s e p t e m b e r

o c t o b e r

oo9

Volume 88 • Number 5

The contents of

Foreign Affairs

.Visit www.foreignaffairs.org/permissions for more information.

Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth

How to Salvage the Climate Conference

Michael A. Levi

This December, diplomats from nearly 200 countries will gather in Copenhagento negotiate a successor to the 1997 KyotoProtocol, which for the ﬁrst time bound wealthy countries to speciﬁc cuts in green-house gas emissions. Most of these emis-sions come from burning fossil fuels—coal,oil, and natural gas—for energy, fromdeforestation, and from the agriculturalsector. They must be cut deeply in thecoming decades if the world is to controlthe risks of dangerous climate change.Most of those devoted to slashing the world’s greenhouse gas emissions haveplaced enormous weight on the Copen-hagen conference. Speaking earlier this yearabout the conference,

Secretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon was emphatic: “We mustharness the necessary political will to sealthe deal on an ambitious new climate agree-ment in December here in Copenhagen. . . .If we get it wrong we face catastrophicdamage to people, to the planet.”Hopes are higher than ever for a break-through climate deal. For the past eight years, many argued that developing nationsreluctant to commit to a new globalclimate-change deal—particularly Chinaand India—were simply hiding behindthe United States, whose enthusiasticengagement was all that was needed fora breakthrough. Now the long-awaitedshift in U.S. policy has arrived. The Obamaadministration is taking ambitious stepsto limit carbon dioxide emissions at home,and Congress is considering importantcap-and-trade and clean-energy legislation. The road to a global treaty that contains theclimate problem now appears to be clear.But it is not so simple. The odds of sign-ing a comprehensive treaty in Decemberare vanishingly small. And even reachingsuch a deal the following year would be anextraordinary challenge, given the domesticpolitical constraints in Washington and inother capitals that make such an agreementdi⁄cult to negotiate and ratify. The many government o⁄cials and activists seeking tosolve the climate problem therefore need tofundamentally rethink their strategy and ex-pectations for the Copenhagen conference.Many U.S. lawmakers want absolutenear-term emissions caps from China andIndia, but those countries will not sign

[

]

Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth

How to Salvage the Climate Conference

Michael A. Levi

Michael A

Levi

is David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and theEnvironment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

foreign affairs

September / October 2009

[

]

Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth

up for anything of the sort for at leastanother decade. And before they considera deal of any kind, Chinese and Indiannegotiators are demanding that developedcountries commit to cutting their green-house gas emissions by over 40 percentfrom 1990 levels by 2020, but none of the world’s wealthiest countries will even comeclose to meeting this goal. Meanwhile,China, together with other developingcountries, is also asking the wealthy nationsto commit as much as one percent of theircollective

gdp

—more than $300 billionannually—to a fund that would help therest of the world reduce its emissionsand adapt to climate change. But Westernpoliticians will not be willing to send any-thing near this amount of money to theireconomic competitors in order to securea deal.Some of these disagreements stem fromnegotiating bluster, but there is little signthat anyone is ready to make big compro-mises. And the high demands of any com-prehensive global agreement are only half the problem. Even a blockbuster deal in which every country signed up to bindingemissions caps would come nowhere closeto guaranteeing success, since the world hasfew useful options for enforcing commit-ments to slash emissions short of punitivetrade sanctions or similarly unpalatablepenalties. The core of the global eªort tocut emissions will not come from a singleglobal treaty; it will have to be built from thebottom up—through ambitious nationalpolicies and creative international cooper-ation focused on speciﬁc opportunities tocut emissions. The aim of a deal at Copenhagen shouldbe to reinforce developed countries’ emis-sions cuts and link developing countries’actions on climate change to objectives inother areas—such as economic growth,security, and air quality—that leadersof those countries already care about.If, instead, negotiators focus on ﬁghtingagainst various governments’ mostentrenched positions, they may leavethe world with nothing at all.

MOVING TARGETS

The goal of climate diplomacy should bea safe planet rather than a treaty for itsown sake. There is an emerging consensusamong negotiators that the world’s govern-ments should aim to cut emissions in half,ideally from 1990 levels, by 2050. This basicgoal, endorsed by the

-8 (the group of highly industrialized states) at its 2008summit, should frame U.S. calculations. This target needs to be divvied up fairly between wealthy and developing nations.Even if rich countries managed to reducetheir emissions to zero and all other nationsheld theirs steady, the world would stillmiss its 2050 target. With great eªort,today’s rich countries might be able tocut their emissions to 80 percent of 1990levels by midcentury—a goal endorsed by the

g-8

at its 2009 summit—but even that will be very hard. Developing countries,in some cases with Western ﬁnancial ortechnological support, will need to makeup the substantial diªerence. To many governments, midcentury goals may seem far away, a perceptionthat encourages them to delay cuttingemissions and place their bets insteadon the development of breakthroughtechnologies, which many claim willslash emissions at little cost. Others insistthat the developed world can move ﬁrstand wait a decade or two for developingcountries to follow. Yet given the glacialpace at which global energy systems