The expected endgame of the international climate talks in Durban is shaping up to be a fierce standoff.

A showdown has emerged between the E.U. and other parties over their conditions for agreeing to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. The first commitment period will expire in 2012. If it is not renewed, the fate of the instruments that support the world’s fragile carbon market is uncertain.

Japan, Russia, and Canada have all signaled that they are unwilling to continue with a second commitment of binding emissions cuts for the treaty, leaving only the E.U. ready to move forward.

But the conditions the E.U. has asked for at this meeting to preserve the Kyoto Protocol are steep. In exchange for their commitment, they expect everyone else — in particular the other large greenhouse-gas emitters like the U.S., China, and India — to begin a road map for a process that will create a binding agreement on reducing emissions later in the decade. What we now know as the “mandate” debate has pulled everyone into a discussion over the fate of the Kyoto Protocol — including the U.S., which is not a party to it.

While the fate of U.S. emissions is not bound to the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the fate of many of the most important achievements of the Obama administration in this forum are now tied to Kyoto through the mandate debate. Included in this list are the institutions that were created out of last year’s meeting in Cancun — such as the Green Climate Fund (tasked with mobilizing a large chunk of the promised $100 billion a year in climate financing by 2020) and the Clean Technology Center and Network — as well as progress they have made on pushing for a more rigorous system of transparency for measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) promises for emissions reductions.

The dominoes could fall like this: If the U.S. and other parties say no to the E.U. demand for a mandate on a process of a new binding agreement, then the E.U. could in turn say no to a recommitment to the Kyoto Protocol.

If the E.U. passes on the Kyoto Protocol, then the G77 (the group representing most developing countries at this meeting) — which has been adamant in its insistence this year that the extension of the Kyoto Protocol was absolutely critical to it — could walk away. And if that happens, then all parts of the climate architecture moving through this process could come to a halt. The result would be that the final negotiating text that has been worked out here on the Green Climate Fund, the Clean Technology Center, and MRV could be left abandoned with no possibility of approving it before the parties go home. We’d have to wait another year until these valuable institutions were potentially picked up again and made a reality.

With this much at stake, why would parties say no to the E.U.’s demands? The key is the insistence that the outcome of the new road map to emerge from this meeting end in a “legally binding” agreement. The E.U. wants some assurance that they will not be the only countries bound by an international regime to reduce their emissions. Currently, all other parties that have registered emissions-reduction targets have only done so through their official submission to the Copenhagen Accord in January 2010 — which is not legally binding.

The E.U. is also concerned about the math and physics of the matter. If they are the only party to continue with the Kyoto Protocol, then only 15 percent of global emissions will be bound under an international treaty. On the other hand, the combined pledges from the Copenhagen Accord cover countries representing over 80 percent of global emissions. If we’re going to get an agreement that binds everyone to a common set of rules and standards aimed at limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F], then a greater percentage of global emissions needs to be covered under a new instrument.

But so far there is little indication that the U.S., China, India, and several other parties like the idea of signing onto this package. While no serious objections have been voiced about authorizing a road map to come out of this meeting that will continue work on a new agreement in a stipulated amount of time, parties disagree on the idea of agreeing ahead of time to a legally binding outcome for this process.

This week several parties, such as the U.S. and India, expressed reservations that they can enter into a process that guarantees an agreement a legally binding outcome when they don’t yet know what the content of the agreement would be. The U.S. has also repeatedly demanded an all-inclusive binding target in order to craft a workable climate agreement. According to our lead climate negotiator Todd Stern, the U.S. is not necessarily opposed to a legally binding outcome, but rather to an outcome that, like the Kyoto Protocol, is binding only to some parties and not to others — regardless of the size, scale, and growth of their emissions.

The E.U. has been lockstep behind Connie Hedegaard, its commissioner for climate action, who claimed in a press conference on Wednesday that parties who don’t commit to b inding actions take on an “unbearable responsibility.”

But the insistence that parties agree on a process to create a legally binding outcome does not mean that those parties entering into negotiations have to say yes to anything that this process produces.

In an exclusive interview with Climate Progress, E.U. lead climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger explained that the E.U. was after something more akin to a couple getting engaged. If two people get engaged, then they aim for a particular legally binding outcome. As a process of achieving that outcome, they embark on a list of things to do — picking a date, a location, an invitation list, etc. — over a discrete period of time. But as everyone knows, an engagement, even a good engagement, is not necessarily a successful engagement.

Engagements can even end at the altar.

Similarly, Runge-Metzger acknowledged that if parties agreed to a road map leading to a legally binding agreement, they can pull out if it takes a turn to something they don’t want. The U.S. has been clear that it will not tolerate an agreement that once again leaves China in the position of not having legally binding emissions cuts while developed countries do. If the U.S. agrees to the E.U.’s proposal for a road map toward a legally binding outcome, and it loses the fight during the creation of a new instrument somewhere along the way to ensure that the agreement is reciprocal, then it can drop out of the process.

Nonetheless, many parties are still wary of signing on to the E.U. process. Right now, throughout the International Convention Center, negotiators are hard at work trying to find the sweet spot between the language the E.U. prefers for the outcome of a new negotiating process, and something that can garner more support.

This afternoon, a new text was introduced from the South African hosts of the meeting floating a compromise. Instead of initiating a process that leads to a legally binding commitment, it would “launch a process in order to develop a legal framework applicable to all under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change after 2020.”

Unfortunately, reports from the floor are that the E.U. will reject this language.
These reasons are certainly not without merit from the perspective of their aims in initiating this process. After all, the current Kyoto Protocol is a legal framework, that China has signed onto, but it does not bind China legally under an international process of scrutiny, review, and enforcement to report or reduce its emissions.  Similarly, the original treaty that created the UNFCCC is a legal framework, ratified by the U.S. Senate, but it does not require the U.S. or anyone else to reduce emissions.

As negotiators go back into meeting rooms late into the night to try and hammer out a new compromise on the E.U. roadmap, the U.S. should aim to broker a deal to get to “yes.” The stakes are far too high not to.

As long as the U.S. is absolutely clear on its conditions for signing onto a legally binding deal down the road, it can sign onto a road map for a legally binding instrument with fair warning to all parties that if conditions are not met the engagement will be off. Some will worry that this could be the U.S. in Kyoto all over again.

In the run-up to Kyoto, the U.S. worked hard to create a climate treaty. But, months prior to Kyoto, the U.S. Senate voted 95 to 0 to not even consider ratifying a treaty that divided the world into two categories, requiring emissions reductions for developed parties and not for developing parties — regardless of the size, scale, and trajectory of their emissions. Since the U.S. worked so hard to shape that treaty, it was a huge disappointment, and a blow to our international credibility to have to bow out of the process.

But this time around is not like Kyoto. The U.S. has been perfectly clear the last three years that we will not accept a non-reciprocal, non-conditional agreement on emissions reductions from developing countries. If our conditions are not met, then we do not have to sign on to the final product (nor does any party if their conditions are not met). On the other hand, if our conditions are clear, then we can work toward an outcome that would make for an agreement that would pick up where the Kyoto Protocol and the Cancun Agreements will leave us off in 2020.

And if we don’t make a deal, and this meeting ends without an outcome, the Obama administration risks losing everything it has worked for over the last several years and the progress that has been made which, though unsatisfying to many, nonetheless gives us critical means for moving forward.

After all, whether the E.U. gets its way or not, the outcome over the mandate debate will not ensure that another ton of carbon gets reduced from the world’s overall emissions. At best, the process the E.U. has proposed would lead to an agreement that would require reductions in emissions after 2020, given the time it will take to finalize a treaty and enter it into force.

On the other hand, the Green Climate Fund is the only measure that could overcome the twin “gigaton gaps” that exist from the pledges made so far out of the Copenhagen Accord. As we argued in a report published last year, it is the key instrument for mobilizing the finance needed to increase the ambition of parties under the Copenhagen Accord, as well as a critical means to provide directed financing to close the gap between those pledges and a path by 2020 that gives us a chance of stabilizing at 2 degrees Celsius.

If this meeting collapses over the mandate debate then we risk the postponement, and worse, the abandonment of this effort. It is not clear when we will get a chance again to put all the major carbon emitters on the road to a common effort.

We need to step up, not cut, our funding for green energy in India.Photo: Amaresh S K

Lawmakers continue to debate the fiscal year 2011 budget. As we approach the next showdown this week over another temporary extension of the continuing resolution, a final resolution of the 2011 budget, or a government shutdown, the top climate issue in this debate is whether the Environmental Protection Agency should have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

A no less critical issue, however, is the potential cuts to international climate investments and assistance. The stakes are high on this issue, and we can see the divide between congressional Republicans and the Obama administration between the initial continuing resolution released in January and the president’s 2012 budget.

In short, cutting these investments now would endanger crucial U.S. leadership on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Climate investments are critical now

At this stage in the international climate negotiations the flow of money is key to continuing the process and having any chance of achieving some semblance of climate safety moving forward.

Most experts agree that the world needs to cut emissions in half by 2050 to have a decent chance of limiting temperature increase caused by carbon pollution at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial levels. Climate scientists concur that holding temperature at this level is key to avoiding the worst effects of global warming. While it is generally accepted as a matter of fairness that the first and deepest cuts should come from developed countries, it would be impossible to stabilize emissions at acceptable levels without the participation of developing countries.

To take just one example, the most recent analysis from the Energy Information Agency shows that the Asia and Oceanic region of the world is now emitting twice as much carbon dioxide as North America. These increases are unfortunately offsetting concomitant reductions in emissions by developed countries. So while U.S. emissions went down 7 percent between 2008 and 2009 — primarily due to the economic recession — India’s went up 8.7 percent in the same period.

We should certainly expect emissions increases in developing countries because of the difficulty in transitioning away from high-carbon to low-carbon power sources as their economies grow to bring their populations out of poverty. Even with India’s recent growth, there are millions of people still living in abject poverty and millions more in “energy poverty” without access to reliable sources of electricity on a daily basis.

