Bali: A Climate of Futility

It looks like the world will fail to convince the US to actually do something about climate change. Big surprise.

I had a chat about this with a staffer in the German Federal Ministry of the Environment a few months ago. I tried to convince her that talks right now would not work and that we should wait until 2009, when there is a new US president. She thought that we need to work on an agreement now because otherwise the schedule for a post-Kyoto agreement might get too tight.

This is the broader line and thereby the broader folly of the German negotiating strategy, and presumably that of quite a few other countries: assuming that you can get anywhere at all with the current US administration.

Stating that we have to make decisions now is something that might work for the Germans in the context of the European Union. But internationally, it just doesn't.

Germany and the EU can do little until the Bush administration is gone. What they should do is sort out a few minor issues where this is possible; build up support for a common position with other countries in order to have a stronger position to negotiate with the next US administration, and keep on working on ways to circumvent the US federal government.

Late Update: The final deal is a bit better than what I'd expected. The US did not succeed in completely derailing the talks. But it did not agree to any binding targets either. So what we have coming out of this are a few small improvements and a 'roadmap' which can hopefully lead to something when this US administration is gone. The concrete targets that were kept in the agreement were moved to a footnote in the preamble. Legally, the preamble means very little, and symbollically, a footnote is not the best place. Read the report in the NYT to get the full picture.