By Justin Guay, apprentice for the Sierra Club Global Warming and Energy Team
Senate
Environment a
nd Public Works (EPW) committee hearings held on the Clean
Energy Jobs and American Power Act last week have built upon the Kerry/Graham
op-ed in the New York Times to provide renewed momentum on domestic
legislation - even if the
party of no continues to childishly obstruct
the process by boycotting committee mark up. Unfortunately, movement in the
Senate is being overshadowed by a deterioration
of negotiations at the global level stemming from concerted attacks by a
handful of countries seeking to kill the Kyoto Protocol and replace it with a
“pledge and review” system.
Pledge and
review in its most general form repeals any notion of a legally binding deal,
allowing countries to instead pledge the level of ambition they deem fit –
rather than that determined by climate science. As if this “race to the
bottom” in terms of emissions targets were not enough of a threat, it also
breaches the Bali “firewall” – the differentiation
between industrialized and developing countries that exempts the developing
world from binding emissions reductions targets. Differentiation was agreed to
under the Bali Action Plan - the outline for the Copenhagen
negotiations – under the tenet of common but differentiated responsibility and
is central to the international negotiations.
For
their part, U.S. and Australia are pushing this system to address the problem of
differentiation of advanced developing countries like China and India to ensure an international agreement that can be ratified
by the Senate. However, this blunt tool has caused great resentment among the
broader set of developing countries. This has brought to the forefront
lingering hostility over the long list of promises that the industrialized
world has made and failed to live up to. Undoubtedly, advanced developing
countries like China
and India must
take aggressive mitigation actions that significantly deviate from business as
usual baselines, but even these
must be differentiated from the actions promised by the industrialized
world to ensure a level of equity in line with historical responsibility for
emissions.
Needless to say, pledge and
review has greatly alienated the developing world since it was announced last
month in Bangkok, creating a toxic negotiating environment that lead to the
walk out of
the African group at the beginning of this week’s negotiations in Barcelona.
While this was a costly and ill advised tactic – there are only 3 days of
negotiations left prior to Copenhagen
– it highlights the very real frustration with the overall ambition of the developed
countries, as well as the blatant avoidance of historical responsibility
embodied in pledge and review.
The general deterioration of the
international negotiations has led to a
downplay in the expectations for Copenhagen, epitomized by the Danish Prime
Minister’s recent comments that it would likely see a politically,
rather than legally, binding agreement. This was reiterated by U.S. Envoy
Todd Stern in a House Foreign Affairs hearing on a post Kyoto
regime.
To
avoid a complete disaster in Copenhagen, it is absolutely vital that the U.S. displays
sorely needed leadership by taking pledge and review off the table. Doing
so enables Copenhagen to be a step
towards a strong international agreement rather than a forced green wash
agreement. Negotiators can then focus on key structural elements that will
enable a comprehensive final deal including a transparent uniform system of
reporting and accounting with robust verification and compliance that builds
upon the significant
number of developing countries who are proposing strong mitigation actions.
The momentum created by the announcements coming from advanced developing
countries like Mexico,
Indonesia,
India
and China
and others can not be overstated. In fact, the U.S. is planning a fourth
quarter push to ensure that both Chinese president Hu Jintao and Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are on board for just such a deal. The only
question will be whether the administration will reject the Bush era policy of
pledge and review and push
the U.S. Senate bill creating a “race to the top.” Only then can we answer
our children when, in the words of Senator Cardin, they ask us where we were when
the world was burning.
