Countdown to Copenhagen

New power, old energy: China, with its coal-fired economy, is already the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Photograph: Reuters

On the long and tempestuous road towards a new climate change treaty at Copenhagen, a few snapshots from my notebook:

• After two nights without sleep, and worn down by the sheer obstinacy of delegates in Bali two years ago, the UN’s top climate official breaks down. His only ambition? To keep the world talking about a new treaty to be settled this December.

• A few hundred kilometres from the North Pole, the British explorer Pen Hadow and his companions confirm what satellites and submarines have been finding: that the ice is now roughly half as thick as it was in the 1960s and thinning fast. The summer melt in 2007 shrank the ice to the extent forecast for 2055.

• Hundreds of Bangladeshi labourers toil with their bare hands in the monsoon heat to build a defence against the rising sea. The government of Bangladesh, blaming the rich world for causing global warming, appeals for $5 billion over the next five years to make the country more resilient.

• America, under Obama, offers to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases at a rate condemned by campaigners as worryingly similar to the position adopted by the Bush administration. The chief US negotiator says his country can only jump as high as the political system will allow.

• At the climate negotiations in Bonn last August, the Indian ambassador attacks as outrageous a proposal that India should limit its emissions of greenhouse gases. Half the population of the rural areas, he says, hasn’t even got a light fitting, let alone a light bulb.

• ExxonMobil, the oil giant criticised for having funded climate sceptics, invests $600 million in research into fuels from algae. Warren Buffett invests $250 million in a Chinese battery manufacturer with the ambition of being the world’s leading producer of electric cars.

For 12 days in December, officials and ministers from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for what are shaping up to be some of the most contentious negotiations for many years. The conference will be slow, cumbersome, expensive and very heavy on carbon, but it is the world’s only shot at an agreement tackling climate change.

The event matters because two years ago the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that there was a 90 percent likelihood that most recent warming was man-made – and that if we manage to level off emissions of greenhouse gases by 2015, we will still have a chance of limiting the average rise in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius, a level beyond which the forecasts for change become cataclysmic. In other words, there is still just about enough time to head off the worst effects of global warming later this century.

The mechanism meant to help achieve that is, at heart, an environmental treaty. But it has become something much bigger and more complicated, not just involving science, politics and diplomacy, but also economic planning, business, development and aid. Among the 11,000 thronging the Bella Centre in Copenhagen will be a great range of people: financial traders anxious to see the carbon markets thrive, corporate leaders weighing green investments, charity workers worrying that the poorest countries will lose out.

At its simplest, the task is to agree on a follow-up to the Kyoto protocol, the world’s first climate treaty. It was hammered out in 1997 but concludes in 2012. Kyoto was never very ambitious – setting a target of global cuts in emissions of only 5.2 percent compared to a baseline year of 1990. Moreover, the two biggest polluters have never taken part. China, like other developing countries, was not expected to join – and the US Senate would not even consider ratification without the inclusion of America’s main economic competitor.

Now, more than a decade later, negotiators are faced with turning 200 pages of contradictory draft clauses into a meaningful agreement. According to one count, there are still as many as 2,000 sets of “square brackets”, the punctuation used by diplomats to mark unresolved points. The UN official in the chair, Yvo de Boer, bluntly summed up the implications of the current rate of progress: “We won’t make it.” Another official described the talks as “like walking through wet sand”.

The ambition of a Copenhagen treaty is to do what Kyoto failed to: include all the key emitters, frame a global programme of emissions cuts, and create streams of finance for poorer countries to adapt and cover the additional costs of becoming lower carbon. Each of those goals is challenging yet essential to complete the jigsaw of a deal.

The starting point is to agree the cuts in greenhouse gases the industrialised world should make by 2020. The IPCC reckoned that this group of countries should reduce emissions by 25-40 percent below their levels in 1990. To date the EU has offered a collective cut of 20 percent (though upping that to 30 percent if a global deal is done), Norway 40 percent, Britain 34 percent, Japan's new government 25 percent. The US has offered a zero cut – in other words for emissions in 2020 to be cut to those of 1990 but not below (officials blame the “lost decade” of the Bush administration). Together this amounts to a collective cut of 10-24 percent – so expect noisy pressure to insist that the rich world goes much further.

These figures matter because the rest of the world points out that the vast bulk of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has come from the richest nations. They, it is argued, should take responsibility and take the lead.

