U.S. takes the offensive, offends plenty

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Ben Jervey in U.S.A.

The negotiations came to a head pretty quickly here in Bangkok. Late Monday afternoon, the first day of meetings, the U.S. delegation tore straight into one of the most critical and contentious issues of the talks–how developed and developing countries should address mitigation. Things got a little ugly between the U.S. and India, and plenty of folks left the U.N. worrying that the talks could derail entirely.

The spat was technically procedural–U.S. lead delegate Jonathan Pershing requested a new discussion sub-group on “mitigation elements common to all Parties.” Outside of Diplomacyland, this roughly translates to “we’ve really got to talk about what China and India’s are going to offer.” Pershing didn’t exactly go about it gently, insisting that this was a core priority for the U.S. and that if it wasn’t addressed (and a new sub-group wasn’t created), then all discussion would come to a screeching halt. We dig into this or we don’t go forward. As heads snapped and shoulders sank, you could practically hear the air suck out of the room.

As you might guess, things got tense. India’s lead delegate, Ambassador Dasgupta, fired back that the proposal flew in the face of the Convention itself (the UNFCCC) and the Bali Action Plan (BAP), in which all Parties agreed on distinctions–or “differentiation”–between developed country mitigation commitments and developing country mitigation actions. (Damn, more wonk to decode: “we agreed back in Bali that us poor countries won’t be punished by the same rules, because, hey, you caused this mess, and we’re poor.”)

Pershing didn’t budge. He really rankled the Indians by quoting their own Environment Minister to make his case. (It later came out that the quote had been made up by an Indian journalist, who’s apparently like the Jayson Blair of the subcontinent–stranger than fiction, this stuff.) Support fell pretty directly along that old rich-poor divide. So much for American leadership, the Global South grumbled.

Under the procedural skin of this debate is the meat, the crux of the entire negotiations: will developing countries have any binding commitments under the agreement? And, again, it’s not really about all developing countries. It’s about China and India.

For the U.S., it’s purely political. Without some commitment on mitigation from China and India (with little doubt, two of the world’s biggest economies in the not-too-distant future), the treaty has a snowball’s chance of getting ratified by the Senate. The timing wasn’t arbitrary. Pershing dropped this hammer on Day One because it’s a “must have” point. America drew a line in the sand, their first.

And possibly painted themselves into a corner. America’s already in a tough bargaining position, what with the immense historic responsibility (the amount of greenhouse gas already spewed to fuel a century and a half of economic growth), the highest current per capita carbon emissions in the world by a long shot, and–perhaps most importantly–failure to ever ratify Kyoto or ever sign on to (or even submit) any binding targets of its own.

This is why America’s still the goat abroad. It’s awfully tough to justify demanding something of China and India that the U.S. itself hasn’t signed up to yet. Plenty of folks–and nations–are calling bullshit.

If there’s a silver lining to this fracas, it’s that things are finally moving. The U.S. has been quietly chipping away at this point for months. They obviously felt it was time to bring out the hammer. “We’ve finally had a fight,” one NGO observer told me. “And that’s a good thing.” Tuesday morning, the Parties sat down at the Working Group Chair’s request for some long, closed-door “informal consultations” (oh, to be a fly on that wall!), and apparently the procedural bits have been resolved. There won’t be any new sub-group, and the U.S. won’t block or walk. And optimists are relieved that a blow-up like this happened on the first day of Bangkok, and not the last week in Copenhagen.

But let’s be clear–this could still go terribly wrong. It’s a Grand Canyon of a rift between the two sides. And it’s crunch time. There are 13 days of negotiations between now and Copenhagen, and delegates have to pair down a ~200 page draft, chock full of proposed text options and hard-bracketed clauses. Logistics alone are going to make it near impossible to bang the treaty into shape in time to wrestle over the final details. If these talks crumble, more likely than not it’ll be over this. The U.S. obviously sees this as an absolute must. A political necessity without which, we’re going nowhere. Which begs the question–what will they give up to get it?

Tags: developing countries, differentiation, India, Jonathan Pershing, Mitigation, north-south, USA