by David Steven | Dec 6, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
The climate talks in Poznan were never going to be a dazzling success – but, away from the nitty gritty of text, three big things need to happen for a reasonable result to be achieved.
First, the Europeans have to set out their stall (again) – but this time show that they can match aspirational targets with domestic delivery. Second, the Americans need to be begin the process of re-engaging: some sense has to emerge of what the post-Bush era should look like. And finally, we desperately need the emerging economies to begin to talk openly about where they think they fit into climate control. What does a good deal look like for them – not just between now and 2020, but over the next generation or two?
Unfortunately, the news doesn’t look good on any of these fronts. The Europeans – staggeringly, unbelievably – have allowed squabbles over their own climate package to spill over into the broader international negotiation. How’s this for showing united leadership to the rest of the world?
French President Nicolas Sarkozy failed to end deadlock with ex-communist European Union states on an EU climate package on Saturday but predicted a deal would be reached by a December 11-12 summit.
“Things are moving in a good way … I am convinced we will arrive at a positive conclusion,” Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said after meeting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and eight other east European leaders.
Poland, which relies on high-polluting coal for more than 90 percent of its electricity, has threatened to veto an EU plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 unless Warsaw wins fossil fuel concessions.
“There is still a lot of work ahead of us” before the summit, Tusk said after the talks in the Polish port of Gdansk.
Poland argues it needs until 2020 to curb carbon emissions, for example by using more efficient boilers and carbon-scrubbing equipment and possibly building its first nuclear plant.
Tusk said Sarkozy and the EU Commission agreed to extend a period limiting mandatory purchases of greenhouse gas emissions permits for east European coal plants, in an offer which would need the backing of all EU leaders.
And Tusk hinted at a willingness to compromise at the summit. “At the very end, maybe at the very last minute, we may decide this is a solution we may accept,” Tusk said.
Meanwhile, the American negotiating team appear not to have even talked to the Obama transition team (h/t Andrew Kneale). If true, this is worse than stupid:
As I’m sure the Obama Administration transition team is aware, Poznan, Poland is currently hosting a very important UN-sponsored climate change conference. At stake is nothing less than the next round of emissions reduction commitments (a Kyoto successor) — which Barack Obama has said he wants the U.S. to participate in.
If they haven’t already, the Obama folks need to make contact with the U.S. delegation in Poznan immediately. One would think that the U.S. Del. would take the initiative itself, but I’m getting word that they feel that the ball is in Obama’s court.
Apparently, current U.S. delegation members — mostly career people with honorable intentions and a willingness to continue to serve (with some notable exceptions) — are waiting for the call. This is no time to fight about protocol, or who is supposed to call who. It’s time to start turning the ship around.
Things are going to slow down for the weekend and then pick up again on Tuesday. The framework that comes out of this week can still be quite ambitious and, at the same time, workable in the U.S. and in the Senate. The Obama people have from now until Tuesday to make their goals for Poznan clear, but the sooner, the better.
Finally, as I posted a few days ago, developing countries seem resistant to even talking about the long-term – even though they have the most to lose through lots of itsy bitsy short term deals…
Happy days.
(For more, see all GD’s Poznan posts, our broader coverage on climate, follow the #poznan feed on Twitter or check out benkamorvan’s list of Poznan related blogs and other sites.)
by Daniel Korski | Dec 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global Dashboard, North America, UK
As President Elect Obama and his new foreign policy team contemplate how to deal with the growing number of security challenges that will confront them on Inauguration Day, a bi-partisan group of experts has tabled a series of thought-provoking ideas for how to reform the U.S government.
The report from the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) shows the U.S national security establishment at its finest – willing to think far into the future, push creative ideas and suggest the reorganization of vast swathes of government. (Full disclosure: I served pro bono as an adviser to the team). It stands in sharp contrast to Gordon Brown’s timid reforms, outlined a few months ago in the now-forgotten National Security Strategy. In fact, the report is veritable smorgasbord of ideas that any up-and-coming Tory security specialist should pick from.
The first recommendation, which a Conservative Party ought to consider when they take office – and legislate to repeat with every new Parliament — a National Security Review, which should prioritize objectives, establish risk management criteria, specify roles and responsibilities for priority missions, assess required capabilities, and identify capability gaps. This would go well beyond both the traditional Defence Reviews, as it would take in all of governments, and leave the National Security Strategy to elaborate on strategy and policies rather than being the hotchpotch of policies and reform proposals that it currently is.
To implement this, the U.S report suggests National Security Planning Guidance, to be issued annually, in order to provide guidance to departments based on the results of the National Security Review. This, too, would make sense in Britain where the National Security Strategy has not been able to force any change in the way departments operate because it never moved into specific requirements.
