On the other hand, the story here is not quite as coherent as the Danish report. Sending this He (“He-man”? Hu?) guy in his place was of course a deliberate gesture by Premier Wen to show his contempt for what was going on, but it turned out to be smart in another way since He turned out to be the direct verbal target of some very powerful Western politicians, along with Indian Premier Manmohan Singh. All this was not because of any sort of anti-Asia prejudice on the part of the other world leaders, but out of the very good reason that China and India had already decided that they simply would not go along with the sort of legally-enforceable national limits to greenhouse-gas emissions that European leaders (mainly) were trying to enshrine in the World Climate Treaty that was supposed to issue out of the conference, limits designed to replace expiring national obligations under the Kyoto Protocol (2005).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the main protagonist here, fighting hard for measures designed to limit the rise in average temperatures to 2ºC through this century. This meant among other things cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by 2050. Western developed nations had already agreed to cuts of 80%, but something would have to be forthcoming from the developing world as well if that 2050 goal was to be achieved, especially considering the explosive recent economic growth in China and India. But behind closed doors the representatives from those countries did not yield from positions that had already been taken publicly, namely that they weren’t interested in any binding restrictions and, in any case, they had no obligation to be interested – it was mainly the West’s fault anyway that the world was in the dire climate-change situation it now found itself. This attitude led Merkel to expressions of dismay and President Sarkozy to (politely stated) accusations of hypocrisy, while according to the transcript Obama tried to intervene to calm the waters, expressing a not entirely-useful hope that things could be settled “later, outside of this multilateral framework.”

The lesson I draw from this report is that the public stances countries take prior to such summits are generally serious ones, i.e. they accurately track the positions those countries will adopt once negotiations begin. The only real sensational element here, then, is the accounts of the personal interactions – sometimes quite tense – between the world leaders present. At least the picture of events from this leaked transcript gives the lie to the assertion of many commentators that at Copenhagen European leaders ultimately were left on the sidelines while the conference’s fate was decided in discussions between the US and China. But I guess a leading European publication like Der Spiegel would say that.

By the way, the reason all this climate-change stuff is current again in the news is probably the international conference now happening at Petersberg, Germany (near Bonn), intended to draw lessons from the COP15 experience. This is meant in preparation for the very next formal UNFCCC world climate-change conference, scheduled for next December in Cancún, Mexico.

                          

In the Statsministeriet’s view, one of the main problems leading to the conference’s failure was the lack of mutual confidence between the Danish COP15 delegation – the conference’s hosts – and the secretariat of the UNFCCC, or United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was the official UN body in charge of the deliberations. As commented John Nordbo, leader of the climate program at the World Nature Funds, “A relationship of confidence would have changed a lot. Then one could have been a bridge-builder towards an agreement. Instead, negotiations were stymied by argument and got stuck, and we ended up with an alarmingly meager result.” But such a strained relationship was probably inevitable, given the skant regard for the UN body’s ability to get anything done held by the Statsministeriet – the document describes what it saw as a “too many cooks” problem within that UN organization, with officials all going off on their own separate ways.

However, the Statsministeriet’s is also frank enough to pinpoint how the Danish government caused a lack of confidence in itself to arise in the crucial period leading up to COP15. In the early part of last year that government decided that it had to be realistic about what it could hope to achieve at the December conference, given that unanimity was required for any final accord, and so ceased to advocate any climate agreement with legally-binding obligations on the participating states but rather a mere political agreement. Not only were many countries not yet ready to cut back in this way their ambitions about what could be accomplished, but most of them were notified of the new Danish approach only about one-and-a-half months before the conference was to start. The result was widespread suspicion about Danish intentions and the belief that the Danes were simply in the pocket of the US and other highly-polluting states that wanted as few results as possible. It might be recalled that, at around the mid-point of the actual conference, the Danish delegation did present a proposal for an agreement; it went nowhere and, despite even frantic high-level deliberations among world leaders, things did not much improve from there.

And thus it was, at least in the eyes of the Danish government, that “Hopenhagen” 2009 turn into a flop.

