by Amanda Little
U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern.A
month after he rode herd at Copenhagen’s COP15 climate talks,
Todd Stern is exhorting participants to make the outcome of the conference
meaningful. “Life needs to be breathed into the Copenhagen Accord,” the State
Department’s special envoy for climate change tells Grist. He insists that the three-page
document represents a “very, very important step forward,” and he’s now pushing major
developed and developing countries to make clear public pledges for reductions
in emissions or energy intensity by a Jan. 31 deadline, to substantiate the Accord.
But
even as he touts the successes of the Copenhagen conference, Stern is tamping
down expectations that a legally binding global climate treaty will be reached at
the next big climate meeting, COP16 in Mexico in December 2010: “there’s a fair
amount of distance between where we are now and then.”
Stern
also talks candidly about his qualms with the U.N. conference process. “You
can’t negotiate in a group of 192 countries. It’s ridiculous to think that you
could,” he says, while also stressing that “it is certainly premature to write
off” the U.N. process. His concerns echo those of his colleague Jonathan
Pershing, who argued last week for a focus on a narrower group of negotiating countries rather than the U.N.‘s
everybody-in approach: “We expect there will be significant actions
recorded by major countries,” Pershing said. “We are not really
worried what Chad does. We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is
going to do about greenhouse-gas emissions. We just hope they recover from the
earthquake.”
I
spoke to Stern, formerly an advisor to President Bill Clinton and senior
counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy, in a stark, fluorescent-lit conference room at
the State Department to get his take on the ups and downs at Copenhagen and
what to expect on climate policy in 2010.
——
Q. What
was the most gratifying moment for you in the morass of Copenhagen?
A. Getting
the thing done. And being part of what President Obama and Secretary Clinton
brought to it, because they were instrumental to that moment of getting [the
Copenhagen Accord] done.
Q. Can
you set the scene of that moment?
A. It
was literally the 11th hour, 11:30 p.m. Thursday [before the last scheduled day
of the conference]. A lot of leaders including Secretary Clinton came together
in a room—it was a pretty extraordinary tableau. You had Gordon Brown [prime
minister of the U.K.] and Angela Merkel [chancellor of Germany] and Kevin Rudd
[prime minister of Australia] and Nicolas Sarkozy [president of France] and
Lula [president of Brazil] and Jacob Zuma [president of South Africa] and
Mohamed Nasheed [president of the Maldives] and Meles Zenawi [prime minister of
Ethiopia] and everybody sitting around this table. It was an up-and-down
process over the course of 20 hours or so, but eventually the leaders are
rolling up their sleeves and negotiating language of this thing back and forth,
completely unscripted. That’s not the way presidents and prime ministers
generally go into meetings these days.
It
was quite an impressive and successful performance by Secretary Clinton and
then by President Obama, who arrived on Friday morning.
Q. What
was your most frustrating moment in Copenhagen?
A. There
were so many to choose from. It was a very difficult conference—constant
procedural wrangling, constant tie-ups, repeated efforts by various parties to
try to get the main players—including those representing smaller and poorer
countries—to engage on the main issues. There were any number of times when
the effort to engage on the issues got procedurally blocked.
Q. Describe
the procedural blocks.
A. You
can’t negotiate in a group of 192 countries. It’s ridiculous to think that you
could. And yet when Denmark [the nation chairing the conference] would over and
over again try to pull together some group based on each country bloc choosing
their own representatives, not in any way cherry-picking who was going to be
in, some parts of the developing-country groups would block it.
Q. How
would you rate the success of Copenhagen on a scale of one to ten?
A. I’m
not going to give you a number. I think it was a very, very important step
forward, and actually quite a good accord, given what it includes on
mitigation, transparency, funding for poor countries, and technology.
Q. What’s
your response to the widespread criticism of the outcome?
A. People
seem to forget that just 36 hours before the conference was set to end, we were
headed for collapse. Instead, we got this three-page document. It isn’t
everything that people wanted, but it includes meaningful elements.
Q. Do
you agree with the perception that China stalled and blocked at COP15?
A. I
don’t want to try to characterize whether they were blocking or not. I think
they had certain objectives in mind, which were not necessarily the same as
ours. But at the end of the day I think Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Obama, along with the other
leaders, found a pretty good common-ground position.
