The Chinese government expressed quiet satisfaction at the outcome of the Copenhagen talks despite European accusations that it had systematically wrecked the negotiating process.
China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, described the outcome as “significant and positive”.
Among the achievements, he said, was the setting of binding emissions cuts for rich nations and voluntary mitigation actions by developing nations, such as China.
“It is not a destination, but a new beginning,” he said in a statement that asserted China’s right to continue its economic growth without the limits of legally binding emissions cuts.
Xinhua, the state-controlled news agency, also emphasised what was maintained rather than what was achieved.
“The Copenhagen accord protected the principal of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ under the climate convention and the Kyoto protocol.
“It outlines the requirement for developed countries to set compulsory emission reduction targets and for developing nations to take voluntary mitigation actions,” said the agency.
This underscores China’s primary goal in the conference: to block any proposal that threatened its capacity to expand. Negotiators played the conference like a football team intent on a 0-0 draw. Their strategy was defensive, their tactics were tough and their tackling of opponents occasionally brutal.
At the opening of the high-level segment, China’s chief negotiator Su Wei interrupted the Danish chair, the most public of a series of moves aimed at undermining the authority of the host.
With the support of other emerging economies ‑ India, Brazil and South America ‑ they shot down all attempts to make emissions cuts legally binding or to set long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gases.
This left little to boast about. After the unusually assertive public diplomacy of the early stages of the conference, China retreated into silent mode during the endgame.
Unlike other leaders who were present at Copenhagen, prime minister Wen Jiabao has not given a press conference about the outcome.
After a marathon of tetchy bilateral talks and barbed plenary speeches, the Chinese premier – who refused to enter the negotiations directly – flew back to Beijing without any public comment. Other senior negotiators also become inaccessible.
Many Chinese reporters at Copenhagen were frustrated at the almost total lack of communication by their officials during the last couple of days.
Chinese media have dampened their coverage. After the conclusion, most ran only the official Xinhua version of events. There was little mention of the crucial role China played in shaping the final document, but plenty of reports about its flaws.
The state-run China Daily reported that moves to reduce deforestation were curtailed and that future climate talks faced an uphill struggle.
It carried two stories that blamed Barack Obama for the failure of the conference. Many gave prominent coverage to a photograph of Obama and Wen that showed the US president leaning forward and downwards with his hands outstretched and open, while the Chinese premier sits back stiffly, hands clasped together, lips pursed, and eyes looking down.
Some publications painted a fuller picture. 21st Century Business Herald, the country’s biggest business newspaper, noted the achievements of the conference, but said it led to disappointment.
“Views are divided. Some developing nations think the accord overlooks their interests and fails to set clear targets for carbon reductions,” noted a report.
“There is a sense in the Chinese media that Copenhagen failed,” said Yang Ailun of Greenpeace.
“Some point the finger at the US. But they have blurred explanations of the role that China played. I think they would like to forget Copenhagen.”
• Live blog - Copenhagen the final day
Follow all the action as it happens on our live blog throughout the day.
The end game
• World leaders work into small hours to forge face-saving text
• Copenhagen draft text obtained by the Guardian
• Obama’s speech to the Copenhagen summit
• Sketch: Epic standoff clears the air
• US bids to break Copenhagen deadlock with support for $100bn climate fund
The end game is upon is at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen and although there has been progress on finance for developing countries to adapt to climate change a substantial deal still looks far off. The big hope is that Obama’s presence at the talks can break the deadlock (you can read his speech here), but developing countries reacted badly overnight but what they see as another attempt by rich countries to impose a final negotiation text on them. You can read the text here.
Video and pictures
• In pictures: The big guns arrive at the talks
• Video: Obama arrives at the talks
• Video: Crunch time in Copenhagen
• Video: Thom Yorke - ‘I want to be here saying No’
• Video: Hillary Clinton pledges US support for $100bn climate fund
• Video: Police tackle 4,000-strong climate protest
Watch how the police dealt with thousands of protestors who tried to invade the negotiations and the action inside. Even Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is there to lend a hand.
