Renew On Line (UK) 32

Extracts from the July-August 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

COP 6 rematch stalled

The restart of suspended COP-6 UN Climate Change negotiations was rescheduled from May to July in Bonn, at the request of the USA, who said that the new administration needed more time to prepare, and was then thrown into disarray by President Bush more or less dismissing the whole Kyoto exercise as ‘unfair and ineffective’.

In the interim there had been a lot of tactical and strategic discussion. Should the whole process be slowed a bit, to allow the USA to get on board- and to avoid precipitating an outright rejection of ratification by Senate, if that issue was put to them prematurely? In principle, final ratification could be left until 2005 without undermining the successful lift off of the various emission reduction schemes in the first commitment period, which starts in 2008 and runs to 2012. But that would let the USA off the hook. The alternative would be to push ratification through, with, say, the EU, Russia and Japan signing up to it - that would be sufficient to meet the criteria that support had to come from countries producing a total of 55% of emissions. That would allow the various Kyoto mechanisms to be put in place sooner rather than later, including emissions trading. But then that would open up the issue of ‘hot air trading’ by Russia - who could sell off its unused emission permits. That issue had not been resolved at COP-6. Neither was the issue of whether nuclear power or large hydro should be excluded from the CDM.

The proponents of delay would presumably have liked to keep contentious issues off the agenda for a bit longer, so as to allow time to work on the details of the Kyoto mechanisms, but it seems inevitable that they will have to be faced soon- otherwise how could the details, e.g. of emission trading, be sorted?

In the event, the softly softly approach collapsed, when, in March, at the G8 conference in Trieste, Christine Todd Whitman, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that the US was going to ‘completely re-think its stance on global warming’. Specifically she said this meant that the US would not necessarily offer the same compromises as had been hammered out with European countries at the end of first part of COP-6. She said that the U.S. government ‘felt no obligation to return to a compromise that was nearly agreed at November's United Nations conference in The Hague’. So it was back to the drawing board for a whole new set of negotiations. But even that looked like an optimistic response following the subsequent policy statement from Bush, who, as we noted in Renew 130, announced that he opposed the Kyoto accord and did not believe that the US government should ‘impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide,which is not a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act’. Instead he said that he supported ‘a comprehensive and balanced national energy policy that takes into account the importance of improving air quality’.

To back this policy up he pointed to a recently released Department of Energy Report, "Analysis of Strategies for Reducing Multiple Emissions from Power Plants", which concluded that including caps on carbon dioxide emissions as part of a multiple emissions strategy would lead to an even more dramatic shift from coal to natural gas for electric power generation and significantly higher electricity prices compared to scenarios in which only sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides were reduced. He said this was especially important ‘at a time of rising energy prices and a serious energy shortage’ and given that ‘California has already experienced energy shortages, and other Western states are worried about price and availability of energy this summer’. Added to that ‘the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide’.

Bush did say that the US government would ‘continue to fully examine global climate change issues’ and hoped that ‘with the proper focus and working with our friends and allies, we will be able to develop technologies, market incentives, and other creative ways to address global climate change’. But most observers saw the new stance as a major retreat from the position reached Kyoto, a reaction strengthened by the off-hand quote by US Vice President Dick Cheney, who, it is reported, said that the US administration had no intention of regulating as a pollutant ‘the gas that you and I exhale’.

The EU’s current Swedish President was horrified and said the EU would go it alone. Sadly, Australia backed Bush’s line, but the other members of the so called Umbrella Group, Japan and Canada were not so keen. Apologist for the US stance have suggested that, actually, the USA wanted something much more far-reaching and comprehensive than the 5% Kyoto emission reductions, and that a delay could be beneficial since then there would be better technology available, but basically the reality is that COP 6, 7 and the rest could be doomed- unless the EU and others opt for a unilateral response. So what will happen next-will COP 6.5 be a wake or the start of something new?

To find out, as events at Bonn unfold, see http://www.igc.apc.org/climate/Eco.html