Copenhagen: So Close, Yet So Far Away, From a Climate Deal

Now that the big Copenhagen climate change confab is underway, is the glass half-full or half-empty? Put another way, whose voice carries more weight—Lord Stern’s or the top Chinese climate negotiator?

Against all odds, the Copenhagen summit opened with a note of optimism, a stark change to the lowering of expectations that marked much of the past four weeks, as world leaders ruled out a legally-binding treaty and climate negotiators stocked up on Mexican travel guides.

Exhibit A: President Obama’s decision to go to Copenhagen not at the beginning, when nothing happens, but at the very end, when something might. That raised expectations that the President’s visit—coupled with fresh action on emissions from the EPA—might bring tangible results.

Exhibit B: A new report out from the UN Environment Programme, drafted by Lord Nicholas Stern, arguing that the world is actually pretty close to getting where it needs to go, when it comes to curbing emissions. The UNEP report takes stock of all the climate promises around the world and concludes there’s just a small gap between pledged emissions cuts and cuts that need to happen to stave off real-life disaster movies.

So it’s all over but the shouting. Except there’s a lot of shouting left. Take this comment from Yu Quintai, China’s top climate negotiator, as reported by Reuters:

“The final stage is here with us. Rather than describing it in optimistic or pessimistic terms, we need to focus on the substantive work before us. The reason I am not using the word optimistic is that from the proceedings today you must have recognized that the parties are still pretty much wide apart, particularly on some of the critical substantive issues.”

For “substantive issues,” read “who cuts how much and who pays for it.” That’s more than dotted I’s and crossed t’s. For all the hopes raised recently by China’s and India’s pledges to curb their economies’ carbon intensity, the developing world is still presenting a “unified front” at Copenhagen.

And despite Lord Stern’s optimistic take on global progress, the UNEP outlook is less clear than it looks at first glance. It supposes that all countries enact their most ambitious climate pledges through 2020. That includes a 17% cut in U.S. reductions, even though progress is stalled in the Senate. That includes a 25% cut in Japanese emissions, even though no one knows where those cuts will come from. That includes further cuts in Australia, which just scuppered its own climate bill. And that counts climate policies in Brazil, Indonesia, India and China which may be conditional on financing from richer countries. All of which means that gap may be a little wider than Lord Stern expects.

There are still about two weeks to go in Copenhagen, so there’s plenty of time left for premature celebrations, overblown rhetoric, anguished hand-wringing, brinksmanship, backstabbing, petty feuds, and oodles of second-guessing.

At least folks in D.C. should be familiar with that: It’s identical to following the Redskins’ nightmarish season week to week.