                          

A similar thing has just happened in France, following regional elections there last Sunday which resulted in heavy losses for the governing UMP party of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Two days afterwards, French premier François Fillon announced that his government was dropping the idea of a carbon tax, something it had previously been developing with a view towards putting it in the tax code on 1 July. And there is reason to believe that this concept is certainly more permanently dead than US health care reform turned out to be; for one thing, as Claire Guélaud reports in Le Monde, the main French organizations representing employers and entrepreneurs broke out in rejoicing at Premier Fillon’s announcement.

Then again, for those who believe that the threat to humanity of climate change is real, a carbon tax is rated by economists as the #1 means of doing something about it. The reasoning comes straight out of standard public economics theory: emitting greenhouses gases is an “externality,” i.e. a spillover effect imposing a cost on others that the emitter doesn’t have to take into account, meaning that he engages in more of that activity than is socially optimal. Putting a price on the externality – here, charging him for his emitted carbon – means in the first instance that he engages in it less and, ultimately, that he probably finds other ways to accomplish the same result without so many emissions. (A second-best answer is “cap and trade,” whereby everyone is given licenses to emit a certain amount which are tradable, so that those who can become more efficient in their emissions can make money by selling their licenses to those who cannot.)

Still, it would have been a new tax, and no one likes that. I guess even in supposedly cerebral France political and business leaders cannot be expected to think ahead to the longer-term – to realize how the carbon tax could ultimately work to strengthen the competitiveness of French businesses by weaning them away from emission-rich production methods into more environmentally-friendly ones in which they could build world-beating expertise; or to realize how the imposition of a carbon tax by such a leading industrial nation as France could have a powerful example-effect for convincing other countries to do something similar. (Like the United States – wait now, let’s not let our thoughts just run complete wild here!)

No, I guess that, if anyone, it has to be retired politicians with no more need to please the voters to whom we can look for such thinking, such as ex-premier (under François Mitterand) Michel Rocard, who the Nouvel Observateur reports as calling the French government’s withdrawal of plans for a carbon tax “a crime against humanity,” and one which it will take only about ten years for everyone to see as such. “But there will be [such a tax] some day anyway,” Rocard goes on, “we’re not going to let the planet gradually become a frying-vat [une poêle à frire] in which life becomes impossible.”

Climate Change: >Yawn<

Just to give the whole picture, it’s also true that the French government was having trouble with its proposed carbon tax even before it withdrew it this past week, namely from the Conseil constitutionnel, basically France’s Supreme Court. Late last year that body advised the government that the tax would probably turn out to be unconstitutional since it violated the principle of equal liability to taxation – but that was mainly due to the many exemptions to big, polluting industries that the government was planning to hand out for the early stages of its imposition, a spoonful of fiscal sugar to help the bitter tax pill go down better. It’s also true, as that Le Monde article reports, that the new EU Budget Commissioner (he’s Lithuanian, and his name is Algirdas Šemeta) has already announced to the European Parliament his intention to present in June new fiscal measures relating to energy, which could potentially include a EU-wide carbon tax. (That would address one important reason why the French businessmen so hated the idea of a French carbon tax: “It would make us uncompetitive against our foreign commercial rivals!”)

But, really, how can anyone have any confidence that a carbon tax could come into being via the EU? The EU itself does not have taxing authority; it gets its money in the form of quota-contributions from member-states, so that the maximal function it could have here is one of coordinating the actions of all member-state governments as they willingly worked to enact such a carbon tax. And how likely is that?

In reality, the French government’s latest retreat on this front fits cleanly into a pattern of recent events, one whose other main highlight was the failure of the COP15 Copenhagen climate-change conference last December to produce any meaningful results. What that pattern says is: Climate change? No one really cares enough to do something about it. The alarm has been sounded, to be sure: anyone looking at the scientific conclusions cannot help but be shocked at what the Earth’s population will likely be facing in a few decades. But humanity’s existing institutions are simply not up to the task of reacting to this threat. You can keep this sad fact in mind tonight, especially if you plan to extinguish your lights for Earth Hour.

                          

That is highly unlikely, as most realize, but that distinct lull in any seeming concern about human-caused climate change has come about not only from the damp squib that COP15 turned out to be, but also from the steep drop in credibility that has been suffered lately by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). And remember, that IPCC has been pushing the urgency of doing something about global warming just as much as Al Gore has with his Inconvenient Truth – as we are reminded from the picture of Gore and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, both holding up their Nobel medals and certificates at the 2007 ceremony in Oslo, that stands at the top of Where have the doubts gone?, an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which reporter Matthias Wyssuwa pays a visit to the IPCC’s Geneva offices to see how that organization is doing.

