Durban and the road ahead

Elizabeth May

Originally published in
Island Tides,Vol 24, Number 1, Jan 12, 2012.

I have been home on Canadian soil for the
last few weeks, happy to enjoy Christmas in Sidney, but having trouble shaking
the residual depression from Prime Minister Harper’s decision to legally
withdraw from Kyoto.  Naturally, most
Canadian media coverage focussed on Canada’s role in Durban, not on the results.

To give you a sense of the nail-biting
finish, look at this photo (new tab), taken (not by me) in the wee hours of Sunday,
December 11 as two weeks of negotiations, and three days of round the clock
talks, hung by a thread.

Since 2005, climate talks have been moving
along two tracks – decisions under the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on
Climate Change (described as the Long-term Cooperative Action - or LCA – track)
and under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  The key difference between the two tracks is that the US is
part of the 1992 FCCC, but not Kyoto. 
All other countries are within Kyoto, but the support for a second
commitment period has been waning. Sub-issues abound, from funding adaptation,
to monitoring, to how to account for changes to forest cover. It is ultimately
enormously complicated.  But it
would be a mistake to think it is challenging primarily due to its complexity.  It is challenging because the weight of
some of the biggest corporations in the world, Big Oil and Big Coal, have been
blocking progress.

People talk about “the U.N” as though it
were a building, or a bureaucracy. 
It is both, but it is in its workings, and failings, a collection of
nations, and they are a collection of people.

This is what the U.N. looks like.  It is not institutional.  It is excruciatingly human.  Here you see the faces of the key
movers of progress (or blockers of progress depending on where you sit) after
many sleep-deprived hours.

Standing is the President of COP17, the
woman who chaired all proceedings, formal and informal – South African Minister
of International Relations, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.  To her left, sits India’s Minister of
Environment and chief climate negotiator, Jayanthi Natarajan.  Across from her, the blond woman in
profile is Denmark’s former environment minister, the woman who unsuccessfully
battled her own Prime Minister to try to avoid disaster in Copenhagen at COP15.
(William Marsden’s new book, Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of
Climate Change Knopf Canada, has nailed down critical details of how and
why COP15 went so very badly).  Connie Hedegaard left Danish politics soon after the
Copenhagen train-wreck to take up the challenge of negotiating climate on
behalf of the EU. 

There in that
snapshot is the drama of our future in negotiation.  Three women working in English, not the first language of
any of them, translation headsets abandoned on the table. In the end, it was
the Brazilian minister who found the language that allowed the whole package of
agreements to be approved (dubbed “weasel words” by The Economist, and not unjustly).  Instead of “legally binding” agreements under the LCA track,
the Durban agreement sets out that the LCA commitments will be in the form of “a protocol,
another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force.”

Some have denounced
Durban as a complete failure; others claim it was an historic break
through.  In truth, it was a bit of
both.  If this set of agreements were
all we ever achieved to reduce emissions, human civilization would not have
much hope of survival.  But if the
negotiations had made no progress at all, our hope of future progress would be
dashed.  As Gwynne Dyer commented
in his analysis, Suicide Pact in Durban,
http://gwynnedyer.com, “The outcome at Durban could have been even worse – a complete
abandonment of the concept of legal obligations to restrict emissions – but it
was very, very bad.”

What the
EU,  low-lying island states,
Africa and environmental groups all wanted was a legally binding second
commitment period under Kyoto.  A
second commitment period under Kyoto was also the sine qua non for China, Brazil and other growing economies to take
on new commitments under the LCA track. 
 EU leadership gained the
lifeline to Kyoto with a second commitment period, to begin January 1, 2013,
avoiding any gap in legally mandated reductions. 

The
weakness is obvious.  The targets
for reductions on the order of 20-30% below 1990 levels by 2020, only apply to
the European Union and a handful of other countries  -- Norway, New Zealand and Australia.  

But what
did the EU gain to win that second commitment period?  An LCA track decision for an all-inclusive set of reductions
(having “legal force”) negotiated by 2015, to take effect by 2020. 

And here is where it is clear the negotiations failed. 2015 is too late
to act and 2020 is certainly too late to avoid shooting way past those tipping
points in the atmosphere that preclude civilization from having a chance. As
one scientist put it to the BBC:

"The agreement here has not in itself taken us off the 4C path we
are on, but by forcing countries for the first time to admit that their current
policies are inadequate and must be strengthened by 2015, it has snatched 2C
from the jaws of impossibility.

"At the same time it has re-established the principle that climate
change should be tackled through international law, not national,
voluntarism." (Michael Jacobs, visiting professor at the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, UK).

Lessons from Durban?  Kyoto still matters. For Canadians to
help the global process, we need to reverse the letter of intent to withdraw
from Kyoto, which will not take effect until December 31, 2012. Somehow, we
need to mobilize a global public to take on the fossil fuel industry. There is
still hope, but with each year’s delay, we have less time.  The atmosphere is not negotiating with
humanity.  And time is not our
friend.