The only way to achieve our goals for climate stabilization is to help these countries develop in a more sustainable way using lower-carbon or zero-carbon energy sources so that their rate of pollution increase slows down and eventually comes down as ours hopefully will.

When and to what extent developing countries are able to begin slowing and bringing down their emissions greatly affects our chances of holding temperature at 2 degrees C. Last year, when the American Power Act was introduced in the Senate, the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed [PDF] two scenarios on developing country action. In one scenario, developing countries’ emissions peak beginning in 2025 and return to 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. In the second, developing countries adopt policies in 2050 holding emissions constant at 2050 levels. Assuming that developed countries fulfill their stated goal at the 2009 G8 summit in Italy to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050, we only have an 11 percent chance of holding temperature at 2 degrees C under the scenario where developing countries begin holding their emissions in 2050. If developing countries peak emissions in 2025 then these odds improve to a 75 percent chance of holding emissions at 2 degrees.

It is in the context of these odds — which are essentially a bet on our children’s future welfare — that we need to understand the critical nature of current debates in the budget over international climate investments. At the 2007 U.N. climate summit in Bali, Indonesia the Bush administration agreed to the “Bali Action Plan.” This laid out the basic formula for enticing developing countries to take a more aggressive path toward reducing their emissions and potentially agreeing to a binding framework for those emissions. The essential elements were that developing countries would agree to reductions in exchange for finance and access to clean energy technology.

At the 2009 U.N. climate summit, it was agreed that the first down payment on this agreement would be the release of $30 billion in “fast start” financing from developed to developing countries. The Obama administration immediately moved to allocate approximately $4 billion toward this total for a collection of bilateral and World Bank initiatives in climate adaptation, clean energy development and deployment, and avoided deforestation programs.

These programs not only help developing countries begin decreasing their emissions but also create opportunities for investments by U.S. companies that deliver the programs that capture these pollution reductions. Moreover, the United States’s ability to reduce our own domestic emissions and our contributions to the global funds that collectively bring down global emissions to tolerable levels is essential for maintaining our credibility in the international arena. Our international partners are skeptical of our ability to deliver on our own domestic pollution reductions given the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation. Thus our continued ability to deliver on funds for overseas climate investments becomes even more important to bolster our credibility in this process.

The House plan to eliminate climate investments

The original House continuing resolution (CR) for the fiscal year 2011 budget slashes [PDF] international clean energy and climate program funds to a debilitating level and eliminates entire programs that are crucial for helping developing countries adapt and advance on a low-emission economic trajectory. The level of international climate and clean energy financing in the CR — around $822 million — is significantly less than what the president requested in his budget. The CR also slices [PDF] the $1.3 billion Congress appropriated for international climate funding in 2010 by more than half.

The starkest example of these cuts is the CR’s zeroing out of two very important World Bank climate funds: the Clean Technology Fund and the Strategic Climate Fund. The $4.4 billion Clean Technology Fund, or CTF, helps to scale up clean energy technology in large-emitting developing countries. Every $1 invested in the CTF leverages around $8 in co-financing from multilateral development banks, governments, the private sector, and other development organizations.

The Strategic Climate Fund includes the Forest Investment Program (FIP), which supports carbon financing that facilitates the development of revenue streams flowing from the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to be used for reducing deforestation in developing countries and the program for Scaling-up Renewable Energy in Low Income Countries.

The Strategic Climate Fund also funds the Pilot Program on Climate Resilience. Poor countries such as Bangladesh, Niger, and Tajikistan were named recipients of this program in Nov. 2010. These countries will receive a total of $270 million to establish climate adaptation strategies including buttressing deteriorating coastlines, improved land use and ecosystem practices, and adopting clean energy. These efforts could save millions of people from the impacts of warming we are already experiencing today.

The CR’s cuts are so deep, in fact, that they threaten to render critical programs ineffective. For instance, U.S. funding for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), currently the primary source of international clean energy investments, would be cut by 63 percent down to $32 million in the CR budget. The GEF distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, namely the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund. The Special Climate Change Fund disburses funds for adaptation, clean technology transfer, and assisting developing countries transition to a diversified clean energy economy.

The GEF is a critical tool for leveraging additional bilateral and multilateral investments. For instance, on Feb. 17, 2011, the GEF announced a $33 million energy efficiency and renewable energy project in India that will save 276,000 megawatt hours per year and expand the market for clean energy technologies in India. The $7 million grant from the GEF leveraged an additional $26.2 million in co-financing by the Indian government and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. President Barack Obama is requesting a 92 percent increase from FY 2010 for this important financial mechanism.

The CR also cuts funding [PDF] for the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) by 30 percent to $790 million. The MCC, an initiative the Bush administration championed, was created by Congress in 2004 to allocate U.S. foreign assistance for recipient country-led policies that integrate environmental, economic, and social goals. Policies that address climate change are a priority for the MCC because they generate economic growth, job creation, and improved livelihoods.

The MCC is already helping countries establish and implement development policies that align environmental sustainability with economic development. A project in El Salvador [PDF] is providing electricity to approximately 8,600 people in rural areas through the installment of clean solar power. Communities and families benefit from lower energy costs and improved health outcomes from avoiding burning oil and wood. And we all benefit from avoided emissions.

The CR also excludes provisions for the bipartisan-supported Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFCA). TFCA supports debt-for-nature swaps that allow developing countries to relieve debt owed to the United States by conserving and protecting forests.

The program — originally sponsored by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) while he was serving in the House and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in 1998 — provides significant opportunities for public-private partnerships and leveraging private finance. But Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) is offering an amendment to the CR that would rescind funding for TFCA.

International climate assistance in the presidential budget

International aid — including climate assistance — should be a priority in the budget because it is an investment in America’s long-term security. Without international assistance, there is little motivation for other countries to cooperate with us on our security goals. This priority is reflected in the president’s 2012 budget.

The total presidential budget for development assistance flowing from the State Department is $2.9 billion — more than twice the amount the CR allocates to bilateral development assistance. The White House budget directs around $1.3 billion for international climate change financing including $659 from the Treasury Department and $651 million flowing from the State Department “to address [PDF] the environmental, human security, economic, and political threat of global climate change.”

The administration allocates $1.125 billion toward the MCC in the 2012 budget. It maintains and increases funding to both the Strategic Climate Fund at $190 million and the Clean Technology Fund at $400 million. The GEF receives a boost of up to $144 million, a 40 percent increase. The TFCA is reduced to $15 million from $20 million in previous years. According to the president’s budget this level of financing for TFCA will generate $260 million for forest conservation over time.

But we can already see the intention to roll back these advances with the fight over the CR and the announcement of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) budget plan this week. The Ryan budget cuts the international affairs budget of the State Department by 27 percent for FY 2012, which would make it impossible to achieve the climate investment milestones laid out in the president’s budget. Combined with the expected cuts this year from any budget compromise the United States could effectively get dealt out of a large part of the international climate negotiations. In other words, if we fail to dole out funding, we are in trouble in the international community.

The stakes are already high. Just this week the new year of international negotiations started in Bangkok, Thailand. They will lead up to the next U.N. climate summit at the end of this year in Durban, South Africa. Already the talks are breaking down on whether the parties should continue with the progress made with the Cancun agreements last December or delay for a discussion on the future of the Kyoto Protocol. The United States is pushing hard for the former but uncertainty over its ability to continue showing leadership in climate finance will jeopardize this position.

The critical importance of international climate investments must be kept in the forefront of budget discussions.

The consensus reached at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday to forge the “Cancun Agreements” was a critical step forward in forging an effective global compact to fight global warming. It was the best possible outcome from a meeting that was often teetering on the edge of disaster. Nonetheless, these agreements will not solve the problem, and some of the hardest issues in forging a climate treaty are still waiting to be addressed. But in a relatively short time, especially for this process, the parties came together on a balanced package of decisions on adaptation, forestry, technology transfer, the structure of climate finance, and other issues which will be the basis for progress moving forward.

Achieving these agreements also vindicates for now the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, which had been on life support for a number of years for failing to negotiate through its own consensus process to move an agreement out of the body. Last year, even though over a hundred world leaders gathered together in Denmark to forge the Copenhagen Accord — the first significant step forward on a climate agreement since the Kyoto Protocol — the UNFCCC could not seal the deal with five countries exercising their effective veto to block the accord as an official decision of the UNFCCC. This left the agreement in limbo throughout the year.

This year, with the exception of a lone holdout who was overruled by the Mexican chair of the meeting at the last minute, all 194 parties agreed to turn the core elements of the Copenhagen Accord, expressed in a scant six page outline last year, to 33 pages of densely packed text which the negotiators will now be bound to use in working for a final agreement. It will also set substantive global goals and requirements on adaptation and mitigation for the present.

This outcome gets us halfway between the original idea of the Copenhagen Accord as originally articulated by the Danes: A two step process starting with a political agreement in 2009 to be followed by a legal agreement based on the same principles at a later date. While the Cancun Agreements are not the full second step they are a solid half step forward, a kind of Copenhagen 1.5.

Two weeks of tension

Coming into these meetings two weeks ago there were a number of issues in play, any of which could have derailed the process and resulted in no agreements whatsoever. Everyone agreed though that a fully fleshed out climate treaty was not going to emerge this year but were hopeful that issues would be resolved sufficiently to get a “balanced package” of agreements, first on improvements to the Kyoto Protocol, and second on core issues like forestry, finance, and technology from the companion negotiating track on Long-Term Cooperative Action (LCA).

The stage for a balanced however had not yet been set. While the Copenhagen Accord had set down markers for the building blocks for a package of agreements many parties didn’t want to use it at all.

Largely due to the ambiguous outcome of the 2009 Copenhagen meeting, there had been tension throughout the interim negotiating season over whether the Copenhagen Accord could even be used as the basis for discussions moving forward. Perhaps sensing this instability several parties, including China, began walking back their commitments under the accord and others demanded that it could not be used in any official communication as new treaty language was hashed out to prepare text for consideration at Cancun.

