Few people seem happy about the Copenhagen climate change talks between the United States, Europe, China and India. In fact, the Copenhagen Accord may have been the most significant climate change outcome since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
European leaders consider Copenhagen a failure and blame the United States and China for opposing a binding treaty. In the U.S., President Barack Obama said he had hoped for more, while conservatives such as Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Lou Dobbs thought even a modest step toward emissions reductions would go way too far.
In fact, the Copenhagen Accord is exactly what the global effort to address climate change needs right now. Judged by the most important bottom line — whether it advanced the prospects for the U.S. and other major emitters adopting real domestic measures to cut emissions — it is unquestionably a success.
This is not just a hindsight defense of history. Quite the contrary. Copenhagen delivered on exactly what Obama and his team outlined in the years leading up to Copenhagen. Judged against that standard, it is hard to see how a better outcome could have been achieved. Indeed, Copenhagen moved the ball forward on several objectives shared by a number of climate change experts:
Legislate first, negotiate second. Obama and his top negotiator, Todd Stern, need to be applauded for what they did not do in Copenhagen: negotiate a binding treaty. In a November 2007 article, Stern and I argued that the great lesson of Kyoto is that key countries should not seek a binding agreement until a number of them had first acted at home. If the U.S. had signed a treaty before passing domestic climate legislation, it would have doomed the chances of that legislation ever happening. Two GOP Senate staffers — one supporter and one opponent of climate action — privately have confirmed that view.
Industrial and emerging powers must act together. Getting a climate change bill through Congress requires major emerging economies (China and India) to also take real steps. For the first time, those two nations laid out what they were willing to do in parallel with the United States. This was an enormous step forward, taking a huge argument away from the administration’s opponents. To be sure, neither country has passed comprehensive climate legislation. But neither have we. All of us are still building the domestic political will and institutions necessary make such cuts, so getting parallel pledges to cut emissions was a major accomplishment.
Negotiate a “general agreement,” not a binding treaty. Stern and I called for a General Agreement to Reduce Emissions, in which nations “explore a more bottom-up form of targets and trading, in which countries attracted by the cost-saving benefits of emissions trading could pass their own domestic cap-and-trade legislation and then agree to link their systems.” The Copenhagen Accord could go down in history as the place where that general agreement was first outlined — pending domestic legislation.
Our model was that great and successful global precedent: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, aka, the GATT. In the aftermath of World War II, in an effort to prevent trade wars from reigniting national hostilities, leading nations tried to establish the International Trade Organization. It was vetoed in the U.S. Senate. At Harry Truman’s direction, negotiators went back and constructed the GATT based on what could pass the Senate (of which he had been recently a member). Sixty years later, that general agreement is the linchpin of global trade. Nations have come to see trade law as consistent both with their sovereignty and their long-term national interests. They have gained confidence in other nations’ willingness to comply. We need that same multidecade experience on the climate issue.
Major powers are key. In early 2007, Stern and I called for the creation of an E-8. Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa and the United States currently account for more than half the world’s population and 70 percent of global emissions. Obama expanded on that group right after taking office, hosting a Major Economies Forum of 16 nations plus the EU. While the forum did not have the full moral weight of the entire 192-nation U.N., it drove the Copenhagen Accord.
Embrace what the U.N. can do; acknowledge what it cannot do. Obama worked with the U.N. but was not bound by its bureaucratic plodding. The U.N. is a good place to debate different interests and views of legitimacy. Small island nations used the Copenhagen meeting to draw attention to rising sea levels. Oddly enough, though, oil-exporting states such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia also made a moral argument in Copenhagen: They sought compensation for lost revenue in a carbon-constrained world.
Unfortunately, the climate — and our children and grandchildren — cannot wait for the perfect moral solution. The U.N. is not the best venue to negotiate an effective global treaty or even a general agreement. The good news is that options such as the Major Emitters Forum are available.
Bring in political leaders. Obama’s decision to not only attend Copenhagen but also engage in active negotiations was perhaps his most important choice. As critical as diplomats are, only political leaders can say what domestic constituencies and agencies will do — and what they will not do. Indeed, by most accounts, the Copenhagen Accord was on the verge of collapse and delivered in the last 10 hours by Obama himself, working with his colleagues from the leading emitters.
Guided by a sense of what was achievable in the U.S. Senate — of which Obama was recently a member — the president may have just laid the foundation for a lasting and realistic international institution, one that will be based on domestic legislation. That is a considerable accomplishment.
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