Roadmap is limited but paves way for progress

DO NOT be downhearted about the outcome of the Bali talks. They did not deliver the binding commitments to cuts in greenhouse emissions that are desperately needed, and as a result millions may die who might have lived. But they did show us something remarkable.

They showed us the human race trying to grow up and take responsibility for its common future.

It doesn’t feel like that, of course. It feels like 15,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists and activists flew across continents in order to sit in Bali for two weeks and achieve little. Disappointment, and even anger, are not out of order, for the commitment to early and deep emission cuts (25% to 40% by 2020) that most developed countries wanted to see in the draft treaty had to be dropped in order to keep the US involved.

The Bush administration no longer denies climate change is a problem, but it is still determined to kill any international deal that involves legally binding targets. The US produces about a quarter of the world’s emissions, so no deal that excludes it would work. Moreover, the developing countries where emissions are growing fastest, particularly China and India, will never accept obligations of their own while the US accepts none. So the American delegation had to be kept on board no matter how obstructive it was. It was amazingly obstructive. There must be no targets, no timetables, no numbers at all in the “roadmap” that the conference was drawing up for the next two years of negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto treaty, insisted chief US negotiator Harlan Watson.

Why not? Because “once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction”. Yes, and if everybody’s shared goal is to cut emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, what’s wrong with that?

The US was almost completely isolated at the Bali talks. Its only two allies among the developed countries were Canada and Japan — both had promised modest emission cuts under the Kyoto accord 10 years ago but then allowed their emissions to soar.

It was Al Gore who saved the day when he urged the conference to be patient.

“My own country, the US, is mainly responsible for obstructing progress at Bali,” he said, but “over the next two years the US is going to be somewhere it is not now... One year and 40 days from today there will be a new [presidential] inauguration in the US.

“If you decide to continue the progress that has been made here on all the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions, on the hope and with the expectation that, before this process is concluded... you will be able to fill in that blank [with the help of a different position from the US], then you can make great progress here,” he said. In short, Bush will soon be gone. Even though time is short, you have to wait him out.

The conference took Gore’s advice and removed the numbers from the text. Even then, astonishingly, the US delegation declared it could not support the revised text. Boos rang out in the crowded conference hall, but the US delegation then announced it would support the revised text after all.

So there is a “roadmap” but the big conference, scheduled for Poland next December, will probably be allowed to slip by a couple of months so the new US administration is in office. And then, hopefully, they can put the numbers back in.