Killing Kyoto Softly: Hard Choices and Hillary Clinton's Climate Change Alternate Reality

I suffered an attack of bulging eye/throbbing vein syndrome when reading presumptive presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s blithe account of a clever piece of business she pulled at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009.

Courtesy of India’s First Post, an excerpt from Hard Choices:

At the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009, US President Barack Obama forced himself into a room where the then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was holding a secret meeting with the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other leaders. Giving a blow by blow account of the incident, of which she was part as the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in her memoirs 'Hard Choices' writes that the purpose of China was to isolate the United States by bringing together countries like India, Brazil and South Africa on its side. But Obama's determination and presence of mind thwarted such a move, she writes.

"President Obama and I were looking for Premier Wen Jiabao in the middle of a large international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark," she recalls. "We knew that the only way to achieve a meaningful agreement on climate change was for leaders of the nations emitting the most greenhouse gases to sit down together and hammer out a compromise, especially the US and China," she said.

"But the Chinese were avoiding us." "Worse, we learned that Wen had called a 'secret' meeting with the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans to stop, or at least dilute, the kind of agreement the United States was seeking. When we couldn't find any of the leaders of those countries, we knew something was amiss and sent out members of our team to canvass the conference center," she writes. "Eventually they discovered the meeting's location. After exchanging looks of 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' the President and I set off through the long hallways of the sprawling Nordic convention center, with a train of experts and advisors scrambling to keep up," she writes in her book. "Later we'd joke about this impromptu 'footcade', a motorcade without the motors, but at the time I was focused on the diplomatic challenge waiting at the end of our march.

So off we went, charging up a flight of stairs and encountering surprised Chinese officials, who tried to divert us by sending us in the opposite direction. We were undeterred," she says. When they arrived outside the meeting room, there was a jumble of arguing aides and nervous security agents, she says. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, got tangled up with a Chinese guard, she adds. In the commotion the President slipped through the door and yelled, 'Mr. Premier!' really loudly, which got everyone's attention. "The Chinese guards put their arms up against the door again, but I ducked under and made it through," Clinton writes recounting the incident. "In a makeshift conference room whose glass walls had been covered by drapes for privacy against prying eyes, we found Wen wedged around a long table with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma. Jaws dropped when they saw us. 'Are you ready?' said President Obama, flashing a big grin," Clinton claims.

"Now the real negotiations could begin. It was a moment that was at least a year in the making," she adds.

Horsepucky as far as the “we broke up China’s cabal and got the real negotiations going” thing. 

 

I wrote a detailed backgrounder on Copenhagen soon after the debacle.  Here are some choice excerpts concerning the United States’ failure to “thwart”, indeed its inadvertent success in creating, the “BASIC” bloc (Brazil, South Africa with initials inverted for maximum acronym effect, India, and China) of affronted developing regional powers:

[T]he United States assiduously ignored the embarrassing fact of ostensible ally India’s move into the BASIC camp—and skated over the issue of how Washington’s conference planning found it lined up against both New Delhi and Beijing instead of playing one off against the other.


When one considers that the essence of U.S. diplomacy in Asia involves pushing China and India into opposition, forcing these two rivals into an alliance is a remarkable if dubious achievement.


India, for its part, was frank about its identity of interests with China, at least on the issue of climate change India has come out quite well in Copenhagen: Ramesh (Lead):

[Environment Minister] Ramesh said: “A notable feature of this conference is the manner in which the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) coordinated their position.

“BASIC ministers met virtually on an hourly basis right through the conference; India and China worked very very closely together.”

…

 “India, South Africa, Brazil, China and other developing countries were entirely successful in ensuring there was no violation of the BAP [Bali Action Plan] (of 2007),” Ramesh said.

“Despite relentless attempts made by developed countries, the conference succeeded in continuing negotiations under the Kyoto Protocol for the post-2012 period”, when the current period of the protocol runs out.

Endquote. 

 

The original piece, long and filled with circumstantial detail, is still up at Japan Focus.

