The original goal of Copenhagen was a 192-country treaty that committed all nations to reduce carbon emissions. The much-scaled down goal that emerged in the weeks before the delegates arrived was a “political agreement” (not a treaty) that expressed a global consensus on the importance of reducing emissions. What we finally got was a political agreement signed by a handful of countries—as far as I can tell from the press reports, only the United States, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, and a “group of European nations.” The other 180-odd countries refused to sign the Accord, instead merely “taking note” of it in the final Copenhagen document. The Accord did no more than reiterate that climate change is a problem and nations should do something about it. The White House has declared victory, or success, or validation, or some such thing; if that is so, what is failure?
As I noted in a previous post, one lesson of the debacle was the impossibility of global governance understood in the conventional sense to mean that all countries have some say in the development of international law. In a recent book, I speculated about this possible effect of the fragmentation of nations—the number of countries have approximately tripled since World War II. More nations, I argued, imply less international law, at least, of the sort that can solve global-scale public goods problems. Copenhagen illustrates the dilemma—you can have climate mitigation or you can have global governance; you can’t have both.
SuperSkeptic says:
Not being able to put positive spin on something, anything.
December 20, 2009, 12:13 pmPeteP says:
“The original goal of Copenhagen” was the money, period. A global scheme by the socialists to hold up the West / aka Northern countries for a global ransom, based on this new fantasy of ‘climate justice’, ‘eco reparations’, etc. That has always been clear. The ‘developing countries’ are willing to do exactly one thing to ‘save the planet’ – accept money, trillions of dollars, from ‘rich countries’, while doing exactly NOTHING to cut their carbon emissions ( the new Global Evil ).
They want to establish a permanent welfare system, transfer of wealth, for hundreds of billions of dollars every year ( years without end ), and they don’t care what lies they tell to do it. They want ‘The West’ to buy them an ‘American lifestyle’ in their southern countries, and that is ALL they ever cared about.
Period.
December 20, 2009, 12:21 pmBarbara Skolaut says:
“you can have climate mitigation or you can have global governance; you can’t have both”
There’s absolutely NO reason that we – as producers – should want either.
And
December 20, 2009, 12:30 pmhundreds of billions of $plenty of reasons we shouldn’t.JRL says:
How about “a 192-country treaty that committed all nations to reduce carbon emissions”?
December 20, 2009, 12:38 pmpireader says:
Professor Adler –
The Copenghagen “conference” of 45,000 people was pure street theater. And the 192-nation sessions were a clown show.
But the real negotiations were among the major developed and developing economies with substantial greenhouse gas emissions. and it appears that the signatories of the “political agreement” include most of those countries. So maybe we’re seeing progress. Maybe.
December 20, 2009, 1:17 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
‘Success’ may be coming back with an agreement so vague – and yet so important – that you can do anything you want to in its name.
December 20, 2009, 1:33 pmMartinned says:
Yes! It’s all a socialist conspiracy! Thank god someone thwarted it!
December 20, 2009, 1:50 pmDavid McCourt says:
Why is this a debacle? The political class got what they wanted: a gathering of the professional great and good where they could bloviate at length and come home declaring victory on the world stage, without risking their political necks by doing something actually harmful to their own citizens’ economic futures. As grand empty gesture, this is beaten only by the recent Nobel Peace Prize farce.
It would have been a debacle if something concrete had actually emerged from this circus of political bandwagon jumpers.
The real pity is that we have no Swift, no Waugh — no satirist who can do justice to these events. How could one, when plain facts outrun the fancies of literary art in the bizarro stakes. From an Australian newspaper:
Meanwhile the likes of Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe took to the Copenhagen conference rostrum to lecture the evil West on its capitalist crimes, to standing ovations, while Hillary pledged that the West will come up with a hundred billion dollars to give to the Indians and Chinese who are already eating our lunch and are far too wisely self-interested to rein in their own growth. Perhaps our salvation will lie in the fact that we owe too much money to the Chinese for them to let us sign up to a carbon-restriction suicide pact.
Away from the cocktail receptions and demonstrations, this week virtually every U.S. press outfit copied and published the PR handout, complete with pretty pictures, of a “report” they say was just issued, claiming that the Emperor Penguin, fresh from its movie debut triumph in “March of the Penguins,” is now endangered by melting sea ice in Antarctica. Only problem is that sea ice is increasing in Antarctica. In 2007 it was over 16 million sq. km., more than at any time since the inception of satellite measurements in 1979:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
So this “report” — which was published almost a year ago, in January, 2009 — cherry picks the one small place where Antarctic sea ice is shrinking and ignores the much larger areas where sea ice is growing. The Emperor penguin’s range includes the large growing areas as well as the tiny shrinking one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manchot_empereur_carte_reparition.png
Maybe that’s why the IPCC 4th Assessment reported: “Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.” Of course, these models are iffy, and satellite data for 30 years is but a snapshot, but that has never stopped the global warming alarmists from preaching certainty based on crude models and inadequate data.
