Optimism and Anxiety Abound at UN Climate Summit
By Roger Nokes
Sept. 23 – President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations climate summit yesterday in New York, citing the seriousness and urgency of global warming and saying that if the tide was not turned against preventing more environmental damage that a tremendous burden would be left for future generations. Yet it was a tide, he added, that “we can reverse.”
“This is a new day. It is a new era. And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history,” Obama said at the conference, which was attended by 100 heads of state and was organized by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to create momentum for the UN Conference on Climate Change this December in Copenhagen.
Obama’s note of optimism was immediately followed by a frank plea by President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, whose island country is literally sinking because of rising sea temperatures and who said that “We cannot make Copenhagen a pact of suicide — we have to make a deal.”
In French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech, he mentioned Europe’s willingness to spend large amounts in fostering clean energy technologies. “In Europe, we are demonstrating we can move from growth with high carbon footprint to sustainable growth,” he said. “No one will have to choose between unemployment and the environment.”
Adding to President Nasheed’s theme of anxiety, however, Sarkozy said that today’s trends mean that the world is “on a path to failure.”
One of the most important – and much anticipated -- speeches of the day was made by Hu Jintao, the president of China, who restated the notion of “differentiated responsibility,” meaning that action by countries should be gauged both by their abilities to adapt to and mitigate against climate change as well as by their share of responsibility for the current climate problems.
In his two-minute speech, Hu said that China was committed, among other goals, to enforcing a carbon-dioxide emissions cap on a “per unit of GDP basis” by 2020, as well as a plan to plant 40-million hectares of carbon-absorbing forest. Some observers of the summit welcomed these pledges while others, like Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, said in an interview with The Guardian that while Hu’s announcement was welcomed, in actuality, “It depends on what the number is.”
The biggest players in the climate change debate are China and the US, which together account for 40 percent of the entire world’s emissions, followed by the European Union with 14 percent. Because China and the US are the biggest emitters, they are deemed by the international community to have the ability to either save or sabotage the Copenhagen meeting, where a treaty on climate change is meant to be agreed on to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The European Union is exerting additional pressure on the US to agree to a new climate change treaty. With a climate bill moving to the US Senate and facing possible dilution there, the European Union’s ambassador to the US, John Bruton, said that “Asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position.”
Copenhagen remains the endgame in the climate change challenge. As Helen Clark, the UN Development chief, said in a recent interview in the Financial Times, “Copenhagen has to be viewed as a very important step.” She added: “Would it be overoptimistic to say that it would be the final one? Of course.”
Yet the summit yesterday was viewed as valuable by at least Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said today at the Baha’i International Community United Nations Office in New York that the event’s success was difficult to measure because of the lack of specifics that failed to emerge, but that significant momentum had been created.
“People are talking about 1.5 degrees” -- limit to temperature increase -- and “no one would have thought about that even five years ago,” he said.
Roger Nokes is coordinator of chapter relations at UNA-USA.
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