Author: Helena

Exciting news from the UN’s Bali conference on climate change. The conference went into an unscheduled extra day of work Saturday, and at the very last minute the US delegation withdrew the objections it had sustained steadfastly, allowing adoption of the painstakingly negotiated final document to proceed.
CNN describes the scene thus:

The head of the U.S. delegation — Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky — was booed Saturday afternoon when she announced that the United States was rejecting the plan as then written because they were “not prepared to accept this formulation.” She said developing countries needed to carry more of the responsibility.
While rhetoric at such conferences is often just words, a short speech by a delegate from the small developing country of Papua New Guinea appeared to carry weight with the Americans. The delegate challenged the United States to “either lead, follow or get out of the way.”
Just five minutes later, when it appeared the conference was on the brink of collapse, Dobriansky took to the floor again to announce the United States was willing to accept the arrangement. Applause erupted in the hall and a relative level of success for the conference appeared certain.

At an earlier stage, the big fight had been between the US and the Europeans– as I described here on Thursday. That dispute apparently got resolved through use of the drafting mechanism of putting the statement of the desired emissions targets into a footnote rather than the main text (PDF here) of the Bali Statement. But crucially, the Europeans retained that mention of the target range, after playing some diplomatic hardball against the Bushites. (In politically related news, US Secdef Bob Gates yesterday also backed down a little on the level of the rhetoric he’d been using against the Europeans regarding their contribution to the US-led military coalition in Afghanistan.)
In Bali, a later dispute then erupted between, basically, the world’s rich– and historically very highly emitting– nations and the low-income nations grouped in the “Group of 77”. (Which guess what, represents many more people than the “G-8”.)
I’ve been interested to note that within the G-77 it was India that took the lead in this fight, with China cleverly staying a little out of sight. See e.g. this Daily Telegraph report.
As far as I can figure, the Bali Statement commits the world’s governments to completing an agreement on the post-Kyoto climate-change plan before the end of 2009. Kyoto is due to run out in 2012.
US citizens who are concerned that the position of our own next president should be one that is engaged deeply and constructively with the global anti-warming effort therefore need to use 2008 to make sure that this issue is kept on the front burner of our country’s political discussions throughout next year’s election campaign, and to push candidates to commit to climate change policies that are equitable, effective, and forward-leaning.
I can note that back in the 1990s, Pres. Bill Clinton used the US’s then-considerable strategic muscle to bend the text of Kyoto in a pro-US direction– and then decided to do nothing to try to win ratification for the Protocol from the US Congress.
Guess what: other countries’ people and governments noticed and remembered that sad (and one could even say somewhat duplicitous) performance.
And then came George W. Bush, who along with his side-dick, VP Cheney, derided the whole notion that international agreements with measurable targets had any useful role to play at all.
Climate change is one crucial arena– along with nuclear weapons– in which the wellbeing and survival of US citizens are seen as very clearly inter-reliant with the survival and wellbeing of the rest of the world’s 6 billion people. We are all in this frail boat together.
Luckily, many US citizens seem finally to be waking up to this fact– even if they are not yet ready to acknowledge either the scale of the damage our country’s past emissions have caused to the rest of the world or the depth of the changes in lifestyles and mindsets that will be required to bring our emissions down to a globally-proportionate and reabsorbable level.
But still, it is good that increasing numbers of Americans are starting to think about these things and that there a number of nationwide groups doing good, solid organizing around them… Good, too, that we have increasingly potent and well-organized friends around the world who will help to persuade Washington to get with the global anti-warming program.
I was horrified, however, to see the “business as usual” news judgment being displayed by the WaPo this morning, when it buried its coverage of the globally important, cliffhanging proceedings of the Bali conference to deep down at the bottom of p.17. What were they thinking?
Were they thinking?
The UNFCCC, the body that convened the Bali gathering, has a web-page that directs you to a fascinating array of news coverage of its work from all around the world. You can bet that most of those other media outlets linked to there did not bury the Bali news deep beneath the rest of their stories.