In Hard Choices, Clinton also misrepresents the key US gambit at Copenhagen: the $100 billion per year mitigation initiative:

The United States was prepared to lead a collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations mitigate the damage from climate change if we could also reach broad agreement on limiting emissions.

Actually, the quid pro quo was not “broad agreement on limiting emissions”; the promise of aid was linked to the PRC’s acceptance of  emission caps and “transparency”.  It was, as Admiral Akbar would say, “A trap!”  As John Lee approvingly put it in Foreign Policy at the time, it was “a clever trap”.

Having just announced that the United States would establish and contribute to a $100 billion international fund by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the challenge of climate change, Clinton added a nonnegotiable proviso: All other major nations would first be required to commit their emissions reduction to a binding agreement and submit these reductions to "transparent verification." … The onus was now on Beijing to agree to standards of "transparent verification." If it did not, poorer countries standing to benefit from the fund would blame China for breaking the deal. Clinton's proposal had cunningly undermined Beijing's leadership over the developing bloc of countries.

It was a trap that worked—for a while.  The solidarity of the G-77+China bloc--which had historically maintained a united front insisting that the developed nations shoulder most of the greenhouse gas burden in the spirit of the Kyoto Treaty--was shattered. 

Actually, it had been shattered pre-Copenhagen as the United States had cultivated the emergence of a pro-Western faction within the G77, led by Tuvalu, to confront the PRC at the conference on the issue of obstructing US-sponsored mitigation aid.  But the benefits were short-lived as the big powers alienated the G77 in toto by excluding it from the closed door negotiations over the final accord, it became obvious that the US lacked the political will to commit to binding agreement on emissions despite the desperate efforts and importunities of the at-risk nations, and that a “collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources” i.e. after President Obama had left office, looked like a piece of public relations vaporware.

Another piece of dubious reportage from Hard Choices is Clinton’s rather counterintuitive explanation that outrage within the Chinese delegation was triggered by fear of the mad US negotiation skillz, rather than anger that the US team had forced its way into a private meeting between Wen and three other world leaders as if it was schooling misbehaving adolescents at a sleepover:

In one surprising display, one of the other members of the Chinese delegation …started loudly scolding the far more senior Premier.  He was quite agitated by the prospect that a deal might be at hand.

WaPo provided the context at the time:

China’s top climate change negotiator exploded in rage at U.S. pressure after Obama walked in on the Chinese while they were holding talks with the Indians, South Africans and Brazilians. After Obama asked whether the Chinese could commit to listing their climate targets in an international registry, Xie Zhenhua launched into a tirade, pointing his finger at the U.S. president… Wen instructed his Chinese interpreter not to translate Xie's fiery remarks. When Xie erupted again, Wen, who was chairing the meeting, ignored him. After Wen handed Obama a draft text of an agreement that included verification language Obama couldn't abide by, the two men led a lengthy debate that ended in a working compromise, sources said.

The “working compromise” was an agreement text that kicked the transparency can down the road to a future “conference of the parties”.  I imagine Xie was continuing to vent his spleen at the US delegation for its disrespect for the PRC, and felt little need to disrupt a “deal” that was little more than face-saving nonsense.

Apparently the fact that the US stunt—which, I note, Clinton is careful not to take responsibility for--caused Xie Zhenhua to berate President Obama, not Wen Jiabao, is one of those awkward items of narrative that demanded some creative bending and stretching.

Beyond placing the lumpy gristle of Copenhagen failure into the political memoir Cuisinart in order to output creamy Clintonian achievement, the book says very little about the objective that has been driving international climate change policy under President Obama: the desire to “kill Kyoto” i.e. collapse the current treaty and its messy framework of unbalanced obligations, big-and-small consensus, and rhetoric of moral claims on the developed world, with something more U.S.-friendly.

