Obama’s Climate Team Opens in Bonn: Getting to Know You …
… getting to like you, getting to hope you like me ….
Yesterday closed out the first of a grueling series of climate change negotiating sessions scheduled to conclude in Copenhagen in December with a new global agreement. President Obama’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and his Deputy Special Envoy used this meeting to listen and refrained from announcing new US positions. This was wise, given that Todd Stern has been in his job about six weeks, while Jonathan Pershing had barely been appointed before he was boarding an airplane for Germany.
Against sharp criticism, they defended the President’s target of reducing US greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% reduction by 2050. The European Union, by comparison, has already pledged to reduce by 20% below the 1990 baseline. Stern emphasized that President Obama is committed to putting the US on a path to the 2050 goal with measures like green jobs included in the stimulus package and a proposed tripling of federal support for research and development of low-carbon technology.
Obama’s launch of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) may be a brilliant stroke. This is a recasting of the Major Economies Meeting created by Bush to promote voluntary measures (and many believe to undermine the UN negotiations on binding commitments). In contrast, Stern emphasized that the negotiation will remain in the UN process, while the MEF allows the subset of truly essential nations a less positional forum to seek a shared understanding. That ultimately may make a deal in Copenhagen possible. And by convening an MEF head-of-state summit at the end of the year, President Obama will provide the added incentive of a global audience to boo or cheer their efforts.
Of course, the real challenge for the US team will be to ensure that the Senate will ratify the Copenhagen Protocol (sorry Jonathan, I don’t think a congressional-executive agreement will do the trick here). No one wants a repeat of the sad spectacle of the Kyoto Protocol where signing the agreement is followed by Senate repudiation.
