THE Sydney climate change declaration is a success for John Howard, a good outcome for APEC and an incremental step on the long journey to find global agreement on a post-2012 emissions policy.
The leaders’ declaration is exactly what the APEC forum was established to do - confront the big issues and strike a regional position to influence global outcomes. (Paul Kelly in The Australian)
CHINESE President Hu Jintao and George W.Bush have delivered a sweeping victory for John Howard on climate change, agreeing for the first time to accept global goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. (Dennis Shanahan and Cameron Stewart)
But not everyone was impressed:
Professor Hugh Outhred, an energy specialist at the University of New South Wales, said general statements such as at Sydney allowed political leaders to appear to be addressing climate change while doing little.
“The main practical implication could be a delay in doing anything,” he said. “They gain time, they are trying to do as little as possible.”
There was biting criticism too from the Los Angeles Times, which said the “aspirational” Sydney statement was political theatre designed to boost Howard’s green credentials before the conservative leader faces an election later this year.
“For aspirational, read: voluntary, vague and useless for anything but padding a fading prime minister’s environmental resume,” it said in an online editorial.
You can read the Sydney Declaration (pdf) yourself and make up your own mind. It does seem to emphasise flexibility and diverse approaches. Lenore Taylor in The Australian Financial Review suggested that the Sydney Declaration had pretty well caught up to Rio 1992, so it’s not all bad.
There is little doubt that the original plan was to set up a framework different from the UNFCCC and Kyoto, for Sydney to become the new Kyoto. As Quiggin says that notion is now dead. In truth it died when Angela Merkel rounded up George Bush at a Sunday lunch just before the G8. At G8 Bush signed up to the UNFCC post-Kyoto process.
What’s more five “poor� nations invited to Heiligendamm by the G8, China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, agreed to do their fair share and committed to the UN process.
With APEC it seems that China headed us off at the pass. Der Spiegel reported under the heading CHINA REBUKES AUSTRALIA:
As Australia hosts this year’s APEC meeting, it is trying to get concrete climate change agreements out of the annual primarily trade-focused summit. But, with a tight smile, China is politely telling them that the issue already has a forum - and it’s not Down Under.
It seems that Malaysia was not the only country questioning why climate change was on the agenda at all. What’s more, while Bush had trouble concentrating on the agenda Chinese President Hu Jintao was right there on task and gave the developed countries a stern lecture suggesting that they take the whole climate change thing seriously and to stop mucking around.
This is in accord with Robert Merkel’s perpective from China. It was noticed in Germany and elsewhere around the world. In the broader scheme what happened at APEC is a sign of China rising and the US on the wane.
In my last post on APEC and other meeting I mentioned that there were a couple of UN sponsored meeting in Vienna. There was next to nothing in the Australian press, but luckily we have TEH INTERNETS and can read about it in The People’s Daily:
Industrial nations reached consensus on Friday [31 August] to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Glory be, the nations of the world establishing targets and they are not even aspirational! Perhaps a few subtleties got lost in translation if you read the Washington Post report. It turns out that the agreed target is “a nonbinding starting point for future discussion.�
The WP report suggests that the meeting was not all sweetness and light. But guess which kids were mucking up in class this time - Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland and, you guessed it, Australia!
There were some other things in the Sydney Declaration. They aspired to plant 20 million hectares of forest by 2020, enough to save 11% on one year’s carbon output for the planet in 2004. And they are going to try to reduce energy intensity by 25% by 2030. On my calculation that means if you double GDP you only increase energy usage by 25%. How much use that is to the planet depends on how you generate the energy.
Meanwhile Clive Hamilton, that stern taskmaster who loves to hold the Government to account, has been reading some of the same stuff I’ve been reading. He’s told us on the day the Howard boosters were heralding the APEC triumph that things are worse than we generally appreciate. I think I need a Bex and good lie down.
Elsewhere Crikey show instances of how the text was watered down during negotiations and there’s more at Surfdom and at Nexus 6.
My take on the mighty aspirational target success. To say it will be instantly forgotten by the rest of the world is, of course, saying too much, as they never noticed it in the first place.
But APEC was worth it!!!
The Sydney Declaration: “Somebody oughta do something about the environment in five years’ time. We mean it.”
Pretty good value for $330 million.
What would you expect from the GG Shamahan and co are looking at there chief leaking source getting his backside booted out of power,so its all shoulders to the wheel to make him look good,and give that bounce that Shamahan is looking for,keeps finding only to lose it in the next poll.
They are saying Downer and Turnbull want Howard to go,leaked to the TV version of the GG Sky.
I just wish Howard would call the election and get it over with
Thanks for all of that detail Brian, that is a great rundown. Howard needed this to be a triumph to justify his 11 years of doing nothing. It leaves him going to an election with nothing tangible in his GW bag. Do they still sell Bex?
Well it is clear that this issue has a while to go yet. Clearly Kyoto is dead, and the Europeans are going to have grapple with the reality that APEC is a bigger hitter geopolitically than the EU.
Thanks, Nexus 6. I should have known you’d be onto it. I’ve added a link to the post.
BilB, I think they stopped selling Bex years ago. I believe they were addictive and ended up wrecking your kidneys. The reference is to the advertisement at the time, which dates me as prehistoric in modern terms.
Yes, great summary, Brian. Pass the Bex.
Dream on JG. As I said in the post China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa signed up to the UN process at the G8. And George promised Angela, who won’t forget.