What really happened at Copenhagen was that President Obama had been unable to get national cap-and-trade legislation passed in the US.  Having never ratified Kyoto (with its binding emissions caps) and with no meaningful prospect of national legislation, the United States was unable to put any pressure on the People’s Republic of China to implement national caps and assist the world in moving beyond the Kyoto Protocol (which bound only the Annex 1 “advanced economies”) to a new regime in which all of the largest emitters (including China, India, Brazil, & South Africa) accepted binding caps.

In 2010, Al Gore told a conference in Montreal that the PRC passed a message to President Obama before Copenhagen that it was ready to work with the United States to come up with a binding successor to Kyoto… if the US Congress could pass similar legislation.

Not to be.

Instead, President Obama and Secretary Clinton apparently came to Copenhagen with the idea that, absent meaningful US advances either on ratifying Kyoto or creating a new regime, the US would settle for half a loaf: incrementally weakening the Kyoto Protocol at Copenhagen so that it could be allowed to expire and the new regime, nonbinding and with the US and other major powers calling the shots (embodied in the “Denmark draft”) would emerge from its ashes.

In tactical terms, this meant attacking the PRC instead of working with it, by dangling the promise of mitigation money linked to transparency concessions to break the united front of China and the G-77 bloc of small countries.

The PRC—apparently because this would make tapping the international carbon offset market subject to the adversarial attention of the United States and its allies, thereby putting at risk a major economic prop for greenhouse gas reduction—declined to yield to the public US demands for "transparency".  (I might add that the PRC is a clever and not entirely scrupulous player in the offset game; however, its resistance to US demands seemed to have more to do with the apparent inability of the US to deliver a binding emissions commitment in return for transparency concessions.)

In PR terms it meant that the virtually foreordained failure of the conference would be laid at China’s feet, something that the PRC was not quite prepared for, and which probably accounted for Xie’s furious but untranslated set-to with President Obama.

Unfortunately for the United States, the $100 billion gambit and shouldering its way into the PRC/Brazil/India/South Africa confab did not isolate China; instead, the BASIC alliance stepped forward to share the political heat and finesse the creation of a pro forma accord that put the West and Japan on the hook for the $30 billion in immediate aid but accomplished nothing else on the key issues of binding emissions targets or transparency.

India’s Jairam Ramesh described the fallout from the U.S. tactics as follows:

"During the last day of the summit (18 December) when the talks had reached an impasse, it was the intention of European Nations and the US to announce the breakdown and hold the four Basic nations (India, China, Brazil and South Africa) accountable for its failure," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said addressing the Aspen Institute of India recently.

Speaking about the talks on the concluding day of the Summit, he said the US President (Barack Obama) kept on saying to the head of state of Bangladesh and Maldives that "you are not going to get money (for climate steps) unless these four guys (BASIC nations) sign the Accord."

He (Obama) made it categorically clear that any money flow to the developing countries will be linked to the Accord provided the four countries of BASIC group come on board, Ramesh said.
"Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina did ask me whether India will deny her country this money. This was the line taken by UK and Australia as well.

"Against this background, none of the heads of the four states wanted to be responsible for the breakdown of the talks. China was particularly wary being world's largest green house gas emitter," Ramesh recalled.

This "was the moral line taken at the summit and against this background the Accord was noted," he added.

The Accord that resulted from Secretary Clinton’s fancy footwork and “clevertrapping” was, by design, a nonbinding collection of loopholes negotiated behind closed doors by the big developed and developing powers in order to save their face as climate change heroes.

The BASIC countries insisted that it be stripped of anything that would allow it to be construed as a (nonbinding) successor to the (binding) Kyoto Protocol.   The Accord was not adopted by the conference attendees, who in general detested it; and it was only “noted” by means of some procedural legerdemain as it was jammed through the general session of the Conference, to the intense resentment of the G77.  By the end, even Tuvalu, the leader of the pro-West bloc, had turned on the United States and condemned the Accord and the $30 billion in promised “Fast Start” mitigation aid as “thirty pieces of silver” that betrayed the interests of the small developing nations.