Q. There’s
a lot of speculation that the UNFCCC [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational climate treaty]
is fundamentally ineffective. Do you think it has a future? Are there more
effective forums for negotiating climate treaties, like the G20 or the Major Economies Forum?
A. When
we first came to the table a year ago, we felt that it would be important to
have a smaller set of countries that could be not negotiating the text of the
agreement but discussing views on the big issues and working on some technology
stuff. You can’t effectively negotiate unless you have the capacity to work in
a smaller representative group where you can have a discussion that doesn’t
occur in a much larger group.
Q. What
would the smaller set of countries be?
A. The
Major Economies Forum last year was 18 countries and served a real purpose. You
had the same set of people that met virtually every month and there’s a certain
level of trust and camaraderie that builds up. The group of countries that came
together at the UNFCCC on that Thursday night into Friday was 28 or so—mostly
the MEF countries with some others like Ethiopia, Granada, and Bangladesh.
I’m
not sure whether we’ll negotiate in the MEF context or what the smaller group
process is going to be this year, but there certainly needs to be one. The
UNFCCC is an organization that has some historical credibility, but it had a
lot of problems in Copenhagen—many days of potentially negotiating and making
progress that just got locked up.
Q. Could
you have definitive success without the UNFCCC? Could the smaller groups alone produce
a meaningful outcome?
A. It
is certainly premature to write off the UNFCCC. There is a credibility that is
provided by the full group. So on the one hand, I don’t think you can negotiate
in that grouping, but on the other hand, it’s good for there to be a larger
grouping that the smaller representative group can come back to.
Some
of the rules [of the UNFCCC] can be difficult. If you’ve got 185 countries
wanting to do something and a handful that don’t want to, that blocks
everything.
Q. In
the ten months leading up to COP16 in Mexico, what needs to happen?
A. Life
needs to be breathed into the Copenhagen Accord. The formal adoption of this
accord by the COP was blocked by Cuba, Nicaragua, five or six countries, and
the ultimate decision was to take note of the thing as opposed to adopt it. So there’s a process going on now where countries need to associate
themselves, affirmatively tell the UNFCCC secretariat that they want to be part
of this.
Step
No. 2 is that the major developed and developing countries decide to list or
inscribe their targets or actions. That’s supposed to happen by the end of the
month. If a month from now all of that’s happened, the plane will have taken
off from the runway.
In
addition, the Copenhagen Accord includes a number of important elements that
need to get fleshed out more. There’s a provision to set up a new global
climate fund [to help vulnerable developing nations]. There’s a provision to
set up a new technology body. There’s some good language on transparency and verification,
and a provision for that to be further spelled out in guidelines. I would hope
that gets worked on this year.
And
there will be efforts to press forward toward a legal treaty, presumably by
COP16 or perhaps thereafter.
Q. What
realistically do you expect to come out of Mexico?
A. I
think that you could have decisions made to further implement the Copenhagen
Accord. And the maximum amount of progress toward a legal agreement—and maybe
even all the way there. But there’s a fair amount of distance between where we
are now and then.
Q. So
it’s hard to expect anything out of COP16?
A. No,
no, I’m not saying that at all. The objective should be this year to flesh out
and implement the Copenhagen Accord. And we should be working toward a legal
agreement in addition.
Q. What
happens if we don’t see progress toward climate action in the U.S. Senate? And
if the EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 is blocked?
What would a double-whammy failure in U.S. domestic policy mean for COP16?
A. I’m
not going to speculate on stuff like that. I don’t think that the EPA authority
is going to be stripped away, and I’m hopeful with respect to domestic
legislation. I think the partnership between Sen. John Kerry [D-Mass.] and
Sen. Lindsey Graham [R-S.C] is a really good sign.
Q. Can
we get a legally binding global treaty in Mexico without success in the Senate?
A. Is
it absolutely necessary? I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary, but I think
it would be pretty important.
Q. Will
the outcome of Copenhagen help climate legislation in the Senate?
A. I
think so. I think the fact that China, India, Brazil, South Africa, the big
countries, agreed to things that have never been agreed to before by major
developing countries was a breakthrough. And the fact that there’s agreement to
a kind of international review with respect to implementation—never happened
before. So if you’re a senator and you’re trying to get a bill done, what
happened was absolutely a net plus.
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