The Age of Global Warming: A History (28 page)

The air of unreality at The Hague started with the reading of some poems by the Dutch poet laureate.

He lost his way within a maze

In search of silver and of gold –

He searched a lifetime and he found

He was where he’d been from of old

Presumably it sounded better in Dutch. Much discussion revolved around sinks. Jan Pronk, the Dutch president of COP6, recalled lengthy debates about the definition of a sink, the definition of a forest and even the definition of a tree. When is a tree a tree? ‘All this went on year after year, month after month, seminar after seminar, workshop after workshop, conference after conference. And during the conferences and negotiations themselves, day after day, hour after hour, night after night,’ Pronk recounted.
[34]

Since Kyoto, European politics had turned deep green. Helmut Kohl lost the 1998 federal elections and was replaced by a Red-Green coalition led by Gerhard Schröder, Merkel being succeeded by the Green Jürgen Trittin. He joined Dominique Voynet, the environment minister in Lionel Jospin’s government and one of the founders of the Greens in France. Trittin and Voynet constituted a Green motor at the heart of Europe. Instead of defining the precise rules and mechanisms needed to implement Kyoto, COP6 was to be Europe’s hour when it cleansed Kyoto of its loopholes and forced rich countries (i.e., America) to face up to their responsibilities and cut their own emissions, rather than buy up poorer countries’ emissions allowances. 

France held the EU’s rotating presidency. President Chirac’s speech to the conference was a call to arms against the common enemy – America. There was no doubt that global warning had set in, he said. Without action, there would be dreadful consequences – rising sea levels, floods, extinctions of plants and animals, storms, typhoons, cyclones, hurricanes, the spread of deserts and the emergence of environmental refugees. ‘That is why, I can confirm to you here, Europe is resolved to act and has mobilised to fight the greenhouse effect.’ 

While acknowledging President Clinton’s personal commitment, Chirac reminded the conference that each American emits three times more greenhouse gases than a Frenchman. ‘It is in the Americans, in the first place, that we place our hopes of effectively limiting greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.’ The bulk of efforts in meeting the Kyoto targets should be through efforts to curb domestic and regional emissions. Flexibility mechanisms were a complement: ‘They should definitely not be seen as a means of escape.’ For the first time, he declared, humanity was instituting a genuine instrument of global governance. ‘If the South lacks the capacity to act, the North all too often lacks the will.’
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Battle was joined over sinks such as forests and how they should be counted in reducing countries’ emissions. Doing so reopened the basis on which the emissions numbers had been agreed. ‘We went to Kyoto intending to accept a target of no reduction from 1990 levels, but we ended up with a seven per cent reduction,’ Loy explained a couple of months after the conference. ‘One of the ways we were able to justify that to ourselves was that there was a provision for sinks.’
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(It’s also worth recalling that, at Kyoto, the EU moved from its opening position of a fifteen per cent cut to eight per cent, but on more generous accounting.) The same went for America’s ability to use the Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms to meet its target. ‘We would not have signed it if they hadn’t been in there,’ Loy commented.
[37]

The treatment of sinks deadlocked the conference. John Prescott, the most thoughtful and realistic of the Europeans according to Loy, tried to broker a deal.
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The deal fell apart after Voynet took it to other EU environment ministers. It led to a spectacular falling out between her and Prescott. Voynet accused the former seaman of behaving like an ‘inveterate macho’ after Prescott had complained that Voynet had scuppered a deal because she had got cold feet and was tired and exhausted. ‘I did not say the lady was tired,’ Prescott told the House of Commons. ‘She constantly said it herself. She was too tired to take in all the complexities. I quoted her words.’
[39]

Less than three weeks after COP6 flamed out, the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush the next president.

During the last three years of his presidency, Clinton was deeply engaged on global warming. His final State of the Union message in January 2000 described global warming as the greatest environmental challenge of the new century. ‘If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted. That is going to happen, unless we act,’ Clinton warned.
[40]

He seems to have believed it. In a conversation with President Jiang Zemin two years before Kyoto, Clinton told the Chinese leader that he didn’t want to contain China:

‘The biggest security threat China presents the United States is that you will insist on getting rich the same way we did.’ And he looked at me, and I could tell he had never thought of that. And I said, ‘You have to choose a different future, and we have to help. We have to support you. And that does not in any way let us off the hook. But it just means that we have to do this together.’
[41]

At the White House global warming wonkfest in October 1997, where he recalled the conversation, Clinton showed an easy mastery of the policy implications across all its dimensions, ranging from the apparent paradox of more droughts and more floods, to policy mistakes in the 1970s that stopped gas-fired power stations (the federal government had grossly underestimated domestic natural gas reserves – his Democrat predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had a big hand in that), to it being better to recover waste heat from electricity generation and to encourage consumer conservation than to force electricity companies to change their power plants.

