The Cancun Setup

The first thing to say about the climate negotiations - meeting soon
in sunny Mexico - is that they're teetering at the edge of what, back in
the day, we used to call a "legitimation crisis." On every side, folks
are eager to suggest the negotiations have become a waste of time.
It's gotten to the point where people are apologizing for going to
Cancun, as if it were bad for their image to be seen at the climate
talks.

Which is an odd turn of events. Because if ever there were a moment,
it's this one, midway through the cycle of negotiations (Copenhagen
2009, Cancun 2010, South Africa 2011) that will determine the shape and
direction of the post-Kyoto climate regime. What happens now matters,
particularly because, all else being equal, the eventual end of the
economic crisis will be accompanied by another rapid rise in global
emissions. The only way to avoid that rise, and many others, is to
escape the logic of the business-as-usual world. Despite the coming
low-carbon energy revolution, we can't expect to make that escape
without systems -- of global cooperation, burden sharing and
accountability -- that can only be rooted in a fair multilateral accord.
Which is to say that the climate talks may not be fun, and may not
even be the main event, but there's no real hope without them.

Copenhagen, unfortunately, was a grave disappointment and was quickly
followed by a cascade of others: the "Climategate" fiasco; the beltway
realists' failure to deliver a U.S. climate bill; the explosion of
denialist populism on the American right; and, of course, the midterm
American elections. Even worse, from the point of view of the climate
talks - the success of which depends on international cost-sharing - is
the emergence of an Austerity Panic Party in Europe, as well as the
United States, that pretends that the North is bankrupt amid
unprecedented inequality and unprecedented wealth. Why the pretense?
To project a story of the future in which declining "foreign aid" is as
inevitable as the decimation of domestic social services.

The discouraging pace of the international talks is anything but
unique. Right now, nothing is working particularly well. The United
States, in particular, is a model of dysfunction, eagerly playing the
international "blame game" that is now in full swing. Nor is this a
simple "climate problem." The truth is the climate challenge is tightly
bound to a larger political crisis. Neither is likely to be resolved
without the other. So, to be clear - there is no "deadlock" in the
global negotiations. Nor is there a "North / South impasse." What
we're seeing, rather, is a political and governance disaster of the
first order. Despite its many critical international dimensions, this
disaster is centered in the wealthy world.

And the Winner Is...

In the United States, China-bashing is much in vogue. Lately, China
has developed a taste for bashing back. After a recent climate meeting
in Tianjin, one of its senior negotiators compared the United States to a
pig preening itself in a mirror. It was perhaps an undiplomatic
comment, but it's hard to deny that the United States makes a tempting
target. If there were a climate-spoiler sweepstakes, it would have to
be the presumptive winner. It's the United States that knocked the
Kyoto Protocol down to near irrelevance and led the Copenhagen charge to
abandon top-down emissions targets in favor of a bottom-up process of
voluntary "pledge and review." It's the United States, in the person of
Obama's climate chief Todd Stern, that insisted on a "new paradigm for
climate diplomacy," one that rejects a "Berlin Wall between developed
and developing countries" and asserts instead a world in which the
developed countries are no longer presumed to bear the overarching, if
inconvenient, obligations of the rich and the responsible. And it's the
United States that avoids even the limited pragmatic obligations of
flexibility, in the face of the "innovative finance" proposals (ranging
from the auctioning of emissions entitlements to an "aviation levy" to
the "Robin Hood Tax") that look to be our best way forward at this
point.

Is this too harsh? Perhaps. There are extenuating circumstances in
today's America, where the "tea party" - a corporate-funded creature of
self-satisfied, self-destructive, flat-earth libertarianism - has
emerged to oppose even climate science, let alone international
solidarity. It's a heartily unwelcome development, and it almost makes a
good excuse.

However, there's plenty of competition for the role of the world's
leading climate spoiler. The Saudis (and, really, the entire global
carbon cartel), the Russians (who haven't yet fully digested the
world-historic heat wave that just ravaged their country), and the World
Bank (you want coal with that?) are still around, and largely
unreformed. There's the usual symbiotic crew of denialists and
disoriented reporters (with their usual convenient failure to
understand, let alone explain, the South's position). There are the
Chinese, who, it must be said, are playing more than one set of cards.
There are the endless ranked phalanxes of corporate opportunists. And,
as always, there are the subtle Europeans, who until recently proposed
to strengthen their emission-reduction target from 20 percent to 30
percent below 1990 levels in 2020. At the same time, they were defending
emissions-accounting loopholes designed to render such strengthening
almost meaningless.

