The search for a global climate treaty - Climate Change: The Facts - page 137

Although the Obama administration had proposed a treaty with legally binding
commitments in the run-up to Copenhagen, policy postCopenhagen should be based on
the reality of what had happened at Copenhagen. The US analysis, outlined by Obama's
climate envoy Todd Stern in October 2010, took as its starting point that Kyoto's Berlin
Wall paradigm was, in Stern's words, 'unworkable as a matter of both substance and
politics:' 4
[T]he United States, as well as a number of other countries, would not accept legally binding commitments unless China
and other emerging markets did so as well, and they have made abundantly clear that they will not. 5
Stern challenged the long-standing 'article of faith' that the world needed a legal treaty to
governinternationalaction.Insteadofalegallybindingtreaty,Sternarguedthatnegotiators
should aim for an agreement that was politically and morally binding on the parties.
Stern could also have said, but didn't, that such an international agreement falling short
of a treaty would have the additional advantage of not needing a two-thirds vote in
the Senate to be ratified. Indeed, avoidance of Congress has become a hallmark of the
Obama administration's climate change policies, demonstrated by its recourse to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation rather than cap and trade legislation.
Adoption of the voluntary accord at Copenhagen had been vetoed by Cuba and its
SouthAmericanallies,sotheconferencecouldonly'takenote'ofit.Theimmediateaimof
US policy post-Copenhagen was to remedy this and get the accord formally incorporated
into the climate change negotiating texts. In large measure, the US succeeded in achieving
this at Cancún. Briefing the press in the run-upto the next conference, Stern called Cancún
'the most significant agreement since the Kyoto Protocol.' 6 According to Stern,
We reached an agreement, which although it is not legally binding, it is a COP [Conference of the Parties] decision under
a legally binding treaty, which is very serious and which covers more than 80 percent of global emissions as compared to
a Kyoto agreement, which people are hoping will cover something in the order of 15 per cent. 7
Stern's problem was that the rest of the world barely noticed. Such smallbore results
were hardly commensurate with the soaring expectations created by Barack Obama's 2008
promise to slow the rise of the oceans and start to heal the planet. It was a strategy that
came to grief at the 2011 Durban Conference of Parties (COP).
By contrast, the EU's goal was to re-litigate Copenhagen and find the Holy Grail of a
binding treaty embracing all major emitters. At Copenhagen, the West had tried to isolate
China, offering $100 billion a year of climate finance to African and other least developed
countries if China capitulated. Whereas the US realised that backing China into a corner
hadn't worked then and wouldn't work in the future, the EU set about peeling off the
coalitions that had veiled the full extent of Chinese intransigence.