Comment and analysis
• Simon Hughes MP: Copenhagen has changed the face of global politics
• Community blog: What you have to say about the conference
• Jonathan Watts: China transforms the balance of power
• Naomi Klein: Better to have no deal at Copenhagen than one that spells catastrophe
Our Asia environment correspondent Jonathan Watts on how China has pulled the strings during the negotiations, plus journalist and campaigner Naomi Klein on why a bad deal would be worse than no deal at all.
And finally…
• Video: When George met Boris…
Watch how London mayor Boris Johnson convinced the Guardian’s George Monbiot to buy an electric Porsche.
Until this year, if you had said “Copenhagen” to the average scientist, they would probably have responded: “Bohr”. Niels, of that name, was the father of the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics – a fairy-tale land in which things could be in two places at the same time, things changed when you looked at them and cats could be both alive and dead.
Now, the significance of “Copenhagen” might have changed for ever – like an electron that’s been peeked at. The headlines are screaming about chaos and failure; disappearing island states saying that they have been betrayed; even Barack Obama admitting that a legally binding treaty will take “some time” to achieve. But, depending on the outcome of the political shenanigans, Copenhagen could still be a name as important for environmental science as it already is for physics.
However things turn out, Copenhagen deserves a different sort of credit, perhaps even more significant than a step towards saving the planet. Copenhagen may mark a turning point in human nature, when the global village acquired a global mind.
What we have just witnessed is delegates from 192 countries talking about making sacrifices, slowing their development, constraining their industry, taxing their citizens, in a collective bid to stifle climate change. Those nations included virtually every race, every religion, every style of government – from monarchy to dictatorship, from constitutional democracy to communism.
For the past 5,000 years, agreements between nations have been determined by military or economic power, by political ideology or religious dogma. What Copenhagen has established, even if the final agreement fudges and procrastinates, is that a new force is at work in international diplomacy. A force that does not speak in terms of faith and conviction, that is not even absolutely certain about what it has to say. That force is science.
Globally, the average temperature has risen by about 0.7C since pre-industrial times. That’s a statistically significant shift (as the boffins would say), but it’s not that evidence that has driven the unprecedented move towards global co-operation in Copenhagen. It’s the predictions of future events – long after the terms of office of elected representatives and even the lifetimes of monarchs and dictators.
The developing nations are unhappy with the offer of financial compensation from the affluent powers. But the amounts over the coming decades are staggering. All of this, and the policies, laws and taxes that will be needed to implement a real agreement, have been driven by the opinions of people of no specific race, creed or politics, and very little personal power – the scientists who have made the doomsday predictions.
What’s surprising about nations acting together to avert a common threat is that it runs counter to so much of what we know of human nature. A simple interpretation of Copenhagen would say the delegates were motivated by altruism and shared concern, reflecting a dispassionate assessment of risk and rational decision-making. But neither humans nor other animals normally behave like that.
Assisting the survival of others who share your genes makes sense in evolutionary terms. When once asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother (sharing half his genetic make-up) the great British biologist JBS Haldane replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” What is remarkable, then, about Copenhagen is that individuals of such diverse genetic background could talk as they did about making sacrifices for each other.
In his first major speech after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama said of the value of science: “It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient.” And in his inaugural address, he promised “to restore science to its rightful place”. Even with its flaws, what Copenhagen suggests is that the rightful place of science is at the heart of policy for a threatened world. The oceans are already rising. Either we sink, separately, or swim, together.
• Colin Blakemore is professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick
We’re all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen
Our political leaders failed to do the right thing: now it’s up to us to push them into action or get on with it without them
A man carrying a baby walks past a globe in Copenhagen. Photograph: Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters
What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another “important first step”. We’ve had nearly two decades of those.
It’s likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we’re in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we’re all eco-warriors now.
