Slow progress

I think what was disappointing to a lot of observers, and particularly to those from other countries, was that he didn't say very much about the need for the Senate in our country to take action on domestic climate legislation in advance of Copenhagen. He did mention that the House has already passed a domestic climate bill and that committees in the Senate are starting to consider it, but he didn't lay down the gauntlet and say to the Senate 'I really need you to do this by Copenhagen so that I can go in there with the credibility of the congressional backing for the position I want to take at that meeting.'

I think people understand the situation he is in. He is fighting very hard for a domestic health care bill. They are focused on that like a laser and don't want to be distracting the Senate with talk about other issues, but I think there is more and more impatience on the international scene about the fact that one body of our Congress is threatening to hold up the whole process in Copenhagen.

Two years ago countries agreed to reach a new deal to replace the Kyoto protocol by the end of this year, yet negotiations remain about as deadlocked as they have been for the better part of a decade. How likely is it that we'll see an agreement at the next big round of negotiations in Copenhagen in December – especially given, as you said, that the Senate in the US seems to be holding up the process?

I think there are two big issues here. One is what the state is of the US domestic debate. If the President comes to Copenhagen with the Senate moving forward on climate legislation – with a leadership bill having been introduced and expressions of support – I think he'll have more credibility. Certainly more than President Clinton and vice-President Gore did in Kyoto when everyone knew that Congress was not likely to back what they were putting forward.

The other piece, which is equally daunting frankly, is the issue of climate finance: The roughly 100-150 billion euro-a-year estimates for developing countries for mitigation and adaptation activities on climate change. And there it's not just the US, but Europe and Japan as well which have to do much more to advance that issue before Copenhagen. Many of the developing countries have made it clear that if there is not the serious financing and technology package on offer in Copenhagen that was promised back in Bali two years ago, there's not going to be a deal from their side.

There are still critics who question not only whether an international deal is feasible, but whether it is even desirable. The controversial Danish Statistician Björn Lomborg told Deutsche Welle this week that cutting emissions was too expensive and ultimately futile. He said the world would get more bang for its buck by investing in super-projects to pump clouds into the atmosphere to cool the planet. Does Lomborg have a point?

We certainly disagree with his premise that cutting carbon emissions is expensive. As a matter of fact, my organization just completed an analysis of the US potential for emission reductions showing that we could go far beyond the reductions that the President and the Congress are talking about, and that (we could provide) savings for consumers.

The reality is, particularly energy efficiency investments pay back very quickly, and then you get benefits from that for years to come. There are also signals that wind energy and other renewable technologies are coming down in price. Wind is taking off in the United States as it is in other parts of the world, so I fundamentally disagree with the premise that cutting emissions has to be expensive. Yes there is some cost, but it is much less than the cost of damages from climate change that we will see if we don't take action.

When it comes to the issue of geo-engineering, this is obviously something the science community is starting to talk about. It is very controversial, because obviously these are unproven technologies, and more importantly there could be side-effects from these large-scale geo-engineering schemes that we don't fully understand. We're obviously not doing a very good of regulating the planet with our activities now, and to think that we can have some kind of technical fix that works without some kind of unforeseen side-effect is a little bit of hubris on our part. So I think there is some interest in exploring some of these options, but I think to hang your whole strategy on that would be a grave mistake.

So what are some of the biggest challenges going to be in securing a good deal at Copenhagen at the end of the year? Indeed, what would amount to a good deal?

I think what you need for a good deal is something that's ambitious, that's in line with what the science says we have to do to bend the emissions curve.

This means we need deeper reductions than what most of the industrialized countries are to date putting on the table. We also need action by the major developing countries to see a deviation from their business-as-usual growth-path in emissions over the next decade or so, with a view towards eventually having an absolute cap and eventual reduction in their emission later this century. And we need a substantial financing and technology package to help make those countries make the transition – to basically leap-frog across the way the industrialized countries did their development over the last century, and go right to cleaner technologies. I think that's going to be a real challenge.

There also has to be a fair agreement. It has to recognize the different stages of development that different countries are at; that acknowledges the fact that a country like India, for example, emits two tones of carbon per person or less, whereas my country, the United States, emits 20 tones per person – ten times as much. So it's not fair to ask India to do the same as the United States in terms of taking leadership. It is fair to ask India to do something, and to do more than they have been, and I think they're showing signals that they're willing to step up to the plate on that, as is China and other countries, but equity is a key part of this.

The third element is that it has to be binding. It has to be something that is not just a voluntary commitment, but where countries look each other in the eye and say 'we are going to do this, we are going to have a system of verification, a system of compliance, that assures us that each of is doing our part in what we agreed to in Copenhagen. Those are the three basic elements – it has to be fair, it has to be ambitious and it has to be binding.

Climate change is also on the agenda when the leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet on Thursday and Friday. Some say the G20 could prove to be an even more important venue to overcome deadlocks between rich nations like the US and developing countries like China…

The two issues that are on the agenda here in Pittsburgh this week are climate finance. How do you generate and govern the flows of investment that are needed for clean energy technologies; reducing the rate of deforestation in tropical rainforest countries; and for helping the poorest countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. That's going to be a big discussion.

The other issue, which the US has put on the agenda, is the issue of fossil fuel subsidies. It turns out that the world is spending somewhere around 200 billion dollars a year or more encouraging production and consumption on the very things we're trying to reduce to deal with global warming – that's coal and oil. So that topic is on the agenda, we'll see how far we get with that, that's obviously a very difficult issue - not only for the United States, but other countries. It's very political and there are entrenched interests that benefit from those embedded subsidies and will fight very hard against efforts to reduce or eliminate them.

Climate is just one of the topics, but it is the first time that it has been on the agenda in a way like at the G20 and I think that does give us some prospect of movement. Certainly if they do some follow up between Pittsburgh and Copenhagen and the G20 process, they could help deliver that element of the package on climate finance.

Interview: Nathan Witkop
Editor: Rick Demarest