The lack of any real achievement at Copenhagen was the signal for a general pile-on intended to put the onus on the PRC and not the US for the failure at Copenhagen, led by the Anglo-American bloc abetted by prestige media, especially in Great Britain.  Kevin Rudd memorably accused the PRC of administering a “ratf*cking” at Copenhagen.

 

Nevertheless, the BASIC countries, led by the PRC and India, have maintained a united front on climate change—and the preservation of Kyoto—to this day.

Subsequent to Copenhagen, in its campaign to supersede the Kyoto treaty with the “Copenhagen Accord”, the Obama administration appeared to be channeling the unsavory spirit of the Bush neo-cons.  For the United States, negotiator Todd Stern (apparently a favorite of Clinton’s; in Hard Choices she singles him out as a “passionate and dogged diplomat” whom she put in charge of climate diplomacy) assumed the role of climate-change goon-in-chief, charged with the task of killing Kyoto—and belittling both the Kyoto Treaty and the smaller at-risk nations that presumed to invoke the treaty to assert moral and financial claims on the developed world.

Post-Copenhagen the U.S. engaged in an intensive global armtwisting campaign to compel smaller at-risk nations to endorse the Copenhagen process as a successor to Kyoto (in 2010, as a part of the kill-Kyoto PR campaign, Todd Stern displayed a “little chart” that pointed out surviving Kyoto binding signatories only accounted for 28% of global emissions, as opposed to the more inclusive [but unbinding] Copenhagen Accord’s 80%)—and keep the pressure on China for “transparency”, instead of hassling the United States to commit to an emissions cap.  

Wikileaks also revealed a sleazy campaign to browbeat dozens of smaller at-risk countries into “signing on” to the Copenhagen accord and and discuss tangible financial inducements, in return for their support.

Todd Stern went distinctly undiplomatic in his effort to neutralize the unfavorable effect of the Wikileak.

In an article entitled US envoy rejects suggestion that America bribed countries to sign up to the Copenhagen Accord, the Guardian reported:

Stern added: "We can eliminate any cause or accusation of bribery by eliminating any money."

This case of affairs is bitterly ironic, since the “Copenhagen” model would require the at-risk developing countries to sacrifice their independent voices (through abandonment of the unanimous consensus system) and the moral and legal claims on developed countries that they enjoyed under Kyoto.  The concrete business of climate change policy would shift to the “Major Economies Forum” and climate change financial assistance would be doled out by the donor countries according to their own priorities instead of collected and distributed by the UN in a spirit of equity.

As the Kyoto regime hollowed out, the United States also gave every appearance of slow-walking the negotiations with the PRC on “transparency”, the issue that the U.S. claimed was the vital precondition to the successful reform of the Kyoto  regime—and the release of billions of aid.

Post-Copenhagen, the US and China have held continual meetings on MRV and it appears that there isn't too much practical difference between the two sides.

The Guardian reported a WikiLeaks cable with this exchange between the EU's top climate change official and the lead US negotiator:

[Connie] Hedegaard asks why the US did not agree with China and India on what she saw as acceptable measures to police future emissions cuts. "The question is whether they will honour that language," the cable quotes [Jonathan] Pershing as saying.

Given the lack of US domestic progress on climate change legislation, at the 2010 Cancun conference the “blame China” dog showed signs of not hunting anymore, as the New York Times reported:

Yet while the United States is casting China as the linchpin of the negotiations, there is anger aplenty at America inside the Moon Palace resort where talks are being held. Many say the United States is demanding compromise from others while bringing nothing to the negotiating table itself.

"I'm actually more concerned about the US's transparency," said Jennifer Morgan, who heads the World Resources Institute's climate and energy program.

One leading US analyst said every time countries make progress on an issue, the United States reminds countries that it might all mean nothing unless China agrees to transparency rules.

"The US is the problem here," the analyst said. "Everybody is so pissed off. Here we are with nothing back home, and acting like bullies."

On December 8, 2012, at yet another conference in Doha, in another exercise in “kicking the can down the road as far as we can before the asphalt melts in the heat”, the Kyoto regime was extended to 2020 and everybody agreed to negotiate a replacement regime in 2015--at the cost of the withdrawal of staunch US allies Japan and Canada, and (because of its dislike of tougher offset standards) Russia.  