The answer is of course “Not well.” Anyone following the climate change issue at all can figure out why. First there were the hacked and leaked e-mails from an environmental research center at the University of East Anglia which surfaced just before COP15, of which the tone of many gave some the impression that the climate researchers involved were not averse to playing fast and loose with the scientific facts if it would suit political interests. (Actually, though, none of this had any direct connection to the IPCC!) And then, just after COP15, came another embarrassment when the IPCC itself had to backtrack on what had been its published contention that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

Such incidents were like manna from heaven for all those many climate change-deniers out there, including those in the US Senate, specifically the minority (i.e. Republican) contingent on the Senate Environment Committee, who thereupon issued a collective press-release stating that IPCC reports were no longer to be trusted. What also happened around that time according to this article – I had not been aware of this – was that world Environment Ministers instituted an independent review of IPCC procedures, which should be completed by October.

So it’s safe to say that morale within the organization has taken somewhat of a plunge since that time only last December when IPCC Chairman Pachauri welcomed attendees to the COP15 conference “which,” he pronounced, “we all hope will lead to deeds – deeds that are critically necessary on the basis of the scientific estimates of climate change contained in the fourth Situation Report of the IPCC.” For an organization founded back in 1988, whose motto is “policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive,” all the criticism has been hard to take, and hard to respond to effectively as well: it had never had to worry before about public relations issues or “crisis management,” and still has no experts in those modern-day organizational arts on its staff.

Science & Politics Must Mix

Then again, all that is a bit strange, since from the beginning the “pure science” that IPCC scientists like to think they pursue has always been caught up in politics. You get a research job there in the first place only after nomination from your sponsoring government; and at the other (more important) end of the process, i.e. the issuing of reports, political representatives have the opportunity via various consultative forums to intrude and adulterate those reports’ original scientific conclusions. Usually that’s only an “opportunity”; a couple of anecdotes which Wyssuwa includes in his piece show how the scientists are usually able to defend the validity of their findings against such political pressure, but that pressure is there to be dealt with nonetheless.

Quite apart from the question of where Al Gore is these days (not to mention the severe winter most of us in the Northern Hemisphere have just endured – you’re intelligent enough to realize, dear reader, that that does not constitute evidence against man-made climate change, yes?), that current lull in mankind’s concern about global warming has to be down in large part to the regrouping stage in which the IPCC now finds itself. There is not only that ongoing audit of its procedures; independent of that, it has also recently fielded a flood of recommendations to consider on how it might better deal with the tension of politics wanting to intrude on the scientific process. These suggestions supposedly include that of cutting the Gordian Knot and simply shutting down operations entirely. In that case we presumably would then have nothing left to save our (grand)children from the rising waters and more-violent weather of the future save good ol’ Al.

                          

But now one of those island nations, the Federated States of Micronesia (that’s who you turn to for your “.fm” Internet domain), has found a novel way to do something about it. I first caught word of this from the Some Assembly Required blog, which provided a link to an article in the New York Times sourced to Reuters (so it must be true, eh?). There you can read all about it: The Micronesia government is trying to intervene to influence the re-commissioning of a coal-fired power plant – one located in Prunéřov, Czech Republic, or around 13,000 km away! It has expressed this intention in two official government-to-government letters, one sent last month (while the Copenhagen conference was going on, apparently), and the second (laying out the technical details of what it objects to in the plant) just last week.

I’ve been able to find Czech-press coverage of this rather extraordinary episode only in that country’s main business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny. But that coverage is pretty thorough. There is a main article, telling the story: Micronesia: Prunéřov is [just] one of a thousand power plants, but it still is damaging us. In addition HN has an exclusive interview in a second piece (conducted by an unnamed reporter) with Andrew Yatilman, Minister of the Environment for Micronesia (We are fighting for our lives, Prunéřov is just our first act, says Micronesian minister).

