The Age of Global Warming: A History (46 page)

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Bali

This is a historic moment, long in the making ... Now, finally, we are gathered together in Bali to address the defining challenge of our age.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon
[1]

There is no doubt that the fate of our civilisation hangs in the balance.

The Prince of Wales
[2]

As Berlin was to Kyoto, so Bali was to Copenhagen.

Twelve years on, the climate change negotiations had accreted multiple layers of complexity. The Berlin Mandate had been relatively straightforward, covering three pages. Bali was the thirteenth meeting under the UNFCCC (COP13)
and
the third conference of the parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP/MOP3). The world’s largest economy was a party to the convention but not the Protocol, so the COP/MOP had to decide how to manage this fissure.
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In addition, there were meetings of subsidiary bodies, dozens of contact groups (a way to get around UN rules that permit no more than two meetings at the same time) and informal consultations. The resulting Bali Road Map was not defined in a single document; rather it set up a series of processes with the aim of agreeing a comprehensive regime in December 2009 at Copenhagen. 

The degree of complexity was in inverse relation to the probability of reaching an effective agreement. It all pointed to the essential unreality of attempting to create a global regime to regulate the quantity of ubiquitous, naturally occurring gases. 

Carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere not only from burning fossil fuel (which along with cement production accounts for seventy-five per cent of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide).
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Carbon dioxide is also released from burning wood and animal dung (providing a source of heat for millions in the developing world) and through bacteria breaking down organic matter. It is absorbed by growing vegetation and by the oceans. The IPCC estimated that the remaining twenty-five per cent came from deforestation, turning grassland into cropland and changing agricultural practices.

Methane, the second most important ‘man-made’ greenhouse gas, is released from fossil fuel production, but also by farm animals and rice paddy fields. In the Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC thought it ‘very likely’ that observed increases in nitrous oxide had been driven by increased fertiliser use and more intensive agricultural practices, as well as fossil fuel combustion.
[4]
 

Agreement to slow down global warming would require regulating not only energy production but also agriculture and land use. The regime would need to last decades and even centuries. For developing countries experiencing rapid industrialisation, still heavily reliant on agriculture, with food accounting for a high proportion of household budgets, that included countries which were custodians of the vast majority of the world’s tropical forests, the logic of such an agreement was not an enticing prospect.

Yet for the true believers, Bali carried a huge burden of expectation. It was going to change the course of history. ‘It is our chance to usher a new age of green economics and truly sustainable development,’ Ban Ki-moon told the conference.
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One hundred and fifty corporate CEOs put their names to the Bali Communiqué organised by the Prince of Wales. It called for global emissions to be more than halved by 2050, a proposition supported by brands such as GE, DuPont, Shell UK, Coca Cola, Nike, Nestlé, British Airways, NewsCorp, Nokia, Volkswagen and Tesco. The shift to a low carbon economy would create significant business opportunities worth billions of dollars.
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To Al Gore, these were the foothills. The greatest opportunity of solving the ‘climate crisis’ was not new technology and sustainable development. It was in finding ‘the moral authority’ to solve all the other crises and unleashing ‘the moral imagination’ of humankind.
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‘We are one people on one planet. We have one future. One destiny,’ Gore told the packed hall. They should feel privileged ‘to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come’.

The proximate obstacle to the realisation of this vision was not a Lockean argument in favour of freedom and popular sovereignty. Neither was it doubts over the science or the machinations of shadowy vested interests undermining the consensus and somehow preventing governments from acting. 

If capping carbon dioxide emissions really was ‘the pro-growth strategy’, as the one hundred and fifty corporate leaders asserted, why had the G77 plus China been so hostile to acquiring anything that appeared like Annex I-style obligations right from the start of the climate change negotiations? The blanket exemption of non-Annex I countries had been the principal cause of America’s non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Without extending emissions caps to the major emerging economies, Annex I countries would face deeper emissions cuts and higher carbon prices.  As long as the price of carbon in the rest of the world was zero, even more economic activity would be diverted from them to non-Annex I countries.

With the US intent on getting developing world commitments onto the table, the outcome was a real world test of the concept of sustainable development. Did sustainable development have any genuine content or was it a masterstroke of branding to buy Third World acquiescence for First World environmentalism, as long as it was lubricated with copious aid flows and did not constrain their economic aspirations? 

