Climate: after the euphoria
Yesterday I was at a roundtable on Europe and climate change, hosted by Jim Murphy, the UK’s minister for Europe, with his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, as the main speaker.
France is about to take over the EU presidency and will play a critical role on the road to Copenhagen. Two questions stand out:
- Can the EU show that it is making credible moves towards its unilateral commitment to a 20% emissions cut by 2020?
- How hard will the French push the idea that laggards on climate change should be punished through the global trade regime?
The first question is the most important. In Bali, the Europeans had some success in leading the negotiations from in front. I summed up their strategy as follows in my Bali wrap up:
(i) Take a unilateral commitment first. (ii) Next bring on board others prepared to move ahead of the pack. (iii) Only then bring the US – the problem player – into the thick of the action, and do so at a time [after the presidential elections] when the country will be desperate to re-engage with the wider world; (iv) And finally, persuade developed countries to do their bit, using a blend of three arguments. First, that rich countries have committed to action first. Second, that incentives are on the table, to help the switch from dirty to clean tech. And finally that not to act is unfair on countries that are poorer and more vulnerable (expect India to hear a lot from low-lying Bangladesh, for example).
But that strategy only works if Europe’s partners believe that the EU intends to keep the commitments it has freely made. At the moment, that is far from clear. The roundtable was opened by the FT’s George Parker, who argued that the UK missed half of its own green targets, public interest in the environment was on the wane, and that the EU was failing to align its budget to its green aspirations. (more…)