Signatories still accepting binding targets are basically the EU plus Australia.  Now advocates of the Copenhagen Accord can claim that Kyoto, governing only 15% of world greenhouse gases post-Doha, is not significantly better than Copenhagen (zero % binding). At the same time, the US and EU refused to make inconvenient commitments for climate change aid to at risk nations beyond the $30 billion in immediate aid they promised at Copenhagen. 

And, in another indications of the problems inherent in the US strategy, America, not China, was putting in time in the climate change doghouse, at least with Friends of the Earth:

 “Doha was a disaster zone where poor developing countries were forced to capitulate to the interests of wealthy countries, effectively condemning their own citizens to the climate crisis. The blame for the disaster in Doha can be laid squarely at the foot of countries like the USA who have blocked and bullied those who are serious about tackling climate change. 

A few observations on Hard Choices:

Clinton’s strategy of advancing US policies (or obscuring their failures) by sticking it to the unpopular and autocratic Chinese regime—through a surprise attack with careful advance planning in an advantageous multilateral forum--was fully formed in December 2009 at Copenhagen, long before the “freedom of navigation” contretemps at ASEAN’s Hanoi meeting in mid-2010.  

By laying down her rather skewed version of what went down at Copenhagen, Clinton is signaling that she wants her readout of the Copenhagen outcome—Kyoto superseded, all caps to be renegotiated on a nonbinding basis with transparency on offsets a prerequisite-- to be regarded as the anchor for further negotiations.  As a practical matter, that means that major, costly joint global action on climate change looks pretty unlikely.

Message to Xie Zhenhua: Suck. On. This.

Deciding to treat China as an enemy is a clever tactic and good politics, but I think it’s a strategic blunder whose cost Americans will pay in matters great and small for decades.

And on the subject of climate change, going adversarial with China and Kyoto might turn out to be an existential blunder that will help decide the fate of the whole planet.

So that’s where we are, Ms. Clinton. 

Cancun Wrapup: Is Your Portfolio Ready for the End of the World?

I have an article up at Asia Times, US, China Lead Merry Dance at Cancun.

It makes the case that the invective and verbiage spewed at the climate conference in Cancun reflects a shared but largely unspoken belief that the chances of coordinated global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are basically zero.  The key then, is reducing the financial pain and suffering for rich and large developing countries by finding ways to disregard the genuine pain and suffering for small and vulnerable countries.

There have been a few interesting and significant developments since then.

The delivery of the Cancun communique, a towering pile of steaming mush deposited on the world's doorstep, was not one of them.

Here is a more nutritious helping of news nuggets.

Killing Kyoto: The Sequel

Cancun was basically another episode in the excruciating snuff serial, Killing Kyoto, officially inaugurated at Copenhagen and designed to conclude at Durban next year (when Kyoto expires).

The United States is distinctly uncomfortable with the current Kyoto structure.  Beyond the obvious problem of the free ride for Annex II countries like China, there is the profoundly awkward moral issue of carbon reparations.

A lot of countries fundamentally threatened by climate change (represented in the G77 bloc), want the West to own up for chunking the majority of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.  Kyoto--a global consensus mechanism--has served as a way for them to get their voices heard, together with demands that the industrialized countries take the economically onerous step of drastically reducing their carbon emissions and funneling tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars to the vulnerable countries in climate aid.

The US, on the other hand, is embarrassed by these small, insignificant states that, in the US view, treat their own survival as an entitlement to be guaranteed by the richer nations.

Better to let bygones be bygones, get the important players in a room, and deal with problems as they arise, seems to be the US policy.

In other words, let the poor nations beg for aid, and give it to them only if they satisfy grantors' requirements for convenience, political and diplomatic utility, and overall value for money.

One more thing: better cap the amount of aid, so it’s clearly a Western initiative, rather than open-ended compensation for screwing up the planet with 150 years of industrialization.