The dynamics between the three key players – the US, the EU and the G77 plus China – were almost unchanged from Kyoto. Bali was the last chance for the Bush administration to overcome the original sin of the climate change negotiations so that a future agreement should contain bankable commitments from key members of the G77 plus China. Conversely, the objective for the G77 plus China was, as far as possible, to avoid assuming such commitments and to deflect attention from this by playing up the alleged inadequacy of the Annex I nations meeting their obligations. 

In this, the G77 plus China was aided and abetted by the EU, together with the usual supporting cast of assorted NGOs and scientists proclaiming the end of the world if the US did not commit to drastic emissions cuts. Then there was Al Gore, who reprised the role he had played in Kyoto in making a dramatic appearance to under-cut US negotiators.

Unlike Kyoto, Bali was to be the beginning of a process leading to an agreement on emissions caps two years later. However the EU decided it wanted to start at the end, by negotiating the overall quantum of emissions cuts. The EU wanted to corner the US into a putting a number on its emissions cut right away. The Bali conference would be meaningless if it did not set clear targets, in the words of Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister.
[7]

Based, it was said, on the Fourth Assessment Report, the EU demanded agreement that global emissions be cut by twenty-five to forty per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The IPCC was not meant to give explicit policy advice. At the February 2007 launch of the summary, Susan Solomon, the American Working Group I co-chair, refused to be drawn on its policy implications. ‘It would be a much better service for me to keep my personal opinions separate than what I can actually offer the world as a scientist,’ she had told a press conference. ‘People are going to have to make their own judgement.’
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Politicians sought the cover provided by what scientists said should be done. The latter obliged with the Bali Declaration. Signed by more than two hundred scientists, the declaration said that a new climate treaty should limit temperature increases to no more than 2
o
C above pre-industrial temperatures, a number already adopted by the European Union. A ‘fair and effective’ agreement, in the opinion of the scientists, would require greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 to be no more than half their 1990 level.
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Unwisely, the UN’s Yvo de Boer aligned the secretariat with the EU by circulating a four-page text containing the twenty-five to forty per cent figure. Its preamble cited the ‘unequivocal scientific evidence’ that required Annex I nations to cut their emissions by this magnitude, although there was no evidence as such, only computer simulations based on a series of unverifiable assumptions.
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Defining the emissions caps upfront was dismissed by Harlan Watson of the US negotiating team. ‘In our view that pre-judges the outcome of the negotiations over the next two years.’
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In this, the US had the support of Canada, Japan and Russia.
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De Boer disagreed. It would be a ‘critical issue’ for the negotiations.
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By trying to turn Bali into a showdown with the US over the quantum of emissions reductions, the EU was repeating the mistake of Kyoto. The critical issue was not the quantum of emissions reductions, but the extent to which non-Annex I nations would be subject to them. A treaty that didn’t include commitments for China and the other large non-Annex I economies would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Were the EU and the secretariat trying to disprove Einstein’s definition of insanity?

In part, the EU’s negotiating obtuseness reflected its immense institutional inertia in having obtained agreement among its twenty-seven member states. In part, it was because lead responsibility lay with member states’ environment ministries and the European environment commissioner who saw their principal constituency as environmental NGOs. Then there was the superficially attractive narrative that framed President Bush, who would be leaving the White House in thirteen months, as the principal obstacle to reaching agreement.

In a lightning visit, Bush’s opponent in the 2004 election endorsed the EU narrative by attacking the Bush administration for undermining attempts to agree stringent emissions caps. Global momentum would make emissions caps a reality whatever the opposition of Bush or from Congress. ‘This is going to happen,’ Kerry told reporters. ‘It’s going to happen, because it has to.’
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By contrast with the EU’s environment ministry-led approach, the US negotiating position was the product of an inter-agency process convened by the National Security Council and involved the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Justice, State, and Treasury, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the National Economic Council and the EPA. The State Department led the negotiations, institutionally vastly more experienced in international diplomacy than Europe’s environment ministries.

