FRANK LOY, chief US climate negotiator, got two custard pies in the face at
the climate talks in The Hague. One from an unfriendly demonstrator and another,
verbally at least, from Dominique Voynet, French head of the European Union
delegation. She rejected his last-ditch compromise, worked out with British
deputy prime minister John Prescott, and followed that with a public spat with
Prescott himself.
It would be farcical if it were not so serious. We are, after all, dealing
with the future of the world鈥檚 climate. By the end of May, when the suspended
talks are due to resume, all three may be gone. Loy won鈥檛 survive a Republican
take-over. Prescott can expect a new job, or even no job, after a likely general
election in Britain. And Voynet will have passed her mantle to a Swede.
Can their successors close the 鈥渄eal that never was鈥�? Will they even want to?
We remain guardedly hopeful.
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For one thing, failure of the Hague talks stemmed in part from raised
expectations, especially among Voynet and other Green Party members in the EU
delegation. The US delegates arrived claiming they had an 鈥渦nderstanding鈥� from
the Kyoto Protocol talks three years ago that they could have carbon credits for
doing little more than watching trees grow
(see 鈥淎 broken pact鈥�). Whether or not European
ministers in Kyoto were party to that understanding, their successors in The
Hague were not interested. This time, when they talked about countries making
real reductions in emissions, they meant it.
So was the US to blame for the failure? Not entirely. One success of the
unconsummated deal between Prescott and Loy was grudging American acceptance
that carbon sinks should not be the centrepiece of the bid to halt global
warming. Sadly, the EU delegation decided it had neither the time nor the energy
to size up these new proposals. Word from the British camp is that another half
day would have sealed the deal, but the conference hall was booked for an oil
industry jamboree.
In any case, it doesn鈥檛 matter who鈥檚 to blame for the failure, so long as a
deal is struck when the talks resume. The one thing we must hope for is that the
Americans won鈥檛 withdraw those concessions over carbon sinks. Not that there is
anything wrong with soaking up carbon dioxide by planting forests. But there are
risks.
The first is that many of these projects have fraud stamped all over them.
They threaten to undermine the credibility of the whole protocol. The chief
problem is that scientists can鈥檛 yet account accurately for the movement of
carbon through the biosphere. Without full carbon accounting, a system of sinks
and carbon trading based on sinks will come unstuck.
Then there鈥檚 the danger that sink projects good and bad will become
substitutes for investment in clean energy technologies. By driving down the
price of carbon credits, they would undermine the economic case for
technological innovation, which would be disastrous.
Why then are we optimistic that a deal can be done鈥攅specially when it
could be oilman George W. Bush sitting in the White House? Bush has said he鈥檚
not convinced we have enough information even to be sure of the origins of
global warming. The answer was apparent at The Hague. There were no Republican
senators and redneck businessmen haunting the corridors denouncing the talks as
a conspiracy against American jobs. They were replaced by Harvard Business
School types, hot for investment in carbon trading and fuel cells, who know that
鈥渂usiness as usual鈥� is not an option.
As the world runs out of oil and gas, we face a switch either to clean energy
sources or to fuels even dirtier than today鈥檚, such as shale oils. It beggars
belief that anyone would choose the latter. Especially when much of the
industrialised world is preparing to adopt fuel cells and renewable energy
sources on a grand scale. When the head of the American Electric Power Research
Institute argues that the world economy will be powered by carbon-free fuels by
the middle of the century, it鈥檚 obvious that the game is up for coal, oil and
gas.
Even the fossil fuel lobby group, the Global Climate Coalition, has seen the
writing on the wall. The GCC has haemorrhaged members, such as Texaco, Shell and
Ford. The problem, says its director Glenn Kelly, is that consumers are pressing
companies to go green. Arguably, it is now businesses rather than governments
that are leading the drive against greenhouse gases. If American industry is
moving this way, it鈥檚 unlikely that Bush will oppose it.
The Kyoto Protocol was intended as the first, small step towards putting
legislative limits on emissions of greenhouse gases. To stumble at this first
step is depressing. But a six-month delay will not matter, provided the show
returns to the road. We will miss you, Frank, John and Dominique, but the world,
with luck, will go on.
