Kerry (and De Boer) on Copenhagen

[karynnj]

Mr. de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, spoke in a telephone conference call sponsored by the Pew Environment Group. Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who will lead the Senate delegation to the talks and who has sponsored global warming legislation, also participated in the call.

Mr. Kerry said that the Copenhagen conference would not produce a binding international treaty, as had once been hoped, in part because the United States cannot deliver a firm commitment to mandatory greenhouse gas reductions until Congress acts on legislation. He said that the health care debate had helped crowd out consideration of climate legislation, but that he expected the Senate to act on his bill in the first half of next year.

He said that a successful outcome at Copenhagen — one that met Mr. de Boer’s three criteria — would help members of Congress fashion a bill that meets the United Nations targets. That, in turn, would help the world complete the Copenhagen process by reconvening next year to hash out a binding international treaty that can be ratified, he said.

“If Copenhagen achieves those three goals - and I believe it can - it will be a very significant agreement and it will lay the groundwork for us to proceed forward,” Mr. Kerry said.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/kerry-de-boer-preview-copenhagen/

[MH1]

1. unfortunately it looks like Hansen now wants Copenhagen to fail

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE5B21BK20091203

LONDON (Reuters) - The planet would be better off if the forthcoming Copenhagen climate change talks ended in collapse, according to a leading U.S. scientist who helped alert the world to dangers of global warming.

Any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed, said James Hansen, that it would be better for future generations if we were to start again from scratch.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track," Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told the Guardian newspaper.

"The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means."

[karynnj]

2. Not good

The odd thing is that where some people were initially concerned that Al Gore should not be a global warning expert because he is not a scientist, this is the reverse problem. Here it is James Hansen speaking outside his area of expertise.

He is a renown scientist, but he is not an economist or a legislator. I have always liked the way Senator Kerry has always spoken of the scientists' work and their conclusions, then spoke of his job as a legislator to write law that would be good policy. Here, Jansen is correct that ANY more carbon into the air is bad, but saying this shows he has no understanding of politics at all.

Tackling climate change does not allow room for the compromises that govern the world of politics, Hansen said.

"This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50 percent or reduce it 40 percent."

"We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed," he added.

What he doesn't get is that in the US, no President has the ability to refuse to compromise. Here, just as Gore, Kerry or Obama, would not think to tell him to make changes to his analyses, they really have more expertise on developing public policy. The fact is that if someone like Kerry says that a carbon tax could not pass the Senate, I believe that he can count the votes.