to a baseline of 2005, not the international standard of 1990.

Developing countries and activist groups say that even these proposed 25- to 40-percent cuts fall well short of what’s needed. Also on Friday, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) issued a proposed treaty that, like the worldwide protests Saturday, called for reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 p.p.m., in hopes of limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius over pre-industrial levels. The planet is already about halfway there—average temperatures have risen approximately 0.7° over the past century—and poor and developing countries in particular are feeling the effects. In the vast delta of southern Bangladesh, for example, rising sea levels have pushed salt water farther inland, salinating soil and crashing rice production.

“We are not backing 350 because it’s a beautiful number,” diplomat Antonio Lima of Cape Verde, the vice president of AOSIS, told a press conference on Friday. “No, it is because of science. Some of our members will disappear [beneath rising seas] if we go above 1.5° C.”

Not only the U.S. but also China and other big emitting nations consider talk of 350 p.p.m. naive, even crazy talk. Since the level of CO2 in the atmosphere currently stands at 389 p.p.m., a target of 350 p.p.m. would require truly radical emissions cuts, including from China (as well as steps to remove carbon from the atmosphere through growing trees and other so-called “carbon negative” practices). Specifically, the AOSIS proposal would oblige rich industrial countries—whose emissions over the last 200 years are what unwittingly caused global warming—to reduce annual emissions by 45 percent by 2020. And global emissions—that is, including those of China and other large emerging economies—would have to fall by 85 percent by 2050.

Chinese negotiators are plainly not pleased by the AOSIS proposal and have allegedly tried to squelch it, in part by offering increased aid to African and other developing nations to deter them from siding with AOSIS. “China says it will help with building hospitals and schools for us,” said Landry Ninteretse, a 25-year-old journalist from the east African nation of Burundi. “I told my country’s delegate to these [Copenhagen] negotiations, ‘Don’t take [China’s] position, as this will compromise future generations. We can build hospitals and schools later, but only if we fight climate change now.’” According to Ninteretse, the delegate was unimpressed. “She told me, ‘You are a young man, and there are many things you don’t understand.’”

Which way developing nations go this week may well shape the outcome of this summit. Will they stand with AOSIS and demand, if not 350 p.p.m., at least a much stronger treaty? Or will they fold in the face of pressure from China, the U.S., and other big emitters? Going into the summit, 92 countries had endorsed the 350 target, according to Jamie Henn, a coordinator of 350.org, and more have indicated here in Copenhagen that they will do likewise. “The big guys are assuming they can bully or buy off developing nations, but what if the developing nations don’t play ball?” asked Saleemul Huq, the director of the Climate Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, who has been training climate negotiators from developing nations since 2001. “If developing nations don’t get what they need for their survival, they may say to Obama and the big powers, ‘We’re prepared to fly home without an agreement—are you?’”

Everyone agrees that the role of Obama, who is scheduled to arrive here on Friday, will be crucial. The president faces a conundrum. His past statements and many of his actions suggest he understands the urgency of the climate threat and would like to take strong action against it. But any treaty agreed to in Copenhagen can be blocked by a mere 34 votes in the U.S. Senate. The Republicans, who generally oppose robust efforts to reduce carbon emissions, have 40 seats, and more than a few Democratic Senators, especially from coal and oil states, aren’t eager to act against climate change either.

But Obama isn’t trying hard enough, says President Mohamed Nasheed of Maldives, whose country, a high-end tourist destination in the Indian Ocean, is one of the lowest-lying in the world. Asked how Obama should overcome the Senate roadblock, Nasheed told Vanity Fair that Obama seems to be avoiding the climate issue in public instead of showing leadership. “He must go to the country and speak to Democrats and Republicans alike, and convince them that this is important for everyone’s children, whatever their political views,” said Nasheed.

Meanwhile, the massive outpouring of public pressure on Saturday suggests that activists could soon deliver the one message politicians of all stripes hear clearly: defeat at the ballot box. As one more of the black-and-yellow placards I saw at the Copenhagen rally put it, Change the Politics, Not the Climate .

