Climate delegates finally finished two years of negotiations Saturday by “taking note” of the two-and-a-half page Copenhagen Accord hashed out Friday night. It reminded me of a marathoner who slow-walks the course, hobbles across the finish line seven hours late, and then declares victory. Yes, there was a semblance of a deal by Saturday, but it’s not what any of the parties said they were coming here to do, and no medals are being handed out.

The most important part of this deal is what’s not in it. Crucial unresolved questions will continue to dog climate negotiators into 2010 and beyond:

Funding

The Accord says there’s a “collective commitment” by developed countries to provide fast-start financing to developing countries “approaching” $30 billion. There’s also a “goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.”

How these collective goals will go over with the national appropriators in the U.S., EU, and Japan who actually write the checks remains to be seen. Senate Republicans have already expressed opposition to the funding. The longer climate deadlock continues without a treaty and verifiable commitments, the harder it will be to justify funding on this scale.

Status of the Kyoto Protocol

Whether the Kyoto Protocol should live on or be replaced was one of the bloodiest skirmishes in the Battle of Copenhagen. This issue held up substantive progress for 8 of the 10 days of the conference. The negotiators in the end decided on the so-called two-track process, in which working groups on the Kyoto Protocol and on “long-term cooperative action” will continue to negotiate (these two “ad hoc” working groups increasingly look permanent).There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how the Kyoto Protocol and any supplemental treaty would fit together, however. Look for this to be a contentious issue in Mexico City and beyond.

Targets and Timetables

The Accord twice mentions the objective of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and the parties agreed to “take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity.” Yet the document has no firm targets for emissions or for greenhouse gas concentrations.

It’s been widely publicized that the existing commitments of all nations don’t come anywhere close to ensuring that warming is limited to 2 degrees. This news wasn’t first leaked in a UN memo on Thursday. In fact, we’ve known for a while that the commitments on the table don’t bring us below 2 degrees. See here and here.

International law often tolerates textual ambiguity, but the cognitive dissonance of a 2 degree objective and commitments that will likely lead to more than 3 degrees of warming is pretty glaring.   This gap will become a rallying cry for the emerging climate justice movement next year.

No deadline for a treaty in 2010

Remember back in November, when world leaders stated their hope for a “political” document in Copenhagen that could be made into a treaty in a matter of months, not years? In the accord, though, a reference to completing a treaty by the end of 2010 was deleted. Perhaps Obama, Wen, Singh, and other leaders did not want to raise expectations again about any timeline. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for fast action on a treaty, but will the key players want to run this marathon again within a year? The G-77 as a negotiating block is in a shambles, there is deep anger by developing states directed at China and other developing states, and the UNFCCC secretariat is widely seen as inept as a conference organizer.

Instead of a near-term treaty, we may see a kind of climate interregnum, a shift from an era of treaties (1992-2009), where addressing climate change was grounded in international law, to an era when climate change is addressed through national pledges with no binding international arrangements. Based on what happened in Copenhagen, it could be many years before we see a new global climate treaty, and possibly a decade before any new treaty enters into force.

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COPENHAGEN — One of the puzzles about the U.S. strategy here in is how negotiators expected that pledging a 17 percent emissions reduction below 2005 levels by 2020 could be taken seriously. After all, that would bring the U.S. to approximately 1990 levels a decade from now, which is higher than the level the U.S. committed to in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 (signed, but never ratified). It’s also far higher than what other governments have committed to, notably the European Union, which has unilaterally promised to get to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The argument, of course, is that the 17 percent pledge is the best the U.S. can do, given the difficulty of getting 67 U.S. senators to ratify a treaty. This message sends developing countries into a tizzy, though, because it seems to make the whole 190-country negotiation (and the fate of the planet) dependent on about ten swing senators from the United States who aren’t even here.

But is the administration’s Senate strategy so crazy? Yesterday, I spoke with John Holdren, President Obama’s chief science advisor, who laid out the case for this strategy in a side-event.

According to Holdren, nothing the U.S. does could contribute more to fight climate change than passing and implementing cap-and-trade legislation. Therefore, it follows that the U.S. shouldn’t agree to anything in Copenhagen that would jeopardize treaty ratification or the prospects for moving a climate bill through Congress. This includes agreeing to larger emissions reductions targets being demanded by developing countries.

“Getting going quickly is more important than agreeing on the ultimate goal,” Holdren said. “Once we get going, we will be on a trajectory to achieve the long term goal” of 83 percent reductions below 2005 levels by 2050, “which is fully consistent with 450 ppm.”

