THE PATH TO PARIS
Battling climate change
The path to a climate deal in Paris a year from now is littered with obstacles, foremost among them how to differentiate between what industrialized nations led by the U. S. will do to cut fossil- fuel pollution, and what commitments developing ones such as India and Brazil will take on.
Envoys from some 190 countries gathered in Lima last week took a step toward what will be the first deal binding all nations to limit greenhouse gases. While they sketched out what information countries must provide to back up pledges they’ll make before Paris, those promises remain voluntary, and the rich- poor divide remained.
“The deep divisions on display here aren’t going to disappear on the road to Paris,” said Alden Meyer, who has been following the talks for two decades for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. “It’s going to be more complicated than people think be- cause there are so many differences in the long- term view of the world.”
Hanging over the talks is the memory of Copenhagen, t he 2009 summit when envoys last attempted an agreement with such breadth. That conference started with optimism and broke down with recriminations between the U. S., China and others.
In order for Paris to succeed, delegates drawn from energy and environment ministries will have to pick through issues one by one rather than attempting to tackle them all in one go, according to Manuel Pulgar- Vidal, the minister from Peru who led the Lima discussions.
“When you have a lot of ghosts, you should kill monster by monster,” Pulgar- Vidal said. “It is not possible to kill all at the same time.”
The atmosphere surrounding the talks is more hopeful now, since the United Nations learned lessons from Copenhagen and the politics shifted.
One of the biggest changes came last month, when U. S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a joint effort to rein in emissions. China is still classed as a developing nation, and its move helped break down the differences between camps. With both temperatures and global emissions touching records, the UN sees a new urgency on the issue from all governments.
“There is a recognition that all countries have to act,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki- moon said in an emailed reply to questions. “The politics have fundamentally shifted since Copenhagen.”
Still, reaching any consensus is difficult at these talks, which ran overtime by more than 30 hours in Lima. The main friction this year was over how the next deal should differentiate between those who’ve become rich on the back of burning fossil fuels and those who say they need cheap energy to eradicate poverty.
A wall between richer and poorer nations is built into the discussions by the 1992 UN treaty that started the talks. That pact, which the U. S. was among the first to ratify, holds that the rich created global warming and should move first to fix it — and pay to help the poor clean up their economies, too.
Since then, China has surpassed the U. S. as the biggest polluter, and India rose to third. Only 15 per cent of global emissions are now covered under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty that applies limits to industrial nations only.
Under that f ramework, the poorer nations of eastern Europe are asked to do more to fight climate change than gas- rich Qatar or prosperous Singapore. The U. S. and European Union say a broader deal is the only way forward.
Developing nations want to maintain the divide, which has ensured a flow of climate finance without painful overhauls to their energy industries. The deal in Lima preserved some of the division by allowing the least- developed nations and small island states to make commitments “in light of different national circumstances.”
Finance is another lightning rod. Richer countries pledged to boost climate- related aid to $ 100 billion U. S. a year by 2020 and have only started providing a fraction of that. Developing nations want certainty on when that money will flow, and that didn’t come in Lima.