Negotiators prepare for UN climate summit opening
Updated
On Monday, the long-awaited UN summit on climate change gets underway in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, with the overall aim of coming up with a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Negotiators will be working frantically to resolve disputes over how much emissions should be cut by in poor and rich countries, and who's going to pay for it all. In week two, world leaders arrive for the ministerial summit, which winds up on the 18th of December.
Presenter: Joanna McCarthy
Speaker: Richard Denniss; Executive director of the Australia Institute; David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne; Kenneth Green, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Jules Boykoff, associate professor of politics and government at Pacific University
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McCARTHY: It was in the late 1800s that scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change the climate. But it was another century before a consensus emerged ... and policymakers began to take note. David Karoly is a Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
KAROLY: At that stage in the 1980s, there were a number of scientific studies indicating that increase in greenhouse gases due to burning fossil fuels were likely to have a future impact on warming the climate system and the governments around world decided it was appropriate to commission an independent analysis.
McCARTHY: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, issued its first report in 1990. The UN General Assembly then agreed to begin negotiations for a framework convention on climate change. Two years later, world leaders gathered for what's now known as the Rio summit. Executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss.
DENNISS: The agreed that climate change was real and was caused by the excessive release of greenhouse gases from man made activity. They agreed that we needed to introduce carbon price to start moving us away from our reliance on coal and oil - and they agreed that rich countries should move first - because it was rich countries that had caused the problem and it was rich countries that could best afford to solve the problem.
McCARTHY: And it's those three principles that came to underpin the Kyoto protocol, initially adopted in 1997. It committed industrialised countries to cutting their emissions by 5 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. But developing countries -- including rapidly expanding economies like China and India -- were spared mandatory targets. And for that reason, the United States and Australia refused to sign on. Kenneth Green is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
GREEN: The fundamental shortcoming of Kyoto is that it was basically a redistributionist scheme that developed countries were never going to go for - at the core of Kyoto is the assumption that developed countries are going to transfer massive amounts of wealth - no matter how you define it, through offsets, or through foreign aid, or investments in transfer of technology - to developing countries. And frankly, they've never done that and they're not likely to do that at the expense of their own economy. especially countries that are their economic and geopolitical rivals.
McCARTHY: But Richard Denniss argues that the U-S Australia position was deceptive.
DENNISS: Because the explicit agreement coming out of Rio earth summit that led to the Kyoto Protocol was that rich countries needed to move first because for the last 100 years it's us that filled atmosphere with global warming that we are already experiencing.
McCARTHY: And another voice had emerged in the public debate - that of the climate sceptic - those who disputed that changes in climate were caused by human activity. Jules Boykoff is an associate professor of politics at Pacific University. He and his brother Maxwell Boycoff analysed coverage of climate change in four major US newspapers from 1988 to 2002.
And he argues coverage of the sceptics' view skewed the public debate.
BOYCOFF: So when you look at whether humans are causing global warming, and you give both sides equal time roughly to give their opinions and ideas, you're actually performing a bias in favour of those who are global warming sceptics which is not in line with the idea of the dominant science community and that humans are in fact causing to a certain degree global warming.
McCARTHY: By 2006 -- the issue of climate change was dominating public debate.
GORE: My name is Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States.
McCARTHY: An Inconvenient Truth, featuring former the US Vice President, broke box office records for a documentary when it premiered in the US on Memorial Day weekend. And while the film took the issue into people's lounge rooms -- another report that year thrust the issue into the boardroom.
Richard Denniss:
DENNIS: The Stern Review was an incredible contribution to the debate because it was the first authoritative statement that was taken seriously by the international policy community that pointed out simply that the cost of failing to tackle climate change dwarfed the costs of tackling climate change.
McCARTHY: The next year IPCC scientists issued their fourth report - and along with Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize. By 2009 -- all eyes are on Copenhagen -- where leaders are hoping to lay the groundwork for a successor protocol to Kyoto.
Richard Denniss again.
DENNISS: My hope for Copenhagen is that our elected leaders show some leadership, that they literally take responsibility for the urgent need to tackle climate change, and commit themselves to targets for reductions that are consistent with what the science says we need to do. But my fear is that we'll see more of what modern politicians love most - and that is to sign up for long term goals which will be irrelevant for their own political futures, and refuse to do anything in the short term.
