Rory Williams
The last time I paid close attention to the annual meeting of the Congress of the Parties – colloquially known as the Climate Change Talks – was in 2009.
This year’s gathering begins today in Paris and I’m feeling inclined to continue avoiding daily reports about it. Not for lack of interest in climate change, but disgust at the politics that for 25 years has prevented international agreement on how to reduce carbon emissions or mitigate their impact on the environment.
The COP meetings are where the politicians, negotiating teams and technical researchers come together after a year of research and discussions, and try to reach an agreement that can be taken back to the nearly 200 member countries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Like most political negotiations, these have little to do with what is best for the world, and lots to do with economic power and self-interest. Fortunately the scientific research that supports the recommendations of the IPCC reports is getting more robust as time passes, so it’s getting harder for politicians to carry on with their shenanigans without their constituencies bringing them to task.
I was still paying attention to the negotiations in 2009 because the 2007 COP 13 gathering in Bali had been a high point for South Africa’s involvement. We send researchers and negotiators every year, but in 2007 we actually had some political influence.
Bali was a dramatic cliff-hanger. After two weeks of negotiations over the text of an agreement, at the 11th hour the US offered a completely new text of its own. It was provocative and arrogant, undoing all that had gone before, and it looked like the whole thing would unravel.
Much of the disagreement was over the responsibilities of developed and developing countries respectively, and South Africa gave what commentator David Steven described as “a ferocious and articulate denunciation of the American position”. South Africa’s position was that “developing countries have gone much further than they needed to. It’s the US that has failed to take on strong commitments”.
US representative Paula Dobriansky, after having blamed developing countries for not shouldering their share of the carbon burden, then conceded: “In a spirit of co-operation and responding directly to the words of South Africa, she is prepared to withdraw her objections and go with the consensus position.”
A few minutes later, agreement was reached on a Bali Declaration, followed by the Bali Action Plan that set out a route for countries to agree on the details needed to respond to the agreed position that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that delay in reducing emissions significantly constrains opportunities to achieve lower stabilisation levels and increases the risk of more severe climate change impacts”. As one of the stronger countries within the G77 block of developing countries, we had some clout. And in Copenhagen in 2009, President Zuma boldly and unexpectedly promised that by 2020 we would reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent.
That was then. Now, although South Africa chairs the G77, we no longer have the moral authority to play mediator. For one thing, we are adding coal-generated power capacity faster than renewable energy, and while there has been a reduction in per capita emissions since 2009, that is due more to declining economic growth than foresight in energy planning. But taking total emissions, the general trend is up. On top of that, in Copenhagen we inserted ourselves in a small group that crafted the final text of that year, firmly divorcing ourselves from the rest of Africa and other poor nations who will be hardest hit by climate change.
One of the arguments about the different responsibilities of developed and developing countries is that developed countries like the US have benefited from decades of carbon-intensive industrialisation, while developing countries have not. But the longer South Africa relies on coal, oil and gas for powering our economy, the less credible is our position as a victim of the developed world’s carbon excesses, and the less likely are we to win handouts to aid transition to a low-carbon economy.
I don’t know where that leaves us. We have many respected scientists participating in the Paris discussions, who are active in related activities throughout the year, so we contribute strongly at a technical level, but it will be interesting to see what happens politically.
@carbonsmart