How about...$30 billion in fast track aid with a rampup to $100 billion per annum by 2020.

Oh, and one last thing: don’t even agree to disburse the aid until the Chinese yield on MRV—even if the Chinese aren’t receiving the aid--so it’s even more clear the aid is discretionary and not obligatory.

It’s a good deal for the West.  Getting the poorer nations to accept it involves a certain amount of heavy lifting for a certain superpower.

In my article, I touch on the Wikileaks cable reported in the Guardian that describes US outreach to the Maldives.  "Outreach" looks a lot like a bribe of a few million dollars up front to the tiny island nation to support the US position on a post-Kyoto regime.

Todd Stern, the chief US climate negotiator, went distinctly undiplomatic in his effort at Cancun to neutralize the unfavorable effect of the Wikileak.

In an article entitled US envoy rejects suggestion that America bribed countries to sign up to the Copenhagen Accord, the Guardian reported:

Stern added: "We can eliminate any cause or accusation of bribery by eliminating any money."

Stay classy, Todd.

To make it clear that we're talking discretionary grease administered by the US to compliant and deserving allies, and not payment of some carbon blood money out of moral obligation, Stern illustrated his middle-finger posturing with an anecdote of an innocent Western moneybags victimized by an odious Third World beggar (from the same Guardian article):

Speaking at the UN climate summit in Cancun, Todd Stern, the US special envoy on climate change, suggested that countries that wanted climate aid were in no position to criticise.

Citing, with approval, a confrontation at the Copenhagen summit in which a Norwegian official berated a counterpart from a developing country, he said, "he just stood up and blasted the person, 'you can't on the one hand ask for and make a legitimately strong case for the need for the need for climate assistance and then on the other hand turn around and accuse us of bribery'."

The BASIC bloc made political hay from Stern's oafishness by pointing out that they are not candidates for climate aid from the US (they are enthusiastic diners at the trough of Clean Development Mechanism funding for green projects administered by the EU instead), and Stern was only bullying the smaller, vulnerable nations--the same nations the US is trying to wedge off China. 

Per Global Times:

Xie Zhenhua, head of the Chinese  delegation in the talks and deputy director of China's National Development and Reform Commission, stressed that BASIC countries would always stand with the G77 group of developing countries.

Xie, who met with delegates from other BASIC nations, also broached the recent WikiLeaks revelations on how the US and European governments used monetary incentives, threats and even espionage to advance their "climate" agenda at last year's Copenhagen summit.

"Countries and people involved in the information that Wikileaks released should reflect upon their deeds, if the information is true," Xie said.

Gutting Kyoto has turned into a multi-stage process that involves

• wedging off China and India from the G77 by highlighting their unwillingness to commit to Kyoto-style legally binding emissions 
• a remarkably crude effort to hold China, instead of the West, responsible for holding back climate aid by linking release of the aid to China's acceptance of onerous "MRV" (monitoring, reporting, and verification) procedures 
• bribing some of the smaller countries with bilateral aid to support the US position 
• proposing capped (and suspiciously unfunded) climate aid to vulnerable countries to clear the West’s 150 year overdrawn carbon account as an alternative to open-ended Kyoto obligations 
• using mighty diplomatic pressure to make sure that the refractory ALBA bloc of left-leaning South American governments is unable to seize the podium and make trouble.

The trend, at least for the United States and a majority of Kyoto Annex I signatories and a certain number of vulnerable states that, for whatever reason, choose to cleave to the US position seems to be: scrap Kyoto, get the small nations out of the room, and let the grownups (at least those with money) manage the climate change inconvenience through the mechanism of the G20 or its climate change affiliate, the MEF (Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate).

One might think that putting this matter in hands of the nations responsible for the problem, able to cope with the local effects of the problem with relative ease, willing to bribe vulnerable countries for peace, quiet, profit, and advantage, and fundamentally averse to sacrificing their economies in order to solve the problem they caused is not going to yield an outcome that the smaller nations will find satisfactory.

But that's where we are.