They've since given up on the 30 percent, but the loopholes remain.

Issues abound, and it's hard to know who to forgive for what. The
global climate wish list is, after all, long and extremely daunting.
Just for starters, it includes: science-based targets; a democratically
governed global climate fund; a fair-shares global effort-sharing
system; an honestly scaled and funded adaptation framework; technology
and investment cooperation on a grand and global scale; a strategy for
finessing intellectual property and trade disputes; a forestry and
land-use agreement that's both pro-poor and effective; the closing of
the accounting loopholes; and national low- and zero-carbon development
plans all around.

This isn't even a comprehensive list. So it's probably fortunate
that coming up to Cancun, the focus is on a small set of key issues,
which must be at least provisionally resolved before the bigger problems
can move onto the stage. Which is to say that what we really need - an
open and creative debate about the architecture of global climate
justice - is not on the Cancun agenda. What is on the agenda is
"fast-start finance," finance in general, and the linked issue of
transparency. And the Kyoto Protocol. Most obviously, the climate
talks can only advance if the North's negotiators rise, somehow, to the
occasion.

The North's Move

Recall that Copenhagen ended with a shaky, acrimonious, and
altogether unsatisfying political deal - the Copenhagen Accord - wherein
most (but not all!) countries, industrialized and developing, agreed to
openly publish their emission-reduction pledges and actions. This in
itself wasn't a bad idea. The problem was rather that, in Copenhagen,
the move toward transparency came packaged with the repudiation of
legally binding targets and timetables, particularly by the United
States. The Accord was immediately (and predictably) used to take the
spotlight off the North's long recognized obligation (enshrined in
1992's Framework Convention, 1997's Kyoto Protocol, and 2007's Bali
Action Plan) to "take the lead." It's a long story, but worth
recalling, especially to get beyond the China-bashing and posed
pessimism that have come to dominate international climate coverage.

The bottom line here, one rarely explained, is that the so-called
North / South impasse will not be broken until the North begins to meet
its obligations, or at the very least, to keep its promises. Which is
why talk of a North / South impasse implies a false, non-existent
symmetry. The Southern elites, to be sure, are hardly above criticism -
they have badly mixed loyalties. Like elites everywhere, they are often
short-sighted and self-interested. With the financial crisis fading
into a crisis of trade and development that neither the United States
nor China cares to honestly face, there's plenty of criticism to go
around. Still, it remains the North's move, particularly when it comes
to climate. No amount of "balance" is going to change this fundamental
reality.

An Interim Deal?

The hope in Cancun is an interim deal that would change the tone,
encourage statesmanship, and just maybe, set us up for a more meaningful
breakthrough in December 2011 in South Africa, when the next milestone
climate meeting is scheduled to take place. Whose fault will it be if
such an interim deal fails to materialize? That is the question that
all good climate watchers must now prepare to answer.

What's on the table, basically, is "finance for transparency." For
the North, this means delivering on its Copenhagen promise to provide
$30 billion in "new and additional" fast-start finance, designed to
support mitigation and adaptation in the South and establish a working
modicum of trust. The South, in turn, would agree to a significant
measure of transparency. India has already signaled that it's willing
to accept a "facilitative process for transparency and accountability."
Brazil and China, not surprisingly, have expressed "cautious support"
for such an approach. Transparency is a natural tradeoff for the
developing world, which is already doing a great deal, particularly when
its efforts are measured against its relatively limited wealth and
capability.

Leaving aside the details, this transparency entails that both
wealthy and developing countries would publish low-carbon transition
plans and package those plans into manageable strategies. They'd also
provide clear visibility for their efforts to shift to new kinds of
development paths. These are the keywords -- measurement, reporting, and
verification. This "MRV" would not be restricted to actions that are
"supported" by international finance and technology. It would also
apply to the support itself - the wealthy world's often obscure and
corrupt channels and devices - and as quickly as possible it would apply
to "unsupported" actions. The goal - essential to any cooperative
strategy for rapid global transformation - would be to make it possible
for everyone to tell what everyone else is doing. Or not doing.