Yet the majority of future growth in greenhouse gases will come from developing countries, notably China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. China is already the world’s biggest emitter and India talks of trebling its emissions by 2030 as it develops. So, in turn, the richest nations say that for any deal to be meaningful, these newly industrialising countries must accept cuts too.

This is one of many stumbling blocks. The largest of the developing economies are resolutely opposed to agreeing to any commitment to reductions. They argue that with so many hundreds of millions of their people living in poverty, they are morally obliged to keep developing. And they point to the principle of “climate equity” – their per capita emissions are still well below those of the US and Europe, and will be for several decades.

But unless a formula can be found to include China and India – maybe with the promise of emissions cuts at some future date – it will be politically impossible for many Western leaders to get any treaty ratified. In the US, it would risk being another version of Groundhog Day with the president, just like in the 1990s with Kyoto, failing to persuade the Senate to approve an agreement which did not also include America’s biggest competitor. A glimpse of the likely opposition came with the fractious and very narrow passing in June of the Waxman-Markey Bill, America’s first legislation on greenhouse gases, through the lower house, the House of Representatives; a Senate struggle would be even greater.

So what is the answer? As with so many seemingly intractable European disputes, the lubricant of finance can help. In fact in this case, it is an essential component of any deal. Developing countries are demanding funding for two reasons: to cover the additional cost of adopting a greener development pathway and to meet the cost of adapting to the impacts of climate change.

Estimates for the scale of these demands run into hundreds of billions of euros a year. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has suggested creating a fund worth $100 billion per annum by 2020. The European Commission is proposing that the EU contribute between €2 billion and €15 billion per annum. Both moves have been welcomed but only as starting points: charities and development experts say far larger sums are needed. India suggests rich world contributions should amount to 0.5 percent of each country’s GDP.

This is already emerging as a potential deal-breaker because there are only two possible sources for this finance. The most obvious is the public purse, but at a time of recession no government is feeling generous. The other is the carbon market – the buying and selling of “credits” for emissions reductions and financing of green projects in developing countries – but at the moment prices are low.

Aware of these pressures, developing countries fear that some of the existing flows of aid may be rebranded as climate-related, with the result that no additional funds will be offered. They also have doubts about the carbon market: like any market, prices are volatile, which would affect support.

This is a cause of grievance, even anger, and campaigners have coined a term to describe its purpose: climate justice. Charities and development agencies see climate change as potentially undermining all their efforts of recent decades. And fuelling this issue is a sense of the need to right colonial wrongs.

As one senior Indian diplomat put it to me, “as the ruling power you prevented us from industrialising and now you want to continue doing the same in the name of climate change”. And at a recent summit of African leaders, held to coordinate their approach, there was talk of walking out of Copenhagen if the demands for climate aid are not met.

No wonder the run-up to the conference is generating its own form of warming. The richest countries must offer deeper emissions cuts and more money to have any hope of getting others like China and India to join; if they do not, a new treaty will not get through the Senate; if there is no treaty, businesses may shy away from green investments of the sort that could lower emissions. This is the Copenhagen conundrum.

And one indicator of the scale of the challenge? The Danes are rumoured to have scheduled back-up talks for April.

Warming words

COP-15: Standing for the 15th Conference of the Parties, this is the official title of the Copenhagen conference

UNFCCC: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the umbrella body managing the Kyoto, and now Copenhagen, processes

AWP: Ad Hoc Working Parties, the engine room of the negotiations, the closed-door meetings where the dealing is done

Bali: the venue for COP-13, where the US delegation was booed and eventually gave ground to allow the “Bali road map” to start two years of negotiations leading to Copenhagen

IPCC: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which last reported in 2007 and later that year shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore

2 degrees Celsius: the rise in average global temperatures above the pre-industrial level beyond which scientists say climate change could prove dangerous. So far the world has warmed 0.7 degrees Celsius

Carbon footprint: COP organisers always try to offset associated emissions but with a huge turnout in Copenhagen, criticism of the carbon cost is inevitable

Mitigation: measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as in the cry, “the developed world isn’t showing enough leadership on mitigation”

Adaptation: the task of preparing for the possible future effects of climate change. Bangladesh, for example, wants help building higher sea defences

Plan B: there isn’t one, though the sometimes bizarre ideas of “geo-engineering” are attracting serious attention – for example scattering particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight