In recent weeks, there has been a welcome shift in focus in the Australian climate politics debate onto the global stage. It goes without saying that, unless the world moves decisively as a community of nations, we have not a snowball’s chance in hell of avoiding climate catastrophe.
But the mainstream Australian discussion of the Copenhagen Conference later this year has thus far focussed entirely on the need for a “successful agreement”, and not at all on how you might define such success.
It is incredibly important that we do not let ourselves believe that achieving any kind of diplomatic “success” at Copenhagen is enough. If Copenhagen does not deliver the kind of ambitious global agreement that will see our generation pass on a safe climate to our children, it will have failed. An agreement to do too little, or an agreement which countries can ignore, will be a failure.
This dichotomy was brought home firmly by statements in Australia yesterday by Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Climate Minister (see here, here, here and here), who is touring the world building momentum for the conference she is to host in just a few months’ time. Hedegaard is so keen for a diplomatic success that she has abandoned the goal of environmental success. Having been thoroughly briefed by the triumvirate of Penny Wong, the Climate Institute and the Business Council of Australia, Hedegaard backed the Rudd Government’s Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme as “crucial” to the success of Copenhagen, saying developed countries must sign up to at least the 25% cuts by 2020 that Australia has now put on the table as a maximum offer.
And that’s where the problem starts.
If the old parties close ranks with the old polluters to pass the scheme that is currently before the Parliament, Australia will go to Copenhagen having legislatively prevented itself from agreeing to a target stronger than the 25% minimum that the world requires from rich, high-polluting countries. The only impact this can possibly have on the negotiations is to lower the level of ambition from other developed countries, encouraging Canada, Japan and Russia to also refuse to take on science-based targets. This in turn makes it less likely that China, India and other very large developing nations will sign up to slow their increases in emissions. They have already made it clear that they expect rich countries to commit to targets in the order of 40% by 2020 and more before they agree to move.
And the chances of agreement all of a sudden look very grim indeed.
The Rudd Government’s conditional 25% offer is part of the problem, not the solution. If legislated, it would see Australia return to global negotiations demanding that the rest of the world goes very hard – other developed nations cutting emissions in the order of 40% and developing nations like China reducing emissions 20% below business as usual – while we once again get away with a weak target.
Of course the world needs to go hard! We need a global agreement that is, in fact, considerably stronger than the one that Australia’s conditions set out. But if such an agreement is reached, it will by necessity see Australia commit to far more than 25% cuts by 2020.
Chinese chief negotiator, Su Wei, told The Age just last weekend that Australia’s conditionality on the 25% was unacceptable. By demanding that China make commitments before we do, we breached the spirit of the UNFCCC’s 1992 agreement on common but differentiated targets. European nations have privately raised concerns with the Greens about Australia’s unacceptable attitude to burden-sharing amongst developed countries.
Now, Australia is not the be all and end all. If the US and China agree to start moving (as may now be about to happen), we will swiftly become irrelevant in the global game and be left behind as the world marches on. But, if the CPRS has any impact on the global negotiations, it will be a negative one, not a positive one. If Australia’s contribution to global climate negotiations is once again to lower the level of ambition, it will be a great tragedy.
In yesterday’s hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy, Philip Sutton, as part of a roundtable of environment groups, made the point that, just like Kyoto, a weak agreement at Copenhagen will hold back progress, not encourage it. On the other hand, if negotiations fall apart this year, it can only spur on stronger efforts in the months afterwards to reach a truly effective agreement.
If we are to have any real hope of preventing runaway climate change, the global community must agree to return the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 as soon as possible. That will mean developed nations getting onto a trajectory towards zero net emissions as fast as possible. Once developed nations take on that challenge, developing nations will swiftly come on board as that is where the markets in the coming decades will be.
Let’s not set our sights too low for Copenhagen in order to achieve some kind of agreement. That approach is doomed to failure – if it does not lead to the collapse of negotiations, it will, in the end, lead to climate catastrophe. Let’s aim for the truly ambitious agreement that we need and keep working until we achieve it!
20 Comments
Tim, 350ppm would be nice, but it’s not going to happen this time around. The best we can do, in my view, is a deal that: a) sets a target in the short term – hopefully 450, but probably higher, b) sets up the institutional machinery to allocate targets between nations, and c) makes the pathway to setting a lower target in the future relatively straightforward (unlike the CPRS, incidentally).
As to your view that the CPRS represents an obstacle to Australia being constructive at Copenhagen, you’re right, but the bigger problem is the government’s attitude that the CPRS is all Australia can do. If the cross-benchers knock off the CPRS in the senate, the government will still take it as Australia’s negotiating position to Copenhagen, and still be part of the problem.
The only benefit to knocking off the CPRS is that it might – if you’re very very lucky – mean less compensation to Big Carbon if a deal at Copenhagen is done, and Australia’s target gets tightened for it.
Is a pretty tight race in which it is not only entrenched polluters which are on the team for the status quo, but the entire political culture of the media age. At loggerheads is the idea that perception is reality, in which case the appearance of action is what matters, and the belief that reality calls the shots, in which case you have to act in accordance with what the situation demands. If our response to most other crises, such as the GFC, assorted diseases, and terrorism, is a guide then I am not confident we can even accurately define what is needed let alone do it.
The main game is not Copenhagen, its Washington. If the US passes anything close to a reasonable ETS scheme it will force action elsewhere.
This is because they will then apply carbon tariffs on every country without an adequate scheme (lobbied by their industries). The difference between the US and Australia is that we are but one exporter, they are the key importer for many countries. Obama has enough political capital to spend (and possible 60 Senate votes) to get something done. It won’t be perfect, but they have enough economic clout to force action elsewhere (including Australia).
Yes, so the key problem with Australia’s 25% “non-core” target is not the conditionality, nor the figure itself, but the words “up to”. Like our go-it-alone 5% target, our all-in 25% target should be the minimum we’ll commit to under the specified conditions. Otherwise we’re locking out the stronger action the world needs. Perhaps supporting the CPRS with this change (and others) would allow the government to save face by sticking to its second-round 25% bid.
And while I agree that Australia should join Hansen’s push for 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 (http://350.org), remember to return to a safe climate we’ll need to go “below 350″ (probably to around 300 or lower), not “to” it.
Also isn’t it time we started focussing on specific big-ticket zero-emission actions, rather than relying prayer to the Market Gods to save us? The 1 GW solar power stations promised in the budget should be followed by 30 GW more to cover our national power needs with renewables and switch off coal. With EVs and the Better Place-AGL-Macquarie Bank deal for charging and battery swap stations due by 2012 (http://betterplace.com/global-progress/australia/), we can switch all or most of our transport to renewable power by 2020.
It is worth checking out the recent issue of Nature on carbon budgets. To have a good chance on not exceeding 2 degrees of warming, we do not want to globally emit more than 1356 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases between 2000 and 2050. This budget would probably be consistent with Hansen’s stabilisation target. A trajectory consistent with 450 ppm CO2-e or 550 ppm CO2-e would exceed this budget, as would a business as usual trajectory.
If we stay on a business as usual trajectory, and global emissions increase by 3% per year, then we will have used up our budget by 2023 or earlier. A 450-550 ppm trajectory would lead to something like 910-950 gigatonnes being released by 2020, which means that not exceeding 1356 gigatonnes by 2050 would be possible, but would require drastic emission reductions after 2020.
The island of Tuvalu, which would probably be lost with more than 1.5 degrees of global warming, is therefore calling for targets from 2013-2016 to be agreed at Copenhagen, rather than a 2020 target, so as not to lock in a poor emissions trajectory.
Robert, re targets and timeframes, see Peter’s comment @ 5. Couldn’t put it better myself! Very clear articulation of the urgency. It may seem impossible, but we need to aim for it or we’ll never achieve it.
My favourite quote of all time is Thoreau from the end of Walden: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
I completely disagree with you on the analysis of the interaction between the CPRS and Copenhagen. The Government has put its 25% on the table and written to the UNFCCC already with that offer. It has been made now and cannot easily be withdrawn. But, as it stands, it is not a maximum target. If we legislate, what we do is make that target a maximum. That is the worst possible outcome. Similar to what Jonathan says @ 4.
EnergyPedant – agreed, except that I see the main game not being just Washington, but Washington and Beijing. As I said in the main piece.
Peter, do you have a web ref for that Nature article? Ta
Tim, I think your right that its Washington + Beijing, I just think that Washington is the only one that can compel Beijing. Once the Chinese decide to act I think they will be very effective (no planning permissions, no debate, government own all the polluters so no one to compensate) and will make a new export industry of permits.
The point on exporting permits is I think why everyone is lobbying so hard for their own slice of the emitting pie. For Australia a 5% difference in target is about 25 MT a year, which at $20+ dollars a tonne is $500M a year in the early years. When it becomes $100 a tonne, $2.5M is a noticeable difference in the balance of trade.
Tim, the Nature article is here. It is part of a special issue that is here. There is also a blog post about it at RealClimate that is worth reading.
Excellent, thanks, Peter.
Tim: Whatever the Senate wants, the government clearly wants to get away with as weak domestic targets as it thinks the rest of the world will tolerate. You can’t change that with a vote in the Senate.
You can force the government (assuming that the Coalition continues to play ostrich) to leave open the option to negotiate for higher targets. But I don’t see how you can force them to actually try to get such a deal.
When the legislation is passed, that won’t lock in any targets. The 5-15% and 25% reductions are part of the objects of the legislation (Section 3). The procedure for setting the targets themselves is specified by Sections 14 and 15 of the legislation. What the legislation states is that before July 2010 the minister must specify Australia’s trajectory for five years into the future; and the minister may at any stage specify upper and lower bounds for Australia’s emissions for any year from from July 2005 onwards.
New modelling from the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model just published in the Journal of Climate suggests that temperature increases are likely to be twice that predicted by previous modelling.
However, even this is probably a gross underestimation because:
Can’t find the study on line, but a MIT press release is at:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html
A great article. An agreement to fail would be worse than an a failure to agree.
