June 10, 2007
How Merkel took the climate change agenda back from Bush
Climate change negotiations among the world’s developed nations for the last 25 years have moved at glacial speed. But in the past ten days, entrenched positions have melted faster than the polar ice caps. For the sudden thaw we have one person to thank: Angela Merkel.
Her gradual build-up of pressure on George W Bush, at times so subtle it went almost unnoticed, on Thursday June 7 resulted in a notable shift in international relations on global warming. As of the G8 meeting, the Kyoto protocol – the only international agreement ever to contain legally binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists say is necessary on a huge scale to safeguard the planet - had been unexpectedly salvaged from its slow demise at the hands of diplomatic intransigence. The unlikely rescuer? President Bush.
It’s worth re-living the series of events that led up to this remarkable turnaround.
First, Mr Bush announced on Thursday May 31 that he would be setting up a series of international meetings to forge agreement on emissions cuts among the planet’s 15 biggest greenhouse gas emitters, within the next 18 months. This was astonishing enough from a man whose officials only in the past year began to acknowledge that climate change exists.
His proposals, however, were quickly found to be flawed and suspected to be a "spoiler" intended to steal the limelight from Ms Merkel’s plans to set emissions cuts based on preventing the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees.
Mr Bush pledged no actual emissions reductions – merely "discussions" - and set no timetable by which to achieve any cuts. In other words, Mr Bush had at last reluctantly agreed to talk about climate change, but without the sorts of commitments that would make the talks bear real fruit.
But by his sudden seizing of the initiative from the Europeans – and bear in mind that at every international climate change meeting since Mr Bush came to power the US has made an appearance only to block moves to bring Kyoto into force or to stall discussions on its future stages – the president appeared to have wrongfooted his G8 hosts. Rather than agree to take on emissions cuts under the Kyoto protocol, he had circumvented the UN process by suggesting an alternative series of talks, controlled by the US.
As the G8 leaders assembled, it appeared that an endorsement of the US initiative would be the only possible outcome of the climate change talks.
On Thursday, however, Ms Merkel showed that although one of the newcomers to the G8 table, she was a past master of climate change debates. As a young politician and a physicist by training, she had helped negotiate Kyoto on behalf of the German government. By the end of last week, she had brought the process nearly full circle.
Ms Merkel had marshalled her forces carefully. She had three overt aims from the G8 summit: to agree to prevent a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees; to halve emissions by 2050; and that the mechanism by which these cuts would be achieved should be emissions trading. The EU member states were in line, naturally, and the US opposed. But Ms Merkel had one more card – her real fall-back position had not been revealed.
By a clever stroke, Ms Merkel also managed to persuade the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to co-sponsor her commitment to halve emissions by 2050. Then, she played on Stephen Harper of Canada – a Conservative politician whose instinctive anti-environmental leanings were sharply rebuked by the Canadian public’s desire for action on global warming. Mr Harper, who had at first endorsed Mr Bush, swiftly joined the camp pressing the US president for further action.
By Wednesday evening, the first day of the summit, these pressures had come to a head. It became swiftly apparent that the US would not agree to a target on a 2 degree temperature rise or to halve emissions by 2050. Most of the media focused on the German hosts’ loss of these objectives in order to brand the summit a failure. The non-governmental organisations buzzed around the conference buildings like flies, eager to brief that the unproductive summit had shamed the host nation.
But on Thursday afternoon, in the teeth of this criticism, Ms Merkel achieved what had been a prime objective all along. Having conceded on emissions targets, she made it clear she would not brook disagreement on whether climate talks should take place within the UN. Six guest nations stood by her. And so finally Mr Bush, having nothing to fall back on, was forced to agree for the first time to conduct negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto protocol. The talks will begin within the next six months – about enough time for an iceberg to ‘calve’ from the Arctic ice shelf. The world will have a chance to renew its only existing global agreement on cutting emissions.
As the direct result of Ms Merkel’s adroit political manoeuvrings, the world-changing treaty she helped to write has been given a new lease of life, when it had long been written off for dead.