In Britain, such a document would have to be tied to the Budget and preferably the Comprehensive Spending Review. But with a National Security Planning Guidance, the Treasury and other Departments will be able to draft multi-year resource plans for each department and ensure consistency with the National Security Review. Perhaps a part of a future Comprehensive Spending Review would by a National Security Resource Document, which could contain which presents the government integrated, rolling six-year national security resource strategy proposals.
The report suggests that a Presidential Security Council replace the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council, thus removing an artificial divide. In many ways, the Brown government foresaw this development with the creation of a Cabinet Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development. But the establishment of a cross-government committee was not accompanied by reforms of the Cabinet Office and so did not create anything resembling the U.S set-up. In fact, the last couple of years have seen a well-reported hallowing out of the Cabinet Office.
Adapting from the U.S report, the Conservative Party should look at ways to adapt the idea of a Director for National Security, who would work to the National Security Adviser and manage the Whitehall decision-making process. This would allow the Prime Minister to appoint a political National Security Adviser –- like Pauline Neville-Jones -– but have a Civil Servant manage the bureaucratic work. The Cabinet Office would have to be considerably expanded with permanent staff covering key countries and issues. Decision-making would still have to lie with Ministers and Cabinet, but the fact that modern policy-making require a stronger center is recognized by everyone except the current officials in the Cabinet Office.
I would add the idea of having Prime Ministerial Regional Envoys or in the cases where Britain has a large-scale, multi-departmental commitment, like Afghanistan, Resident Ministers, such as Harold Macmillan’s role in Austria, Duff Coooper’s in Singapore and Oliver Lyttelton’s in Cairo during World War II. These individuals would have the clout to manage all departmental interests, have a direct link to Parliament (and so could keep the arguments for interventions alive) and ensure the necessary delegation of authority. Their constituency duties could be dealt with like the Speaker’s. Now that I’m thinking about the subject, I’d add the previously-floated ideas of upgrading the UK military representative in the U.S to a Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff akin to John Dill’s role during WW II.
To get the right kind of people supporting missions, the report recommends a National Security Professional Corps and a National Security Strategic Human Capital Plan to identify and secure the human capital capabilities necessary. Here too the Conservative Party should take note. Though there are Arabists in the Foreign Office and micros-finance specialists in DfiD, Britain does not really have a cadre of national security professionals. And why not? National security work is, after all, the most imrpotant kind of work and now cuts across all departments so it makes sense to create a career-path and incentives for people.
As changes cannot only happen in the Executive branch. The report therefore recommends the establishment of Select Committees on National Security in the Senate and House of Representatives. This, too, makes sense in Britain where the various Select Committees tread on each others toes, and fail to provide oversight of cross-department issues. A Lords/House Select Committee on National Security seems like a good idea.
The next election will not be fought on defence policy and few have been won on the strength of bureaucratic reforms. But the Tories will need to have serious ideas ready if they hope to change the country’s foreign and security policy. This U.S report shows how it can be done.
by Alex Evans | Dec 5, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Relatively little media coverage so far on the UN climate talks currently underway in Poznan – but that’s not to say that nothing interesting is happening there.
Item 1 is that China and India have come out arguing that Obama’s proposed 2020 emissions reduction (namely, to get US emissions back to 1990 levels by that date – more details here) is insufficient. He Jiankun, a Chinese delegate, was quoted in Reuters as saying that “It’s more ambitious than President Bush but it is not enough to achieve the urgent, long-term goal of greenhouse gas reductions”.
Given that the IPCC says that stabilising at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (the maximum level on which we still have a better than even chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C) probably requires developed countries to reduce their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, you can see where the Chinese and the Indians are coming from.
But as David pointed out when he and I were debating this a couple of weeks ago, the US’s emissions have gone through the roof under Bush: even the very modest target proposed by Obama is going to be a massive stretch for them. Expect this one to run and run.
Item 2: Brazil is reportedly sidling up to per capita convergence as the formula for sharing out a global emissions budget, at least if you believe this report in Business Green yesterday, which says:
Brazil reportedly put the finishing touches to proposals apparently based on the contraction and convergence principle that would see countries agree to per-capita emission reduction targets. Under the proposals, emission targets would be set on a per-head-of population basis, meaning that developing economies with low-carbon emissions per capita such as China would face less-demanding targets, while those countries with the highest level of emissions per person would have to deliver the deepest cuts.
Fascinating if true, but they don’t cite their source, so I’m regarding as tentative until I hear it from another source or two.
Item 3, meanwhile, is that in a workshop on “shared visions” for the future on Tuesday, China made some tentative steps towards setting out its stall on how it would want an emissions budget to be shared out. This is very interesting, as China’s the most important of the handful of developing countries for whom straight per capita convergence wouldn’t be advantageous – as its per capita emissions have (just in the last few months) gone over the global average per capita level, meaning that even immediate convergence at equal per capita shares to the atmosphere would leave them with no surplus permits to sell. What then is China proposing? The Worldwatch Institute wrote it up like this:
China, citing the equity language of Article 3, mentioned the need for eventual “global per-capita emissions convergence” – the idea that, at some point in the future, all countries in the world should have similar per-capita emissions as a matter of climate equity. But this concept did not pick up momentum, at least not in the workshop.
