This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the EU’s inf luence at-tempts and their effects during a time period that was supposed to lead to the substantial development of the climate regime, but resulted only in minor reforms. It traces the EU’s inf luence on the “post-2012” climate negotiations during the period 2007 to 2009, starting with COP 13 in Bali and ending with COP 15/MOP 5 in Copenhagen, originally designated as the f inal point of this negotiation process (see Annex II).
The Context: Major Developments in Global Politics and Climate Science
The period 2007 to 2009 was marked by one important event that would impact on global politics. Moreover, long-term trends concerning global policy-making, the GHG emission trajectories of major countries and advances in climate science played a role in changing the overall framework in which global climate negotiations were conducted.
The major event occurred in mid-September 2008 in the United States, but immediately gained global signif icance. Following the f ile for bank-ruptcy of Lehman Brothers, one of the major global f inancial-services companies, US and global f inancial markets came under serious strains.
This initial distress quickly turned into a major global f inancial and eco-nomic crisis when other f inancial institutes equally became insolvent. The crisis would have two major repercussions for the global politics of cli-mate change from late 2008 on. F irstly, it made many governments across the world pay almost exclusive attention to the economic well-being of their populations, weakening the often already volatile interest for tackling climate change – despite voices from the UN, EU and US calling for solv-ing the economic and climate crises together (Goldenberg 2009a; Dimas 2009; Ban Ki-moon 2009; Yuxia 2008). To stabilize the global economy (inter alia by rescuing major private f inancial institutions) and to attenuate other effects of the recession (such as growing unemployment), consider-able amounts of public money were invested by governments all over the
world. Although the stimulus packages initiated in major countries regu-larly dedicated a percentage to so-called “green investments” (Goldenberg 2009a; European Commission 2009h), the lion’s share went into other measures, inter alia the stabilization of certain polluting industries (e.g.
automotive). The sheer magnitude of public funding also implied that gov-ernments felt that fewer resources were available to support mitigation and adaptation measures in developing countries, constraining their own room for manoeuvre on this major cornerstone of the global climate nego-tiations. The second signif icant effect of the crisis was a tectonic shift in global (economic) politics more generally, with the sudden rise in impor-tance of the G-20 (gathering the G-8 members, including the EU, as well as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey). After several meetings about new regulatory measures for the global f inancial markets, the forum proclaimed, in September 2009, that it would henceforth replace the G-8 as the key site for coordination among the most signif icant economies of the globe, including on such issues as climate change (CBS 2009).
Several gradual developments were equally to affect climate negotia-tions during this time period. Although an immediate product of the cri-sis, the rise of the G-20 also ref lected the growing importance of emerging countries, such as China, India or Brazil (regularly referred to as BRIC, together with Russia, Keukeleire/Bruyninckx 2011), in world affairs. Their heightened signif icance was, in many cases, a direct result of long-term high economic growth rates, often coupled with equally exceptional de-mographic weight (e.g. China, with growth rates between 9 and 11.5% in 2004–2008, for 1.32 billion people; India, with growth rates between 7.3 and 9.8% in 2004–2008, for 1.15 billion people – Chinability 2009; CIA 2009). Economic growth had, however, also been accompanied by a stable trend of steeply rising GHG emissions in these countries. In 2007, China had overtaken the US as the world’s number one emitter in absolute terms (PBL 2008). Moreover, studies suggested that the proportions between de-veloped and developing countries were continuing to change dramatically not only in terms of annual absolute emissions, but also with regard to cu-mulative contributions to the problem of climate change. Under a business-as-usual assumption, China would overtake Western Europe as a cumulative CO2 contributor during the 2020s and the US by mid-century, while India would arrive at an equal level of CO2 emissions as Western Europe by 2080 (Botzen et al. 2008: 571). Taken together, these trends in economic growth, demography and the resulting effects on the global environment were bound to represent a gradual shift in the balance of powers in global (climate) poli-tics. Where past debates on these issues had been dominated, oftentimes and on many agenda items, by the industrialized players, emerging economies were moving centre stage in the second half of the 2000s.
