How Australia is complicit in the climate failure at Copenhagen

Having been in Copenhagen for the UN climate negotiations that ended in such spectacular failure last month, it is difficult to say exactly what went so badly wrong. Copenhagen was the largest gathering of political leaders in world history and the success of the talks carried immense political expectations for many of them back home, thanks to the emergence of a growing international peoples movement on climate change. Many of the important ingredients for a deal were there, if only in half measure, but this was a huge step forward from the situation 12 or even 6 months ago.

The sheer complexity and past political baggage associated with multilateral climate negotiations means that the failure to achieve an effective deal at Copenhagen cannot be blamed on any one party.  When all is said and done however,  the agenda for these talks remains dominated by a few major power players on the global stage, including the US, the EU, and now increasingly China.

At Copenhagen one rapidly developed the sense that the climate talks were being undertaken in the shadow of a much larger agenda involving the rapidly shifting geopolitics of emerging, stagnating and declining global economic superpowers. Perhaps for this reason, any climate talks at this time could not have succeeded. It is clear that for all the political rhetoric, the climate change negotiations are still seen by important countries primarily as a means by which to gain competitive advantage in the high-stakes game of global geopolitics, and only secondarily as an opportunity to avert the global climate catastrophe that threatens to reverse all of the gains they are striving for.

Obama

Obama had been elected on a strong climate platform and all indications were that he was preparing for the US to play a leadership role. In practice, however, his ability to deliver this remains severely constrained by the domestic political situation he faces at home, where a conservative-dominated Senate will not pass ambitious climate legislation. Many commentators said that the Obama administration no longer requires Senate support as a result of a decision announced by the EPA during the Copenhagen talks – that CO2 would be listed as a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. While this does allow Obama to take strong action on US emissions without Senate support, to do so apparently represents a political risk for Obama that is greater than having to shoulder part of the blame for failure at Copenhagen, and a risk the President is unprepared to take at present.  So while the US is clearly not playing the wrecking role it has been known for in the past, the US is still out of the picture as a driver for a major breakthrough.

Developing Countries

Another major issue that has held up talks for years is the lack of commitments to reduce emissions by developing countries in general, and China and India in particular. While the current climate crisis is caused in a very large part by the historical emissions of rich nations like the US, Canada and Australia, these countries have been holding out on taking on strong targets without stronger, binding commitments from the developing world. This issue remains vexed, however China and India did come to the Copenhagen table with commitments that were significantly more ambitious than had been expected even 6 months ago. This at least partially removed a barrier that has been so fundamental in the past, but disappointingly the same arguments quickly shifted to whether developing country commitments should be monitored, reported and verified through the UN process, which apparently was considered by China to be  an unacceptable incursion into domestic  affairs.

While there could be light seen at the end of the tunnel on some important past sticking points, the underlying geopolitical and ethical issues that have led to past problems have not substantially changed.  As a consequence these issues simply manifest themselves in different ways, which is what we were seeing unfold in Copenhagen.

As the clarity of hindsight gradually reveals, so much of what happened, or did not happen at Copenhagen can be attributed to the negotiating positions adopted by China, who have recently overtaken the USA as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse emissions. While China have been more than happy for rich country leaders including President Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and Australia’s Kevin Rudd to get the blame for failure at Copenhagen, there is strong evidence that behind the scenes the Chinese were playing a highly strategic wrecking game that may have been carefully designed to assist China’s ascent to become the world’s most powerful economy.

China

In the past, developing nations have tended to negotiate as a block together with China and India.  Since the beginning of the UNFCCC process this block has been consistently pressuring developed countries to take on much stronger climate commitments. The first evidence that observers saw of that China may be playing a different game in Copenhagen was a number of Chinese statements that were not aligned with the rest of this negotiating block.

Mark Lynas, who was attached to the Maldives delegation, offered the following fly-on-the-wall account of China’s antics in a piece published in <the guardian>.

“To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. […] Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

 China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.”

There can be a number of reasons offered for why China would take such a position.  One Chinese NGO offering and interesting perspective at the conference suggested that it could be an attempt by China to hold back clean development in the US and other developed countries so that China could position itself as a leader in the new green energy economy. Others have suggested it is simply China trying to protect it’s ‘right’ to dirty, carbon intensive economic growth as it becomes the world’s largest carbon polluter.

Whatever the reason for China’s wrecking tactics in Copenhagen, it puts a very different perspective on the global politics of climate change than the one we have been used to. For a start, how does international civil society begin to configure itself to put pressure on the Chinese government in the same way we have seen political pressure applied in the US and Australia?

Australia

One way to tackle this problem requires a new way of looking at the climate problem, and a new way of understanding the sources of pollution. At present under the Kyoto Protocol, we measure carbon pollution based on where fuels like coal is burned, but if you consider where the fossil fuels come from the picture changes radically for Australia.

Much of China’s growth is fuelled by burning dirty coal, with the construction of one new coal fired power station per week on average over the past 2 years in China. Much of the coal that feeds these power stations comes from Australia, and we are the largest coal exporter in the world. We also supply China with large amounts of LNG and this is set to increase very significantly in the future with the development of more gas fields off the Northwest coast of WA.

For Australia, the Kyoto Protocol and its associated accounting methodology is an exercise in papering over the fact that Australia directly benefits from, and contributes to the climate destruction taking place in economies like China that gobble up Australian fossil fuels.

When you add to this scenario the fact that China is now holding up international negotiations to protect its right to burn Australian coal, you see why Australia is deeply complicit in the failure to reach a binding agreement for a safe climate in Copenhagen.

Unfortunately one of the first things the United Nations did agree on at Copenhagen was that no nation would act unilaterally or put in place trade barriers or sanctions as a way to combat climate change. The sanctity of free trade must be preserved even as the planet cooks.

Perhaps if it was not for this totally inflexible approach, Australia could apply some pressure to the Chinese as a major supplier of the coal they burn. We could choose to sell Australian coal only under certain conditions, like China signing up to a strong international climate agreement, and only burning Australian coal in power stations that meet strict emissions obligations or use carbon capture technology

There is an attempt to place similar end-use controls on the sale of Uranium through agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the case of Uranium these controls do not work very well. However they do provide a precedent for the use of trade restrictions to prevent global destruction (in this case nuclear war).

Until we put in place strict controls over where and how Australian coal is used, Kevin Rudd’s commitment to reduce our emissions by between 5 and 25% is like tuning up the engine in the family car to improve mileage, but neglecting to fix the gaping hole in the petrol tank.

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