The transparency problem is not a small one. Verification is a
charged and intrusive process in which industrial secrecy and state
sovereignty are both at risk. But the deeper issue, now as always, is
the South's fear that the climate transition will mean the end of its
dreams of development. A fear that even as the ice melts and the storms
rage, endless negotiations will unfold into a trap with an
ever-narrowing series of gambits and tradeoffs. And, in which the
powerful North shifts the burdens of transition to the weaker, and far
less culpable, South. In this context, transparency means lost
flexibility and thus risk. Nor is this a paranoid view of the
situation. The recent positions of the United States - which seems to
have taken its domestic travails as license for bluster and
aggressiveness - have done much to make it credible, and to exacerbate
distrust.

Finance proves the point. It's now clear that the finance pledge
made in the Copenhagen Accord - "to provide new and additional
resources, including forestry and investments through international
institutions, approaching USD 30 billion for the period 2010 - 2012 with
balanced allocation between adaptation and mitigation" - is not going
to be met any time soon. There are many key words in this passage, but
attend for the moment to "new and additional," because the bulk of the
pledges are, in the scrupulous words of the World Resource Institute,
"restated or renamed commitments already made in the past." Most,
moreover, are intended for mitigation projects, with a mere $3 billion
earmarked for adaptation. And they are slated to be delivered, if
indeed they ever are, though bilateral channels and multilateral
agencies (like the World Bank) that the North controls in ways that are
anything but transparent and straightforward.

In the longer term, the forecast is more of the same. This, at
least, is the easiest conclusion to draw from the just-released final
report of the Secretary General's High-Level Advisory Group on Climate
Change Financing, which explores options for raising $100 billion
annually, starting in 2020. Here, too, is a story that fails to inspire
confidence. For one thing, the $100 billion figure is entirely
arbitrary, with absolutely no relationship to the likely costs of a
rapid global climate transition. For another, Northern functionaries
still stonewall the most promising ideas for innovative global finance.
With deadly consistency, they remain enthralled by the habits of
neoliberalism. Realism-as-usual is still the order of the day. Despite
the severity of the climate crisis, the wealthy world continues to limit
funding options by offering instead small amounts of public finance
padded out with loans, repurposed and non-additional assistance already
in the pipeline, and, of course, a great deal of private
(profit-seeking) money.

Will the South eventually accept such an offer? Or, even, should it?
After all, by accepting the offer, the South might be agreeing to a
future in which the high-minded aspirations that launched the climate
talks back in 1992, aspirations that echo in the UN Framework
Convention's invocation of "common but differentiated responsibilities
and respective capabilities," are set aside in the interests of
short-term northern realpolitic. Many people will say that the South
has no choice. But what if the consequence is a muddle of inadequate
policies that, while better than nothing, still fall tragically short of
both moral and scientific necessity?

Placing New Bets

Consider finally the Kyoto Protocol, the fate of which remains
strangely, and strongly, explosive. Why do so many of our dearest
comrades - delegates and activists alike - continue to aggressively
defend Kyoto, despite its manifest, even absurd, inadequacy? The answer,
perhaps, is that the Kyoto Protocol, almost alone on the negotiating
table, represents the obligations of the wealthy world. For many, this
trumps even its rude, unscalable, architecture. Nor is this difficult
to understand. These negotiations, from Copenhagen on, mark a time of
decision. It's one we simply can't afford to get stupidly wrong. We
can't, in particular, follow Todd Stern, casting aside Kyoto's blunt
recognition of the North / South division with rough talk of an obsolete
"Berlin Wall." To do so would be to cast aside reality. It would not
be statesmanship, or even realism, but rather abdication.

It's time to place new bets. Here's mine: at Cancun, the lines will
be starkly drawn. The logic of pledge and review will come to be widely
recognized as collective suicide. The negotiating halls will seethe
with better ideas, straining for traction. And, despite all, there will
be a drive towards compromise and face saving. Whether it will
succeed, I do not know.

I have hopes, too. I hope we'll manage a recovery, in which
emissions do not immediately accelerate. I hope the finance problem
(which could, actually, be solved) will at least be faced, coldly and
dead on. I hope the rules of a new game will become increasingly
discernible, a game of building blocks and momentum in which the
obligations of the rich and the responsible can be openly and
productively debated. And I hope that we'll wake soon to a world where
calls for extremely rapid global emission reductions are no longer
invitations to despair.

It's still possible. And by the way, Cancun will not be boring.