Climate Diplomacy, In Bonn And D.C.

In the lead up to the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris later this year, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was recently hosting its annual Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) session in Bonn, Germany. This session, ADP 3, is three months prior to COP21 and presents the Parties -- the negotiating bodies for each country -- with a need to further develop and clarify the text that came out of the previous intersessional, ADP 2.9, in Bonn, Germany. This text will be used during the final 2015 climate negotiations in Paris and will give us the 2015 Agreement. 

 

With the close of the latest round of the United Nations climate negotiations in Bonn, it is now more likely than ever that a comprehensive, durable new climate regime will be agreed upon in Paris this December. While discussions were often painstakingly slow, diplomats were able to find areas of convergence on some key issues and carve out a credible pathway toward a final outcome.

 

This progress was not assured when the week began. Negotiators arriving in Bonn were confronted with a long list of critical issues and a dizzying array of proposals for resolving them. The catalogue of these options ran to over 80 pages. Since the final agreement will only be a small fraction of that, a lot of work remains to edit it down to a manageable size. But at this stage of the negotiations, the text is not that critical. What matters now is finding political shape of the outcome. Which issues are universally agreed upon and can be included in the deal? Which issues may need further elaboration and can be resolved after Paris? Where are the lines that certain Parties will not cross, and where are the best avenues toward compromise? Only after the boundaries of consensus have been clarified can the commas and semicolons be coaxed into place.  

 

Parties showed that they are willing to move beyond the rote repetition of familiar positions and grapple with these fundamental issues. They began to identify ways forward, opportunities to bridge differences, and potential landing zones of agreement. And the tone was pragmatic and productive: voices were not raised, tables were not pounded, fingers were not pointed.  At the close of the session, the Parties saw enough progress on the broad outlines of the agreement to give the co-chairs—Daniel Reifsnyder of the United States and Ahmed Djoghlaf of Algeria—a mandate to draft a more concise negotiating text that will provide options on all of the key elements.

 

President Obama and his team deserve a lot of credit for the constructive vibe that has taken hold in the negotiations. His success last year in securing an agreement with China to reduce carbon pollution has deflated much of the tension between developed and developing countries that has long divided global climate politics. His focused engagement with other world leaders has also helped to reframe the challenge in more pragmatic ways. And within the negotiations, Reifsnyder and his Algerian co-chair have earned credit for adeptly facilitating the discussions.   

 

Meanwhile, back home, Congressional Republican leadership has been conducting a parallel diplomatic initiative of their own. Their aides were making the rounds at foreign embassies in Washington, D.C., peddling a “can’t do” vision of American fecklessness. “Don’t count on America,” they told the ambassadors, we won’t implement the Clean Power Plan, we won’t meet our proposed target for reducing carbon pollution, and we won’t do anything to help poor countries address the most extreme threats of a changing climate.  

 

As David Doniger at NRDC pointed out, this is a new variation of an old, discredited theme. Congressional Republicans have long fought U.S. action on the grounds that other countries were not reliable, now they are trying to persuade other countries to do nothing on the grounds that the U.S. is unreliable.

 

I’ll let David and others discuss how disingenuous and short-sighted this is. To me, it just seems rather pathetic.  It’s the kind of “only-in-Washington” mashup of hypocrisy, self-importance, and absurdity that Jon Stewart would have just crushed.

 

It’s hard to see why anyone would think this might work. The vast majority of foreign leaders want a strong deal in Paris, and they know that President Obama wants one as well. They understand American politics well enough to hold Congressional Republicans, not the President, accountable for their obstructionism. And surely, they also understand power politics well enough to see that this is a gambit born out of weakness rather than strength.

 

If any foreign diplomats were influenced by this ham-fisted effort, it certainly wasn’t evident in Bonn. The effect there was precisely zero.  No one, not even our most difficult adversaries, saw fit to challenge the credibility of the U.S.’s proposed contribution.  Russia, it seems, has declined the Congressional Republicans’ kind offer to draft their talking points for them.

 

This all raises the question of whether there is anything we can learn from juxtaposing the   steady progress in Bonn with the farce in Washington. I think there is. Previously, the main rift in global climate politics was between developed and developing countries. Each could justify a lack of action on the basis of the inaction of the other. But now, due in no small part to the deft diplomacy of the Obama administration, this dynamic is receding. All countries are agreeing to do what they can to limit carbon pollution, and as clean energy becomes cheaper and more pervasive, they are agreeing to take increasingly more substantial action.

 

However, in its place, a new fault line is emerging as the critical battleground in the fight for climate stability. Rather than between countries or groups of countries, this battle is taking place within all countries. Arrayed on one side of this fight are those who are working to put the policies and investment strategies in place to unleash the clean energy revolution—civil society, far-sighted decision-makers, and progressive business leaders. On the other side are those who have profited handsomely under the old ways—mainly the coal industry, other fossil fuel interests, and the politicians who serve them.

The spectacle of the Congressional GOP’s junior varsity diplomats trying but failing to hamstring the President’s efforts to build global climate partnerships shows just how much the old North-South politics are changing, how activists around the world are winning their domestic fights for climate action, and just how far some politicians are still willing to go to defend dirty energy interests. It also serves to ensure that the way forward will be more difficult and divisive than the politics we are leaving behind.