Additionally, the rise of the G-20 provided an emblematic example of the continued trend of an unprecedented increase in the number of fora, meetings and actors in global climate politics. With the partial de-localisation of talks into the G-8(+5), the Major Economies Meeting/
Forum and many regional or inter-regional gatherings (the APP, APEC, Asia-Europe meetings, EU/Latin America summits etc.), global climate policy debates became less restricted to the sole UN regime. In the late 2000s, extra-UN meetings would remain related to the UN regime talks, but would also take on a dynamic of their own. The change in quality and quantity of arenas also coincided with an increase in the number of meet-ings, enabling an almost continual exchange between the representatives of the major players (Interviews US, EU representatives 17, 6). This was further facilitated through new communication technologies that, at the time of the Kyoto talks, had only just begun to become more widely used (Oberthür/Ott 1999: 82–84). F inally, climate change became also increasingly subject of exchanges at high political levels and by different constituencies (development experts, f inance experts etc.) in the vari-ous new fora. This increasing trend of “high-levelisation” would become particularly visible during the f inal days of the Copenhagen summit.
Together with the further explosion of the number of non-party partici-pants in and around global climate talks, be they from civil society, re-search institutes or the media, this contributed to the growing complexity of the climate politics arena.
Turning to the scientif ic knowledge about climate change, the succes-sive release of the various parts of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report (FAR) over the course of the year 2007 marked a major event during this time period. Without repeating details of the FAR already discussed in the Introduction to this work, some of its key messages shaped, together with the 2006 Stern Report that linked the science and the economics, the understanding of climate change and the perceptions of the issue among the interested public and politicians (Hasselmann/Barker 2008: 219).
Those messages were above all: 1. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal” (IPCC 2007b: 30); 2. Some impacts of climate change may be “abrupt or irreversible” (IPCC 2007a: 13); 3. Stringent early action is necessary to prevent its most worrisome consequences. With regard to the latter, it was especially various GHG stabilisation scenarios – linking, e.g., a 2°C global mean temperature increase above pre-industrial levels to a stabilisation at 450 ppm, which would necessitate a peak in global GHG emissions by 2000–2015 and a reduction of 50 to 85% by 2050 – that would acquire signif icance as points of reference in global debates (IPCC 2007b: 67). F inally, compared to its predecessors, the FAR had a much higher public resonance, underscoring the urgency with which climate change had to be tackled (Garber 2008).
Key Actors in the Global Climate Regime and their Positions
To further set the stage for the process-trace, the negotiation posi-tions and their foundaposi-tions as well as the strategies of the main coaliposi-tions/
countries in the regime negotiations prior to the kick-off (and as far as relevant and not explicitly taken up during the discussion of the negotia-tion process also in the early stages) of the post-2012 negotianegotia-tions require particular consideration.1 The analysis focuses in the f irst instance on the key actors other than the EU, before explicitly discussing the Union’s ac-tor capacity and position.
Key Actors Other than the EU
The Umbrella Group continued to be split across UN negotiation fora in 2007: under the Framework Convention, the US was an active part of the Group, while it played (formally) a marginal role as observer in de-bates on the Kyoto Protocol.
In 2007, the United States possessed still the largest economy in the world, and had only just ceded the top spot as the world’s biggest GHG emitter to China (World Bank 2008; UNSD 2009). As a result of its high dependency on fossil fuels (oil: 40%, coal: 23% of total energy produc-tion in 2006, US EPA 2008: ES-12), signif icant growth rates were still directly linked to rising emissions. As of 2006, these had increased by 14.7% compared to 1990 (US EPA 2008). In the face of these numbers, and despite observable ecological and socioeconomic impacts, the per-ception of vulnerability to climate change in the US had, for a long time, remained rather low (Romàn/Carson 2009: 41–42). It would only change in the course of the late 2000s under the more compelling evidence of climate science (IEEP/NRDC 2008: 60–61). One contributing factor to the fairly limited degree of concern had been the attitude of the Bush ad-ministration, which had downplayed or even opposed the f indings of cli-mate scientists ever since the 2001 withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol ratif ication process.2 In the particular US institutional context for climate policy-making (see Chapter 3), which grants a strong role to Congress (and here notably the Senate), the fact that the latter was Republican-dominated for much of the time during the Bush era meant that “no federal policies of signif icance” were enacted between 2001 and 2008 (Urpelainen 2009: 100). Yet, “while climate change policy appear[ed]
1 The distinction between “prior to” and “during” the negotiations is fuzzy because re-form talks had been ongoing ever since 2005, but it is fair to say that the off icial post-2012 negotiations commenced with the 2007 Bali COP.