Actually, in contrast to the impression of cool rage that that headline might give you, you’re really struck much more in the interview by how ad hoc this effort is on the part of the Micronesian government – how they are feeling their way as they go along in this legal initiative without precedent. For instance, Greenpeace (as you might expect) has had a big influence in this whole thing: it was protests carried out in front of the Prunéřov plant in question by Czech Greenpeace activists last month that inspired the idea in the first place, and Greenpeace has cooperated closely with the Micronesian government in providing both legal and technical advice. Will you be trying this with other plants, other governments? asks the reporter. For sure, Yatilman replies, although only after this episode is over and we have a chance to learn from the experience. (Note well that Micronesia is not going so far as to demand that the Czech government shut down the plant, it is only asking to be included in the process for granting it approval to re-open, so it can insist on a range of anti-CO2 emission safeguards.) Are any other island nations ready to join you in these efforts? I don’t know yet, Yatilman replies.

The interview concludes with a bit of unwitting comedy, as the HN reporter inquires whether Minister Yatilman is aware of the attitudes towards global warming of the Czech President, Václav Klaus. He is not; HN informs him how Klaus denies that global warming even exists, that he’s one of the world’s most-prominent climate change deniers. “Good that you say that,” replies Yatilman,

because we got a letter from the Czech Republic that purported to be from the president. But we didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t written on any letterhead stationery and it tried to find out why we were doing what we are doing. As if we weren’t a sovereign state. Underneath was some signature, but whether it was from your president, I don’t know. In any case we didn’t take it seriously.

                          

The EU punks the American government on climate questions, and the USA is behind due to the Bush administration. But when it comes to measures for the coming years, the EU has nothing for the Americans to hear, say experts.

(Yes, I have to assume that that Danish punker corresponds to “punks,” from “to punk,” as in “to rag on, to give someone a hard time about,” even though that meaning of “punk” is some rather obscure American street-slang – with which I myself am nonetheless familiar from the past, by the way. That’s simply the meaning called for by the context.)

The ultimate point here is a counterintuitive one. As Nielsen notes, the EU in particular loves to upbraid the American authorities for dragging their feet on anti-climate change measures, and it’s true that there was absolutely no progress on this during the George W. Bush years while the Europeans already succeeded in reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions somewhat compared to the 1990 baseline. But going forward, US “ambitions” for addressing climate change can actually be regarded as superior to those of Europe.

The key element here is the Waxman-Markey bill on climate change and carbon credits, which passed the US House of Representatives in June and which President Obama hopes to have signed by the time he heads off to the great international climate-change summit in Copenhagen coming up at the beginning of December. On the face of things, the seven percent reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions that that piece of legislation aims for pales before stated EU objectives of a 20% reduction by the year 2020, and even a 30% reduction if other developed countries agree to accomplish roughly the same.

But Nielsen engages here a couple of independent environmental experts to look into these matters more deeply; the result is not so much that the US plans (again, as embodied in Waxman-Markey) come out looking better, but that EU plans come out looking worse. For one thing, the EU is already on-line to fulfill its obligations for greenhouse gas reduction to 2020 under the Kyoto Treaty, namely by 8% from the 1990 baseline, so its new ambition to accomplish 20% instead only ups the ante by another 12%. But the main thing is that EU law allows countries to gain credit towards fulfilling their greenhouse gas-reduction obligations by purchasing “CO2 credits” from undeveloped lands which naturally do not pollute as much, as a substitute for actually taking measures to reduce those gases at home. (One expert also adds that those CO2 credits are often bogus, i.e. do not really represent true CO2 emission reduction.) Under Waxman-Markey, the US can also buy such “CO2 credits,” but they cannot be used to fulfill the mandtory reduction quotas. Finally, Waxman-Markey includes an interesting provision earmarking some of the money the US Government expects to earn from selling carbon credits to domestic businesses to create a fund devoted to the preservation of (greenhouse gas-eating) natural forests in undeveloped lands. This is supposedly a highly-effective measure, and there’s nothing similar to it in anything the EU does.

Ah . . . But Will It Pass in the First Place?

The general assessment going forward, then, is that the US is set to make greater anti-climate change progress than the Europeans – again, under the assumption of Waxman-Markey. Ay, but there’s the rub . . . in a sidebar to the article, entitled “USA’s climate law can have decisive consequences for the climate summit,” Nielsen basically undercuts his argument in the main article by showing how doubtful it is that that the Waxman-Markey bill will be able to pass the hurdle that is the US Senate. For one thing, it’s a well-known fact by now that it takes at least a super-majority of 60 to pass anything there. That total may be unreachable because several Democratic Senators look at that legislation with a wary eye, fearing that it could destroy manufacturing jobs in their states. Or it could simply be watered-down to enable it to pass, in which case Nielsen’s entire analysis in the main article similarly goes out the window.