And off in the corner, unnoticed, the Russians are now saying that the British appear to have cherry-picked Russian meteorological station records for their database, using only that data which showed a temperature increase in the second half of the 20th century, and ignoring the large segment of station measurements that showed no increase. http://icecap.us/images/uploads/BOMBSHELL.pdf
No matter, Global Warming is a movement now beyond the reach of scandal, or reason, or fact, or science, or prudence, or commonsense reasonable doubt. In that, if in nothing else, Al Gore and the Copengagen worthies are right: for them, the debate is over.
December 20, 2009, 2:45 pmrjs says:
EP: “The original goal of Copenhagen was a 192-country treaty that committed all nations to reduce carbon emissions.”
That’s a pretty broad statement. What is the authority for stating that this was the “original goal?” Whose goal?
December 20, 2009, 2:48 pmDavid Schwartz says:
rjs: The original stated goal of the Copenhagen conference was to complete a treaty. You can find many cites, but here’s one:
Expectations have been lowered several times.
December 20, 2009, 5:13 pmKim Gammelgård says:
Eric,
in your last post, you complained about lack of international democracy and in this post, you complain about that there are too many countries in the world to take a decision.
These frustrations are real, but I think you would benefit from spending some time analyzing what that subject is about.
Democracy is a state in which all affected have a say either directly or by elected representation. This is certainly not the case of most of the leaders present at Copenhagen, let alone the majority of the delegates, and if you wish to complain about Democracy, then you have to take a different route. One state=one vote could be one, but is not necessarily what I consider democracy.
On the other hand, in this post you complain about decisions not being able to be taken, as there are too many states. I believe that no decision could be made because there are too few states represented, as it is always the big countries who fail to enter an agreement, as they have too many interests to follow. This has been the case in the European Union for instance, where the bigger states are much more likely to act with a veto than the smaller states.
Another feature of democracy is that you should be able to find out what the consequenses for the different actions that are proposed will be, including doing nothing of course. It was perhaps the case that there was an alarmist consensus among the Western delegates as what would happen if nothing was decided, but did anyone find out what the consequenses of a binding treaty had been? That missing part made the democracy aspect a bit blurred in my view.
As I understand it, a “good” agreement could mean things like no more private holidays by air, no more (or much less) private air trafic, much limited private car trafic, better family planning in 3rd world countries including easy access to both condoms and abortion or whatever, oh no, the family planning thing was a taboo ;-)
December 20, 2009, 5:52 pmDavid Sucher says:
Hypothesis: It could be that one of the reasons that nothing happened at Copenhagen is that the USA wasn’t able to convince other nations that we would do anything due to the political noise coming from climate change “skeptics” (quote because skeptic suggests enough information for an opinion based on facts) like those found in the comments section (and elsewhere) on this blog?
December 20, 2009, 6:02 pmrjs says:
I’m not sure what the Washington Times – or any other newspaper – says matters as to what the goal of the conference was. You first have to determine whose goal you’re talking about, and then you might able to determine what that person/organization/government’s goal was. EP stated the goal passively, without attributing it to anyone. The article you quoted is similar.
I believe the conference is sponsored by the United Nations. My assumption, therefore, was that the “goal” would be the UN’s. If you look at so-called Copenhagen Accord, it says at the beginning: “In pursuit of the ultimate objective of the Convention as stated in its Article 2 . . ..” I tried to track backwards to Article 2, and I believe the Accord is referring to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Article 2, entitled “Objective,” states: “The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”
That’s not to say that I don’t agree, at least in part, with what I think EP is saying, which is that it’s almost impossible to get that many countries to agree on anything. Hey, we can’t even get agreement within each of the countries. Nonetheless, his post makes certain assumptions that arguably trigger loaded conclusions. I don’t think those assumptions are necessarily well-founded.
December 20, 2009, 6:25 pmSteven Den Beste says:
Diplomacy is always successful. It doesn’t matter what they do or what they come up with, the diplomats involved will always announce it as being important and worthwhile.
It is extremely rare for diplomats to walk away from such a meeting and say that it was a complete waste of time. (It has happened, however.)
December 20, 2009, 6:30 pmRowerinVA says:
Europe’s business community certainly thinks it’s a failure — a failure to impose regulation on the rest of the world to “level [the] playing field.” An EU business rep “suggested that industries based in Europe would increasingly move their operations to less regulated parts of the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/world/europe/21scene.html?pagewanted=2&hpw
I wonder if this threat is real, and if so, if it has already been occurring. I wonder if it’s only a fig leaf to cover the fact that business has been avoiding Europe due to other regulatory burdens, not just carbon rules.
December 20, 2009, 6:45 pmLarryA says:
I know of several individuals and small corporations that have moved firearm-related businesses to the U.S. due to “other regulatory burdens.”
December 20, 2009, 7:34 pm;-)
John Moore says:
Absent government coercion, business is generally going to go where it makes sense. Globalization and all that.
Even if the businesses don’t move, the business (economic activity) itself will move.
Either way, the business unfriendly countries lose.
December 20, 2009, 7:42 pmElliot says:
Did the US actually sign the document with pen and ink? If so, who signed and when?