Most important to the United States was the compromise language that had been achieved in Copenhagen on a system of measuring, reporting, and verifying emissions (MRV). For years developing countries had maintained that they should not be bound, indeed could not be bound under the rules of the UNFCCC, to any system of MRV on their voluntary emission reductions. The Copenhagen Accord suggested an agreement whereby one system of MRV would be used for mitigation actions by developing countries supported by outside financial support, and another system would be used for actions which were not supported. As early as spring though this compromise looked like it had evaporated.

In response, the U.S. maintained that they would not agree to a balanced package coming out of Cancun until progress was again made on this issue and argued throughout the year that the only satisfactory outcome was a complete agreement rather than a package. As Deputy Climate Envoy Jonathan Pershing put it at the beginning of the Cancun meeting: “Moving ahead on a few issues — deemed by some to be easy — while holding off on others — deemed by some to be difficult — is not be a path for success.”

But the U.S. was far from being the only party raising possible hurdles. Japan rocked the meeting at the outset announcing (though in reality just repeating something they had been saying for a year) that they would refuse to sign on to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. Their rationale however was sound. The countries in the protocol now only account for less than 30 percent of global emissions and so even the most ambitious mitigation targets in a second commitment period cannot hope to solve the problem.

Many parties however reacted in shock and anger. Given that the protocol is the only agreement that binds parties to emission reductions, and that a Japanese withdraw could lead to the effective end of the protocol if other countries followed, some saw this as an effective end to the goal of achieving a legally binding climate treaty. Unconfirmed reports in Cancun claimed that over a dozen world leaders had called the Japanese prime minister over the course of the meeting in appeals to reverse the decision.

Finally, of the five countries who blocked the Copenhagen Accord from moving forward last year — Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and the Sudan — Bolivia emerged as the most outspoken critic of almost all parts of the Cancun package. Throughout the week they confidently threatened to blow up any compromise deal using the UNFCCC’s consensus rule unless their demands were met. These included a requirement that the climate fund described in the Copenhagen Accord be funded only from public sources from developed countries and set at 1.5 percent of GDP from these parties, a ban on using market mechanisms to leverage funding for forest programs, and insistence that the overall agreement had to acknowledge “rights for mother nature.”

The showdown

The air of the conference hall was thick with rumors up until the final outcome that one or another of these parties, or others, would prevent a compromise from emerging. Following reports from late night negotiations the previous evenings the biggest worries were about the United States whose negotiators had been digging in and arguing for substantive changes on almost all parts of the negotiating text. Others thought that any developing country invested in the continuance of the Kyoto Protocol might object to any agreement because of Japan’s announcement.

Following an elaborate system of consultation the meeting chair, Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa, temporarily stopped the negotiating on Friday afternoon and prepared a chair’s text which made the hard choices on all points of disagreement. These clean copies of what were christened later as the “Cancun Agreements” — a package of deals from the working groups on the Kyoto Protocol and Long-Term Cooperative Action — were then distributed and a three hour break was called to absorb them.

When the next plenary started at 9:00 p.m., it was clear from the beginning that the problem would not be the United States, or any other party, but primarily Bolivia. Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations Pablo Solon started with
a sustained attack on the documents and almost all points of compromise. Cuba later joined in with severe words for both the Mexican hosts and the texts. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia called for longer negotiating sessions to get to the bottom of the disagreements.

But otherwise the mood in the hall was overwhelmingly in the other direction. Leaders of small island states, least developed countries and all major industrialized polluters praised the Cancun Agreements as imperfect but altogether an excellent compromise. They lauded Espinosa’s leadership and marked the agreements as a sound step forward. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh called Espinosa a “goddess.” Many obliquely suggested trying to end the meeting then and there with a unanimous declaration of consent but Espinosa divided the room back to the two working groups to have them individually consider each separate package.

Other than a few minor technical questions, the two working group sessions starting at midnight mainly consisted in Bolivian Ambassador Solon denouncing the very idea of the Cancun documents and then going on to iterate a series of criticisms of the substance of each document. In both cases, the chairs of these sessions tried to gavel through a consensus agreement on the documents despite the objections and in each case Solon insisted that the consensus rule gave him the prerogative of blocking anything from emerging out of these meetings.

The bulk of his arguments were curious. What most had in common was an insistence that any agreement made in Cancun would completely lock the UNFCCC into a disastrous policy choice. For example, Solon argued that the LCA document was completely insufficient to achieve its stated goal of holding temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) because it had no stated emission targets. But while true, it was clear before the meeting started that such harder to negotiate details would be left off the table for now in order to achieve a compromise on some building blocks for a final treaty.

In this respect though, Solon’s worries were not unlike many that have been expressed since last year about the Copenhagen Accord by a variety of commentators. But just like the Copenhagen Accord the Cancun Agreements are not designed to foreclose the possibility of eventually folding in their content into a binding treaty with emission reduction targets. Both documents simply don’t address certain questions in the interests of making progress for now. What is even more important is that the agreements are structured so as to beg their gaps as important questions that must be addressed as soon as possible to make the agreements complete.

This rejection by the Bolivians of any pragmatic steps toward progress began to turn the assembled negotiators even more solidly against them. The most vocal were representatives from neighboring Latin and Central American nations who had clearly had enough of Solon’s intransigence. One after another challenged the Bolivians until eventually they voiced an opinion that had not been strongly expressed in pubic at these meetings though many had expressed it in private: The UNFCCC consensus rule either has to go or be radically reinterpreted. A negotiator from Columbia in the LCA meeting put it most starkly: “Consensus does not mean giving the right of veto to one country.”

It was a good turn of events to have this view expressed from the floor as reports on Friday were that the Mexicans had already decided that if push came to shove they would take a hard hitting interpretation of the prerogative of the chair in these meetings and simply not allow a single objection to impede an agreement.

When the final plenary reconvened Espinosa delivered, and after patiently listening to a series of strident objections from Solon, gaveled away his objection saying, “Of course I do note your opinion and I will be more than happy to make sure it is reflected in the records of the conference. And if there is no other opinion, this text is approved.” (The final showdown between the two can be watched here staring eleven minutes in.)

Another kind of step forward

But what did the Cancun Agreements get us? Primarily they enshrined the gains from the Copenhagen Accord — establishing temperature target for mitigation, a system of MRV, an agreement on forestry and land use, technology transfer, adaptation, and the architecture for a climate fund that apply to all parties and not just developed countries — in an official U.N. decision. But rather than being a thin paragraph on each topic, as we had in Copenhagen, the agreements have included detail which will significantly elevate the expectations on all parties for a range of obligations and lock in good compromises for a future hoped for binding treaty. In a companion column to this one, Richard Caperton outlines the details in the agreements on forestry, finance, and MRV. In all cases we see significant improvement in the texts since the negotiating began and massive improvement over the status quo which was, of course, no agreements on these topics at all.

A lot is left unanswered, most critically the gap between the national pledges under the Copenhagen Accord and the now confirmed 2 degree Celsius target in the Cancun Agreements. In that respect the substance of these agreements will best be measured over the next year as we see how they help to bootstrap serious discussions over those topics and advance a new treaty to deal with those problems.

But what may be remembered as the biggest success of this meeting may not be the agreements themselves but the success over reforming the process which emerged in the birth of the Cancun Agreements.

Many commentators, including myself, have been saying for some time that the UNFCCC has outlived its usefulness as the sole forum for seeking a climate treaty and needed to be complimented with parallel processes to get a climate agreement in the G20 or the U.S. led Major Economies Forum. While there is no reason to stop seeking complimentary technology development programs and sectoral agreements in these other forums as I’ve been calling for, the Cancun outcome has demonstrated that the UNFCCC’s biggest problem — the consensus rule — could be massaged under the right conditions.

One could even hope that the outcome today might lead to a call for a wholesale revision of the voting rules of the convention. After all, this is the only major deliberative body on environmental issues which operates in this way. And though flawed for many reasons neither the Montreal Protocol, the International Whaling Commission, the Convention on Biological Diversity, nor the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species work in this manner. From the negotiating floor in Cancun in the wee hours of Saturday morning many appeared hungry for a similar alternative.

One can also imagine looking for an alternative because the Cancun outcome could have been so very different. If Bolivia had not wound up being the sole voice of dissent, and if they had been joined by their friends in Cuba and Venezuela, and possibly even Saudi Arabia, their objections might not have been gaveled through with the support of the hall. If the Mexicans had not been such skilled diplomats from the beginning, and fashioned a process where the vast majority of parties felt that they had been fully vetted on a compromise package, others might have rallied to the Bolivian’s procedural objections.

What is certain however is that we finally have an agreement on critical areas of mitigation and adaption that need to be built upon if there is to be any hope for an international climate compact that can get the job done.

The watchword in the halls of this year’s UN climate summit is “balanced package.” It’s the oblique phrase referring to what might be possible as a final agreement at this year’s meeting, at least to those who don’t have unreasonable expectations on what can be achieved. What many hope can be achieved is not a full-blown climate treaty but rather a package of discrete agreements — what we’ve joined the United Nations Foundation and others in calling “building blocks” — that can advance an ambitious agenda on mitigation and adaptation in the absence of a complete climate treaty.

The most substantive and important part of that balanced package which many hope will come through is an agreement on forestry, known here as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program, or REDD. Last year in Copenhagen parties came extremely close to finalizing a deal on REDD and this year they appear even closer. According to Doug Boucher of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been following this track closely through the night, “We were on the five-yard line, and now it’s something like the four-. But no touchdown yet.”

The stakes here are high. Globally, emissions from deforestation are equal to emissions from the entire transportation sector. And, as opposed to other areas of mitigation, there has been considerable progress in the last decade. A recent U.N. study reported that deforestation had slowed to 5.2 million hectares a year in the last decade, down from 8.3 million a year in the 1990s. And some countries like Indonesia — where tropical forests and peat land combine for added sequestration potential — did even better reducing their yearly loss to 0.5 million hectares per year since 2000, down from 1.9 million in the previous decade. Critically, mitigation of emissions through avoided deforestation greatly improves our ability to protect habitats and slow biodiversity loss.