Copenhagen: Radical Cuts Urged, Deal In Jeopardy

2009-12-17T07:04:45Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for The Nation Blogs

Big news from Copenhagen Friday, where the divide between big emitters and at-risk nations deepened, threatening the prospects of reaching a climate deal for president Obama and other heads of state to sign when they arrive at the summit next week.

In a day of major developments, the Alliance of Small Island Nations put forth a radically tougher proposal for confronting climate change than the US, China and other major emitters favor. The AOSIS proposal, which calls for temperature rise not to exceed 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, ran counter to a separate text released today by the chairmen of the summit that called for smaller but still significant cuts. Meanwhile, activists prepared for a worldwide day of demonstrations on Saturday that organizer Bill McKibben of 350.org said were “explicitly endorsing” the AOSIS proposal and would involve “millions of people” and 3,000 actions around the world.

“We are not backing 350 because it’s a beautiful number,” said diplomat Antonio Lima of Cape Verde, the vice president of AOSIS, referring to the alliance’s call to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million from today’s 389. “No, it is because of science,” he added. “Some of our members will disappear [beneath rising seas] if we go above 1.5 C.”

The rich-poor divide also reared its head on the all-important question of who will pay the bill for climate change.

Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator, said Thursday that he “categorically reject[s]” the suggestion that rich industrial countries owe compensation to the victims of climate change. Stern acknowledged that the emissions of rich nations over the past two hundred years of industrialization had caused global warming, telling a press conference, “We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere.” But, Stern added, “the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations–I just categorically reject that.”

Stern’s statement put him at odds not only with international law but with America’s European allies. European Union leaders announced in Brussels today that their governments would provide 7.2 billion Euros over the next three years to help poor nations adapt to sea level rise, drought and other intensifying impacts of climate change. The EU’s offer was in keeping with the provisions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change–the climate treaty President George H.W. Bush signed at the Earth Summit in 1992 and which the Copenhagen negotiations are seeking to extend. Nevertheless, it was quickly rejected by developing nations and aid agencies as grossly inadequate.

“We have talked about $100 billion a year,” ambassador Lima told The Nation, citing an estimate the World Bank has made for climate change adaptation by poor nations. “Now we are hearing about $10 billion for three years.”

“Worst of all, this money is not even new,” Tim Gore, the climate adviser to Oxfam EU, told the BBC. “It’s made up of a recycling of past promises and payments that have already been made.”

The emissions reductions included in the AOSIS proposal go far beyond what is currently on the table in Copenhagen. AOSIS calls for global emissions to peak “no later than 2015,” which aligns with statements made by IPCC Chair Ranjendra Pachauri. But AOSIS then demands that the US and other developed nations cut emissions by 45 percent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2020. Furthermore, global emissions, including from large developing countries such as China and India, are to fall at least 85 percent by 2050.

Noting that Pachauri, NASA scientist James Hansen and other experts have endorsed reducing carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million as soon as possible, McKibben hailed the AOSIS proposal as “the first truly rational attempt to grapple with what the science of climate change tells us.”

But the US, China and other big emitters are backing much smaller cuts. The EU has offered to cut its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and by 30 percent if other nations do the same. Japan has made a similar pledge, while the Obama administration, facing congressional resistance, has offered to cut by a mere 4 percent. China and India have said they will limit the growth of their emissions but that population growth and the need to fight poverty require absolute emissions to grow for years to come.

Thus the stage is set for a showdown in Copenhagen next week. Heads of state do not generally come to high-profile international negotiations like this one unless they expect to sign a deal. Poor and vulnerable nations are counting on global public pressure to compel the biggest emitters to go further, much further, than they have in mind.

“If we leave Copenhagen without a legally binding outcome and without very strong commitment on finance, how can we go in front of our children and tell them, We couldn’t reach [an agreement],” ambassador Lima told a roomful of young activists holding signs saying, “We stand with AOSIS.” That’s why we need the support of you, the youth,” he continued, “because you are the ones who are going to suffer if we don’t have a good result. And sometimes your governments will hear you when they do not hear us.”