I am very interested in what we can learn about the current state of world politics from watching the current UN Climate Change conference in Bali, Indonesia. The biggest dispute there today was reportedly between the US (with a few supporters) and the Europeans.
Bush is still proceeding with his ‘coalition-of-the-willing” type of approach to dealing with the climate change issue. The basic idea of COTW, regarding climate change, nuclear non- (or counter-) proliferation, invading Iraq, or any other issue is that it is (a) always US-led, and (b) intentionally opposed to the kind of true multilateralism in which the US like all other parties commits itself to reciprocally binding agreements.
Bush’s first attempt to use COTW with regard to climate change was notably to stay out of the Kyoto Protocol, and to urge/encourage other governments to do likewise. (So you might also call it Coalition of the Unwilling, I suppose.)
Then in June, at the G-8 summit in Green-strong Germany, he proposed this notably non-UN gathering of “industrial nations” that would be convened by the US to discuss the issue. The invitees politely went along, but sent only very low-level people to the meeting, which was held in the US in September.
Bush did at least agree to send administration officials to the current UN gathering in Bali, where the main task is to negotiate a follow-on to the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. But the US official delegation dug in its heels in opposition to the idea of any mention of actual targets for the CO2 emission reduction. Washington apparently has the support of Canada, Japan, and Russia in the anti-targets position it has adopted. Also, Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has signaled that he wants to back the US position, which is particularly sad given that many of his supporters back home had hoped that his election would mark an end to Australia slavishly following Washington in its foreign policy errors.
The EU, which favors targets, has now come flat out and accused Washington of being the main obstacle to success in Bali.
We can note that this is at a time of increasing disagreement between the US and many European nations over Afghanistan, as well, with US Defense Secretary Bob Gates publicly criticising the Europeans for not sending enough troops to Afghanistan.
In Bali, the Chinese seem to be sitting outside the main arena of the EU-US conflict. This Reuters article from Bali says,

The Chinese team has been applauded by other delegations and activists for its cooperative attitude, but says its proposals to do more in return for help with clean technology have foundered amid squabbling over who is responsible for rising temperatures.

Regarding China’s role on the future of climate-control efforts, this short essay by Swiss writer Christoph Neidhart suggests that China may soon be in the forefront of the technological innovation processes required to wean the world off greenhouse-gas-emitting fuels: “It seems likely that the next industrial revolution – which will be as transformative as the introduction of coal, steam-power and the combustion-engine – will take off in China or elsewhere in east Asia.” Worth reading the whole argument he makes there…
I have a suggestion. The US is still a huge weight within the world community. I truly don’t think the US is going to be a force for constructive engagement on climate issues so long as GWB is president. Kyoto– with all its flaws– runs until 2012. I realize that the post-Kyoto arrangement will take time to implement. But couldn’t we all just postpone the next round of Bali negotiations till after January 2009? Even if that would delay arriving at an agreement by, say, 15 months, and might delay being able to implement the agreement reached by something like that period of time, wouldn’t it be better to wait till we have a person in the White House who is open to the idea of mutually binding multilateral agreements, and less fixated on the dreadful and nearly always very damaging COTWs?
We should remember, too, that the effects of global warming are already posing life-and-death risks to large populations in a number of countries– and might well pose a risk to international peace and security within just the next few years. If the US persists in its stubborn and selfish pursuit of “CO2 emissions R Us”, then the rest of the world would have every right to impose sanctions against us until such time as our country stops poisoning the six billion people who live outside our borders.