That had me sitting bolt upright in my chair and reaching for the phone to ask people in Poznan if it was really true. The answer back: not quite. In fact, what China seems to have been proposing is a system of per capita convergence in cumulative emissions – i.e. taking into account historical responsibility for past emissions, as well as current emissions – which would clearly be much more advantageous to it, given how much later China industrialised than (say) Britain (for whom historical responsibility based allocations of emissions permits would be rather, ahem, challenging).
But the real significance here is less the specific formula that China proposed (more details needed – if you were in the workshop, please drop me an email), and more the fact that China may now be starting to engage in a conversation about the formula that might be used to share out a global emissions budget. Up to now, discussion of stabilisation targets for greenhouse gas levels in the air has been off the table – in large part due to Chinese unwillingness to talk about how the emission budget implied would then be shared out. If that’s changing, then the future just got a little more hopeful.
by Alex Evans | Dec 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America
As regular readers will know (since I post this quote about once a month), I’m a fan of Milton Friedman’s sage advice to his fellow monetarists when they were still voices in the wilderness: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
So it’s deeply gratifying to see that Barack Obama’s pick for White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is clearly no slouch either when it comes to seeing the opportunities in big crises. Here he is doing an interview for the Wall Street Journal – excerpt:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 … missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil. This is an opportunity – what used to be long term problems, be they in the healthcare area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things we had postponed or too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us … to do things that we could not do before. The good news is … the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution.
by Daniel Korski | Dec 2, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
“Never let Germany walk alone”, Francois Mitterand apparently used to tell his military commanders. But two decades after the end of the Cold War, Germany has slipped away not only from France’s embrace, but also from its traditional role within the EU. On a range of issues, Germany is going-alone, even if doing so is detrimental to Berlin’s own interests and corrosive of alliance relations.
On Russia, for example, Germany has been almost hysterically concerned that the Baltic states would push the EU towards an anti-Moscow stance. In NATO and EU discussions, it has often been German diplomats who have debased the debate, accusing those, like Britain and Sweden, who want a tougher post-Georgia policy towards Russia as wanting to start a new Cold War.
To The Economist, these mishaps are a function of Germany’s political situation. Facing a general election next year, Chancellor Angela Merkel is locked in a battle with the SDP’s likely front-runner and current Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, making every foreign policy issue a battle for domestic advantage. Things have not been helped by the notoriously poor relationship between Mrs Merkel and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who’s frenetic diplomatic style cuts against the German chancellor’s measured ways.
But the problem runs deeper and may not be solved by the future German elections or the recently held U.S ones. For while the polls show the CDU in the lead, they are sufficiently tight to be able to force another so-called “grand coalition” between CDU and CDU, which would see a re-run of all the foreign policy battles.
The election of Barrack Obama in the U.S is also unlikely to make a big difference. On Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq — trouble-spots that will to occupy the Obama administration’s time —Germany’s position is at best awkward. Germany’s industry still has strong links with Iran; last month Germany’s ambassador to Iran, Herbert Honsowitz, told his Iranian hosts not to worry about Berlin’s announcement that it would reduce trade links as German companies would use the United Arab Emirates as a middleman for more than $4 billion in commerce.
And everyone expects President Obama to ask Germany to send more troops to NATO’s Afghan mission and deploy some of those 4500 soldiers already there to the war-torn south. German diplomats are furiously compiling arguments that would counter such a request –- and may offer police officers instead — but these are unlikely to make too much of an impact when President Obama makes the public case and Secretary Clinton does the follow-up.
Then there is climate change? Mrs Merkel was once seen as of the key reformers, even at one point dubbed “the climate chancellor”. But she is now pushing for parts of Germany’s industry to be exempted from emissions trading. This may put her at odds not only with the Obama administration, but also Congress, now that Democratic congressman Henry Waxman has taken the reigns of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Running through all these issues is one big question: what role does Germany want to play in the world? Does it want to be a large Switzerland – unarmed, mediating between all sides, but unwilling to take bold positions, devote resources and make sacrifices? Or does it want to be a key ally for the U.S, Britain and France, a motor of the EU and a pillar of the Euro-Atlantic community?
On my recent visits to Berlin I have become convinced that many of Germany’s politicians know current policy is not working. They also know that many of the world’s problems –- from Russia to Iran –- can only be solved by Germany’s active involvement. However, a large proportion of the public does not want to accept the price that has to be paid for Germany’s freedom, security and prosperity. And German politicians of all hues have been unwilling to make the case as forcefully as required, in part –- but not exclusively — because of the political situation. However, neither Germany nor its allies can afford for Europe’s largest country to walk alone.
