The road to Bali
Appropriately enough, it is going to be hot at the climate change talks which begin on the Indonesian island of Bali on Monday.
Temperatures at this time of year range between 78 and 86ºF (26-30ºC).
The chief official of the UN climate change convention, Yvo de Boer, has already set the tone by telling the officials from over 170 countries who will be flying there - boosting the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as they do so - that they do not need to wear a jacket and tie, at least until their ministers fly in a week later.
He says this will avoid the need to turn the air conditioning up so high. I suspect it will make little difference.
The world may well wonder what this great junket in Nusa Dua, one of the world’s top holiday resorts, at the height of the holiday season, can actually achieve. It hardly instils confidence to be told that most important business is expected to be conducted at cocktail parties.
As a veteran observer of the enormously slow way the world has confronted the climate issue from Rio, through Berlin, Kyoto, the Hague and now on the road to Bali - without any apparent change in the relentless rise in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions - I can confidently predict that what Bali will NOT produce is a clear successor to the Kyoto treaty, which expires in 2012.
As a senior British official was at pains to point out this week, the media has been rather too successful in raising expectations. The reality is that the best that can be hoped for from Bali is drawing a roadmap towards a global regime for after 2013 that might be agreed in Copenhagen next year - crucially, after the next United States presidential elections.
President Bush’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty remains the blockage to China and India signing up for legally binding emission reductions after 2012. All his potential successors want to do more, but that is unlikely to mean immediately ratifying Kyoto - because US emissions are wildly above the reductions promised in 1997.
Meanwhile, Bali will be a feast of process without finality. With luck, and no filibustering, it will bind together all the potential elements of a post-2012 agreement, including a never-before-achieved plan for avoiding the destruction of the rainforests, which could be tied up with ribbon in Copenhagen.
For some, this will be like watching paint dry. For others, it will be rich with significance and drama, for what is decided in Bali almost certainly will frame the way all industries and all households have to behave decades hence, as far as their use of fossil fuels is concerned.
Will we have scenes of high tension like in Berlin in 1995 when the chairman only just managed to get his gavel down on the consensus before the Saudi delegates could get their objections in ? Will we have 72 hours of sleeping on tables while talks go over deadline as we did in Kyoto?
Will we see a bitter bust-up like the one between John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, and Dominique Voynet, the hapless green French environment minister, whose cheese-paring objections in The Hague led to Prescott walking out saying he was “gutted” and which meant the United States could not ratify Kyoto before the election that sent George Bush to the White House on the basis of a few hanging chads?
We will not know until the protagonists arrive.
One of those, and the only other head of state attending besides the Indonesian president, will be Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia, a former diplomat, who has said he will ratify the Kyoto treaty, thereby removing the United States’s last ally in refusing to do so among developed countries.
As with our own Confederation of British Industry going “green” this week, the old order is slowly changing. What the new one will look like we can only guess.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth
Add comment November 30th, 2007