Copenhagen: A Historic Breakthrough?

2009-12-17T07:07:05Z

by Mark Hertsgaard, for The Nation Blogs

The Copenhagen climate summit just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As a journalist who has covered the climate story for twenty years now, including the historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that produced the climate treaty being updated in Copenhagen, I can’t recall a moment more filled with genuine possibility and hope. To be sure, there are a thousand ways things could still go wrong in Copenhagen. But make no mistake: momentum is building, governments are feeling the heat and Copenhagen could bring an historic breakthrough—if the public pressure that got us this far is sustained over the next fourteen days.

Last Friday’s stunning announcement by the White House that President Obama would attend the end of the climate summit, rather than the beginning, is just the latest in a series of developments that have upended the conventional wisdom about Copenhagen. Remember: it had long been assumed that Obama wouldn’t even attend the summit; administration officials were saying as much as recently as a month ago, in a clear attempt to lower expectations. But Obama declared otherwise in a Nov 9 interview with Reuters, saying he would come to Copenhagen if negotiations were making progress.

Obama followed that with a real game-changer, though it’s one that still hasn’t registered with most people: he reached a climate deal with China, in the culmination of backchannel talks that began in July 2008, before he was elected president.

When Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao jointly announced on November 17 steps that each nation would take to tackle climate change, it marked the first time the two climate superpowers had publicly told the world they would limit their emissions. News accounts and activist comments generally saw this announcement as a glass half-empty, noting that neither side specified how much it would cut emissions by when. A few days later, both China and the US answered this criticism by outlining specific targets. Again, commentators complained they didn’t go far enough. That is true, but it misses the larger point.

To draw a parallel with the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, the Obama-Hu announcement was akin to the first meeting between US President Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1985. In that meeting, the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers agreed for the first time to put down the pistols they had long had pointed at each other’s foreheads. It took the US and USSR more time and more meetings to agree on the necessary next steps: unloading the pistols and doing away with the bullets inside. The same will be true for today’s climate superpowers, China and the US, but the shift in mood and intent is unmistakable, and it may have encouraged some of the other remarkable announcements of recent weeks, including offers from Brazil, South Africa and India to limit their own emissions, even though as developing nations they are not legally obligated to do so.

But, again as with the nuclear arms talks, there remain serious obstacles to reaching a fair, ambitious and binding agreement on climate change, and it appears that the Obama administration is responsible for one of the biggest. Obama’s climate negotiators have been insisting that the existing international procedures for confronting climate change—codified in the Kyoto Protocol to the treaty signed in Rio in 1992—be scrapped and a new mechanism created. The arguments pro and con on this are long and complicated. The upshot, however, is not: the US proposal would create a system where future emissions reductions would in effect be voluntary–nations would pledge to reduce emissions by such-and-such amount by such-and-such date, but there would be no international enforcement of these pledges.

Such a voluntary scheme would plainly invite disaster, which helps explain why governments from rich and poor nations alike have rejected the US position. This is one of the stories I’m going to be following most closely in Copenhagen. It’s also one where pressure from civil society could do the most good. President Obama has given many signs that he is serious about tackling climate change, a very welcome shift from his predecessor’s malign neglect. But Obama cannot claim to be serious about combatting climate chaos if he meanwhile backs a voluntary approach to emissions reductions.

Nevertheless, the US position might well shift over the coming days, especially if more pressure is brought to bear. After all, the positions of many governments have changed substantially in recent weeks as the world’s attention focuses on Copenhagen and momentum builds. The UN has christened this summit “Hopenhagen,” a nice touch. Just remember: hope is a verb.

Copenhagen 2009

2009-12-08T07:29:00Z

So the Copenhagen summit has now begun, and it looks like it’s
going to be a hell of a news event and maybe—though this is
much less certain—even produce a real breakthrough. I’ll be
there from Dec 10 morning through the conclusion on Dec 18,
departing on the 19th. I’ll be covering events for The Nation,
Vanity Fair and Marketplace radio and perhaps L’espresso, as
well as gathering material for the Epilogue to my book.

Copenhagen, here I come!