Copenhagen's Inconvenient Truth
How to Salvage the Climate Conference
Article Summary and Author Biography
The Copenhagen conference won't solve the problem of climate change once and for all. Rather than aiming for a broad international treaty, negotiators should strengthen existing national policies and seek targeted emissions cuts in both rich nations and the developing world.
MICHAEL A. LEVI is David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.
News & Events
Michael Levi talks with Robert McMahon about the deadlock in climate change negotiations and argues that the world urgently needs a "Plan B" for Copenhagen.
Author Interview
Postscript
For many climate-change experts, the Copenhagen summit was something of a failure. In order to make real progress on pressing climate issues, policymakers must give up on a binding deal and begin to look outside the UN process.
This December, diplomats from nearly 200 countries will gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which for the first time bound wealthy countries to specific cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions come from burning fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- for energy, from deforestation, and from the agricultural sector. They must be cut deeply in the coming decades if the world is to control the risks of dangerous climate change.
Most of those devoted to slashing the world's greenhouse gas emissions have placed enormous weight on the Copenhagen conference. Speaking earlier this year about the conference, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was emphatic: "We must harness the necessary political will to seal the deal on an ambitious new climate agreement in December here in Copenhagen. . . . If we get it wrong we face catastrophic damage to people, to the planet."
Hopes are higher than ever for a breakthrough climate deal. For the past eight years, many argued that developing nations reluctant to commit to a new global climate-change deal -- particularly China and India -- were simply hiding behind the United States, whose enthusiastic engagement was all that was needed for a breakthrough. Now the long-awaited shift in U.S. policy has arrived. The Obama administration is taking ambitious steps to limit carbon dioxide emissions at home, and Congress is considering important cap-and-trade and clean-energy legislation. The road to a global treaty that contains the climate problem now appears to be clear.
But it is not so simple. The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small. And even reaching such a deal the following year would be an extraordinary challenge, given the domestic political constraints in Washington and in other capitals that make such an agreement difficult to negotiate and ratify. The many government officials and activists seeking to solve the climate problem therefore need to fundamentally rethink their strategy and expectations for the Copenhagen conference...
This is a premium article
You must be a logged in Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you wish to continue reading this article please subscribe , or activate your online account to get full online access.