One reason a REDD agreement is so close today is because a substantive series of bilateral and multilateral arrangements between donor and recipient countries has already emerged.  Norway has pledged $1 billion for programs in Brazil, Indonesia and Guyana, which are already underway, and the U.S. has pledged $1 billion as part of any financial packages which are jump-starting now. Combined with other country commitments, the global total for current forestry financing even without a global agreement approaches $5 billion.

But while significant, this funding is not yet sufficient to hit the goal that CAP and other groups have endorsed for the end of the decade: cutting deforestation in half by 2020.  In a Center for American Progress — Alliance for Climate Protection report released this week on near term international climate finance, we estimate that to hit the 2020 target, the 2015 goal should be to reduce deforestation 20 percent and reforest approximately 55 million hectares of land. We estimate that the initial cost for such a program would be approximately $12 billion per year by 2015. More funding is needed and, in addition, more coherence is needed for making sure available funds get to recipient countries in a timely manner and projects achieve the desired results.

These issues were prevalent in discussions throughout the week and were highlighted at back-to-back events on Wednesday sponsored first by the Obama administration in the U.S. Center and, later in the day, at a high-level summit organized by Avoided Deforestation Partners.

The U.S. event features four key players in the administration’s team who are moving the first part of the $1 billion in forestry funding out the door to projects. Joe Aldy, Special Assistant to the President on Energy and Environment, was joined by Maura O’Neill, Senior Counselor to the Administrator at USAID, Billy Pizer, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at Treasury, and Patrick Smith, leader of USAID’s climate change team.

O’Neill, who Skyped into the meeting from South Africa, laid out in some detail the rationale for U.S. spending so far with a focus on three areas: architecture, readiness, and demonstration. While there has been a lot of activity in the forest sector globally there is still a surprising lack of coherence among programs. In that light the U.S. government is not just writing checks but actively shaping projects with partners that can be quickly tested and scaled up. Through programs like the newly announced “SilvaCarbon,” USAID is working with U.S. scientific agencies to create tailored monitoring and measurement instruments that can both assess need and demonstrate success.

Pizer walked the audience through the rationale for why the U.S. was directing most of its REDD funding through multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The bottom line: leverage. Every dollar the U.S. puts through the GEF leverages five, and every dollar through the Banks’ Climate Investment Fund leverages three to four. Echoing O’Neill, Pizer argued that using the multilateral development approach also increases coherence in distribution of funds across parties and the chance to test innovative approaches to monitoring and evaluation. (While the event is not yet online, you can check for updates here.)

White House aid Joe Aldy commented in the session that the “President has a personal commitment to forestry issues,” and he continued that message later in the day when he appeared on a panel at the Avoided Deforestation Partners summit, “Advancing REDD+: New Pathways and Partnerships.”

The plenary panel for the event, following an address by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, featured Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway; President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana; Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, who will head a new Indonesian REDD agency; financier and Founder of the Open Society Foundations, George Soros; and Aldy.

Most of the session covered familiar ground for those who have followed this issue. Stoltenberg opened with a proclamation that his country’s motivation for providing funding for forestry projects as opposed to other areas of mitigation is because it is the “largest, cheapest, and fastest way to reduce CO2,” and that the co-benefits for protecting biodiversity were substantial. Soros discussed the importance of peat lands and how stopping their destruction needed to be a top priority, given the hundreds of years of accumulated carbon that is released when they are lost.

But President Jagdeo threw down the gauntlet and bluntly challenged the system that is being used to funnel money from donor countries like Norway to his country through the multilateral development banks.

As was demonstrated in the earlier session in the U.S. Center, one of the reasons for using such institutions to funnel this money is to harmonize a system of measuring success of projects. But Jagdeo claimed that while he had absolutely no problem with that, the other hurdles in the multilateral bank system made it more difficult to get funds after reductions in emissions had been delivered. This made it more tempting, he said, to simply invest more effort in farming rice and s
ugar and sell it on the open market without any restrictions than to cooperate on REDD.

All parties agreed that this system needed to be streamlined, and it needed to be done quickly to allow finance to move to places where it could most effectively be used. More telling, Jagdeo argued, was the need to shore up the political capital he and other leaders of developing countries were expending when employing REDD as a sustainable development strategy, rather than turning to more destructive alternatives.

At first glance, such concerns might lend themselves to other criticisms coming from left-of-center NGOs here who have been demanding a rejection of the current REDD agreement. Their core argument, which has been repeated in the negotiating sessions most prominently by the Bolivian negotiators, is that any system that includes market mechanisms to leverage more capital will of necessity corrupt the system. At this point the Bolivians remain the leading opponents to the current REDD agreement, suggesting they are considering their prerogative to derail a final agreement as they did last year in Copenhagen with four other countries. Tellingly, their lead negotiators refused to discuss substantive issues at a morning press conference promising instead for more later in the day so as not to interrupt the still in-process negotiations.

But if the fight here over REDD is really between the capitalist and anti-capitalist forces, the former side couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador than World Bank President Robert Zoellick. Throughout the meeting he’s been pushing hard on a REDD agreement, primarily as a vehicle to fund impoverished programs to preserve biodiversity. Closing out the Wednesday summit with Stoltenberg and Jagdeo, Zoellick put it bluntly: “We don’t want silent forests.”

There are of course many other ways an agreement could come off the tracks. Reports are that U.S. negotiators are employing a very hard line on proposals measuring, reporting, and verifying emission reductions, which could also impede proceeding with a balanced package. Nonetheless, progress on a global REDD agreement may be decide in the next few hours.  Check back here for updates.

The buzz over Japan’s announcement in the halls at the Moon Palace in Cancun, where negotiators from 194 countries have gathered for the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, started shortly after a plenary session on Monday and continues to reverberate in press conferences and side events. In an announcement that originated in a ministerial level meeting in Tokyo, Japanese negotiators reiterated a position they have been making for a year now: they will not sign onto a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, setting new and more ambitious targets for binding emission reductions among the parties of that treaty beyond 2012, unless the biggest carbon polluters do as well. 

The first commitment period of the protocol started when it went into effect and binds 37 developed nations and the European Union to cut emissions from 1990 levels by a collective 5.2 percent by 2012. The understanding reached in Kyoto was that this first commitment period would be temporary, as a matter of design, only beginning the process of reducing emissions under a legally binding agreement and implementing various programs that could make a global system of emission reductions workable such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows for a system of offsets. 

The expectation has been that parties to the protocol would eventually agree on a second commitment period after 2012 which would set more ambitious targets for reducing emissions consistent with the goals outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and other scientific bodies, for achieving some measure of climate safety such as stabilizing temperature increase caused by greenhouse gas emissions at 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) over pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, the fact that the world’s second largest emitter and largest per-capita emitter, the United States, famously never ratified the Kyoto Protocol — the very idea of the protocol was rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997 by a vote of 95-0 — and that it does not require emission reductions from developing countries including the biggest emitters like China and India, calls into question whether the protocol by itself could ever assure climate safety.

The Japanese reasoning is based squarely on this key problem with the protocol. In that light, can we really blame their decision? Why should they sign onto a second period of binding reductions for an agreement that can never hope to achieve meaningful carbon reductions when it does not include the U.S. and China? A press release circulated by the Japanese government added up the cold but convincing numbers: “… the total emissions of energy-related CO2 from the countries undertaking obligations to reduce emissions under the Protocol account for only about 27 percent of the global emissions in 2008, which dropped down from 42 percent in 1990. Thus, it is not effective as regards to emission reduction obligation or the scale of emissions to be reduced.” 

In contrast, Hideki Minamikawa, vice minister for global environment in the Japanese environment ministry, noted that the parties aligned to the Copenhagen Accord — the non-binding political agreement delivered in the 11th hour at the U.N. climate summit last year in Denmark — represented 80 percent of global emissions. While some have suggested that the Kyoto Protocol should continue to a second commitment period and be tied to a new agreement based on the Copenhagen Accord, Minamikawa made it clear in an interview with The Guardian that his government did not support such a potentially cumbersome architecture: “We want a single binding treaty,” he said.

Some will conclude that Japan’s decision on the protocol is simply a ploy to shirk their responsibilities on carbon mitigation and assistance with adaptation in poorer countries. But Japan’s pledges and actions to date point to a different conclusion. Japan’s commitment under the Copenhagen Accord is to cut emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, a target which is more stringent than Europe’s current goal. And of the fast start financing announced in Copenhagen last year — for developing countries to provide $30 billion to developing countries by 2012 for adaptation and mitigation — Japan has pledged $15 billion and already implemented $7.23 billion as of the end of September. In comparison, the U.S. delivered $1.7 billion in 2010 and is scheduled to deliver approximately $4 billion by the end of the fast start period. Indeed, it is difficult to see how developed countries could meet the fast start goal without the Japanese contribution. Nor does it appear that the Japanese want to kill off emission trading and offset programs under the Kyoto Protocol. Later this week, Japanese officials will discuss their planned scheme for bilateral offset programs designed in part to keep retain the qualified successes of the CDM.

Reaction from other Kyoto signatories has been mixed. Not surprisingly, the Canadians, who have long since given up on meeting their reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, have endorsed this move. Bill Rodgers, a spokesman for Canadian Environment Minister John Baird, concurred on Saturday that the protocol was indeed ineffective because it does not include the top two carbon polluters. Peter Wittoeck, a spokesperson for the European Union, made it clear that while the E.U. was resolutely undecided on extending the protocol for a second commitment period with a new set of emission reduction targets, the Japanese calculations were correct: “If it is only the E.U. that is under such a commitment without the rest of the world … [then] that would not be a solution for the global climate problem.” In contrast, Bernarditas Muller of the Philippines, a spokesman for the G77, the group of more than a hundred developing countries who often negotiate as a block in these talks, condemned Japan’s announcement: “We don’t want to kill the Kyoto Protocol, so we’re not very happy about it.” 

China and the United States, in some respects the real targets of ire in this development as neither will ever consent to being bound by the Kyoto Protocol, predictabl
y divided on the issue though they were worried about the same thing: the impact that Japan’s decision could have on achieving some kind of successful outcome at the Cancun summit. 