That said, an additional question which I think the climate movement needs to urgently consider is how we relate to the Copenhagen process generally. A significant proportion of the movement have put huge faith in the hope that government negotiators committed to business-as-usual ways of thinking have the flexibility to come up with an emergency response.
This is worrying, because we are also setting ourselves up to think that a failure at Copenhagen is the ‘endgame’ for a safe climate goal – and, unfortunately, failure is looking (to use IPCC’s methodology) likely. As Copenhagen approaches it’s getting harder to say that the negotiators ‘shouldn’t treat it like just another trade deal’ – because it’s increasingly shaping up to be exactly that, and no more.
The stance of our movement, unfortunately, seems to be something quite immature. It’s almost unthinkable now for an anti-poverty campaigner to believe that real solutions will emerge from the World Trade Organisation, World Bank or International Monetary Fund. But we’re still looking to the UNFCCC for answers, just as we still feel we must be part of the process of fixing the ETS and other major-party-initiated schemes. Sure, let’s engage, but let’s do it as a show for the audience, not the directors.
It will be a real show of maturity when the climate movement confidently walks it’s own independent path, when we no longer believe that the usual politicians and negotiators are even capable of coming up with anything worth considering – unless it’s borrowing a proposal from the movement. Let Rudd and Turnbull have to seriously engage with our ideas instead of us waiting for their own silly proposals. Let our ideas be more than just a ‘better ETS’ and then let our ideas do battle with their ideas.
We would have surely grown up when we start refusing to leave the fate of the planet up to a bunch of slick CV-building negotiators trying to please their politicians, who themselves are in the pocket of the polluters. A crisis of legitimacy would be very positive right about now.
Everything in time I guess.
Peter @ 11. This is rather a crucial point. There may, at some point in the future, be substantial pressure to change the targets from either changes in the international situation or dramatic deterioration in the climate (though I’m yet to see a climate impact that’s been noticed by a politician).
From what you’re saying, the sole determinant of the upper and lower cap 5 years out is how the minister du jour was feeling when they got out of bed that day? I’d assumed that the cap levels were just how fast or slow we make it to the 10 year target set out in the object.
Is it really possible for the minister to act more strongly or more weakly than the targets dictate?
This is very much true. This is exactly what happened with the Montreal Protocol of ozone depleting substances — one of the few international environmental agreements that has achieved anything close to full cooperation. When the Protocol was first negotiated in 1987 the reductions were not very impressive at all. But in subsequent negotiations in London in 1990 and Copenhagen in 1992, and to a lesser extent in Vienna in 1995 and Montreal in 1997, the baundance of ozone depleting substances was brought down dramatically.
a great blog by tim hollo, and i note christine milne has already said much the same in commenting sharply on the danish minister’s position. I loved the line by socialistica – ‘An agreement to fail would be worse than a failure to agree’ – mainstream media take note.
two important things i noted in newspapers this past week – the age poll of nine anonymous australian IPCC panel member scientists last thursday shows how well rudd and co have wedged and divided climate scientists as well as wedging the coalition and green groups – rudd and co must be feeling pleased with themselves. six out of nine sciebtists said anything agreed at copenhagen is better than nothing, three disagreed. it’s worrying that so many scientists continue to place any faith at all in a corrupted political process. the only thing that might shake rudd is a resolute united front of scientists saying – PM, you are wrong on this!
also the opposition is said to be getting ready to support rudd’s targets for copenhagen without passing any CPRS legislation. and on perhaps proposing raising the low end aspirational [without legislation, this is all it would be] target from 5 % . is this a good thing, or just more political game playing? i would appreciate an early ”rooted” blog on this by someone with an informed line into coalition thinking. it seems potentially important – or is it just more spin? tony kevin .
Peter@11, strictly speaking, you are right that, with the targets in the objects of the act, they are not binding on the Government. But think about how it will operate in practice. Judging from the rent-seeking going on now, you can be damn sure that polluters will challenge the Minister’s decisions on setting the year-on-year caps in every way they possibly can, including through the courts. I can’t imagine a Minister actually setting a cap outside the range of the objects of the act for fear of it being struck down. It simply won’t happen.
Socialista: “An agreement to fail would be worse than an a failure to agree.” Brilliant! I love it.!
Tim, I agree that polluters will do their best to ensure that caps and gateways well ensure that poor choices for caps and gateways will be set. Even if we had good targets this could happen. This is why it is essential that Sections 14 and 15 are amended — see my submission, 371, to the senate select committee on climate policy. I view this as more important than the targets — but also politically much easier to fix than the targets. Sections 14 and 15 of the legislation are much more relevant to what our actual targets will be than Section 3 of the legislation.
Its a great argument to be making, Tim.
Geoffrey Robertson talk about the trade-off/sell-out continuum at one of the big human rights conferences – I forget which one… – in Crimes Against Humanity : The Struggle for Global Justice.
You might get powerful examples for your argument there?
One other thing,
The international negotiating process is extremely important but that is not just about Copenhagen. I don’t for a minute expect that we will get a just, equitable international agreement at Copenhagen that brings down emissions as rapidly as we need to — but I wouldn’t rule that out later down the track — and that is what we should focus on. The other thing to focus on right now is the international negotiations in Bonn over the next couple of weeks.