Before heading to Bali, Dobriansky and her team in the State Department met negotiators who had served in the Bush I and Clinton administrations. Several from the Clinton administration emphasised the importance of obtaining high-level commitments from non-Annex I parties. This, they argued, needed to be set forth in Bali. One former senior State Department official asked for a private meeting with Dobriansky to give her some insights before Bali. ‘Very helpful, very useful,’ Dobriansky recalled.
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Thus there was a consensus among current and former executive branch policymakers of both parties. Furthermore, the US had reached agreement on a text with key parties prior to Bali, according to Dobriansky.
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Yet what transpired in the Bali conference hall suggested something rather different and made the denouement at Bali the most dramatic of all the COPs before Copenhagen. 

Snow lay thick on the ground in Kyoto ten years before, and snow would fall on the delegates in Copenhagen two years later. Lying eight degrees south of the equator, Bali was better located for a December meeting on global warming. It drew nearly eleven thousand participants. They included more than three thousand, five hundred government officials, outnumbered by five thousand, eight hundred representatives of NGOs, UN bodies and agencies and nearly one thousand, five hundred accredited members of the media.
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The Indonesian government brought some welcome colour. COP President Rachmat Witoelar and others on the conference platform wore tropical shirts. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wrote a song for the occasion – its lyrics a marked improvement on the Dutch poet laureate’s efforts at The Hague in 2000:

Mother Earth is getting warmer

Climate change is tragedy for all

Together we must find answers

Don’t let it destroy our life

Ill-at-ease government leaders and ministers were invited to sing the chorus as a video of smiling children, burning forests and trees uprooted by storms was beamed into the hall:

We all gather in Bali

We all gather in Bali

We want to save our planet

We want to save our planet

We are all united here in Bali

For a better life, a better world

For you and me
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The Indonesians also broadened the talks beyond environment ministers to bring in trade and finance ministers. These included talks aimed at removing trade barriers and tariffs on environmental goods and services. There was little doubt about the geopolitical orientation of the conference chair as a leading member of the G77. In 1955, Sukharno, Indonesia’s first president, hosted the Bandung Conference, the first major Asian/African conference, and in 1961 founded the Non-Aligned Movement together with Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Nehru (India) and Nkrumah (Ghana).

‘We are all united here in Bali,’ the chorus sang.

Up to a point. The delegates were united in their determination to present the outcome of the COP as a success, a sentiment which the G77 plus China used to isolate the United States in the COP’s final minutes.

The underlying motivations of the key players can be assessed by their responses to attempts at Bali to find breaches in the Berlin Wall separating the Annex I parties from the rest. There was a renewed effort on voluntary commitment, which China and the G77 had chased off the agenda at Buenos Aires in 1998. At Bali, it was Belarus’ proposal to ‘legitimise’ its participation in Kyoto’s first commitment period, supported by Russia and the Ukraine. It sank without trace.

On the conference’s third day, there was discussion of a long-standing Russian proposal to enable developing countries to take on voluntary emission limits. It attracted the support of the EU and other Annex I parties. India and Saudi Arabia voiced their opposition.
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There had been ongoing discussion about how to carry out a review of the Protocol. The fifty-four-member African Group and China warned against ‘undermining the Protocol’, even though it specifically required the review. India went further, wanting to rule out new commitments for developing countries.
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At the beginning of the conference’s second week, there was another meeting on the review. Annex I parties wanted it to focus on the effectiveness of meeting the Protocol’s objective. Growth of non-Annex I emissions would inevitably call into question the Annex I bifurcation. Russia, Canada and Australia wanted to establish a working group.
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They were opposed by South Africa, China, India and Saudi Arabia. Joined by the EU, the three Annex I parties then proposed requesting proposals on how to amend the Annexes to the Protocol, i.e., to provide some form of graduation mechanism. They were opposed by a solid phalanx of China, India and Saudi Arabia.
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The consistent pattern of opposition by the G77 plus China provides context for their public statements in front of the cameras. At the high-level segment a couple of days later, the US restated President Bush’s position that a future agreement should include a long-term global emissions goal and national plans with measurable mid-term goals. In front of the TV cameras, South Africa declared that it would take serious mitigation actions (i.e., limits on greenhouse gas emissions) that were measurable, reportable and verifiable.
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If made in good faith, why had South Africa – with China and India – acted to block discussion that might result in a developing nation becoming an Annex I party or acquiring similar obligations? It was a question that would hang over the climactic events during the COP’s grand finale.