2 For one of the f irst times, George W. Bush mentioned climate change as a “serious challenge” in his State of the Union Address of 23 January 2007 (Bush 2007: 5).
hopelessly deadlocked in Washington, a set of state governments that cut across partisan and regional lines [was] demonstrating that it is possible to make some signif icant inroads on the issue” (Rabe 2004: 4).3 These and other, civil society-based initiatives (IEEP/NRDC 2008) did, how-ever, not have a major impact on the administration’s overall position and strategy in the global climate negotiations. Until the end of 2007, it “rejected binding country-by-country limits on greenhouse gas emis-sions, focusing instead on a long list of voluntary bilateral and regional initiatives”, such as special ties with India and China and the APP as well as, since September 2007, the “Major Economies Meeting” gather-ing countries that covered 80% of the world’s emissions (Pataki/Vilsack 2008: 27–28). Although unique in its domestic inactivity, the Bush ad-ministration’s negotiation position actually represented a continuation of long-standing US positions in global climate talks. For quite some time, the US had emphasized the importance of hands-on technology- based international cooperation to ensure cost-effectiveness of climate policies, notably through the use of f lexible mechanisms, and had been concerned with the participation of major emerging economies, particularly China, in the global climate regime (Urpelainen 2009: 101–103; Biermann 2005: 276–277). It was not until late 2007 and 2008 that US climate poli-cies would slightly alter, before undergoing signif icant transformations, paired with a change in public attitudes, in 2009. Without going into the details of the development of the US position, discussed where relevant in the process trace, the Bush administration did, in 2008, begin to acknowl-edge the necessity to act on climate change, with the President proposing to halt the growth of US emissions by 2025 (AFP 2008a). Further, during the presidential election campaign of 2007/2008, both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain displayed greater willingness to engage on climate policy domestically and globally (AFP 2008b). At the same time, a now Democratic majority in Congress attempted to have climate legislation passed: the most wide-reaching of several proposals, the Liebermann-Warner Climate Security Act, foresaw a stabilization of GHG emissions at 2005 levels by 2012, and a reduction by 70% until 2050. It was voted down in the Senate in June 2008 (Spiegel 2008b).4
3 To highlight but two examples (Romàn/Carson 2009), at state level, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) of 2005 joined ten states from the East Coast to-gether in a cap-and-trade system covering utility sector emissions. Similar initiatives were created by f ive Western states and in the Midwest (six US states plus Manitoba).
At the local level, the US Council of Mayors signed a Climate Protection Agreement in 2005: covering more than 900 cities in early 2009, the mayors committed their com-munities to individually complying with the Kyoto targets.
4 A key feature of the bill was the proposal of a national cap-and-trade scheme covering electric utility, manufacturing and transportation industries. Emission trading would remain the policy tool of choice of US lawmakers in the period thereafter.
An almost complete reversal in terms of (i) the attitude towards climate change (both by political elites and growing parts of the public),5 (ii) the necessity of global cooperation on the issue, and (iii) the means of achiev-ing climate-related policy objectives could then be detected after Obama had taken off ice with the promise of reducing emissions by 80% by 2050 (Urpelainen 2009: 112, 100–117; Romàn/Carson 2009). Regarding his administration’s approach to global climate politics, it quickly became clear that domestic policies would have to precede US commitment to a global climate agreement: “the US will have no international credibil-ity until it acts decisively at home” (Stern/Antholis 2007/8: 177; Pataki/
Vilsack 2008). By following this approach, the US government wanted to avoid a repeat of the frustrating experiences associated with the Kyoto Protocol (Interviews Observers 23, 4). This implied, as further developed in the story of the negotiations, that the Obama administration – and here in the f irst place the State Department negotiators – would be waiting for any type of legislation out of Congress as a basis for committing to climate policies negotiated globally.