Su Wei, China’s chief negotiator, joined the G77 in criticizing Japan’s pointed announcement suggesting ominously that a failure to extend the Kyoto Protocol “is one of the crucial issues concerning the success of the Cancun conference.” U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern was worried about a fallout effect of Japan’s decision as well, pointing to its potential impact on the parallel track of negotiations in this process known as the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action (LCA), which has been struggling for three years to create text for a new climate agreement which could either compliment or replace the protocol. The LCA track is currently the only official place in the negotiations where elements of the Copenhagen Accord could be enshrined in a legally binding agreement. According to Stern, it would be “very unfortunate to lose the progress” that could be reached on that track due to this debate.

Reactions from NGOs and the environmental community were almost universally critical but also striking in their predictions of dire consequences based largely on exaggerated assessments of the protocol’s effectiveness.

Mohamed Adow, senior climate change advisor at Christian Aid, was reported as claiming that Japan’s decision “puts the global climate architecture at risk … and violates Japan’s legally binding commitment, turns its back on science, and disrespects the people most vulnerable to climate change.” Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, argued that Japan’s actions, risking the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol, “would leave us with no guarantee that emissions will be reduced.”  

But as a point of fact neither Japan, nor any other signatory party of this agreement, are bound to sign on to a second commitment period under the protocol beyond 2012, but rather only to meet their reduction commitments in the first period. And given the basis of their decision — that the current parties in the protocol cannot hope to set a target for emission reductions in the second commitment period high enough to compensate for the lack of a similar commitment from the world’s two largest emitters — the Japanese are being consistent with hard physics of the matter. The present group of parties bound by the Kyoto Protocol can never guarantee that emissions are reduced sufficiently to protect anyone, including the most vulnerable, because they simply do not account for enough of global emissions.

The reasonable worry about Japan’s actions however is that moving away from a second commitment period for the protocol would signal a move from developed countries altogether away from a system of binding emissions cuts to one of voluntary measures only. After all, the worry many have is that if Japan does not renew the protocol then other parties will follow, and given the implementation rules of the treaty, without a sufficient number of parties, it would not continue as a vehicle for binding emission cuts in the future. This would leave the world without any binding treaty to cut emissions. Reacting to Japan’s decision, Martin Khor, director of South Center, put it this way: “Some developed countries want a voluntary system of pledges, which are not legally binding. We are at a major crossroads, with the future of the climate negotiations at stake.”

The specter here is the emergence of a framework of mere “pledge and review” or “shame and blame” whereby parties are not bound to emission reductions, nor potentially penalized if they fail to meet them, but only committed to the national actions they are willing to take without any international oversight. It is noteworthy that this is also the mistaken fear that many came to after the Copenhagen climate summit last year ended in the creation of a political accord which does not bind parties to reducing emissions but only asks them to inscribe their voluntary measures in a pledge under the accord. What many fail to recognize though is that from the beginning the Copenhagen Accord was designed to be the first step in a two step process which would conclude with a legally binding treaty to finish the skeletal political agreement which was achieved last year.

Similarly, what critics of the Japanese position fail to acknowledge, or simply do not believe, is Japan’s insistence that they are not opposed to a second commitment period of the protocol because they have some problem with binding emission cuts but rather because they do not see the current agreement as either fair or effective. The Japanese claim that they also want to see a next step for a more ambitious agreement like the Copenhagen Accord — ambitious in terms of the number of parties willing to make commitments to it of some sort — and they want it to be legally binding. Again from the government’s official press release: “The ultimate aim is early adoption of a new single legally-binding instrument that establishes a fair and effective international framework with the participation of all major emitters based on the Copenhagen Accord.”

Given Japan’s delivery to date on its emission reductions under the protocol, and its willingness to take on fully half of the $30 billion fast start financing pledge from Copenhagen by itself, the real issue among their critics may not be their commitment to a legally binding treaty but rather the kind of legally binding treaty the Japanese are signaling they want with this decision. 

Ever since the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol because it divided the world between developed countries, who were required to make mandatory emission cuts, and developing countries, who were not required to reduce their emissions regardless of their emission profile, various parties have been sharply divided over whether it was possible to forge a new kind of climate agreement. On the one hand were countries such as the U.S. who insisted that the Kyoto architecture was unfair to their economic interests given that their biggest competitors like China and India were not bound by such an agreement to bear any costs associated with emission reductions. On the other hand are the bulk of developing countries who argue that they should not be required to reduce their emissions given that the current accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere causing this problem were emitted by developed countries and that their development needs outweighed emission reductions for the present time.

But in between these two positions is the physical reality that the Japanese have now publicly recognized: We cannot hope to achieve any measure of climate safety without emission reductions from the largest polluters, both developed and developing countries. This doesn’t mean that small and impoverished nations ought to be bound to emission reductions but rather that the problem cannot be solved without cuts from major emerging economies like China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil. 

In this light, one of the positive developments at Copenhagen was the emergence of an alliance of these parties (the so-called “BASIC” group) with the United States, the E.U., and other developed nations which produced the Copenhagen Accord. While this new division — between major carbon polluters and everyone else — is more the alignment needed to solve the problem it is not yet one that the rest of th
e developing world feels comfortable with insofar as they fear that it could lead to increased expectations for emission reduction from developing countries. 

This week, we can see this in the strident and threatening pronouncements of the ALBA countries, or the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (which joins together Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, and others in an anti-Capitalist alliance) who, according to The Hindu, are “demanding a firm commitment from developed nations to the second phase of the Kyoto protocol, putting pressure on the main polluters.”  Unfortunately in the consensus process which governs these meetings, where all 194 parties have a veto on any political or legal agreement, this could spell trouble for the only possible progress expected from these meetings, a “balanced package,” as it is now referred to, of decisions on the building blocks of a climate agreement such as forestry, technology transfer, black carbon, and climate finance infrastructure. According to Claudia Salerno, the Venezuelan negotiator, “If there is no second period of commitment, it would be very difficult to have balanced package in this negotiations.” If this happens then we will see a repeat of the Copenhagen outcome where the ALBA countries blocked the final passage of the Copenhagen Accord as an official action of the conference.   

While negotiators are working without rest to ensure that we do not see the same outcome at this meeting we can only hope that cooler heads prevail. Fundamentally though, if the Japanese decision does effectively end the Kyoto Protocol as a mechanism for reducing emissions it does not mean that we are on a slippery slope to seeing rich countries demanding emission cuts from poor countries. What the Japanese decision may instead mean is that we will finally be free to stop talking about the future of the Kyoto Protocol and move on to discussing an agreement that might actually get the job done.

Representatives from 194 countries gather this week in Cancun, Mexico, for the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The meeting will run through Dec. 10 and, predictably, pull an emergency session all-nighter through to Dec. 11 — though to what end no one knows for certain. This is the body that succeeded in Copenhagen last year in crafting a nonbinding political agreement, the Copenhagen Accord, that could serve as the foundation for creating a new binding climate treaty to either replace or complement the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol — also created by the UNFCCC — is currently the only binding global agreement for limiting carbon emissions. Its “first commitment period” for signatory parties requiring emission reductions will expire in 2012.

Despite the fact that five countries — Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Sudan — used their veto in this body’s consensus process to block the Copenhagen Accord as an official U.N. Framework Convention decision, approximately 138 countries aligned themselves with it and submitted pledges for greenhouse gas, or GHG, mitigation by the end of last January. Included in this group were the 17 largest emitters in the world responsible for 80 percent of carbon pollution.

After a long year of negotiating, the parties now reconvene for another bite at the apple. Chances for a big success, such as final ratification of the Copenhagen Accord or a new legally binding treaty, approach zero. But we could see significant progress on smaller but nonetheless critically important parts of a larger deal, such as so-called “sectoral agreements,” which are essentially smaller parts of what we would want to see in a comprehensive treaty, such as an agreement on limiting emissions from deforestation or an agreement on how intellectual property would be treated in the transfer of low-carbon technology from rich to poor countries.

Emission reduction pledges to date

To understand what could happen in Cancun, it’s first important to know where we are currently in international climate negotiations and national pledges to reduce emissions. In the final run-up to Copenhagen last year, the world experienced a dramatic period where some of the most important players joined parties like the European Union in finally announcing their commitments to reduce emissions by 2020. Most critical to the process were countries like the United States, China, and India, which either by design or by choice are not bound to reducing emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Without the active participation of such countries it is impossible to get to climate safety. But how significant were these pledges?

Before the Copenhagen meeting started last year, the Center for American Progress initiated our “carbon cap equivalents” project. Working with Project Catalyst, we started tracking the national commitments of all the major GHG emitters to try to assess how close those policies and pledges, if enacted, would get us to a 2020 stabilization pathway that had a decent chance of holding temperature increase to 3.6 degrees F. (Holding temperature increase at 3.6 degrees is largely but not universally agreed as the best-case scenario for what can be achieved by collective global climate action at this time. It is the temperature goal stipulated in the Copenhagen Accord, though there is a requirement to investigate the possibility of stabilization at 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) at a later date.)

We found that even prior to the Copenhagen climate summit, if all parties did everything they claimed they would do at the time, the world was only five gigatons of annual emissions shy of the estimated 17 gigatons of carbon dioxide or CO2 equivalent annual reductions needed to put us on a reasonable 3.6 degrees F pathway. Since three gigatons of the projected reductions came from the economic downturn and improved projections on deforestation and peat emissions, the actual pledges of countries for additional reductions were slightly less than two-thirds of what was needed. But they were still not sufficient for the 3.6 degrees F target.

We need some kind of climate agreement to lock in the commitments that countries are willing to make — largely for reasons of self-interest — and to squeeze out of a system of cooperation additional reductions that can get us where we need to be to achieve some measure of climate safety.

After the Copenhagen Accord was finalized at the December 2009 climate summit, a January 2010 deadline was established for countries to submit pledges for actions by 2020 consistent with the accord’s 3.6 degrees F goal. Two breakdowns of the pledges in February, and later in March, by Project Catalyst estimated that the five-gigaton gap had shrunk somewhat and more pledges had come in from developing countries. Part of the reason that pledges increased from developing countries was that the Copenhagen Accord had finally made a significant step forward on establishing a system of cooperation between developed and developing countries that had a chance at providing incentives for additional reductions.

