Environment

Copenhagen aftermath

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The outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit has disappointed many and now the blame game is in full swing. Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, says the summit was held to ransom by a small number of countries. One of his ministers has accused China of blocking major agreements at Copenhagen. China insists it was already doing a lot to deal with global warming. Marco Werman talks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson

• Our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Peter Thomson’s Copenhagen photos
• BBC coverage

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  The reviews are in and most give thumbs down on the Copenhagen climate summit.  The critics include Britain’s Prime Minister.  Gordon Brown called the non-binding agreement at best flawed, at worst chaotic.  His government accused China of blocking major agreements.  China responded that it’s already doing a lot to deal with global warming.  One of the more positive assessments of the summit came from its Danish hosts; they called it better than nothing.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson is back from Copenhagen.  Better than nothing Peter?  Is that the best that can be said?

PETER THOMSON: Well even President Obama who was the catalyst in brokering this agreement said that it was insufficient, far insufficient to meet the task and really just a first step.  So there really is a sense even from those who made the final agreement happen that it’s far less than we need, far less than they hoped for.

MARCO: Now you mentioned the one thing that was actually put back in, into the final draft of the agreement that you had not heard until actually today, right?

PETER: Yeah.  Well I mean this document has been in play since well into the last week and even over the weekend I was looking at what I thought was the final version of it and then this morning I come in and I look at the UNFCCC’s, the UN’s official final version and it’s got an interesting number back in there that had not been in there over the weekend.

MARCO: What is that?

PETER: That is one point five degrees Celsius.  It says at the top of this document that we recognize that the science says that we should try and keep global temperatures under a rise of two degrees Celsius as the threshold for dangerous climate change.  At the end of the document, previous versions had said we should reassess that in a bit and maybe think about one point five.  That was out of what I thought was the final version.  Now it’s back in and the final version says that we should look in the future to come back and look at this temperature threshold of a one point five degree rise and that’s really crucial because a lot of the least developed countries, the countries that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, are saying we have to hold global temperatures to one point five degree rise.  And they were some of the ones who were the most critical of this accord.  So that’s back in and that’s interesting.

MARCO: That half a degree Celsius would make a huge difference for countries that are low lying like Vanuatu and Tuvalu who are facing sea rises.

PETER: Sure.  Nobody knows exactly what it’s going to mean but certainly I mean, even that what sounds like a small difference, half a degree Celsius could be life and death.

MARCO: Now top British officials used words like chaotic and farcical even to describe the talks in Copenhagen.  How did it feel for you on the conference floor?

PETER: Well sure as has heck chaotic.  I mean all weeklong I arrived on Monday and from the get go when it took me six hours just to get into the building and I was lucky.  There were colleagues of mine, journalists accredited who didn’t, who sat in line for ten hours outdoors and did not get in; to Friday when talks seemed on the verge of collapse we had all this back and forth between Obama and Premier Wen of China.  Nobody knew what was going to come out of it and then finally about 9:00 in the evening after the official program was supposed to have finished by noon, we have word that Obama has brokered this deal and we hear about how it happened.  We hear that maybe he burst into this meeting of China and Brazil and India, or maybe he was invited, nobody really knows.  And all of that is sort of off the official program.  The official program is supposed to be 192 countries negotiating stuff together, and what we have actually is like the world’s biggest players going off into a back room someplace and hammering something out, and ultimately getting this agreement between the two biggest players which are the US and China which had seemed totally out of reach just hours before.

MARCO: It does seem kind of crazy there on the floor.  One thing that you know we might have forgotten in all of the discussion of the treaty and agreements, is that there is kind of a trade show quality to this with a lot of green activists and people selling stuff on the sides and countries having their booths in a convention center.

PETER: Yeah I mean nobody was actually selling stuff per se but there was a whole section that was devoted to NGOs and business and countries to sort of promote their position and their technology.  It was, it really did have a trade show feel to it.  And then of course there were the country delegation offices, which were off in another whole other side of the building.  And an interesting thing is that every country had one office for their delegation, except for the United States, which had two.  And this really came back to the crux of the problem to a large degree, was the split between our administration and our congress.  The administration has certain goals, congress has been reluctant to go along with them.

MARCO: And you really mean that Congress had a booth and the White House had a booth.

PETER: Yeah.  They weren’t booths they were offices.

MARCO: I see, okay.

PETER: They were delegation offices.  And that was something that a lot of people remarked on, yeah.

MARCO: So the key question is what happens next, Peter.  There are talks slated for Bonn in Germany next summer then again in Mexico City a year from now.  What are the goals?

PETER: Well I mean there’s a lot going on here and the talks in Bonn and Mexico City are part of this official Kyoto UN framework convention on climate change process that continues even though this document did not actually have sort of the force of their stamp of approval coming out of that.  They will attempt, you know to continue the dialogue, move things forward.  But there are important things that are going to happen before then.  One is that this document, the Copenhagen Accord has this annex that countries have to submit their national plans for emissions reductions by January 31^st of 2010, just a month, a little more than a month from now, and that’s a key thing that the US got these countries to agree to, China and India in particular was to put on paper for the rest of the world to see these are the things to which we are committing.  That has to be done by January 31^st.  That’s very important. It’s important in part because it’s going to pressure the Senate and part of, a lot of what was going on here was an effort to essentially assuage the concerns of the Senate that China and India were not going to commit to real reductions in their emissions and to oversight.  There’s also a provision in here for oversight of those developing countries, those large developing countries’ economies.  And that is also starting to be in progress.  So this is in some ways all aimed at the Senate in Washington.  And John Kerry has promised coming out of this meeting that he will push through a bill in Washington to commit the US to hard targets for carbon reduction.  So we have the official Copenhagen UN process, we have the US process in Washington, those are on different tracks but they have to converge.  And that’s kind of what people are hoping will come out of this is that Obama has somehow managed to put it on a track for those two to converge and only then do we really get progress.

MARCO: We’ll see where these two tracks end up.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson just back from Copenhagen thanks a lot.

PETER: Thanks Marco.

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