When things go smoothly, you do your civic duty by casting a vote, paying your taxes, and generally keeping out of trouble. It’s enough to leave it to the ones in power to think things through and make certain choices for you. In rare circumstances, though, our obligations enlarge, and it’s up to us to do the right thing when no one else will.
When the state perpetuates injustice and human suffering, when there’s real urgency, when other avenues of protest have done no good at all, your civic duty becomes something very substantial. You have to bring change into the world, and a vote is not enough. Anything less ties you to an ongoing wrong. Civil disobedience and other direct efforts to bring about change are the only options you have.
It’s no longer any good just hoping that the men in suits will come up with a decent solution. They messed it up. It’s not enough to click a link and send a message to your representative or even go on a march. None of it is enough when the people you petition fail again and again to do the right thing. Perhaps it’s now up to us to make trouble for them, to leave our governments no choice but to act, to get in the way, make business as usual impossible, and force real action against climate change. Think of all the usual examples, large and small, of human beings at their finest: the end of slavery in America, the civil rights movement, suffrage, India, the velvet revolution, the poll tax protests and on and on. When human beings see that something is wrong we almost always change for the better. Sometimes we need our noses rubbed in it, but we do the right thing in the end. The developed and developing worlds are doing something wrong – we’re all causing suffering to people alive right now and to great numbers of those who will come after us. If civil disobedience was warranted to stop past injustices, isn’t it warranted right now to stop what is probably the greatest amount of harm any group of human beings ever inflicted on any other?
The green movement has always suffered from the lack of a clear target. How do you protest against something that’s all around us, a fossil-fuel burning world we all inhabit and depend upon? Do you chain yourself to yourself and insist on a carbon tax on the things you value most? With the failure at Copenhagen we have for the first time a clearly delineated and easily accessible object for our protests: our governments.
What about the so-called deal-breakers at Copenhagen? It’s being said that what really stood in the way of a binding conclusion is China and America failing to see eye to eye. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that sanctions were warranted against South Africa because it harmed its own people. The world’s biggest polluters harm not just their own people, but people all over the world. How much greater are sanctions warranted in their case, compared with South Africa?
But maybe this isn’t the right way to think, and anyway we’ve all had enough doom and gloom. It might be wrong not because it’s over the top, but because it depends on a conception of politics that no longer fits the world as it is now. Perhaps global treaties and talks and sanctions are not part of the solution to climate change. Those are the bones of something that died near the start of this awful millennium.
Maybe the solution never was a deal at Copenhagen – who really thinks that climate change has just one big answer? What we need are a billion different solutions, perhaps billions of little revolutions in thinking and acting all over the world. The good news is that such things do not depend on a handful of negotiators sitting around a table. What matters are people like you and me who see the world for what it is and do something about it. There’s room for a little hope still, the hope that even though our leaders fail to do the right thing, the rest of us will either push them into action or get on with it without them.
Well it worked didn’t it? All that hot air in Copenhagen then Brown and Obama ride in like Butch and Sundance, kick a little ass and wallop, global warming goes away leaving Ambleside (left) in blizzards and arctic style chaos.
We’ve heard that the University of East Anglia has started a project looking at the deadly risk of an imminent new ice age. Meanwhile George Monbiot is calling for the nationalisation of igloo and sled making companies to ensure fair distribution of resources as we face decades of ice, snow and freezing temperatures from, well, about now.
But that’s it for now, off to clear a pesky polar bear from my garden before it eats our cats for breakfast.
by James Dunstan & Berin Szoka* (PDF)
Originally published in Forbes.com on December 17, 2009
As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to consider drastic carbon emission restrictions that could require large-scale de-industrialization, experts gathered last week just outside Washington, D.C. to discuss another environmental problem: Space junk. Unlike with climate change, there’s no difference of scientific opinion about this problem—orbital debris counts increased 13% in 2009 alone, with the catalog of tracked objects swelling to 20,000, and estimates of over 300,000 objects in total; most too small to see and all racing around the Earth at over 17,500 miles per hour. Those are speeding bullets, some the size of school buses, and all capable of knocking out a satellite or manned vehicle.