Most critical was an agreement on climate finance whereby donor countries would provide some developing countries with the assistance they need to make the transition to a low-carbon economy. Another crucial agreement helped to reconcile differences between various parties on expectations for measuring, reporting, and verifying promised mitigation actions, or MRVs.

As for the former, the accord created a commitment for $30 billion in “fast start” funding from 2010 to 2012 for developing countries, and it pledged to mobilize a climate fund of $100 billion annually by 2020. With these pledges in mind many developing countries made conditional pledges under the Copenhagen Accord, essentially promising a certain amount of reduction they would make on their own, which we call the “low Copenhagen scenario,” in our analysis with Project Catalyst, and a certain amount they would do with support — a “high Copenhagen scenario.”

As the Cancun meeting gets started these estimates look even better.

Now the five-gigaton annual emissions gap between the high Copenhagen scenario and a 3.6 degrees F pathway is down to four gigatons. And again, due to different estimates of where we are with business-as-usual, or BAU, emissions because of the economic downturn and other factors, the high Copenhagen scenario has us holding at two-thirds of where we need to be in terms of pledges to action.

Pledges, of course, are not what are needed but real programs on the ground that translate into real emission reductions. What we are getting now, though, is a concrete sense of what those programs will be with some of the largest carbon polluters, especially and perhaps most critically among the largest emerging economies. (See table.)

Each of these programs represents a concentrated and significant amount of work in each country. Insofar as those plans have been developed and some deployment has started, this should be sufficient to quell the complaints of those who continue to claim, erroneously, that countries
like China and India are doing nothing. In fact, at this stage, their policy planning on GHG mitigation is at least as advanced as that of the United States — if not more so.

State of the negotiations

If national policies are moving forward then the question becomes whether the negotiations are helping to take the next critical steps of forming cooperative efforts that assist national deployment and holding countries accountable for the pledges that they make.

Any close observer of the last year of international climate negotiations would conclude that it’s been a difficult time. Many of the Copenhagen Accord’s accomplishments, especially on finding a compromise between developed and developing countries on MRV, and other technical matters eroded over a long summer of negotiations where confidence in the accord did not show the resilience that many hoped to see. U.S. negotiators have expressed frustration about the inclination of some negotiators to walk back the positions that their leaders had negotiated personally in Copenhagen.

Nonetheless, progress has been made on other parts of the agreement, especially the initial delivery of the “fast start” financing. The United States managed to deliver $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2010, and the administration is aiming to deliver approximately $4 billion total by 2012. To help make the 2020 $100 billion climate fund a reality, the U.N. secretary general impaneled an advisory group on finance which produced a report released last month staking out the viability of various mechanisms that could be employed to meet the long-term climate finance goal.

Even so, many developing countries are understandably skeptical that the fund will move forward until they see more concrete steps to create it. On Monday, the Center for American Progress will release a report with several partner organizations identifying an interim strategy between 2012 and 2020 that might inspire more confidence in this process and create a new opportunity for U.S. leadership.

But as the Cancun summit turns to its more important second week of negotiations, the biggest source of concern to many will be how the United States will meet its commitments under the Copenhagen Accord of reducing emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The House of Representatives passed a comprehensive climate and energy bill last year, but the Senate was not able to complete the congressional package with a bill of its own.

Coupled with the results of the midterm elections, no one seriously thinks a comprehensive climate bill is in the offing anytime soon. While disappointing at home, this result is positively threatening abroad. If the world’s largest per-capita emitter is ultimately not able to deliver on its promised emission reductions under the Copenhagen Accord then other countries might well drop their commitments as well, endangering the possibility of a global climate agreement.

Yet there is some good news. A week and a half after the climate bill died in Congress last July, the United States firmly announced that its commitments under the Copenhagen Accord, and therefore its global commitments on climate change to date, remained in place. At the opening of an interim U.N. negotiating session in Bonn starting on Aug. 2, Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. deputy climate envoy, announced that the outcome at Cancun did not depend on passage of legislation and that the United States would still make good on its promises under the Copenhagen Accord by other means if necessary.

Pershing repeated this promise again in his opening press conference this past Monday saying, “We remain committed to President Obama’s pledge announced in Copenhagen last year for a reduction in GHG emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.” When asked how they will deliver on this pledge, Pershing, Climate Envoy Todd Stern, and others point to executive authority for rule-making under the Clean Air Act through the Environmental Protection Agency, state action, and the possibility of passing less comprehensive legislation.

There have already been some reports suggesting that it will be very difficult for the United States to hit this mark without further legislation. Others see more potential in state programs than has been appreciated. Regardless, what is clear is that at some point either the United States must be able to present to the world an action plan for hitting its mitigation targets or else an independent system of review must be created that can provide assessment of the United States and all other international actors.

What to expect

What could emerge from Cancun, then, if we cannot expect a comprehensive agreement this time around? Again, the consensus view for some time has been that the best chance is on a series of smaller though not insignificant agreements on deforestation, technology transfer, and the architecture for a global climate fund. All of these would be valuable, especially deforestation, which globally accounts for the same total emissions as the entire transportation sector. It’s also one of the areas where donor countries like Norway have already launched game-changing programs of cooperation with recipient countries like Brazil and Indonesia with significant amounts of financing.

Throughout the year, however, the United States has insisted that it would not allow smaller pieces of an agreement to go forward, or, as Jonathan Pershing put it earlier in the week in Cancun, “Moving ahead on a few issues — deemed by some to be easy — while holding off on others — deemed by some to be difficult — is not be a path for success.”

The United States has particularly insisted on holding onto the gains that were made on the language of MRV in the Copenhagen Accord and expanding them. The essential position is that any progress on an agreement will be pointless if there is no way of verifying the emission reductions different parties promise to make. Unfortunately, the official negotiating text going into the Cancun meeting does not yet include substantive language that could satisfy all parties.

China and other developing countries have expressed strong reservations in the past that they should be bound by a system of MRV, especially for voluntary reductions in emissions that they take on themselves (such as the ones identified in the figure above in the “low Copenhagen scenario”) without financial or technical assistance from developed countries. The question that many are asking now is whether the United States will use lack of progress in this area to stop movement on smaller agreements on forestry and other areas.

The buzzword around the verification issue since the last interim negotiating session in Tianjin, China, ended in October has been “ICA,” or “International Consultation and Analysis.” Various systems of ICA have been discussed as a compromise position on MRV. The Indian government, among others, has been actively drafting language on what a system of ICA might look like focusing on how it could be used to assess progress that all parties make on emission reduction pledges regardless of the source of finance. One proposal would have actions by all parties subject to ICA and then apply a more stringent form of verification for projects designed to achieve emission reductions which are supported by a global climate fund.

Early reports from Cancun suggest t
hat the United States and China are showing signs of more agreement on the issue of measuring, reporting, and verifying emission reductions. If a proposal on ICA, or something else that could take that good will and turn it into an agreement, survives the meeting, it could ensure substantive agreements in other areas like forestry or technology transfer. If it does not, the meeting may end in a showdown between those who want to move forward on individual parts of a climate treaty and those who do not.

As with last year’s climate summit, however, I’ll be ready to blame the process rather than particular parties in the event that nothing emerges from this meeting other than an agreement to meet again next year. The UNFCCC’s consensus rule among 194 parties makes the U.S. Senate’s 60-vote threshold for action enviable. Failure to make any gains this year will only increase calls for more climate action in smaller forums like the G20 or the U.S.-led Major Economies Forum, which now brings together the 17 largest emitters in a series of regular discussions on proposals for clean technology cooperation.

These smaller venues might offer a better chance at coming to an agreement. But in doing so we will inherit an equally difficult problem: how to adequately represent the interests of the entire world into a process that won’t have all parties around the table. Let’s hope that the negotiators act in good faith to avoid such a predicament.

Governments can use policy measures alongside relatively small sums of public money to catalyze the private sector to help developing countries finance their clean energy transition.Photo: Center for American Progress

A new report released today, “Investing in Clean Energy,” from the Center for American Progress and seven other global think tanks that comprise the Global Climate Network, provides a progress report on commitments to clean energy development in several sectors in China, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. Our report estimates the total cost over the next decade for achieving these targets, and then offers recommendations on how best to use public funds that may become available in the creation of a global climate fund to leverage the private capital needed to meet these goals.

Before detailing our findings, some history about the global climate fund. One of the items agreed to as part of the Copenhagen Accord at the U.N. climate summit in Denmark last December was a commitment to raise $30 billion from developed countries for “fast start” financing for these projects in developing countries between 2010 and 2012, with the goal of generating $100 billion in new capital annually by 2020. The money would be deployed toward enhanced mitigation of carbon pollution, technology development, and adaptation to a warming world.

The accord stops short, however, of determining the ratio of funds that will be spent on mitigation and adaptation, respectively, and of identifying any specific mechanisms or sources of finance other than “public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources.” Later this week, however, a special report from the U.N. Advisory Group on Finance — an informal but high-level group of heads of state, experts, and finance ministers — will provide a more comprehensive look at the instruments that could be used generate these funds.

Our report complements this forthcoming U.N. Advisory Group report by demonstrating that significant amounts of additional funds will be necessary to achieve a successful, global low-carbon transition for long-term climate protection. Private finance is undoubtedly needed. According to the World Bank, additional annual capital costs for mitigation in developing countries will range between $265 billion and $565 billion by 2030. We find that investments in the sectors and countries highlighted in this study must double if current government ambition for renewable energy expansion is to be achieved.

Indeed, excluding China, the average annual investment needed is $15.93 billion, yet the financing gap is around $15.73 billion in India, South Africa, and Nigeria, all of which are currently only investing a tiny fraction of what would be required.

Take India, which is embracing substantial targets to decrease their emissions and shift to a low-carbon growth strategy. The Indian government’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan includes a renewable energy target of 10 percent of total power generation capacity, with 4 percent to 5 percent of the final electricity mix to be achieved by 2012. If these goals are met, then renewable energy would account for approximately 20 percent of the total added energy capacity planned in the 2007 to 2012 period. Toward the same goal, India expects to install 15 gigawatts of additional renewable power capacity by 2012.

