"He who is cautious may seem timid in the beginning, but his mettle will shine through in the end."
On 26 November, the Chinese government announced the target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent from the 2005 level by 2020. The announcement was widely applauded by the international community. It was also announced on that day that Premier Wen Jiabao would attend the Copenhagen conference.
After the opening of the conference on 7 December, Copenhagen became a stage of intense wrangling between national governments, interest groups, NGOs and research institutes. But the unending arguments, talks and negotiations never seemed to have gotten very far and an enormous gulf remained between divergent positions. The clock was ticking, and a pervasive sense of pessimism and despair began to fill the conference center.
At 20:00 on 17th, Premier Wen attended the dinner hosted by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. It marked the beginning of the high-level segment of the Copenhagen conference.
Something unexpected however happened during the dinner. A foreign leader mentioned to Premier Wen inadvertently that a certain country would call a small-group leaders' meeting following the dinner to discuss a new text. This caught Premier Wen's attention, because the list of invited countries held by this leader had the name China on it, yet the Chinese side had never received any notification about this meeting. Premier Wen then sought confirmation with some other leaders, who told him that indeed such a meeting was scheduled after the dinner. It was really absurd that the country who called for the meeting never informed China.
Premier Wen concluded that this was no small matter. Since the start of the conference, there had been cases where individual or small group of countries put forward new texts in disregard of the principle of openness and transparency, arousing strong complaints from other participants. He immediately left for the hotel, where he convened a meeting to discuss how to respond.
Upon Premier Wen's instruction, Vice Foreign Minister He rushed to the venue of the small-group meeting and raised serious concerns with the host for arranging such a meeting with hidden motives. He stressed that the principle of openness and transparency must be respected. No one should try to form small circles or force decisions upon others, or they would risk leading the conference to failure.
In the meantime, speculations and rumors of all sorts were prevalent: some developed countries were planning together privately to put more pressure on China; major emerging countries were vehemently obstructing the negotiation process, and the conference was therefore very likely to end in failure; developed countries, unhappy with China's rejection of MRV, refused to offer more financial assistance to small island states; the developing camp was beginning to fall apart; a certain big power intended to propose its own text, and so on and so forth. All signs pointed to a less and less optimistic picture.
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t648096.htm
Earlier on:
More than a year ago, Mr. Obama said of climate change: “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”
But when Mr. Obama and other world leaders met last month, they were forced to abandon the goal of reaching a binding accord at Copenhagen because the American political system is not ready to agree to a treaty that would force the United States, over time, to accept profound changes in its energy, transport and manufacturing sectors.
So the leaders said they planned to leave Copenhagen with an interim political deal and work toward a binding treaty next year.
Delay, it turns out, was the only option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html?_r=2&ref=global-home
Blame China.
To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.
Don't blame China.
The accord itself is weak mainly because it does not contain any commitments by the developed countries to cut their emissions in the medium term. Perhaps the reason for this most glaring omission is that the national pledges so far announced amount to only a 11-19% overall reduction by the developed countries by 2020 (compared to 1990), a far cry from the over 40% target demanded by the developing countries and recent science.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/28/copenhagen-denmark-china
To deflect from this great failure on their part, the developed countries tried to inject long-term emission-reduction goals of 50% for the world and 80% for themselves, by 2050 compared to 1990. When this failed to get through the 26-country meeting, some countries, especially the UK, began to blame China for the failure of Copenhagen.
In fact, these targets, especially taken together, have been highly contentious during the two years of discussions, and for good reasons. They would result in a highly inequitable outcome where developed countries get off from their responsibilities and push the burden of adjustment onto the developing countries.
Together, they imply that developing countries would have to cut their emissions overall by about 20% in absolute terms and at least 60% in per capita terms. By 2050, developed countries with high per capita emissions – such as the US – would be allowed to have two to five times higher per capita emission levels than developing countries.
In a UN context, the drama of Copenhagen was in itself not new. All recent major UN conferences have played by this script: days of haggling, recriminations, walkouts, all-night sessions and personal meltdowns before a final agreement emerges that suits almost no one. If two political parties in the United States cannot work out a deal on healthcare, more than 190 nations are up against an even bigger hill to climb. Unlike at meetings of the old G8, agreements at UN events are not pre-cooked. They are flimsy drafts festooned with brackets revealing the holes where important decisions should be. Weeks before Copenhagen it was clear, and publicly proclaimed, that a legally binding accord was not in the cards. Onward to the next round in Mexico in 2010.
In Copenhagen, Obama pulled off what was perhaps the only possible agreement by working in tandem with Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister. They then brought in major developing nations such as Brazil, India and South Africa. India, a country with a poor environmental record now in the top half-dozen emitters of greenhouse gases (and soon to be the world's most populous country), has been adamantly opposed to binding pacts and international monitoring, even more than China. India's power to obstruct had to be calculated into cobbling together what was realistically doable.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/crossette
