Late yesterday, I was having dinner with our former PM, Helen Clark, here as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).  The UNDP is taking a close interest in a number of issues, principally the financing of developing economies as they move away from fossil fuels.  It was great to catch up with Helen.  Before dinner, I introduced her to Oliver Bruce, a kiwi studying in the US who is here with one of the youth delegations.  Oliver and Mahara Inglis, a member of the NZ Youth delegation, posted a great blog last week .

After the dinner break yesterday, a new draft treaty text emerged.
Almost as soon as it was released, reservations began to be added by the major players.  The US and Japan objected to any legally binding reduction targets for developed countries, and insisted that there be no reference to the Kyoto Protocol.  The EU expressed its disappointment at this approach, and said that reductions targets should be legally binding for developed, as well as emerging, countries.  China and India objected to the suggestion that all countries, not just developing ones, should have binding reduction targets.  Technology transfer, financing the developing world’s transition and the merits of market mechanisms like carbon trading also attracted reservations.

The Conference session was delayed, then suspended, only to resume late in the night with countries starting to express their concerns in detail and start redrafting.  The Chair – the Danish Enviroment Minister Connie Hedegaard – resigned her position – as the session was brought to an end for lack of time.  Today, countries have been expressing reservations and positions in greater detail as the Danes grappled with demonstrations from NGO representatives and others locked out of the conference venue because of capacity concerns, eventually providing them with a new meeting venue in the central city.  Danish PM Rassmussen has taken over chairing the sessions.

Meanwhile, Tim Groser was doing his best to try to make sure that some positive spin from the NZ delegation started Thursday’s NZ news cycle.
At a press conference scheduled for 3am Thursday NZ time, he sat at the press table with a slightly bewildered looking Tom Vilsack, the US Agriculture Secretary, to announce the first contributions to National’s “Global Agriculture Fund”.  This is designed to get international scientific cooperation going on the reduction of emissions from agriculture (and, everyone suspects – although it’s not often said out loud – build support for excluding food-related production from international agreements altogether).  Details are scant, but it looks like a bit of money from the Canadians, NZ$125M from the US, and NZ$45M from NZ.  In other words, about 25% of what the previous Government committed to the Fast Forward Fund – a PPP that would have had funding research into emissions reductions as one of its key roles.  National scrapped the Fast Forward Fund.  That’s a pity.  Not only would it have done a lot more to kick-start emissions reduction in agriculture, New Zealand would have owned all the intellectual property resulting from it.  We could have exploited that IP commercially, or given some of it away in aid to food producing developing countries.  Now that it will be funded multilaterally, it would be my guess that won’t be possible.  In other words, a lousy deal for NZ Inc.

Reports are now coming through that President Obama, on the eve of his departure for Copenhagen, has announced a US commitment to a 17% reduction in emissions by 2020 over 2005 levels.  This amounts to a 4% reduction over 1990 levels.  It’s not nearly enough.  But it’s the first time we’ve heard a commitment from the US to a target.  Now things start to get really interesting…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under climate change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.