Tough Negotiations on Climate Change in Bonn

Bob Baugh, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council and co-chair of the AFL-CIO Energy Task Force, is in Bonn, Germany, for meetings to ensure that labor’s input contributes to larger United Nations global climate change discussions later this year. His latest report below follows up on his first blog from Bonn here.

Trade unionists know that negotiations are a tough business even in the best of times. Imagine a negotiating process with 189 nations and multiple stakeholders, including business, labor, environmental and other civil society organizations. It is an intense process. Yesterday was one of those days.

The G-77, a group of developing nations that includes China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Uganda and Tobago, rallied behind a rejection of the draft negotiating text on developed countries’ commitments. In their view, developing countries should have no measurable commitments and will only take action on technology transfer and other measures funded by developed nations. While there are real differences between the least developed countries and advanced developing economies like China (with major cities that have a gross domestic product [GDP] greater than many Eastern European countries), they follow the lead of China’s government.

This certainly wasn’t new nor unexpected. U.S State Department staff simply shrugged it off as “posturing for negotiations.” It is similar to responses from the Chinese to demands they live up to such existing trade obligations as currency misalignment, workers’ rights and the environment.  

Two weeks ago, U.S congressional delegations returned from China bearing hopeful climate change messages from their meetings with China’s leaders. At the same time, China’s message in Bonn has been that the developing world must cut emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, that the developing world should be responsible for emissions on products it buys from China, that developing nations are not required to do anything under the current framework and that the developed nations have a “historic responsibility” for the current level of emissions.

Developing nations have a responsibility to act, but the Chinese version of having your cake and eating it too is not a solution. They didn’t like it when one U.S. negotiator responded: “China and the developing world’s current emissions are tomorrow’s historic responsibility.” The fact is, this is no longer the pre-Kyoto climate change conference days of 1992. Yesterday’s developing countries are today’s advanced developing nations and they are now on a track to produce more than 80 percent of the growth in carbon emissions during the next several decades. 

Ambassador Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, acknowledged these facts in an excellent speech he gave on climate negotiations with China at the Center for American Progress.

He said that

even if every other country in the world beside China reduced its emissions by 80 percent between now and 2050—a thoroughly unrealistic assumption, by the way—China’s emissions under business-as-usual assumptions would alone be so large as to put us on a track to global concentrations of 540 ppm [parts per millimeter] of CO2, and a 2.7 degree centigrade temperature increase, far above what scientists consider safe.

The ambassador pointed out that the impression that China refuses to take action is both inaccurate and unfair. He cited China’s efforts in its five-year plan to reduce energy intensity 20 percent by 2010; to increase the share of renewable energy in the primary energy supply to 15 percent by 2020; and to increase stringent auto emissions standards. China also created a domestic stimulus package that contains substantial clean energy investments. Yet, as the ambassador also noted, China now is the world’s largest pollution emitter in the midst of unparalleled growth and so “they must do more.”  

The Obama administration is now pursuing a three-track approach to addressing the Chinese:

1. The current climate change negotiating process.
2. A 16-nation Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate—Including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa and Indonesia—which will meet in July immediately after the G8 meeting.
3. Bilateral relationships, especially with China.

The latter provides a backdrop to the Bonn meetings. While we met here, Ambassador Stern was in China pursuing a joint research and development agenda and other cooperative steps to encourage China to embrace a new low-carbon growth agenda. 

Many here are hopeful the private U.S. discussions will open a path to a real discussion of mutual responsibility that recognizes the obvious. Success depends upon each nation playing a role. There also is another obvious political reality that Ambassador Stern said everyone must recognize:

developed countries who do agree to take strong action won’t long accept a world in which economic competitors are allowed to free-ride with respect to CO2 emissions.

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