The Indian government has allocated $850 million of public finance to support renewable energy under the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, including $16.2 million for wind power demonstration projects and $43.3 million in subsidies to support grid-interactive solar photovoltaic power generation infrastructure. Yet the total capital investment required to achieve the plan’s target of 15 gigawatts of installed renewable electricity by 2012 are likely to be significantly higher.

Using estimates of capital and generation costs calculated by the Indian government’s Integrated Energy Policy-Expert Committee, our report finds that between $9.5 billion and 12.7 billion will be required between 2007 and 2012 if the 2012 target is to be met. This will require leveraging as much as 15 times the budgetary support currently provided by the Indian government in the form of private investment. Follow-up interviews with government officials and clean energy investors in each country participating in our study point to the hurdles and possible solutions needed to build the needed renewable energy infrastructure by tapping private capital. In most countries, the majority of participants suggest that the primary barrier to private sector low-carbon investment was the absence of clear and stable national policies.

Inadequate regulation and standards (South Africa, China), lack of incentive policies (South Africa), the absence of market mechanisms and a price on carbon (China), and failure to implement existing policies (Nigeria) were all cited. Nonetheless, participants in several countries (India, China,) suggest that financial instruments deployed by governments at the national level to date have been quite effective in stimulating private investment in low-carbon energy projects despite limitations in the policies.

The types of instruments that have been successful so far differ depending on a country’s unique circumstances. In India, for example, feed-in tariffs for renewable-sourced energy have been important. In China, requirements on banks to phase out loans to high-carbon emissions sectors have been very effective. Clearly, if the balance of risk and return is acceptable then the private sector will invest. Indeed, participants in the national dialogues held by the various partners in our study suggest there is no lack of enthusiasm or available capital for clean energy. Yet our unequivocal finding is that government intervention will be needed to ensure the private sector’s perception of risk does not exceed its expectation of return.

In effect, clean energy investment requires a public-private partnership. Governments can use policy measures alongside relatively small sums of public money to catalyze private sector participation, enabling government involvement to help reduce the perception of risk, and consequently actual risk, among private sector investors. We propose that governments building the proposed $100 billion climate fund should foster an investment partnership with the private sector. Our report proposes several leveraging mechanisms, such as loan guarantees, subordinated equity investments, and policy insurance, which together could be the basis of this partnership. These tools will help lower costs in two ways.

First, lowering the cost of capital will bring down incremental costs. Developed country government-sourced subsidies and guarantees to help private investors finance clean energy in developing countries will reduce the costs of borrowing. The reason: Cheaper capital i
n most clean energy sectors means lower incremental costs generally.

Second, deployment on a large scale will drive down technology costs. A public-private partnership for clean energy investment should lead to a rapid increase in the pace and scale of deployment, which in turn would lead to technological, technical, and business innovation — learning by doing — and so bring down the currently high relative unit costs of clean energy.

There are some participants in the international climate community who criticize the deliberations of the U.N.’s Advisory Group on Finance because it focuses too much on generating private investment out of public capital. Our report demonstrates that the clean energy investment challenge will only be solved through coordinated public and private effort. This investment challenge is now the world’s greatest innovation challenge.

This post was co-authored by Richard W. Caperton.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) released analysis today of their American Power Act, or APA, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s analysis definitively demonstrates that we can reduce our carbon pollution and jumpstart the clean energy economy at a very small cost to American consumers. This analysis is also consistent with several other studies showing that the American Power Act would create jobs, reduce consumer energy prices, and help the United States lead the world toward stabilizing carbon emissions at safe levels by 2050.

The EPA concluded that the APA would be affordable for American families if it is enacted. The average family will have to spend less on energy if this important legislation passes, primarily because of increases in energy efficiency mandated and stimulated by the legislation. EPA projects that passing the APA would reduce Americans’ annual energy expenditures by 10 percent by 2020.

The agency also finds that Americans will be more prosperous in 2020 than we are today. While families will on average consume $79 to $146 less per year in 2020 if the bill passes, this pales in comparison to how much consumption will increase from 2010 due to predicted economic growth. The EPA also concluded that the bill’s consumer protection programs work so well that those who can least afford a decline in consumption — low-income households — will actually be better off under this bill than in a future without it. In fact, the poorest 10 percent of the population would be almost $160 better off in 2010 under the APA.

It’s important to note, however, that the EPA analysis is primarily focused on environmental modeling, which means it doesn’t include everything one would want to know about the bill’s economic effects. The Center for American Progress has previously argued, for example, that any analysis of climate legislation’s economic impact is incomplete without discussing climate change’s devastating effects. EPA does not explicitly model the economic benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they do recognize the importance of this issue, stating, “Economic effects of these impacts are likely to be significant and largely negative, and to vary substantially by region …”

Among other things, EPA also doesn’t study how the bill would affect jobs and employment, the federal budget, or oil consumption. But fortunately the EPA analysis is not the only study of how the APA would affect the United States.

Recent work from the independent Peterson Institute (using a U.S. Energy Information Administration model) and ClimateWorks (using a McKinsey model) both show that the APA would lead to new jobs for American workers. These studies find that it would create an average of 203,000 to 440,000 more jobs per year between 2012 and 2020 than would exist without the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office found that similar climate legislation would generate revenue for the federal government. Upcoming CBO analysis of the APA will also likely show that passing this bill will actually reduce the government’s budget deficit.

The Peterson Institute analysis further shows that Americans will use less gasoline and import far less oil in 2030 if the Senate passes the APA than under a business-as-usual scenario. Despite the oil industry’s claims that climate legislation will make gasoline unaffordable, the EPA finds that this legislation will only increase the price of gasoline by about a dime by 2020 — well within gasoline’s normal price volatility.

The APA will also encourage American businesses to invest in clean energy technologies that will power our low-carbon future, and it will drive significant increases in renewable energy. What’s more, the EPA predicts that there will be seven-and-a-half times more generation from coal with carbon capture and storage if the Senate passes this bill.

Finally, the EPA convincingly answers an old criticism leveled by many who are opposed to U.S. action on this global problem: If the United States acts to reduce its emissions will it make any difference in global levels of carbon pollution? EPA’s answer is a resounding yes.

EPA modeled three scenarios for global emission reductions based on the APA’s passage, which is unlike their analysis of the House of Representatives’ climate bill from last summer. Their first scenario assumes concerted global action, where the United States follows the carbon reduction path laid out in the Kerry-Lieberman legislation and the other developed countries of the world follow suit, keeping good on their pledge at the Group of 8 meeting in July last summer of cutting their emissions 80 percent bellow 2005 levels by 2050. This scenario assumes the plausible outcome whereby developing countries adopt a policy beginning in 2025 that caps emissions at 2015 levels and reduces emissions to 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

The scientific goals for achieving climate safety established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are that we should aim to hold temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels by 2050. Under this first APA scenario, EPA estimates that there is a 75 percent chance of keeping temperature rise at 2 degrees and a 95 percent chance of holding temperature rise at 95 percent.

But EPA also modeled a more modest scenario for those such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who find such developing country action overly optimistic. Under the second scenario developing country contributions to global emissions reductions do not effectively start until they make good on their promise to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050. On such a “we act only if you act” scenario, which imagines the contribution of developing countries to be nothing until 2050 and from thereafter to hold their emissions at 2050 levels, there is still a 50 percent chance of holding temperature increase under 3 degrees Celsius and an 11 percent chance of holding the increase at 2 degrees. Of course, we would also need to pass APA for this to work.

Clearly this second scenario does not represent where we want to wind up. But it does illustrate how important U.S.-led action is for developing countries. We can expect a more realistic “tit-for-tat” scenario if the United States acts. If the United States makes good on its promise to reduce its emissions now — rather than waiting until 2050 to act — then the developing countries that matter the most — the major emitters such as China and India — will likely reduce their emissions in response, which increases the likelihood that we will stabilize temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius for each year we move forward.

The third scenario that the EPA modeled was no global action, which, as one might expect, essentially gives us no chance of holding temperature increase at 2 degrees. But when we step back and look at the total package APA offers on the plus side of the ledger — the reduced energy costs, decreases in dependence on foreign and unsafe sources of oil, and the job creation possible from this legislation — the best choice is clearly enacting this legislation and improving our global chances for achieving climate safety.

Center for American ProgressThe UNFCCC’s midterm goal for climate safety is stabilizing temperature change increase caused by humans to no more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. According to analysis from Project Catalyst hitting this goal requires a 17 gigaton decrease in annual greenhouse gas emissions to 44 gigatons per year from the projected increase of global emissions of 61 gigatons by 2020 if we continue polluting at current rates (Figure 1).

The tense two weeks of negotiations in Copenhagen—preceded by an intense year of international negotiations once the Obama administration came into office—resulted in the creation of the Copenhagen Accord. This is not yet a legally binding agreement, but it does fulfill President Barack Obama’s promise prior to the Copenhagen summit that the United States was committed to getting a political agreement out of the meeting that could be implemented immediately and serve as the first step in a process to eventually produce a new international accord setting us on a pathway to climate safety.

Among the accord’s virtues are its commitment to limiting humanly caused temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius with a promise to investigate the feasibility of holding temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also includes a pledge of $30 billion in “quick start” financing from developed countries by 2012 to assist developing countries with adaptation to a warmer world and transition to a low-carbon economy. Progress was made in reconciling differing interpretations—primarily between the United States and China—on standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying reductions. But most importantly the accord provides for the first time an avenue for developing countries to make commitments for emission reductions, which is particularly important for moving beyond the Kyoto Protocol’s old divisions between expectations for reductions from developed and developing countries. Yet the accord is as of yet incomplete given the lack of emission reduction targets for different parties, the inconclusive determination about whether it will become a legally binding agreement, and a robust plan for how compliance with commitments for reductions will be enforced.

These gaps will be addressed over the next year of negotiations, but the accord has already provided us with the information needed to determine where we are on the path to achieving climate safety. The initial deadline for submitting commitments under the Copenhagen Accord was this past January 31. According to the UNFCCC, 92 countries, including the 27-member European Union, have now made commitments to the accord, representing over 80 percent of global emissions.

