Needless to say, there’s been a big and promising shift in tone and some substance in global warming diplomacy of late — led by the paired pledges of China and the United States to intensify efforts to curtail heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. Other countries, including gas-rich Malaysia, have promised to act on climate.
No one should presume things will be easy in Lima, Peru, where negotiators are gathering through next week to shape a global climate agreement that could be finalized in Paris a year from now. There’s strong — and to a large extent justified – resistance to new carbon commitments in India, for example, where hundreds of millions of people lack access to any modern energy sources, let alone clean ones. And there will be intensifying demands for billions to flow from industrialized countries that spent decades building wealth burning fossil fuels to poor, vulnerable ones. Given continuing economic troubles in many developed countries, those demands will be hard to meet.
Still, there are plenty of signs that there’s room for a global accord to emerge, with every faction — from the poorest to the richest — finding a comfort zone thanks to the 24-year-old clause in the original climate treaty laying out nations’ “common but differentiated responsibilities” (here’s a great explainer from McGill’s Center for International Sustainable Development Law).
As long ago as 1991, there were calls to pursue “soft,” not internationally binding, steps toward a global climate treaty. Read these notes from a fascinating 1991 Harvard meeting on Negotiating a Global Climate Agreement to get the idea. (There are some excerpts below. I first wrote about that meeting in 2010.)
Talks are progressing now because this shift is in fact occurring.
John Upton has an informative piece on Climate Central that lays out the logic of non-binding success and also why some parties, particularly Europe, still resist: Read more…
