The Copenhagen Challenge: Prospects for Successful Climate Negotiations [ PDF ]

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Breaking the Impasse

John C. Topping Jr., President and CEO, Climate Institute

Negotiations set this December in Copenhagen have a tall order to fill. Mounting evidence shows that emissions from human activity are producing metastatic climate change and altering Arctic reflectivity, thereby accelerating warming and permafrost thawing that speeds methane release, in turn increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in a positive feedback loop. Still, there are glimmerings of hope.

The US, which has produced nearly a third of humanity’s emissions over the past century, may soon act decisively. Although the Waxman-Markey legislation narrowly emerged from the House, laden with trade sanction provisions and pork to persuade wavering industrial state Democrats, there is a chance that much more effective legislation could materialize from the Senate despite or perhaps because of its de facto 60 vote threshold. Ideally the Senate will retain the ambitious goals of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill – a 42% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 and an 83% reduction by 2050 - but will achieve much of this by removing costly barriers to energy recycling and local generation.

Breaking the impasse in international negotiations will require a creative use of win-win strategies by countries in the Global North and South alike. Though China’s growing emissions have been used in Congress to argue against US action, rapid change is underway in China’s energy sector. In just over a year, the breakneck pace of new coal plant installation has slowed from two a week to under one a week. This year China, whose wind capacity has doubled in each of the past four years, seems likely to exceed the US in new wind plants.

China’s top scientists have long recognized that climate change could imperil coastal areas, increase typhoon risk and threaten food production - a fact underscored in the Beijing International Symposium on Climate Change Impacts organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Climate Institute in the summer of 1991. Since this Symposium China has emerged as an economic superpower with greatly improved living standards. Yet this remarkable development has caused urban air pollution to worsen, giving China the dubious distinction of having 16 of the world’s 20 most air polluted cities. Adding to the health burden are lethal and pervasive indoor air pollution levels in many rural homes and urban dwellings, where coal and biomass stoves are inflicting a heavy toll.

Barring a dramatic shift in air pollution and smoking habits, one health projection shows China experiencing 83 million deaths from lung cancer and other respiratory diseases over the next 25 years. With a fifth of the world’s people and only about 5% of the world’s fresh water China is already severely water stressed. Construction of coal-fired plants to meet soaring electricity demand increases these pressures. Mao Yushi notes that washing one ton of coal requires 4 to 5 cubic meters of water and that of the 96 major state-owned coal mines, 70 % face water shortages. These considerations and a desire to establish global leadership in wind, solar and carbon capture and storage at new fossil using facilities may be producing a sea change in Chinese policy.

The Lifetime Leveraging approach advanced by Michael MacCracken and Frances Moore advocates slashing black carbon, which could yield large, affordable near-term reductions in radiative forcing, allow China, India and Pakistan to reduce human health risks of indoor and outdoor air pollution, and slow the melting of glaciers crucial to the region’s water supplies. Lifetime Leveraging with a focus on black carbon might provide inducements for China and other rapidly industrializing nations to agree to reduce their environmental impact, enhance the health of their citizens and safeguard future water supplies.

Meanwhile, encouraging advances in ecosystem valuing could catalyze progressive global action. President Correa’s proposal to forego extensive oil extraction in Ecuador’s Yasuní region through debt-for-nature financing could create a new model for achieving climate and biodiversity protection. It might light the way for ecosystem service value allowances in the US - perhaps enabling the Navajo Nation to derive revenues from foregoing coal mining and combustion at the Desert Rock site. Such a system would provide credit for the value of natural ecosystem services, such as undisturbed coal in the ground aiding recharge of aquifers in the water-parched American Southwest.

Breakthroughs like the successful adoption of a Lifetime Leveraging plan, ecosystem services valuing, and increased cogeneration will facilitate the adoption of strong climate protection measures. As the past two issues (Spring and Winter 2009) of Climate Alert have indicated, the US could save tens of billions of dollars annually by removing anticompetitive restrictions at the state level to harvest power from waste heat and use local generation. Moves in the Senate to foster model interconnection standards and facilitate net metering could slash the costs of large-scale greenhouse gas reductions and attract the necessary votes of both moderate Republicans and Democrats to enact legislation.

Climate change is already wreaking havoc in the US Pacific Northwest, destroying fisheries that have underpinned Native American culture and economies for generations, and in Coastal Alaska, where villages now need to relocate. Large disruptions are likely soon in affluent retirement havens such as the Florida Coast and water starved Southwest. A retooling in the Senate toward least-cost reductions might enable the US to enact climate legislation, perhaps even before the Copenhagen conference. Action there by key developing countries (Mexico has already stepped up boldly) might in turn make it possible ultimately to achieve Senate ratification of a strong international accord and safeguard vulnerable individuals and species across the planet.

SUMMER 2009 Climate Alert

The Copenhagen Challenge: Prospects for Successful Climate Negotiations [ PDF ]

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