It was always going to be unrealistic to expect a legally binding international treaty on climate change from the just concluded meet in Copenhagen. But the fact that countries are still willing to talk about all the sticky issues?emission cuts, financing and international monitoring?in Bonn and Mexico City next year is an encouraging sign.
However, if the talks are to make significant headway in the next year, certain key countries have to, quite literally, do a lot of homework. Unless governments are able to evolve a broad consensus on climate change mitigation within their borders, they are unlikely to be able to sign on to binding agreements. And the plain truth of the matter is that most of the countries that mattered were not yet ready (in terms of a political consensus at home) to make significant binding commitments.
Interestingly, the agreement that was ?taken note of? at the final plenary session in Copenhagen was essentially the text agreed upon by the wavering, unready countries?US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa (US-BASIC). The EU, which has actually taken most of the action to mitigate climate change to date, was left out of the final negotiations, as were the countries which stand to lose the most from no action being taken to mitigate climate change (some of the G77 countries).
It is safe to assume that the fate of future talks also depends on the positions that the US-BASIC group takes. And each of these countries needs to go back home to settle questions about how much, at what cost, and in what time after a process of deeper consultations and political outreach to key constituencies at home.
The homework will be different for each of these countries. Let?s take the US first. President Obama needs to first convince a clear majority of Americans that climate change is for real?the number of doubters still remains significant. Then he must convince them that the US will need to do more than countries like China and India, given the gap in incomes. Even if he can win those arguments, there remains the even tougher bit of convincing people that they must incur a cost by consuming less or paying more for ?cleaner products?.(Clean power will cost more than dirty coal, for example.) Also, this cost will be incurred to benefit a future generation. A difficult task, particularly when a country is coming out of a serious economic crisis, but then good leadership is about persuading. He will also need to work on specific interest groups, like the manufacturing industry, which believes that all of this will shift manufacturing advantage to places like China and India permanently. On this, Obama?s task ought to be easier?the US has no manufacturing advantage even now. In fact, a move to new cleantech may actually help it regain an edge in manufacturing.
In developing countries like China and India, it will be impossible to convince every citizen to consume less and pay more, in general. While these are indeed the fastest growing economies in the world, they are still in the low-income bracket. Hundreds of millions of people in both China and India (and millions in the case of Brazil and South Africa) need to be pulled out of poverty as quickly as possible. That means they will consume more, emit more and nobody can tell them to pay more or consume less without a political backlash.
But that?s only one constituency of the poor. The BASIC countries need to convince their sizeable middle classes and industries to get serious about cutting emissions. There is no reason that China and India should subsidise the consumption of fossil fuels by the middle classes, but they do. There is every reason to strive for cleaner sources of energy than coal. In all likelihood there will be financial transfers from the West to help finance these. And industry in emerging economies can actually leap to the next technological frontier if they beat the West to the development of cleaner tech. Industry needs to be persuaded to see climate change mitigation as an opportunity, not a threat.
Back home, the government made a sensible, but delayed, move by giving up the per capita emissions position to move to emissions intensity of GDP. Now, more political weight should be put behind this position. And let?s be a little more flexible on international monitoring and verification. We seem to get unnecessarily sensitive about sovereignty?a loud minority had reacted similarly to the Indo-US nuclear deal. Instead of resisting the idea, we should focus on how to make the monitoring mechanism independent and credible. In exchange for monitoring, we should press the US and industrialised countries for deeper cuts.
The stakes are high. If the US-BASIC group of countries in particular don?t begin their homework now, they will certainly flunk the test, and fail the planet, in Mexico City in December 2010.
?dhiraj.nayyar@expressindia.com