Copenhagen: lessons to be learned

The end result of the Copenhagen summit should not be measured against the overblown expectations engendered by media hype, but in terms of the lessons we can learn from this extremely instructive exercise. Lessons that are by no means discouraging, provided they are properly understood.

1 – This kind of outcome – statements of policy but no firm commitments – was always likely and was indeed predicted, on this website and elsewhere. The two biggest ‘polluters’ of the planet (in terms of CO

₂

emissions) had said beforehand that they would not be giving any commitment: the USA, because the Senate was against it, and China, because the USA was not making any concessions. Of the other emerging powers, India repeatedly indicated that it was not prepared to do anything at all, and Brazil’s attitude was one of skilled equivocation.

2 – Against this background, all honour to the countries of Europe for having sustained and carried the whole process. If there were a Nobel Prize for the environment it should go to the European Union. From December 2008 onwards the EU did more than just give political undertakings; it adopted a whole raft of legal and financial measures designed to get Europe to cut its emissions by 20% by the year 2020,

regardless of what was or was not agreed at the Copenhagen talks!

Since then its leaders and diplomats have relentlessly brought pressure to bear on their partners, to the point of suggesting substantial financial assistance for the least favoured nations. The French President deserves a special mention here: his dogged persistence and his refusal to countenance any kind of defeat not only saved the conference, but the entire venture, which would not have survived the collapse of a summit like this.

3 – Its failure is due to two fundamental factors, to which there are no ready answers.

Fundamentals: the accepted European view of the dangers and causes of global warming is not widely shared outside Europe. The other continents have different priorities. Growth, development, joining the ranks of the major powers, beating the age-old scourge of poverty – these are seen as more important than a threat which is perceived as remote and even hypothetical. In France Claude Allègre is demonised for arguing that climate change may not be man-made, but we could say, to use an image in this media-driven debate, that the Copenhagen summit ranged 500 million proponents of the anthropogenic case (as argued by TV presenter Nicolas Hulot) against 6 000 million doubters (as represented by Claude Allègre). That brings us suddenly to the realisation that the group of climate experts, the IPCC, was honoured not with the Nobel Prize for physics, but the Nobel Peace Prize, which, despite being open to citizens of any country worldwide, is awarded by a committee which is 100% European (in fact 100% Norwegian). The political impact which this produces in Stockholm or Paris is considerable, but it has less of an echo in Beijing, Delhi or Lagos. Even in Houston, despite Al Gore …

Method: on this, the Europeans should be the least surprised of anyone. It has taken us half a century, among Europeans, to free ourselves from the requirement of unanimity before the slightest joint decision can be taken. We only shook off this yoke on 1 December 2009 when the Lisbon Treaty entered into force. Just a few days later, here we were with 189 countries meeting in Copenhagen, being asked to subject their producers and consumers to draconian technical and financial demands, as part of an embryonic political system which was still hogtied by the unanimity requirement. That’s ‘globalisation’ for you, in its political guise! During the cold war, agreement between Washington and Moscow equated to international agreement, with each of the two ‘super-powers’ ensuring that its camp toed the line. As late as the 1990s, agreement between the Americans and Europe opened the way for the World Trade Organization to be established, with the rest of the world going along with it. Those days are gone: the emerging nations are speaking out, taking their proper place and, behind them, follows a crowd of small or medium-sized powers all keen to have their national sovereignty respected. It took extreme urgency and the feeling of a shared fate for the G20 to agree a concerted response to the financial crisis. For the rest, however,

the geopolitical rulebook for the 21

^st

century is yet to be written.

On the environment, and on trade: this is why the Doha process has remained stalled for years. On arms reduction too.

4 – Arms reduction, indeed, and specifically the control of nuclear proliferation. This is the next major international get-together scheduled for 2010, to update a treaty from 1968 which has been circumvented, ignored or blatantly breached ever since by half a dozen or so states. How can emerging nations fail to challenge the legitimacy of a text signed forty years ago against the backdrop of the cold war and sponsored solely by the countries that were players in that cold war? How can we achieve a virtually worldwide agreement – excluding only the ‘rogue states’ – which demands guarantees of security for all, and a form of equal treatment between ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ states, large and small states, and ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ ones?

This constitutes a far more immediate challenge than global warming, and, unlike global warming, human agency alone can resolve it.

The lesson of


Copenhagen is that one needs first to agree on the source of legitimacy, and on the method of negotiation. That will take time, but might we not start by agreeing to freeze the armament programmes of all the participating states?

5 – Looking beyond military threats,

it is time for the European Union to refocus on the issue of prime urgency and prime need: sustainable revitalisation of an economy under threat from permanent underdevelopment

. Even before the crisis our growth was limping along at below 2%, whilst the USA was doing half as well again, Africa twice as well, Latin America three times as well, India four times, and whilst China’s growth was cruising along in double figures. Currently, the economists all agree that ‘potential’ growth for the whole of the euro area (the average achievable outside a crisis) is unlikely to exceed 1.5% between now and 2020!

One and a half per cent! If that is the case, none of our problems is solvable

: not unemployment, not inequalities, not educational reform, not pensions reform, not debt repayment when we start from a deficit in the national budget which is equal to six months’ worth of expenditure! This is why the ‘Europe 2020 strategy’ being prepared by the new European Commission must set as its absolute, indeed sole, objective a doubling of our potential growth. Our leaders must now put into this grand design all the inexhaustible energy they have quite properly been devoting over the past year to major world causes.

6 –

That is not to say that we should give up on energy and climate change

. Disappointing though they are, the Copenhagen conclusions at least set dates and venues for future sessions. The Lisbon Treaty gives the European Union something it previously lacked: the power to plan and conduct a common energy policy. A unanimous, global and comprehensive agreement may appear to be unattainable for now, but significant progress is possible in a number of directions:

–

On oil and gas prices

: assuming the inexorable dwindling of deposits is slow to translate into an effect on prices, it should be possible, either to negotiate with the producing countries (OPEC, and the fledgling Gas Exporting Countries Forum) to keep the price high, or to achieve this through taxation – whether we call it income tax or a carbon tax. It should be remembered incidentally that the reassurances given to the general public until very recently are an illusion – action to counter climate change will be expensive for the consumer and/or taxpayer.

–

On neutralising emissions from coal-fired power stations

, which are by far the most harmful: China alone brings an average of one new coal-fired power station on stream every week! The European revitalisation plan includes funding for several pilot plants for carbon capture and storage, one of them in France, at Florange. Experimental ventures of this kind must, of course, be speeded up.

–

On halting deforestation

: Brazil is the main target here, and a number of African and Asian countries may join together in an intelligent international agreement on the subject.

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Lastly, on aid to the developing world

: a radical revision of this is long overdue. What is the point of pouring tens of billions of euros and dollars into the ‘least developed countries’ if that money does nothing to further economic development, democratisation (coyly renamed ‘good governance’), food security (less than 5% of aid to Africa!), or environmental conservation? The economic crisis has left our national budgets in such a state that we can no longer pour money into salving our guilty consciences for past misdeeds, without putting the interests of the countries concerned first. This is another major area that calls for a creative global approach, at a time when China, India, South Korea and a number of oil-producing countries are moving in to take over from the former colonial powers, to help these countries, certainly, but also to control their natural resources and, in some cases, to buy up their fertile land.

There are most definitely many fruits to be garnered, after the ‘failure’ at Copenhagen…