Robert Stavins, who wrote us a dispatch from Copenhagen upon President Obama’s arrival there last week, has had a couple of days to mull over the outcome of the talks. His verdict: qualified approval, with a healthy dose of “too soon to tell.”
At the final hour in Copenhagen, the leaders of a small number of key countries worked creatively together to identify a politically feasible path forward. I have previously argued (“Defining Success for Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen”) that the best goal for the Copenhagen climate talks was to make progress on a sound foundation for meaningful, long-term global action, not some notion of immediate, numerical triumph. That has essentially been accomplished with the “Copenhagen Accord,” despite its flaws and despite overt challenges from five of some 193 countries represented (Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela).
Stavins calls the deal “a potentially very important third step” (the Rio Earth Summit in ’92 and Kyoto in ’97 being the first two), noting the improvement it makes over the Kyoto Protocol. The accord “expand[s] the coalition of the willing” by including rapidly growing developing countries that were left out in the Kyoto agreement, a crucial move if the world really is to make a concerted effort to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
Underscoring the immense difficulty of getting the whole world to sign on to one agreement, Stavins argues that while the Copenhagen accord may fall short of people’s expectations, it nonetheless was much better than what most people anticipated days before the conference’s end, when talks seemed hopelessly stuck in neutral. Stavins singles out President Obama’s late-game intervention as key to hammering out an accord. But as Stavins’ item-by-item breakdown of the deal suggests, there are simply too many details that have yet to be hammered out to fully determine the accord’s merits. The jury is still out.
One point that Stavins does make stands out: pointing the way forward, he suggests that bilateral and multilateral talks might be the more effective path as we proceed from here. I’ve been wondering about this, too. Considering how unwieldy it is to get nearly 200 nations on the same page, and that only 17 countries in the world account for some 90 percent of its emissions, wouldn’t scaling down agreements to the bilateral and multilateral level have a better chance of getting results?
Of course, it will all go for naught if the U.S. doesn’t act. Although China is now the world’s largest GHG emitter, it is still doing more on the renewable energy front than the U.S. And let’s face it: the average Chinese citizen is still nowhere near the polluter the average American is. The fact is that the U.S. needs to now do its part and enact a cap-and-trade bill. Senators, the world is watching — and waiting.
