Has the climate change summit failed?
A prophetic ad in Copenhagen airport’s terminal 2 – picturing an Obama as old as Nelson Mandela, the caption reads ‘back in 2009 we could have turned the tide on global warming….we didn’t.’
It’s true, the climate change summit failed. On the opening day I talked to the UN chairman of the summit, Yvo de Boer. He told me that if the meeting did not conclude with clear global carbon emission targets and a specified date in June 2010, upon which to sign a legally binding climate change treaty, the summit would have failed.
There is to be no treaty in 2010 and no promise of one any time soon thereafter.
Barack Obama, who for the international community has for so many months ‘walked on water’, had a bad summit. His body language at the plenary, two hours after he landed, was ungracious. Instead of doing what the heads of government from every other attending state did – taking a seat in the belly of the hall – he entered somewhat ostentatiously from a door beside the stage. He left the same way, never therefore appearing to participate in the wider aspects of the summit at all.
Having talked so strongly of reengaging with the international community, Obama eschewed the UN run negotiations and conducted backroom deal making, picking off assorted heads of State – Brazil, India, China, South Africa and eventually announcing his decisions, not to the summit participants but to the world beyond.
His row with the Chinese over external monitoring of their carbon emissions claims served to obscure his own senate imposed failure to offer any hope of new and more radical immediate carbon emission levels inside America.
Indeed in facilitating the finger pointing against China with his emphasis on ‘transparency’, Obama retreated to that safe old Cold War territory of castigating the ‘other’ superpower – China becoming most assertively right now that new ‘other’.
On the plane home I had the good fortune to sit between ministers and delegates from Trinidad, St Lucia, and Nigeria. They confessed shock that Obama’s behaviour had appeared to them virtually interchangeable with George Bush’s. Although they concede that Obama does at least believe the science.
Yet these people were still buoyed by the reality that their voices had been heard even if rejected by what they termed ‘American and other big power arrogance’.
I find myself thinking of President Nasheed of the Maldives, holding court yesterday at a round table in the public area of the summit…beseiged by cameras, telling us the meeting was in trouble and that his country would be the first to pay for it.
His, and other small island states like Pacific Tuvalu, whose delegates, hailing from his 11,000 people, took six long days to make it to Copenhagen and who found his room given to someone else when he arrived.
But these guys believe they are at last in on a process and whatever failure the big powers may have authored in Copenhagen, there is no turning back from this inclusive global process that is begun…and they intend to continue it until it is thoroughly finished.
We northerners may concentrate on the new super power collision, but if we do so we are in danger of missing the other big moment that Copenhagen represents.
We have just glimpsed the new global order so many have dreamt of. The giving of voice to the left out, the forging of coalitions – north and south. It may LOOK like the old order, but the NEW is definitely there to be seen, if we want to look.