When I was writing the chapter on climate change in my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World after Bush I found many really excellent on-line resources on the issue. Some of the best-thought-out policy papers on the issue came from Oxfam. (See a list of these papers here.) One of the main points they make is that the rich northern nations must not only help the much poorer nations of the low-income world to undertake measures to adapt to the consequences of climate change– rising sea-levels, desertification, increased frequency of storms, etc– but they (we) must also take equally or more urgent steps to stop inflicting harm on them in this realm.
Many young (and not so young) people from the US and Europe become very idealistic and become fired up with the idea that they can go off to low-income countries and do something very worthwhile to “help” the people of those countries. It’s a laudable motivation. However, in terms of net amount of good done for humanity, I think such people might do a lot better to stay back at home in our own well-off countries and work to change those of our own countries’ policies that continue on a daily basis to inflict harm on the very vulnerable people in those other countries.
Human-induced climate change is one clear arena for such action. What the whole world most needs from Americans (and Europeans and residents of other high-income countries) right now is mainly that we should all emit far less CO2. Once we ourselves have done that, we can go around “helping” other countries to both reduce their emissions and adapt to the effects of the human-induced global warming that we know is anyway– even with the best emissions-control policies we can imagine– going to continue to occur for many years…
But first, surely, we should take responsibility for our own past and continuing actions and try to stop inflicting harm.
The US is by far the emittingest country in the world, on a per-capita basis: 20 metric tons of CO2 emitted per-head in 2004 in the US, as opposed to 3.6 metric tons in China, 11.7 in Japan, 9.4 in the EU…
Trade and economic policy is another area in which we fortunate residents of the rich world can do far more good all round if we work first to stop our own governments and societies from doing things they’ve been doing for some time, that have been inflicting great harm on vulnerable others elsewhere, than if we simply set out to start “helping” those others. Oxfam (again) has done some great research on the terrible effects that barriers to free trade such as tariffs and huge subsidies to domestic producers of agricultural goods, such as have been steadfastly maintained by the US, the EU, and Japan for many decades now, have had on farming communities throughout the low-income world. Some people come in with proposals to “help” the low-income countries by increasing the international aid contributions made by rich countries. Those are good and necessary suggestions. But they will have little to zero effect so long as the rich countries still hand out massive subsidies to their (our) own huge agribusiness conglomerates.
The concept of “do no harm” is an old one in the medical profession. But there are so many fields of international relations in which it should also be applied! Military/security policy is certainly another one.
Following a policy of “do no harm” is at one level rather easy. It is a fundamentally rather conservative policy, suggesting as it does that when we are in doubt about the effects of any given action we should avoid doing it until we have more information. It urges us not to do things, rather than urging us to get out and “do things”. (This is known as the precautionary principle.)
At another level, though, it is a rather demanding approach. It requires that we take some rather deep responsibility for the effects our actions and policy choices have on distant others, which in turn requires that we make energetic and good-faith efforts to find out what those effects are. And this applies, moreover, in areas such as farm subsidies or the development of our own national economies in which at one point we may not even have been aware that our policy choices had any effect on people outside our own borders. But now we know that those two do. Farm subsidies in the US, the EU, and Japan hurt millions of poor farmers around the world. (I want to give a big shout-out to Jimmy Carter for this fine article on the topic that he published in Monday’s WaPo.) And unbridled economic “development” in these same rich countries has been puffing out absolutely unconscionable amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere…
What other habits and policies might we be pursuing that, without our being aware of it, are inflicting harm on others elsewhere? Clearly, we need to pay attention.
Another aspect of the “do no harm” approach is that we need to recognize that the people of other countries are in every way just as human and as deserving of our respect and consideration as the people of our own countries. Even– or rather, especially– if they are people who are far, far more economically vulnerable and more politically marginalized than ourselves.
This is actually an important foundation at the very core of the Hippocratic oath approach. Doctors, after all, have often been thought of as especially powerful and smart members of the human race and they have often– in Nazi Germany, here in the US, and in many other places as well– become tempted into the mindset that they can or even should use their powers on more vulnerable other members of society at their own discretion and for their own reasons, without paying anything like due heed to the rights of those others.
So the Hippocratic oath (“do no harm”) approach reminds people with power (and with potentially dangerous skills) in any given society that their skills must be used in a way that:

(1) accords due respect and consideration to the rights of vulnerable other persons;
(2) embodies a commitment to take pro-active steps to learn about the effects their actions and decisions have on those others;
(3) errs on the side of caution– not doing things, rather than doing them– if there is any suggestion or possibility that these effects might be harmful to others; and
(4) embodies a commitment to stopping actions that on examination turn out to be inflicting harm on others.

… Anyway, this is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot over recent years. Reading all the news about the UNFCCC (Climate Change) conference in Bali reminded me about the whole topic again.