When I asked Holdren if he was concerned about feedback loops and tipping points that might cause serious damage before 2050, he said that a more aggressive 2020 goal was not needed. The most important point was for U.S. emissions to peak and then start to decline by 2015, he said, and the U.S. negotiating stance is consistent with that path.

Holdren added that it is a distraction to debate whether the ultimate goal should be 350 ppm versus 450 ppm, or limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C instead of 2 degrees C. Targets and timetables can always be made more aggressive later, and inserting those issues into the current congressional process would only result in delay, he said.

So the administration is playing a delicate two-level negotiating game here. It is working hard for agreement at Copenhagen, but it is not budging on its emissions reductions pledge to ensure that any future treaty has some chance of getting ratified at home.

The administration’s Senate strategy explains why the U.S. is pushing for a “pledge and review” system in which developed states could all pledge widely varying emissions reductions figures. It opposes a Kyoto-style agreement in which all reduction pledges are roughly uniform.

It also means that the major wiggle room for the United States at Copenhagen is not in the emissions numbers, but in financing. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s announcement today that the U.S. would work for a $100 billion per year fund for climate change mitigation and adaption in the developing world could be a crucial breakthrough in the negotiations.

We can only hope that the administration strategy works. They are right to emphasize treaty ratification — there’s no point in agreeing to a treaty here that can’t become law back home. President Obama will also push hard for domestic legislation, regardless of the outcome in Copenhagen. But it is not clear that a Senate bill will mandate a 17 percent emissions reduction by 2020, nor is it clear that it will involve any firm reduction commitments (it might be structured around subsidies, pork, and tax credits instead). It is also not clear that the House will again pass a final bill with a 17 percent reduction. Waxman-Markey passed by a nine-vote margin in June 2009, but 2010 is a whole other ballgame.

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As 120 heads of state arrive at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, there’s amazingly little direction on just what exactly they are negotiating. Is this going to be an extension of the Kyoto Protocol (a second commitment period), or will the Kyoto Protocol be buried, with some brand new treaty rising from its ashes? Will the agreement be legally binding or just a declaration of principles?

Here at the “climate café” lunchroom at the Bella Center, there’s a lot of talk about the proper “architecture” of an agreement, so let’s look at some building styles that might come out of Copenhagen:

The Taj Mahal: A Legally Binding Treaty

Negotiating a full-blown treaty was the original intent for COP15 in Copenhagen, according to the 2007 Bali “Roadmap.” A full treaty would include emissions targets for developed countries, compliance mechanisms, possible new commitments by developing countries, and detailed provisions on ratification and entry into force. Lowering expectations, the U.S. and other developed nations signaled weeks ago that there is simply not enough time to hammer out a formal treaty, but many developing states and NGOs are still pushing for the Taj to be built in the next two days.

The Concrete Foundation: A Consensus Agreement with Hard Numbers

Heads of state from 120 countries don’t fly in here just to have a photo op. There’s personal and national prestige on the line to solidify some written agreement in Copenhagen. Conceivably, the agreement could contain hard numbers for emissions targets and financing by developed nations, as well as pledges by developing countries to take some low-carbon policy measures (in COP-speak, “Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions”). Imagine that many of the crucial blanks are filled in a draft agreement on long-term cooperation that was released this morning [pdf], and that the document is then completed as a treaty in 2010.

This is what lead architect Barack Obama said he wanted to build when he gets to Copenhagen: an accord that will have “immediate operational effect” in the sense that national commitments at Copenhagen could be implemented while a formal treaty is drawn up. But the parties are very far apart even on the basics, like the future status of the Kyoto Protocol, levels of emissions reductions, baseline years (1990 or 2005), financing commitments, and whether the goal of the whole thing should be limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees. If a foundation for a future treaty is going to be laid at Copenhagen, the concrete commitments better get solidified soon.

The Rain Tarp: Kicking Everything to 2010

There’s only about 60 hours left in this conference. Walkouts and deadlock have already plagued the negotiations. There’s a real possibility that despite years of lead-up, the only thing the parties will agree to in Copenhagen is a face-saving document to protect them from political flack. This document would note general areas of agreement (such as the need to finance adaptation in the least developed countries and continuing the Clean Development Mechanism) and it might provide a roadmap for further negotiations in 2010.

The fallout would be immediate. The COP would be called a failure, and the prospects for a treaty in 2010 would not be pretty. After all, if the parties can’t agree now, with the involvement of heads of state and the attention of the world, why would they be able to resolve their differences in August or September, in the run-up to the next COP in Mexico City? U.S. cap-and-trade legislation would also be jeopardized if a flimsy deal gets patched together in Copenhagen and carries the taint of failure.

The stakes are high, and time is running very short here. I’m pretty sure a global climate architecture will get built — eventually. But we need a roof over our heads now.

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