Of course, Clinton understood the politics better than anyone else in the room: ‘Number one, we can’t get to the green line unless there is a global agreement that involves both the developing and the developed countries.’
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In his post-Kyoto testimony, Eizenstat told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the problem of global warming could not be solved unless developing countries got on board. By around 2015, China would be the largest overall emitter of greenhouse gases and by 2025 the developing world would be emitting more greenhouse gases in total than the developed world.
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He was right, but underestimated the speed at which it was happening. China overtook the US in 2007, eight years before Eizenstat predicted, and non-Annex I emissions overtook Annex I emissions in 2008, seventeen years before Eizenstat thought they would.
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Administration officials believed if they could come back with a reasonable regime that included the larger developing country emitters, they would be able to get the Senate to go along with it. To succeed, they needed to breach the new Berlin wall. In retrospect, Loy believes that agreeing the Berlin Mandate was a serious mistake. Rio had got it more right, but the Berlin Mandate had hardened the structure into a bifurcated regime.
[45]

Although global warming was a priority towards the end of Clinton’s presidency, it wasn’t at the beginning. National prosperity, social progress and the longest period of economic growth in America’s history topped the list of administration accomplishments in his final State of the Union message. Like Thatcher a decade before, who had championed the environment in her last two years in Downing Street, fixing the economy was what Clinton was elected to do. If Clinton had emulated Carter, more likely than not, he would also have been a one-term president.

A
New York Times
poll published on the first day of the Kyoto conference found that sixty-five per cent of those surveyed agreed that the US should take steps to cut its emissions regardless of what other countries did. Although fifty-seven per cent of respondents said environmental improvements must be made regardless of costs, when asked of the most important problem facing America only one per cent answered the environment.
[46]
  Voters wanted symbolism and that’s what Clinton gave them.

Yet the whole policy was based on a massive illusion. Through thick and thin, developing countries stated that the developed world had to take the lead in cutting carbon dioxide emissions. If America had met its Kyoto commitments through using the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms to the hilt, all it would have shown is that the super-rich America lives by its own rules and could buy other countries’ emission reductions so it didn’t have to cut its own. It is hard to believe that developing countries would have viewed that as a realistic basis for their participation in a regime to cap their emissions. The Europeans too had a point, except they were sharing the consequences of the collapse of communism within the EU bubble.

Ultimately Clinton’s global warming policy failed. For sure, he managed the politics superbly and pulled out every stop to secure some measure of developing country involvement. At Buenos Aires, even the experienced Eizenstat got carried away when in reality the battle was over. But the longer-term legacy of his efforts was to perpetuate a myth that Kyoto would have been viable but for five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida. 

In this respect Clinton’s predecessor left a more durable legacy by risking isolation to exclude emissions targets and timetables from the 1992 climate change convention. As Clayton Yeutter sees it, the strong economy of the 1990s would have made it impossible for the US to have complied with any probable targets and timetables that might have emerged at Rio. Reasonable Americans might have argued about this in the early 1990s, but twenty years on President Bush’s decision was, in Yeutter’s view, clearly the right one.
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What might someone who served at a similar level in the Clinton White House say? The final negotiating instructions to the American delegation in Kyoto were relayed over the speaker phone in the chief of staff’s office. Erskine Bowles, who held the position at the time, told me he was unable to recall his impressions of the evolution of the policy with sufficient accuracy from that long ago.
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Silence speaks volumes.