US on PR Defensive

From a public relations standpoint, things did not quite go the US way at Cancun.

The climate is headed for a trainwreck.  Based on the current scenario--lack of significant emissions action but plenty of self-congratulatory greenspeak--global warming is going to be well north of what is considered to be very bad but maybe manageable--2 degrees--and might be as high as 5 degrees.

The fact that the United States is trying to cripple Kyoto, the only binding treaty dealing with this situation, and replace it with a multilateral rich-nations circlejerk is beginning to attract some attention.

The US came in for a lot of adverse comment from climate change NGOers at Cancun, and it even filtered into the New York Times.

Nevertheless, the US is committed to demonstrating the dysfunctionality of the Kyoto process.  If the inability of the world's nations to forge a meaningful and binding concensus is due in part to American obdurancy, well so be it.

China--which gained a lot of kudos for its relatively aggressive greenhouse gas policies--can happily watch the United States under Obama once again take the majority heat, as it did under Bush, for roasting the planet.

The other big Wikileaks noise related to climate change was a breathless piece in Der Spiegel entitled The US and China Joined Forces Against Europe (in an interesting example of the synergies--a.k.a. big media tail wagging Julian Assange dog--between Wikileaks and its media partners, as far as I can tell, Wikileaks has not yet released the cable Der Spiegel is reporting).

The article, by Gerald Traufetter, seized upon an embassy account of a visit by John Kerry to Beijing in summer 2009 to assert:

The dispatches reveal that the US and China, the world's top two polluters, joined forces to stymie every attempt by European nations to reach agreement.

...

During his visit to China, Senator Kerry, a former presidential candidate for the Democrats, told the Beijing leadership that the Europeans were determined to push through their goal for agreement on concrete cuts in emissions for the US and other industrialized countries. However, nothing would change for China. Together with the other "developing countries" the Chinese would merely have to say they would "work hard to reduce emissions."

The quid pro quo for the joint US-China collusion against Europe was allegedly trade in green goods like US nuclear reactors.

This article is a bookend to a much more interesting article in Der Spiegel from May 2010 based on a leaked recording of a heated Copenhagen discussion between world leaders that also pushes the Everybody's Stabbing Deutschland in the Back theme: How China and India Sabotaged the UN Climate Summit.  President Obama was identified as a co-conspirator in the body of that article, if not the title.

The Der Spiegel Wikileaks article is pretty weak beer.  The US position in summer 2009 was a matter of public record long before Wikileaks

On May 28, 2009, the Guardian reported on Kerry's trip:

In their formal positions, the two sides remain far apart. China wants developed nations to make a 40% cut in emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels, far above the goal set by President Obama's administration.

The United States wants China to set voluntary but verifiable goals to reduce its energy use and, in the longer term, to join richer nations in cutting overall emissions.

But Kerry said senior Chinese politicians had shown a willingness to compromise, particularly over the 40% target that he described as politically impossible in the US at present.

By sharing know-how and conducting joint research into renewable and energy-saving technology, he said China would realise that it can go beyond its current target of a 20% cut in energy intensity of its economy - the amount of carbon released per dollar of GDP.

It is rather clear that China and the US, though both fundamentally uninterested in accepting legally binding cuts, were at each others throats in Copenhagen, not colluding.

What happened between Kerry's trip and Copenhagen was the bruising US fight over health care, and the realization that President Obama could carry no genuine commitments on US emissions cuts to Copenhagen that could somehow finesse a consensus approach to Kyoto.

China pretty much has put its eggs in the EU basket--the Clean Development Mechanism funnels a lot of money into China--and wants to keep some kind of Kyoto arrangement going.

The United States has apparently decided that it won't be able do anything on climate change until it drives a stake through the heart of Kyoto and starts over with the Annex II countries compelled to adhere to the same regime as the EU, Japan, Russia, Canada, and the US.

But nobody believes that, once Kyoto is thrown under the bus, the United States will possess sufficient political will to legislate genuine domestic emissions reductions, let alone bankroll a massive global transition to a low carbon economy.