December 20, 2009, 8:03 pmRoger Zimmerman says:
Probably, but to show why your analysis is incomplete, it is useful to compare the COP15 outcome with the apparent forward progress of the “health care” (and *I* use the quotes with the same purpose as you) monstrosity. There is very much ‘political noise’ in opposition to socialized medicine, but it has not been very effective. Why not? I suggest this is because the _moral_ ground was ceded to the socialists on this issue a very long time ago, and it therefore gives the politicians cover to proceed, no matter how cynical are there actual calculations. No matter how much you argue the economic insanity of the bill, if it is “the right thing to do”, morally, you will be pushing against a very strong tide. The proponents have an unspoken confidence in their goodness, and this will trump all practical considerations.
In “climate change”, there is no such moral confidence, mostly because the underlying morality of environmentalism is so completely and transparently heinous that few dare to name it. Monbiot’s recent column is the one recent exception, and I guarantee it will not be well received: “Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers”. How many Americans want to be on the side of the “restrainers”?
When you add in that almost all of the political push for command-and-control economic policy is from non-scientists that *also* lack confidence in their ability to understand (never mind argue for) the pro-AGW science, the contrast becomes clearer – COP15 could not buck both of these trends. If your argument is, in essence: we need to stop human progress in the name of an extremely complicated theory, that is showing some plausible signs that it may not be right, but we still have to “just trust” the scientists whose funding depends on our acceptance of this theory … it takes a very warped individual to argue with moral confidence for that position. Al Gore qualifies, as do some others, but, thankfully, not many exist.
The pure totalitarianism of the logically consistent environmentalist position appeals to a very small segment of the American electorate, and that is what doomed COP15.
December 20, 2009, 8:59 pmDave N. says:
But David Sucher, I thought that it was all Kumbaya and purple unicorns and good feelings now that the evil Bush Regime has been replaced by the beloved-by-the-world greatness of Barack Obama and his sainted administration.
I mean, the guy won a Nobel Peace Prize after being in office for less than month so he must be some special kind of leader. He was supposed to provide the Hope and Change the world believed in.
December 20, 2009, 10:22 pmSarcastro says:
Glad Dave N. brought up the old “The left thinks Obama is the messiah, unicorns lololol!” joke. I was worried it may have died. But of course such awesomely cutting humor can never die.
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December 21, 2009, 1:32 amEd Darrell says:
I’ll wager that most of the participants at Copenhagen thought the goal was to find agreement on solutions to to global warming, especially greenhouse gases control. Governance is a tool toward that, but not the goal.
The goal of the Clean Water Act was to get pollution out of natural streams and protect drinking water, agricultural water, recreational waters and resources for industry. As a move to totalitarianism, it didn’t work well. As a move toward clean water, it was okay.
Working against clean air and reduction of greenhouse gases isn’t likely to produce any breakthroughs in wise world governance, either. The disaster that looms isn’t likely to produce any benevolent form of increased world governance.
Maybe we should abandon this fetish with governance, and worry about how to clean the air, yes?
December 21, 2009, 4:36 amChrisB says:
Great to see a comment from a Chinese reader!
December 21, 2009, 6:07 amWidmerpool says:
I loved the quote from the U.N. apparatchik on the cover of Sunday’s NYT stating that “taking note” is “shorthand” for “acceptance.” In a similar vein, I’d like to point out that “no,” being only two letters, is “shorthand” for “yes.” Has Orwell finished rolling in his grave yet?
December 21, 2009, 9:02 amMartinned says:
…neither of which is remotely like signing or ratifying. If you’re going to talk about things like international summit meetings, you’re going to have to get used to the fact that diplomats, like lawyers, have their own jargon, with minute differences that lay people may not appreciate. (What’s the difference between possession and ownership, anyone?)
December 21, 2009, 9:12 amlgm says:
VC alternates between global warming denial and taunting people who are unable to combat global warming. But the Copenhagen accords are not a total debacle. In fact, the obstacle to fighting global warming is the large emerging economies — India and China. Any agreement between the US and those two is progress. It doesn’t matter that much whether Fiji is on board.
December 21, 2009, 9:56 amDave N. says:
Sarcastro,
I realize sarcasm is your schtick, and perhaps should have left it to you, but David Suchor’s comment was so vapid that I thought it deserved sarcasm.
December 21, 2009, 10:14 amwws says:
Eliot wrote: “Did the US actually sign the document with pen and ink? If so, who signed and when?”
Obama has now gone on record as saying that there was nothing agreed to at Copenhagen that actually required any signatures. In other words, it’s all in the nature of gentleman’s agreements and secret accords.
Which should give you a good idea as to just how “bound” anyone is going to be to it. Even the talked about $100 billion to poor countries is just wishful thinking – it only happens if Congress votes for it, and won’t THAT be a popular vote to take next year! My bet is that they never get around to actually bringing it up. And of course, Obama won’t mind; as with everything, there was no intent to actually DO that, there was just the desire to get the credit for proposing it.
But it’ll take a couple more years for the smaller countries to realize just how badly Obama has just sold them all down the river.
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August 30, 2010, 8:32 pm