Concensus Trance, The Copenhagen Collapse, And What To Expect From Paris
This is a long, but really interesting article.
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Since Copenhagen, progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock. Annual COPs have happened in Mexico, South Africa, Qatar, Poland, and Peru, with each year’s proceedings proclaimed a diplomatic success, despite the fact that the parties may be farther than ever from a legally enforceable plan to reduce emissions. The agenda of voluntary national pledges was finally ratified – over Bolivia’s strong objections – in Cancún in 2010; in Durban, South Africa the following year, the parties agreed that no new climate treaty would come into effect until 2020, with the terms to be finalized in Paris in 2015. National “pledges” turned into “commitments,” and last year in Lima, Peru, they were further watered down to “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” to emissions reduction (INDCs). Contributions in some cases could be based on reductions in the carbon intensity of an economy, even if those reductions would be overwhelmed by economic growth, as in the case of China. Further, the US and other rich countries have pushed to dilute the long-standing focus on “common but differentiated responsibilities” for climate mitigation that was enshrined in the original UNFCCC, and abandon the more explicit language on climate equity that was approved in Kyoto and has long been an underlying principle of the negotiations.
Still, proponents of the “voluntary contributions” approach continue to spin it as the best possible outcome of the process. In a 2014 article in Yale’s environmental web journal, former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle argued that the current paradigm offers the most promising possible “bottom-up” approach, and one that “builds on national self-interest and spurs a ‘race to the top’ in low-carbon energy solutions,” while shifting the focus from “burden to opportunity” and from rhetoric to “tangible action.” Unfortunately, none of the global South delegates who staged a walk-out of the massively industry-sponsored COP in Warsaw the previous winter saw it that way at all. Without any meaningful enforcement measures, how can nation states be held accountable for honoring their voluntary “pledges”? With fossil fuel interests still dominating domestic politics in many countries, can the world settle for a diplomacy based mainly on cultivating a sense of moral obligation on the part of national governments and global corporations?
Indeed a 2013 speech by Obama’s lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, made it clear that the primary US role in the process remains one of obstruction and obfuscation (the full text is available on the State Department website). Stern blamed poorer countries for resisting an “agreement applicable to all parties,” and celebrated the focus on “self-determined mitigation commitments” instead of legally-binding obligations to reduce emissions. He dismissed the “loss and damage” debate that would come to dominate the 2013 Warsaw COP as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame,” and insisted that no significant public funds for international climate aid would be available beyond the meager $2.5 billion that the US has committed annually since 2010. Further, he thoroughly rejected the long-standing principle of responsibility for historical CO2 emissions, insisting, with unsurpassed arrogance, that, “It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.” Ethics aside, Stern would have us all forget that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and a much larger share since the first scientific observations of rising atmospheric CO2 levels in the late 1950s.
Managing Expectations
In recent weeks, laudatory headlines have accompanied the news that formerly reluctant countries, especially China, India and Brazil, have now announced their intended climate “contributions” for the decade of the 2020s. Unfortunately, despite some incremental progress, these quasi-pledges don’t really add up. Two independent analyses of all countries’ climate pledges to date were released in early October. The MIT-affiliated Climate Interactive projected that the existing pledges would result in 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 °F) of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, far short of the Copenhagen goal of a maximum of 2 degrees. The Climate Action Tracker, a project of four independent research organizations with support from international environmental groups and the World Bank, among others, put forward a more optimistic estimate, projecting a global temperature rise between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees C by 2100 if current pledges are fully implemented. These represent a significant improvement over the business-as-usual scenario of 4 to 5 degrees of average warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, but not a huge step beyond the modest carbon-reduction policies that various countries already have in place. The Climate Action Tracker now projects a 92 percent probability of exceeding 2 degrees this century.
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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-11-12/is-the-paris-climate-conference-designed-to-fail
= new reply since forum marked as read
Uh...I don't think that's gonna cut it, assuming Paris even ends up with a binding agreement. 