At stake are much more than the $200 billion a year satellite and launch industries and jobs that depend on them. Satellites connect the remotest locations in the world; guide us down unfamiliar roads; allow Internet users to view their homes from space; discourage war by making it impossible to hide armies on another country’s borders; are utterly indispensable to American troops in the field; and play a critical role in monitoring climate change and other environmental problems. Orbital debris could block all these benefits for centuries, and prevent us from developing clean energy sources like space solar power satellites, exploring our Solar System and some day making humanity a multi-planetary civilization capable of surviving true climatic catastrophes.
The engineering wizards who have fueled the Information Revolution through the use of satellites as communications and information-gathering tools also overlooked the pollution they were causing. They operated under the “Big Sky” theory: Space is so vast, you don’t have to worry about cleaning up after yourself. They were wrong. Just last February, two satellites collided for the first time, creating over 1,500 new pieces of junk. Many experts believe we are nearing the “tipping point” where these collisions will cascade, making many orbits unusable.
But the problem can be solved. Thus far, governments have simply tried to mandate “mitigation” of debris-creation. But just as some warn about “runaway warming,” we know that mitigation alone will not solve the debris problem. The answer lies in “remediation”: removing just five large objects per year could prevent a chain reaction. If governments attempt to clean up this mess themselves, the cost could run into the trillions—rivaling even some proposed climate change solutions.
Instead, space-faring nations should create an Orbital Debris Removal and Recycling Fund (ODRRF). Satellite operators would pay relatively small fees to their governments, who would contribute the money to the Fund. These governments already charge satellite operators large licensing and regulatory fees. Private companies would be paid bounties out of the Fund for successfully removing debris according to the debris-creation-avoidance value assigned to each object. Apart from the obvious long-term benefits of preserving the usability of the space environment, satellite operators would benefit in the short term from reduced insurance rates and fewer mysterious satellite outages caused by collisions we cannot track. With the right funding mechanism, entrepreneurs can solve this problem. Governments must encourage innovation rather than crippling industry or creating yet another large government program to build and operate systems when the expertise for doing so clearly resides in the private sector.
Better tracking data would be required to maximize the effectiveness of debris removal prizes. Since much of that data is classified, only a trusted intermediary could get American and Russian defense officials to work together. But the largest obstacle is legal: While maritime law encourages the cleanup of abandoned vessels as hazards to navigation, space law discourages debris remediation by failing to recognize debris as abandoned property, and making it difficult to transfer ownership of, and liability for, objects in space—even junk. By adapting maritime precedents, space law could make orbital debris removal feasible, once the right economic incentives are in place. Entrepreneurs may even find ways to recycle and reuse on orbit the nearly 2,000 metric tons of space debris, which includes ultra-high grade aerospace aluminum and other precious metals.
We must solve the orbital debris problem, if only so that satellites can continue collecting the climate data we need to make informed decisions about carbon emissions. But how we solve this problem should offer valuable lessons for all environmental policymaking. All this cause needs is a champion who can rally policymakers in the U.S. and abroad, not with scare tactics but with a relentless optimism about the power of entrepreneurs to solve even the most difficult environmental problems through innovation, and about the bright promise of humanity’s future—on Earth and in space.
James Dunstan practices space and technology law at Garvey Schubert Barer. Berin Szoka is a Senior Fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Director of the Space Frontier Foundation, and member of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee. The views expressed in this report are their own, and are not necessarily the views of the PFF board, fellows or staff.See generally James E. Dunstan & Bob Werb, Legal and Economic Implications of Orbital Debris Removal: A Free Market Approach, Space Frontier Foundation presentation to International Conference on Orbital Debris Removal, December 8-10, 2009, Reston, VA.
