U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the United Nations summit on climate change in New York on Sept. 22, 2009.Mario Tama/Getty Images
As world leaders gather to discuss climate change at the United Nations and the G20, the Europeans have begun to finger the United States as the bad guy. Noting that the Americans have been refusing to sign up to internationally binding carbon emission targets, EU officials are also unhappy that Congress is unlikely to enact legislation in time for December's Copenhagen conference.
In what should be seen as a concerted effort to up the pressure on President Barack Obama, the Europeans are now pointing to China as the good guy, and are heavily promoting the new measures it is about to announce. And, not-too-subtly, the UN official in charge of the conference is echoing the European position:
"This suite of policies will take China to be a world leader on addressing climate change, and it will be quite ironic to hear that expressed tomorrow in a country (the United States) that is firmly convinced that China is doing nothing to address climate change," [UN climate chief Yvo]de Boer said.
In the United States, by contrast, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that China will not be proposing this week to sign up to internationally-binding hard caps; rather, it will simply be including intensity targets (much maligned in Canada), in its next five-year plan - a move not likely to allay the competitive concerns of U.S. producers facing a hard cap or of the legislators who represent them. Nor will it reduce China's overall use of coal.
Still, the pressure on President Obama in the coming days and in the months leading up to Copenhagen will be intense. Already embattled on health care and Afghanistan - with Iran and the Mideast not going swimmingly either - he'll be casting around for allies wherever he can find them, which may explain the conclusion of a piece penned by the acting U.S. ambassador to Canada in today's National Post:
"Last Wednesday, in Washington, D. C., the President and Prime Minister received an initial Action Plan on the Clean Energy Dialogue, laying out next steps that will support our climate change objectives and put North America on a pathway to a low carbon economy. Together, we can build a cleaner, stronger and more prosperous North America while contributing to the global climate change effort."
What, then, is the prognosis for the Copenhagen conference scheduled for December?
Some Europeans - including French President Nicholas Sarkozy - are reported to sense weakness in President Obama and may figure they can roll him on climate change. Others, noting that Bill Clinton and Al Gore did not submit Kyoto to the Senate for ratification because they knew it would not be approved, may have a more sophisticated understanding of the U.S. legislative process.
Notably, Sir David King, former scientific adviser to the British government, says in today's Financial Times that it would be better to postpone negotiations to next year rather than risk a weak deal. And the same paper quotes "Lord Stern, author of a landmark review of the economics of climate change, [that]he was still optimistic that an agreement could be reached but: 'I would much prefer a framework that had to be filled in [next year] than something agreed with weak targets that would be difficult to unravel.'"
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Update La Presse reports that Jean Charest addressed a UN conference in New York yesterday as spokesperson of the "Federated States." (I bet that, like me, you thought Québec was a Canadian province.)
Mr. Charest says that Québec, unlike Canada, is committed to the Kyoto targets. He could have added, but didn't, that the Obama administration isn't - though he, too, according to La Presse, is beginning to wonder whether there will be an agreement in Copenhagen in light of the U.S. position.
Another update I see that Environment Minister Jim Prentice, Canada's negotiator in the lead-up to Copenhagen, is putting the onus on both the United States and China for the success of the conference:
"It's China and the United States that together account for pretty close to 50 per cent of the global carbon emissions," Prentice told CTV's Canada AM during an interview from New York on Tuesday morning.
"And in the case of the United States they did not ratify Kyoto and in the case of China, they do not have targets under the Kyoto Protocol. So, progress in Copenhagen depends very much on what these two countries do and how they decide to move forward."