Climate talks grind to a halt

With China, India and other developing nations boycotting the climate talks in Copenhagen Monday, one has to ask: Will anything real get done there, or is this just an elaborate drama with a disappointing climax that has been known for weeks?

According to the Associated Press, representatives from 135 developing nations are refusing today to participate in any of COP15’s working groups. They’re demanding that penalties written into the 1997 Kyoto Protocol be imposed on rich countries that do not meet their emissions targets under the treaty.

The walk-out comes on the heels of a scathing analysis by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, who call the Copenhagen talks a “festival of phoniness,” and “history’s first completely postmodern global event.” Before even one of the 5,000 journalists, and thousands of diplomats, activists and NGO staffs stepped aboard a plane to fly to Denmark, the outcome was already known, they say: “no treaty, no emissions reductions.”

From their post:

With all hopes of a treaty abandoned months ago, diplomats and greens are in a state of serious cognitive dissonance, attempting to resolve the seriousness of the problem with the total lack of a meaningful government response. They do so, not by asking hard questions about the viability of the Kyoto framework, but rather by creating a simulacrum of action to substitute for any meaningful action to reduce emissions or adapt to a warmer world.

Ben Hale, my philosopher friend and colleague here at the University of Colorado, has responded today with his own blog post, informed by his experiences in attending the Copenhagen conference. He argues that while “there is a contrived element to the COP,” the same can be said “with almost all politics, on all issues.” And while there is certainly much in the way of opportunism, drama, staged charades and shenanigans, something substantial is actually happening in Copenhagen, and “one has to be blind to miss it,” he argues.

From his post:

The commitments made and pronounced at Copenhagen make up a unique set of speech acts known as “performative utterances,” first discussed in the speech act theory of J.L. Austin. If the sovereign of nation X says that X will do A for the purpose of addressing CC, that’s not merely a symbolic pronouncement but also a commitment that, while not legally binding, is at least morally binding. It’s not the same sort of utterance as saying “There’s a cat on that mat.” (That’s a declarative.) It’s more like a judge pronouncing the guilt of an accused, or a justice of the peace declaring two people husband and wife. When the sovereign of X  announces their commitment, they commit themselves by virtue of that announcement. X can (and certainly will) be called to task for failing to live up to that commitment. That’s a pretty big deal.

Maybe. But the real question is not whether some sovereign will be taken to task. The real question is whether Copenhagen and the policy approaches that are being debated there will ever accomplish the goal of reducing the risks of dangerous interference with the climate system.

Copenhagen is all about one side of the climate policy coin: the cost of carbon. The other side — the cost of non-carbon — seems to be all but ignored, and perhaps to the great detriment of efforts to rein in climate change.

The cost of carbon, of course, is what we pay for fossil fuels. The cost of non-carbon is what we pay for “negawatts” (saving energy through efficiency) and energy from such non-carbon sources as solar and wind.

Negotiators in Copenhagen are flailing around trying (Shellenberger and Nordhaus would say “pretending”) to find an agreement to deal with the former — one that would allegedly drive up the cost of carbon and thus make non-carbon more competitive.

Today’s walk-out by developing countries at the conference is yet another manifestation of a drama that has been acted out time and time again. A few weeks ago, the drama manifested itself in the “Climategate” email controversy. It continued in Copenhagen with demonstrations in the streets by activists, and the spectacle of a British viscount shouting at young people attending the conference that they are “Hitler Youth.” Now we’ve got diplomats staging the equivalent of their own demonstration.

One part of the drama revolves around the perennial “global warming: yes or no?” argument. And now, among the people who profess to answer “YES!,” we see the other part: the seemingly intractable arguments over how much emissions reductions are really enough, who will bear the brunt of the burden, etc.

All of this makes me wonder whether a greater focus on the other side of the coin — cooperation to spur innovation that would drive down the cost of non-carbon — would move us forward much more quickly, and with much less drama.