He cites John Kerry, chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, as stressing that Waxman-Markey or any similar environmental bill should not even be brought to a vote before the Senate unless its sponsors are certain that it will pass, lest a legislative failure put off sentiment in the Senate for doing anything about climate change for years. In fact, Kerry is already worried enough to be thinking about a “Plan B”: let Obama go to Copenhagen without any US-passed climate-change legislation, and instead use the results and ringing declarations from that summit to then go back and pressure the Senate to finally pass it.

Sound lame to you? (No wonder Kerry lost the presidency in 2004 – although maybe he is only being realistic.) It also sounds lame to an unnamed climate-change expert from the World Wildlife Fund whom Nielsen quotes: “[A] clear American position is a decisive precondition for a climate agreement in Copenhagen. If the Americans bring nothing? [Then] forget everything about a Copenhagen agreement.”

Still, that dispiriting result seems to be a very real danger. Until then, though, you Europeans need to stop all your lecturing of the Americans: what they theoretically desire to enact as anti-climate change legislation, at least, is superior to what you actually have enacted.

UPDATE: I was wrong! “To punk” has now seemingly made the mainstream.

                          

For now, though, I’d rather discuss the Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its leading Congressional sponsors, that was passed in the US House of Representatives yesterday by a narrow 219-212 vote. This is the legislation that would move the US towards a “cap and trade” approach to regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. One key to understanding the push for such a law is clearly the issue’s whole international aspect: the rest of the world rather expects the United States to embark on something of this sort, whether it is Europe that already is further ahead in its environmental legislation or it is China and India who are definitely behind, but looking on to see whether there will ultimately be American inaction that can justify their own.

That’s why it is good to see an article in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde such as the one just written by Corine Lesnes. Obama launches his green revolution, she proclaims in the piece’s very title, which features at the top an oddly hagiographic photo of Obama standing in front of what seems to be an early-American wilderness mural, perhaps during a visit to the Department of the Interior.

In fact, both that title and illustration, in their implicit optimism, are somewhat at odds with the general tenor of the full article, which rather emphasizes the tenuousness of the legislative victory – as in that 219-212 vote – and the uncertain prospects going forward. Many quotes are provided from the bill’s opponents, which include not only Republicans (e.g. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma: “This legislation will destroy our way of life!”) but also Democrats (including black Congressman Artur Davis from Alabama – Lesnes misspells his first name, which happens to be the very first word in the body of her piece – who even attended Harvard Law School with Obama: “The system of a market for CO2 emissions penalises industrial regions. Alabama will lose jobs.”). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in order to make sure the bill could be brought up for a vote before everyone left for the 4th of July recess, had to take what sounds like the extreme measure of limiting debate to only one allotted minute per speaker. Naturally, that sort of thing is impossible under Senate procedures, and indeed there is by no means any guarantee that the bill will pass there as well to actually become law.

But Lesnes is also willing to look on the bright side. As she points out, anything like this was quite impossible only a year ago, under the Bush Administration, with its well-known attitudes towards climate change generally, and was even hard to imagine just six months ago, when according to Lesnes few Americans had yet heard of the concept of “cap and trade.” And again, the House passage did save the president from considerable embarrassment. For one thing, you might recall that German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel happened to be in town visiting the President; yes, she was flying back to Germany by the time the vote was actually taken, but still, it’s easy to imagine how talks with President Obama would have been rather strained if it had been apparent beforehand that Waxman-Markey was likely to go down to defeat. Plus, remember that Obama is once more scheduled to head the other way in about two weeks’ time to meet Merkel and the rest of the G8 heads of government in Italy, not to mention Pope Benedict XVI as well, who presumably is interested in what kind of steward of God’s earthly creation the American president intends his country and its economy to be. It’s clearly better to travel off to these encounters with that “cap and trade” bill still alive in the legislative process – and that Congressional recess happening next week probably means that the US Senate will not have the opportunity (at least quite yet) to destroy the happy façade Obama will be able to present that “cap and trade” is well on its way in the USA.