The inability of the US to lead on climate change, coupled with its desire to control and drive global climate change policy notwithstanding, is the source of a lot of the US-China acrimony that obscures the general developed-world paralysis on the climate change problem.

Something You'll Be Hearing More About:  Adaptation

Adaptation is the climate change measure that dares not speak its name.  Adaptation means dealing with the consequences of global warming.

Nowadays, it is still much more politically correct to talk about Mitigation--the noble crusade to reduce greenhouse gases in order to prevent the intensification of global warming.

The window for mitigation, however, is rapidly closing.

So expect to hear a lot more about adaptation aid, investment...and business.

Take it away, Katie Fehrenbacher via Reuters!

The Hot New Sector in Greentech: Adaptation

The modest agreement that came out of the Cancun climate talks this weekend points tells me one thing: It’s time to start talking a lot more about adaptation to climate change. ..

Adaptation technology has long been a slightly taboo subject, with the idea that technology should be used to stop global warming, not help humans deal with it. But more and more scientists, companies and pundits are taking the subject seriously in recent weeks, including an excellent article in The Economist last month. As The Economist article points out, the world will warm by 3.5 degrees C by 2100, and that’s if countries hit the emissions reductions targets put forth in the Copenhagen Accord.  The much-discussed 2-degree safe temperature rise is now a joke we can’t realistically hit.

So, in the face of us all crying into our pillows every night, here are 10 technologies we’ll need to help the world adapt to climate change over the next century. In Cancun, governments agreed to supply $100 billion via a Green Climate Fund for climate change adaption by 2020. Many of these technologies will be used by the world’s poorest, by farmers, and by country’s that already are facing droughts or extreme weather conditions:

1. Innovations around infectious diseases. ..

2. Flood safeguards. ...

3. Weather forecasting technologies...

4. Insurance tools. ..

5. More resilient crops. ..

6. Supercomputing. ..

7. Water Purification. ..

8. Water Recycling. ..

9. Efficient Irrigation Systems. ..

10. Sensors. ..

Yeah, stop crying in your pillows, bitches!

The "Green" in "Greentech" means money!

The Maldives are perhaps not the best Global Warming Poster Child

Finally, the Maldives.

In the ecospirit of recycling, here’s something I posted in November but didn’t circulate at the time:


The textbook image of the threat from global warming and rising sea levels is the precarious city/island of Male, capital of the Maldives island nation in the Indian Ocean.



Despite the dazzling images of its tourist resorts, the Maldives is not an unspoiled Eden with underwater cabinet meetings.

As a  fascinating photoessay by Francesco Zizola on the Maldives revealed to me, the Malidives is in many ways an artificial human construct.  The capital city, Male, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

In a quest for lebensraum, the island was expanded by filling in the surrounding sea floor to the encircling coral atoll and beyond.  A 3.5 meter high, six kilometer sea wall was constructed with Japanese aid to protect the island (mostly 1 meter above sea level).  Another atoll a few miles away, Hulhumale, was filled in to a height of 2 meters above sea level to serve as a new home if Male becomes unviable.

The least edifying piece of geoengineering in the Maldives is Thilafushi Island.  Zizola writes:

Thilafushi island, also known as a rubbish island, was originally a vast lagoon. It was reclaimed in 1992 using waste as the filling material to solve Male's unmanageable refuse problem. Few Bengali immigrants work at the waste disposal centre in Thilafushi. Their job basically consists of indicating to the numerous dump trucks where to unload the waste. They then incinerate part of the waste or bury the majority of it in landfill sites. No recycling is carried out and hazardous wastes are not sorted from common rubbish.

Maldives Live reports that 330 tons of rubbish make it to Thilafushi each day, some generated by the thousands of tourists visiting the Maldives, the rest coming from Male.

There are many good reasons for a concerted global effort to mitigate global warming.  However, enabling the Maldives to continue its high population density/atoll-filling/trash-dumping/tourism-based lifestyle one meter above sea level is perhaps not one of them.