BTW Merkel was the environment minister representing Germany at the Rio summit way back when.
Predictable Howard (& Bush) spin. What is dead is Australia’s contribution and participation.
From Dictionary.com:
ambitious; desirous of success
Example: She makes aspirational purchases of self-help books.
This is the target to aspire to when you don’t have a target, and like a lot of self-help efforts, it is destined to fail. The Sydney declaration is piss and wind.
Meanwhile, business has moved on, leaving our fossil fool PM behind with his economic credentials in tatters, as per Kyoto resistance could be costing billions:
And the AIG report release today says much the same.
Thanks for that Peterc. I’ll have a look at the report tonight. Heather Rideout is one of the more sensible industry leaders, I find.
So the Australian people are going to buy a climate change policy which in essence states:
We are thinking about thinking about setting some carbon emmission targets to deal with climate change some time in the future which we don’t have to agree to if we don’t feel like it.
Have I got it about right?
Who does Howard think he’s fooloing this time, apart from himself?
As I keep on saying from time to time, the man has lost touch with reality.
At least we got to see some fireworks.
You got to see the fireworks, Jangari? I thought they weren’t for public consumption.
Paul, that’s about right. To be fair, though, there quite a few concrete proposals in the Declaration. But on goals or targets they are amazingly vague. There’s this:
So they’re aspiring to aspirational goals. But there is nothing about it in the action agenda.
To be fair to Howard also, he has said they will identify their targets for the purposes of emissions trading after the election, if they win. I’m thinking he would go for a 2030 target, so that nuclear and possibly geosequestration could be dealt into the time-frame.
Brian,
Yeah, 2030 target. Trouble is, if the climate change predictors are right, and we can’t take the risk that they’re wrong, we could well have gone past the tipping point by then.
So what then? End of the world by fire instead of flood?
I’m utterly irreligious and an atheist, but sometimes I wonder.
Paul, that’s absolutely right. I haven’t got time to chase down the reference, but there is a growing suspicion that we’ve tipped. The albedo effect on the Arctic ice, and Greenland, has probably been underestimated. From memory, as ice melts you go from reflecting 80% of heat to absorbing 90%. That’s going from ice to open sea as in the Arctic. The effect is less in Greenland and Antarctica as you go from drier to wetter ice. Hansen and mates have identified an ‘albedo flip’ effect from the paleo record that leads to the disintegration of ice sheets. Once started, this happens quicker than the millenia usually assumed.
Most modelling incorporates only ’short-term’ climate effects, whereas the long-term ones may be of equal strength even in the short to medium term. That would explain why things seem to be moving faster than predictions.
Anyway that’s a line of thought that Hamilton has latched on to in the link at the end of the post. In the course of time I want to go into this in more detail.
Brian/Peterc
What do i have to do with John Howard for goodness sakes? It is so dispiriting to see so many thinking about this issue ion terms of some dreary provincial culture war. John Howard is irrelevant. What IS relevany ios that the axis of geopolitics moved away from Europe a while ago. The REAL action is now in APEC, not the EU.
Nope. APEC sets irrelevant non-binding “aspirational goals” relating to climate change rather than targets and any real action. Its a PR sideshow, as the Chinese observed.
The EU has set real real reduction targets & MRET increases for 2020 and 2050, so they are streets ahead and leading by example (along with California).
The main game will soon shift to the UN sponsored global post Kyoto agreement/process since Kyoto expires soon in 2012.
JG, no-one underestimates the importance of Asia. But nor should they write Europe off. The EU has 490 million people, an economy equivalent to the US, Europe makes up half the G8 and 5/15 of the UN Security Council. Then there’s ASEM, The Asia-Europe Meeting, with 27 European countries and 19 Asian states. Last I heard Australia was struggling to get observer status.
In other news Guy Pearce, author of High & Dry, had an article in Crikey today:
Brian
Your ode to Old Europe is sweet, but does not address my argument. APEC represents 2.5 billion people (3.5 billion when India joins), produces over 50% of global GDP, is by a galaxy the fastest growing and most economically/culturally dynamic region on the planet, and produces over half the globe’s greenhouse gases.
Read my Lips. Europe is toast. So is Kyoto.
APEC is a strange beast. So far it includes only countries that border the Pacific with a focus on economics and trade. What common interest Russia has with Chile and Peru is questionable. For now it seems India will have to wait at least until 2010.
I’m sure the leaders love to get away, to have a chat, to wear funny shirts and do a few side deals. I doubt whether anything decided at APEC is going to change the world in a significant way.
But we’ll see. There is a lot of talking to come. Bali will only establish the framework for the post-Kyoto negotiations. These negotiations are meant to culminate in Copenhagen in 2009.
I think it’s very likely that developing countries will be very keen to see developed countries set and meet binding targets. At what point and under what circumstances the developing countries accept limitations is the real question. Angela Merkel seems quite keen on the idea that emissions be governed by population:
The Chinese are not so keen, but their approach is that they want to get as far as they can before they have to cut back. The problem with the Indian proposal is that emissions will continue to rise too long before they are capped and begin to reduce.
On APEC 2007, there is little doubt that Howard wanted to use it to set up a Kyoto alternative. This started to come unstuck when Bush blinked at the G8. Then China made it clear that the UN was the proper place for serious negotiations about climate change. At first I thought, at least the Sydney Declaration did no harm. Now I’m inclined to think it did insofar as it gave the appearance of action when in real terms it was pretty much business as usual.