Submissions so far by parties signing on to the Copenhagen Accord show improvement compared to modeling from Project Catalyst and analysis by the Center for American Progress prior to the Copenhagen summit of existing commitments for reductions by the world’s largest emitters. The high end of proposals for reductions from all countries under the accord has gone from 8.7 gigatons of abatement by 2020 compared to a business-as-usual scenario up to 8.9 gigatons of reductions compared to a business-as-usual scenario. The low end of proposals has improved from 3.6 gigatons to 4.9 gigatons, contingent, for example, on whether the United States will meet its stated commitment to emission reductions and whether developed countries provide sufficient financial incentives for developing countries to meet their targets.

Center for American ProgressAccording to Project Catalyst, emission reductions on the low end have improved largely due to countries such as Brazil and Indonesia strengthening their own direct commitments for reductions, rather than, for example, only providing a less expensive offset market through deforestation projects for developed countries. These figures also still include the pre-Copenhagen commitments from major emitting countries in the developing world such as China and India to reduce their emissions by 13 percent and 19 percent respectively below a “business-as-usual” growth in emissions (Figure 2).

Center for American ProgressWith other smaller changes in global emissions projections—including a decrease due to the recent economic downturn and reduced emissions from deforestation and loss of peat lands—the high-end abatement path so far from the Copenhagen Accord commitments leaves us only 5 gigatons short of the 44 gigaton goal by 2020—two-thirds of the reductions needed to achieve climate safety (Figure 3).

The current submissions under the Copenhagen Accord are not yet sufficient to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius according to this analysis, but they are by no means the end of the story. The January 31 deadline for submissions under the accord is soft and allows for submissions to come in during the year. There is also ample room for improvement in our global emissions profile as we move toward the next UNFCCC meeting, which begins at the end of November in Cancun, Mexico. Consider the following:

Many will complain that the Copenhagen meeting did not achieve its goal of delivering a new final climate agreement. But it avoided a much worse outcome, namely locking in a legally binding agreement that would not reach climate safety. If the current submissions under the Copenhagen Accord were final for a new climate agreement then it would be difficult if not impossible to improve the ambition for additional emission reductions as we move forward. Instead, as President Obama intended, the accord is only the beginning of a process to achieve the reductions in climate pollution that we need. Given that the accord commits parties to the 2 degree Celsius goal of achieving climate safety, the logical next step in the process—agreeing on emission reduction goals under the accord—will need to be tied to that temperature goal.

There is also reason for optimism because it is very likely that the United States can deliver the necessary reductions even if Congress fails to deliver on comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year. The low-case scenario in this analysis is primarily a function of whether the United States can achieve its goal of achieving a 17 percent cut below 2005 emission levels by 2020. This figure represents reductions from the economy-wide cap-and-trade mechanism in the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House of Representatives last summer. If the United States cannot meet this goal, as is modeled on the low-end scenario here, then other countries will likely only achieve the low end of their ambitions as well. But what these figures do not take into account is that if this happens the administration will still be required to begin the process of reducing carbon emissions under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, thus increasing the likelihood that we will reach the high-end scenario. Estimates now show that individual states alone will already deliver 7 percent of reductions commensurate with this 17 percent goal from their policies alone, leaving only 10 percent needed from executive action at the federal level.

If the Senate does pass legislation that mirrors some of the important provisions in the House climate legislation, then the United States can deliver additional reductions that could overcome the 5 gigaton gap between the high end of these reductions and climate safety. The high-end scenario here only models the 17 percent reduction from an economy-wide measure such as a cap-and-trade program as the extent of the U.S. contribution to global carbon abatement. It does not count additional reductions that will be achieved under the House legislation such as the 0.7 gigatons of reductions from direct assistance to international forestry programs. We previously calculated that this program would improve the U.S. reductions from 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 to a reduction of 11 percent below 1990 levels of emissions. This is all the more reason to press for successful action in the Senate, which, if similar steps are taken to preserve these measures, can achieve almost a full gigaton of the additional reductions needed by 2012 to close the 5 gigaton gap between the high end of the Copenhagen Accord submissions and the path to climate safety.

Many are determined to see the outcome of Copenhagen as a failure, but this analysis reveals a different picture: a good start in this new year to the reductions needed in climate pollution and a clearer pathway on how to meet our global goals.

The international negotiations on climate change wrapped up Dec. 19 in Copenhagen. The conference achieved an interim agreement, known as the Copenhagen Accord, which could put the major polluting nations on a pathway to reducing global warming pollution, and it continues to set the expectation for U.S. domestic action on climate change.

Much work remains, but there were also numerous notable achievements and meaningful insights into how the United States can gain from leading the world toward a new international clean-energy agreement.

A “meaningful” deal on climate mitigation

President Barack Obama left Copenhagen Friday night after personally working to secure agreement from China, South Africa, Brazil, and India on a “meaningful and unprecedented” climate change agreement. The president played a major role in crafting the Copenhagen Accord that was hammered out by 28 countries and accepted by 188 by the end of the meeting. Only five countries — Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Sudan — refused the accord.

The Accord will go forward with committed parties now required to submit national action plans for emission reductions by the end of January 2010 that are consistent with the agreement’s stated goal of limiting global temperature increases from carbon pollution from rising to more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) over pre-industrial levels.

The Accord stipulates that countries should consider further strengthening this goal by limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees C. Further, specific targets are not iterated in the accord and need to be added as soon as possible, but most parties are committed to strengthening it and taking the next step to turn it into a binding agreement by the 2010 U.N. climate summit in Mexico City.

The existing and proposed policies by the nations that produce large amounts of greenhouse gas pollution provide a good start toward the pollution cuts that we need. The Accord allows nations to undertake a full range of policies that reduce pollution, rather than limiting qualifying policies to economy-wide pollution caps. Preliminary results from a Center for American Progress report on carbon cap equivalents using recent data from Project Catalyst finds that current and pending policies among the world’s 17 major carbon polluters will yield 65 percent of reductions needed by 2020 if all parties succeed in doing what they have promised to do as of today.

Responsibility from developing countries

The Kyoto Protocol called on developed countries to reduce emissions but did not demand reductions from developing countries. Major polluting developing countries, including China, India, South Africa, and Brazil, are now poised to make transparent emissions reductions or reductions in pollution rates. This is the first time that developing countries have agreed to binding emission reductions in an international agreement. This represents a major shift from the schism between developed and developing countries that blocked progress in the past.

First-ever compromise to measure, report, and verify pollution reductions

The Accord includes a compromise between the United States and China to verify pollution reductions according to rigorous and transparent guidelines depending on the source of financing for the reductions. All reductions are subject to “international consultation and analysis.” As a New York Times editorial observed, “China is now a player in the effort to combat climate change in a way it has never been, putting measurable emissions reductions targets on the table and accepting verification.”

Serious emissions reductions targets for developing countries

The ramp up to Copenhagen and the United States’ decision to put midterm emission reductions targets and immediate financing numbers on the table prior to the start of the summit stimulated unprecedented national commitments from key countries. China announced on Nov. 26 a target of reducing carbon pollution per unit of gross domestic product by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. Soon after the U.S.-India summit in Washington, India announced on Dec. 2 that it intends to decrease its carbon intensity 24 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. More importantly, other clean-energy and climate policies in both countries will result in reductions in China of 13 percent below business-as-usual emissions by 2020 and 19 percent below business-as-usual emissions in India by 2020.

Major financial commitments

Developed countries committed significantly more financial resources than ever before to developing countries for mitigation, adaptation, and forest conservation. This was despite disappointments in negotiations over an international forestry deal and an international technology transfer regime. Developments include:

• The Accord establishes a “fast start” fund to provide $30 billion from 2010-2012 for assistance to developing countries, including funds for forestry and a commitment to mobilizing $100 billion a year to address the needs of developing countries by 2020. Japan said that it will provide $15 billion through 2012 toward the fast start fund, contingent on achieving an international agreement. And E.U. leaders will provide $10.5 billion over the next three years as part of the fund. The United States promised a fair share of meeting this goal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States’ funding is contingent on a commitment by developing nations to make emission reductions transparent.
• The United States will finance $1 billion for avoided deforestation that will be matched by other countries for a total of $3.5 billion to prevent the destruction of tropical forests. The global goal is to cut deforestation by half by 2020, which would be equal to eliminating emissions from the entire global transportation sector.
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the launch of the Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative, or Climate REDI, which will contribute $85 million to a global fund of $350 million over five years to assist developing nations with adoption of clean-energy technology. Secretary Chu also announced 10 new clean-energy technology road maps under the Global Partnership, which was launched during the Major Economies Forum in July in L’Aquila, Italy.

A boost to passage of U.S. climate change legislation

As the Washington Post editorial board observed, the Copenhagen Accord “should prod the U.S. Senate to take up climate-change legislation.” President Obama said that we should meet our commitment to reduce pollution, not only because the science demands it, but because it offers enormous economic opportunity to build new clean-energy companies. This first step in Copenhagen commits the United States to passing legislation to make way for an international binding agreement. It is time for the U.S. Senate to continue its international leadership role by acting in 2010, which would create millions of jobs, secure energy independence, and boost the economy.

The primary international opponents of the Copenhagen Accord are oil states

The leading voices of opposition to the Accord came from Venezuela, Sudan, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. The first three nations are oil-producing states that would lose major revenue if countries reduce their global warming pollution by using less oil. The latter two nations are clients of Venezuela that must curry favor with their patron. The ability of a handful of petro-states to block the Accord from being endorsed by the entire U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change at Copenhagen suggests the flawed nature of the United Nations process that requires unanimity among 193 nations. Their opposition will not stop those signing onto the Accord from moving forward and carrying out its mandate, but many observers believe that the outcome of this meeting suggests that alternative venues, such as the Major Economies Forum, which includes the world’s largest developed and developing nations polluters, can and should play a larger role in the design and implementation of future agreements.

Rebecca Lefton is a Researcher for Progressive Media, Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow, and Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress.