It was a day later than scheduled, but the 13th U.N. climate change conference (COP-13) in Bali at last came to a close. The world is now breathing a sigh of relief; as late as Saturday, negotiations looked like they would run off the tracks. But Bali gave us only a vague sense of the road ahead, and the only certainty is that the road will be difficult.
The most important decision taken at the COP was the agreement on the “Bali Action Plan,” or what’s been called the Bali Roadmap. It creates a process and set of principles for negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The negotiations must conclude by COP-15 in 2009. The action plan calls for a long-term goal for global emissions reductions (without saying how much), and various “mitigation actions” for developed and developing countries (without saying what they actually are). Deforestation, technology transfer, and adaptation—all critical to addressing climate change—are also in the Bali Roadmap, again with few specifics.
There are several points to note about COP-13. First, it is clear that this U.S. Administration has lost political influence in this forum. The European Union, and in particular Germany, are providing the leadership that the U.S. is not, and they have lost patience with U.S. obstructionism. Germany announced a national 40% emissions reduction target by 2020, and threatened to boycott the U.S.-led “major economies” process if the U.S. didn’t back reduction targets in Bali. This level of confrontation has to date been unprecedented in the UNFCCC; it reflects increasing alarm on climate change, and the level of frustration with the U.S. U.S. participation is still vital in a post-Kyoto world, but the world seems more prepared to move ahead with or without its largest economy.
The reality is that on some points, U.S. positions were reasonable. For instance, the targeted 25-40% reduction below 1990 levels proposed by the EU is arguably unattainable within a 12-year timeframe. But the US failure to propose negotiable alternatives, or to act to reduce its own emissions, isolated U.S. negotiators. US influence is a casualty of an environment that has soured over a decade of U.S. resistance to any form of commitment.
Negotiators in Bali also saw the Bush Administration’s position as less relevant to future negotiations, increasingly out of touch with the rest of the United States. Senator John Kerry, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Vice President Al Gore brought similar messages to Bali; in all likelihood, the U.S. would rejoin the international community by COP-15. States and cities are already out in front in passing climate change legislation. The major corporations that have joined the 35-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership are calling for mandatory emissions caps (WRI is also a US-CAP member).
Developing countries too are more progressive than is often recognized. The Bali Action Plan calls for “measurable… mitigation actions” by developing countries (at the insistence of the U.S. but with developing country acquiescence), opening the door for more active participation in a post-Kyoto agreement. And developing countries are already taking action. China has a renewable energy target, an efficiency target and a strong reforestation program. Mexico has a sophisticated national GHG emissions registry, while India, South Africa, and Brazil have policies to increase energy efficiency and use of cleaner fuels.
Unfortunately, in spite of the mention of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, the sense of urgency seems to be missing from the Bali roadmap. New scientific findings in 2007 confirm the fact that we have very little time—years not decades—to start drastically reducing emissions if we have any chance at avoiding unacceptable damage to the global climate. A failure in Bali would have been catastrophic. We dodged that bullet, but the road to success at COP-15 looks dauntingly hard. We have several clear tasks ahead: The single most important step we can take is to adopt strong national legislation to make immediate and continuing reductions in US GHG emissions. Then, we must clarify how we will engage China, India and the other large emitting countries. This will entail developing and deploying new technologies, and require creating a set of solutions that can be politically achieved and that will yield environmental change of an unprecedented scale.
The political will that was barely hinted at in Bali will need to be strengthened—and quickly—if we are to succeed on the road from Bali to Copenhagen, when in 2009, we must agree on an aggressive next step, or else truly suffer the consequences of climate change.
Jonathan Lash, PresidentJonathan Lash has led the World Resources Institute as its President since 1993.
5 Comments
the US acts IGNORANCE
I am a Masters student of the university of dar es Salaam, Tanzania, specialising in Natural Resources Assesment and Management. I have read comments from US, it looks like the US are taking this matter as a movie series that they keep on wathing and enjoy the scenes. time have come for legislation to be put in use, it is only through legislation the world will ensure complience on intenational agreement.
Electric cars = 40% less US air emissions
Major emissions solutions are soon coming to market.
Fortune-CNN Money recently reported on eleven new companies planning to offer highway-capable electric vehicles (EVs) in the US within a few years.
EVs can reduce US air pollution by 40%, free us from Mid-east oil and let us drive trouble-free for three cents per mile.
I find it humorous that most corporate news groups still cannot seem to pick up on EVs. Even the environmental groups' attention seems to be diverted from EVs' virtues by massive corporate sponsorship.
I am a member of the Florida chapter of the Electric Auto Association and maintain an informational guest blog on EVWorld.com.
Much depends on whether
Much depends on whether Jonathan is arguing that US domestic reductions of 25% to 40% below 1990 levels are "arguably unattainable" by 2020, or whether he intends to include both domestic reductions as well as reductions in other countries' emissions that could be achieved through use of some of the allowance auction proceeds from a domestic cap-and-trade regime.
If the former, I would agree with him that going from 16% above 1990 levels today to 25% or more below by 2020, while not technically infeasible, is economically and politically very challenging. But if his comment was intended to include the sum of both domestic actions and offshore reductions as a result of US actions, then I'd ask he share his thinking. To my mind, that range of reductions through a combination of domestic action and financial support for offshore reductions is not only feasible, it's essential if the US is to do our fair share of coming to grips with the climate crisis.
Note this also likely means that the US (and other wealthy countries) will need to be on the hook for combined domestic/offshore emissions reductions of more than 100% in the mid-century time frame, if we're to achieve the greater than 50% reductions in global reductions that the science says we need by then.
Educating the American people and policymakers about our responsibilities in this regard is obviously going to take some work, but as we like to say at UCS, "the difficult we accomplish right away; the impossible takes a little longer."
Two thoughts in
Two thoughts in response.
First, the point Lash was making is that even defensible U.S. positions are no longer viable in COP proceedings because the U.S. has offered few constructive alternatives to the points it finds objectionable, and because U.S. obstructionism has, in large part, soured the environment.
The concern on the 25-40% target is not whether it is needed, but whether it can be achieved in less than 12 years. WRI has started to look more closely at the changes it would take to hit that kind of target, either via on-shore or on-shore/off-shore reductions, and what the implications would be of the policies necessary to get there–if we could get there. We’ll post something soon.
The question of how fast and
The question of how fast and how far the US can reduce emissions is a pivotal one. Beyond what Alden and others have said, these are key issues in my view, looking for the moment only at the realm of domestic mitigation and leaving out the knotty questions involved in eventual participation in the carbon markets to get credit toward our national targets:
(1) Major technology shifts take a long time . . . a generation, plus or minus. This is borne out in both technology studies and just practical experience. Even modest energy efficiency and renewable energy programs take five years to get going, tested out, refined and expanded. And we are talking about changes at least one order of magnitude larger than our current program experience encompasses.
(2) It is very important to set ambitious targets for 2020, but it is even more important to get to something much earlier than that, which is actually decreasing GHG emissions from the US. (The decline in 2006 which Connaughton and the rest were crowing about last week was due to mild weather reducing energy use in buildings and ongoing efficiency improvements in the industrial sector, even as transportation energy continued zooming upward in the face of what was then $65/bbl oil).
(3) People generally respond to incentives. If we get those right (not just monetary ones but the institutional and cultural ones we create as we go along), things will move forward. As a small but telling example of a non-financial incentive, consider the award structure of LEED and how it is tipping the commercial building market at the top end. But right now, as epitomized by the most recent battle over repealing some of the 2005 Energy Act tax credits, our country just doesn't have the incentives figured out at all.
(4) There is a gap between what is technically possible, what is economically feasible (once you get the incentives right) and what is practically achievable. I've talked in the past about the "45-35-25" rule for energy efficiency which is that we can get savings of 45% of current energy use (and cut emissions by that much or more) with today's technology, 35% is cost-effective at more or less current price levels, and 25% is what you can achieve in the real world. Those numbers will increase as technology innovation proceeds. Efficiency is the great untapped resource and it has some interesting properties, one of which is that when you really get it going, not only can you shut down some of the dirtier power plants, smokestacks and tailpipes, but it makes it a lot easier for the renewable sources to get a foothold.
(5) The national models that are generally used to project future energy supply and demand and responses to price changes are badly, badly broken, as research by Skip Laitner and others shows pretty convincingly. It's not that we don't need models -- we need better ones in order to test effectively what the real prospects are for the energy transition that both peak oil/gas and climate change demand. Getting the models right is crucially important because like it or not, they drive policy at the political and financial centers of Capitol Hill and Wall Street.
(6) "Nothing succeeds like success." I love those archaic phrases from the 1930s movies. However dire the situation, someone would pipe up, "Never fear!" Or, "More power to you!" The energy transition is going to be a gigantic boost for an economy badly in need of a pep-up. While I'm all for cutting-edge gee whiz technology, the broad range of what we have to do, in the US and around the world, requires the knowledge and skills people already have. The hardest part is getting started. But the US is if nothing else a momentum economy, and once the wheels start to go forward we can do more than we think we may.
(7) We need new institutions both domestically and internationally to propel the transition. After 25 years of involvement with energy efficiency programs, I have lived through the early voluntary efforts and the uneven development of utility-based programs, which had a lot of flaws. We are now evolving a new type of state-level planning/granting/monitoring agency, for which the leading and somewhat different examples are Efficiency Vermont and the Energy Trust of Oregon. We now have RGGI going active in just a couple days, and if all works well the WCI and midwest carbon markets will get underway as well. These are not the only possibilities, and we should be aware of how institutional innovation will drive actual emissions reductions. Building new institutions takes a long time and there are many pitfalls. But it is a necessary step.
The big struggle ahead will be over what it means to say "feasible results" for greenhouse gas reductions. Everyone has a different definition of what level of impact the changes we propose can have before it damages the economy. But the singular accomplishment of the Stern report is to put in lights the idea that, faced with the most important challenge we have ever seen, the cost is really not all that much. The question is going to be, is our political system prepared for a level of risk-taking that we have not seen in at least a generation? If we set a clear course I think the answer will be yes, because early results will engender positive political direction.