As of 2007, Japan’s stance in the global climate talks had not consider-ably changed since the Kyoto COP. The main economic and political con-ditions for policy-making on this issue had remained stable. As the second largest economy in the world, Japan remained the sixth largest emitter in the late 2000s (behind China, the US, the EU-27, Russia and India) (World Bank 2008; van Asselt et al. 2009: 321), with an important fossil fuel dependency (oil represented 46%, coal 21% of the energy produc-tion in 2006) (Korppoo 2009a: 71). Measures to curb emissions, mainly through the 2005 “Kyoto Protocol Target Achievement Plan”, comprised policies and measures such as voluntary targets for large companies and energy eff iciency standards for vehicles and appliances (Korppoo 2009a:
74–76). Advances in energy eff iciency were, however, offset by rising car and household appliance sales. As a result, Japan’s emissions had grown by 5% in 2006 compared to 1990 levels, and were further on the rise (Korppoo 2009a: 73). In 2007, its 6% Kyoto emissions reduction target seemed thus out of reach (Luta 2009: 4). Policy-making on climate meas-ures had regularly been subject to intense struggles between the concerned Ministries of the Environment (MOE) and of Economy, Technology and Industry (METI, formerly called MITI). As “Japanese society and econo-my ha[d] traditionally been industry-oriented” and climate change had not yet become a major topic in public debates, business interests – defended by METI – played a decisive role in the def inition of policies (Interview EU representative 24; Korppoo 2009a: 78–79). In the past, turf wars
5 In mid-2009, this rise in US public support of domestic and international climate poli-cies had already come to a halt again (Nordhaus/Shellenberger 2009).
between these two players had been settled through interventions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and/or the Prime Minister injecting foreign policy considerations into the debates (van Asselt et al. 2009: 322). Such considerations usually concerned the country’s relationship with China and the US as well as its desire to sustain the global leadership it had provided regarding climate change through hosting COP 3 (van Asselt et al. 2009: 320–321; Korppoo 2009a: 79). This type of internal strug-gles based on tensions between ecological, economic and foreign policy considerations continued well into the analysed period. When def ining the country’s position for the post-2012 talks, successive Japanese gov-ernments had refused to quantify mid-term reduction targets in 2007, of-fering only a long-term aspirational aim of halving emissions by 2050 (van Asselt et al. 2009: 323). Further specif ication of this position became necessary in 2008 when Japan was to host the G-8 summit (Interview EU representative 24). During the debate preceding the summit, “the Ministry of the Environment (MOE), together with a network of environmentally-minded NGOs, pushed for a post-Kyoto commitment that would be in line with the EU’s –20% target”, but opposition was “organized, f ierce and unapologetic” (Luta 2009: 4). The f inal position would only emerge in mid-2009, and be subject to an unprecedented reversal by a new gov-ernment in September of that year, as further discussed in this chapter.
A more stable element of Japan’s position concerned the long-standing call for “meaningful participation” of all major emitters in global mitiga-tion efforts (UNFCCC 2007j). A novelty in the expression of this interest was its proposal to distinguish among categories of non-Annex I coun-tries on the basis of criteria such as emissions share or wealth indicators (e.g. GDP/capita) (van Asselt et al. 2009: 324). It proposed that different groups of countries should adopt varying measures, ranging from binding targets to voluntary commitments (Korppoo 2009a: 67; Interview EU rep-resentative 24). In the defence of these positions, Japan initially adopted a strategy best characterized as a “two-arena game”, with participation in the UN regime as a major forum to discuss a global policy framework and in the APP as an arena to pursue interests regarding technological co-operation and to intensify relations with partners (US, China) (van Asselt et al. 2009: 326–332).
The Russian Federation had been the latecomer to the Kyoto Protocol, and joined it for reasons related to economic self-interest rather than cli-mate mitigation as such. As the ninth largest economy on the planet in 2007, the country was the fourth largest emitter (behind China, the US, the EU-27) due to its high reliance on gas (53% in 2006), oil (21% in 2006) and coal (16% in 2006) (World Bank 2008; UNSD 2009; Korppoo 2009b: 88). Russia’s role during the Kyoto Protocol’s ratif ication process demonstrated that the country did not really possess a clear conception of
the importance of climate change and its own vulnerability to its effects, with Russian elites and the public paying little attention to and, to some extent, denying the threats related to climate change (Andonova 2009:
38; Korppoo 2009c: 4). As Russian compliance with its Kyoto target of stabilizing its emissions over the period 2008–2012 (against 1990 lev-els) was never really endangered,6 few domestic measures had been put into place. A key tool was the “Energy Eff icient Economy” programme including a range of macroeconomic policies to reduce energy intensity by modernizing economic structures. The def inition of both internal and external climate policies had long been led by the largely independent Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet), placed under the responsibility of the Ministry of National Resources during the period analysed here (Korppoo 2009b:
82). Gradually, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade had also taken on a stronger role in the def inition of the country’s climate policies (Andonova 2009: 42). Together with the highest political lead-ers (President and Prime Minister) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
82). Gradually, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade had also taken on a stronger role in the def inition of the country’s climate policies (Andonova 2009: 42). Together with the highest political lead-ers (President and Prime Minister) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,