22 September Climate Summit
By Dean Bialek
On 22 September, President Barack Obama will for the first time rise to the podium at United Nations headquarters in New York. That his inaugural address to the world body will focus on climate change is both symbolic and instructive. Climate change is now widely recognized as one of the most fundamental challenges ever to confront humanity. It must be tackled head on if we are to secure long-term global prosperity, and ensure the livelihoods of the billions that will bear the brunt if global warming is allowed to spiral out of control.
President Obama will join over 100 other Heads of State in New York, responding to the clarion call of a U.N. Secretary-General fixated on breathing fresh life into international negotiations. Many believe that the talks are moving too slowly to produce an agreement worth inking in Copenhagen this December. Ban Ki-moon's 22 September Climate Summit is an historic opportunity to get the talks back on track, and U.S. leadership is vital to this effort.
President Obama's election brought hope to many that his unique leadership and energy would usher a break from the past and a new U.S. engagement on climate change. While the right signs appeared to be emerging with passage of a climate change and clean energy bill in the U.S. House of Representatives in late June, a shift in emphasis in Washington to public health has delayed progress in the Senate.
In the absence of legislated targets, Obama's leadership becomes central to bridging the developed / developing country divide that still threatens to derail a deal later this year in Copenhagen. But if done properly, this deal has the potential to become the world's blueprint for greening the international economy and ensuring the survival of the world's most vulnerable countries, including the small island states that have been the focus of Independent Diplomat's work on climate change.
There are few countries that understand the risks of failure more than the 42 small island states that make up the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Some of those states - like ID's client, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, as well as the Maldives, Kiribati and Tuvalu - lie at less than two metres above sea level.
In its seminal 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global warming would produce sea-level rise of between 18 to 59 centimetres by the end of the century. But more recent observations of accelerating melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets now put potential sea-level rise in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 meters, or even higher. This would spell disaster for many countries, playing out recent warnings from the UN's lead agency on refugees that a number of small island states, including the Marshall Islands, are facing statelessness.
To head off these existential dangers, the world has been seeking to chart a course for greenhouse gas emission reductions and measures to counter the impacts of global warming once current commitments under the Kyoto Protocol expire. Put simply, talks remain deadlocked over how to allocate responsibility for emissions reductions and who should pay for them.
Current offers of emissions cuts from industrialized countries are vastly inadequate and would set the world on a catastrophic path to three degrees or more of global warming. Major emerging economies - including China and India - are reluctant to commit in the absence of more ambitious emissions cuts from the industrialized world, especially from the U.S. And they also expect promises of significant transfers of finance and technology to support their leapfrogging of carbon-intensive development in favor of new, green economic growth.
The Chinas and Indias of the world are not wrong to expect leadership from the wealthy emitters, who should pay for their past pollution and the damage it is causing. And following its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. must have its own house in order before demanding action from others. Prompt passage of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate would give the world confidence of the country's low-carbon intentions, and its negotiators freer rein to extract compromises from other big emitters. In these difficult and complex negotiations, confidence is king.
The key to success in Copenhagen is a mutual understanding that it is in every country's interests to act. But as British economist Lord Nicholas Stern points out, even though climate change threatens devastating impacts on the lives of millions, it is difficult to persuade people that a response is necessary unless they have seen or felt the impacts themselves.
In the island states, the bleaching of coral reefs and the flooding caused by rising seas, king tides and more frequent and intense tropical storms are bringing home the dangers in stark reality. But as a group responsible for less than half of one percent of global emissions, they can have little impact on the cause, and must rely on others for the solution. Nevertheless, some are trying to lead the way. For example, the Maldives has committed to becoming a carbon-neutral economy within the next decade. The plan is ambitious, but President Mohamed Nasheed sees it is as a good investment. It might cost the Maldives $100 million a year to make the transition to renewable energy, but the atoll country expects to recover the costs in one to two decades by doing away with expensive imported fossil fuels.
Similar equations should guide American policy. The U.S. spends a massive $335 billion a year on fossil fuel imports. On top of this, a recent U.S. Congressional Budget Office paper quoted estimates that 2.5 degrees Celsius of global warming would produce economic losses of about 5 per cent of U.S. output by the end of this century. Investing now in a low-carbon future is therefore not only good for the environment, it makes economic sense too.
The U.S.' ability to respond to a major crisis was once again exemplified at the height of this year's global economic turmoil. The response was swift, and recovery appears to be on the way. But it taught us that in politics, prevention is always better - and cheaper - than cure. We cannot simply wait for the climate crash to happen. Planning for a global green economic overhaul must start here and now. A new and truly global climate agreement in Copenhagen this December is the best way to get there.
This Tuesday at the United Nations, President Obama will have the attention of the world's leaders, and an opportunity to help break the impasse in negotiations on an issue that threatens the planet as we know it. The President needs to explain what the U.S. is willing to commit to in Copenhagen, with or without domestic climate legislation in his pocket. To borrow the words of his historic campaign, it is time for climate leadership we can believe in.
Dean Bialek is Independent Diplomat's UN Representative in New York. He leads ID's work on climate change, advising the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the 42-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in this year's international climate negotiations.