On 6
th
March 2001 Chuck Hagel and three other senators wrote to Clinton’s successor to clarify the new administration’s position on Kyoto. A week later, President Bush wrote back: ‘I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts eighty per cent of the world, including major population centres such as China and India.’
[49]
Only later in the month did the implications finally sink in: Bush was not submitting Kyoto to the Senate. ‘The President has been unequivocal,’ a White House spokesman said. ‘It is not in the United States’ economic best interest.’
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It ignited a firestorm. ‘The world is tottering on the brink of climate disaster,’ Friends of the Earth raged.
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The State Department was inundated with cables reporting the dismay of foreign governments. A more measured analysis was provided by MIT economics professor Henry Jacoby, who explained that Kyoto was two different things. ‘It’s the current text and numbers, and it’s a process,’ Jacoby said. ‘The numbers are no longer going to work, but the process is going to go on.’
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Viewed like that, Bush had little choice, as Senate ratification was about giving its consent to the text and numbers in the Protocol.

The White House was taken aback by the international reaction. On the eve of his first European trip in June, Bush had a second go and began to map out the beginnings of an alternative approach. Somewhat naively, chief of staff Andy Card told reporters that other nations would come to appreciate Bush’s decision. ‘The emperor of Kyoto was running around the stage for a long time naked,’ he said, ‘and it took President Bush to say, “He doesn’t have any clothes on.”’
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Only in the fable does the boy get thanked for saying so.

‘Breaking up is so very hard to do if you really love him,’ the Walker Brothers sang in their sixties’ hit. ‘Oh baby, it’s so hard to do.’ It wasn’t for Bush. His no to Kyoto was how the new president introduced himself to the world. Breaking up wasn’t hard at all. That was what probably hurt the Europeans most of all. 

The Europeans should have seen it coming. They had done little to assist the Clinton administration in securing developing world participation. The result was the outcome of the logic of the decision made by COP1 in Berlin six years earlier. To keep the G77 plus China in the process, the Berlin COP made a trade-off that increased the probability of losing the US further down the track. But the view the parties took then was if they hadn’t agreed to the developing world’s demands, there would have been no process at all. 

Columbia University’s Scott Barrett has criticised the Bush rejection for lessening the chances of adoption of a more viable approach than Kyoto. ‘In rejecting the treaty in the way that he did – and, crucially, in doing so without offering an alternative – President Bush only reinforced the view that Kyoto had to be the only way forward; and he only made other signatories, especially members of the European Union,
more
determined to conclude the negotiations and bring the treaty into force.’
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No one gets criticised for blaming Bush, but the idea that the world was willing to entertain an alternative to Kyoto was for the birds.

Four months later, the suspended COP6 resumed in Bonn. When it concluded, the EU environment commissioner, Sweden’s Margot Wallström, commented, ‘I think something has changed today in the balance of power between the US and the EU.’
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What actually happened was rather different.

The threshold at which the Protocol came into force had been set to accommodate American non-ratification. America’s exit gave the remaining members of the Umbrella Group, especially Japan, Canada, Australia and Russia, much more leverage because they could decide whether the treaty ever came into force. Ironically the EU conceded far more to them than they had refused the US the previous November at The Hague. COP7 at Marrakesh in November 2001 doubled Russia’s sink allowances from seventeen to thirty-three mega tonnes of carbon dioxide. The Japanese delegation, over eighty strong, gained a reputation for intransigence. At one point, a delegate speaking for the G77 plus China responded to Japan’s request with ‘you must be joking’.
[56]
They weren’t. They too gained concessions on sinks and significantly weakened the compliance regime, a negotiating objective they shared with the Canadians and Australians.

In 2002, Canada announced that it would unilaterally claim a further thirty percent for its exports of hydro-electricity to the US, prompting the
Globe
and
Mail
to comment: ‘If a country like Canada can claim credits in violation of the agreement and get away with it, more deceitful ways of breaking with the agreement can easily be found by other countries.’
[57]
Canada, a midwife of sustainable development in the 1980s, had travelled a long way in the fourteen years since the Toronto conference had called for twenty per cent emissions cuts below 1990 levels.

Kyoto ended up with a compliance regime that gave Annex I countries a free pass if they left the regime altogether (as Canada would do) and no financial or other economic penalties for staying outside it. By carrying forward excess emissions and adding an extra thirty per cent of the over-emission to the next commitment period, the compliance regime created incentives for countries to exit and incentives for everyone to forgive the overshoot to keep them inside it. Indeed, at COP16 in Cancún in December 2010, Japan confirmed it would not participate in a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. For the EU and the environmental NGOs, Kyoto had become too big to fail, enabling other large Annex I countries to punch holes in Kyoto with near impunity.