As climate change accelerates,
it appears the Obama administration is in retreat. In an address on
Thursday, the top climate negotiator for the United States rejected the
administration’s formal commitment to keeping global warming less than
two degrees Celsius (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. This about-face
from agreements
endorsed
by President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010 indicates a rejection of the
United Nations climate negotiations process, as well as an implicit
assertion that catastrophic global warming is now politically impossible
to prevent.
Speaking before an audience at his alma mater Dartmouth College, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern argued that treaty negotiations based around “old orthodoxies” of a temperature threshold “will only lead to deadlock”:
For many countries, the core assumption about how to address climate change is that you negotiate a targets stringent enough to meet a stipulated global goal – namely, – and that treaty in turn drives national action. This is a kind of unified field theory of solving climate change – get the treaty right; the treaty dictates national action; and the problem gets solved. This is entirely logical. It makes perfect sense on paper. The trouble is it ignores the classic lesson that politics – including international politics – is the art of the possible. . . .
These basic facts of life suggest that the likelihood of all relevant countries reaching consensus on a highly prescriptive climate agreement are low, and this reality in turn argues in favor of a more flexible approach that starts with nationally derived policies. . . .
The keys to making headway in this early conceptual phase of the new agreement is to be open to new ideas that can work in the real world and to keep our eyes on the prize of reducing emissions rather than insisting on old orthodoxies. . .
This kind of flexible, evolving legal agreement cannot guarantee that we meet a 2 degree goal, but insisting on a structure that would guarantee such a goal will only lead to deadlock. It is more important to start now with a regime that can get us going in the right direction and that is built in a way maximally conducive to raising ambition, spurring innovation, and building political will.
Stern is absolutely right that the political challenge of achieving a 2°C goal is extremely high, but what is the “flexible, evolving” regime he proposes?