COP15 Draft Agreement.

On Friday December 11th the Danish hosts of the COP15 summit leaked a draft text of a possible agreement which can be read here; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-change

Even by the high standards of multi-national, intergovernmental summits this text is mostly incomprehensible gibberish with bracketed passages promising to do things like cutting emissions by [X3%] by the year [20??] and my personal favourite paragraph 25 which reads simply; [placeholder for facilitative matching mechanism].

The main obstacle for turning this rather strange text into a workable agreement is that there are actually two sets of negotiations going on at Copenhagen in what is being called the two track process. In one track there are groups of nations who are trying to produce an exact replica of the Kyoto protocol that was passed in 1992 and expires in 2012. This group is mainly made up of developing nations who are keen to hold onto the generous subsidies made available to them under Kyoto and some developed nations who just seem intent on causing trouble. In the other track there are groups of nations who are trying to produce a brand new agreement that will learn the lessons, both good and bad, from Kyoto and take into account advances in the depth of available scientific knowledge alongside changes in predictions of emission growth in countries like China in order to better prepare the world for the challenges of climate change. This group is mainly made up of developed nations and nearly developed nations who are acutely aware that although Kyoto was a noble undertaking it was a failure in practice. This is because the United States did not sign up to it and continued to grow their emissions while many of the countries that did sign up simply didn't bother to honour their emission cutting targets.

The other major obstacle is that apart from not knowing what type of agreement COP15 is trying to draw up there is also a deep division over whether it should be a legally binding agreement like Kyoto or a non-binding agreement. This is crucially important because it will ultimately decide what sort of numbers people will be prepared to sign up to. If it is a binding agreement then a lot of people, especially the Americans, will only sign up to the absolute minimum emission cuts over the longest possible timescale, if they sign up at all. However if it is a non-binding agreement then more people will be prepared to sign up to larger cuts because theyll be doing so safe in the knowledge that they will be free to renegotiate those cuts should circumstances change.

Another smaller but still quite large problem that has arisen during the course of the summit is a debate over whether nuclear power should be considered a green technology under the terms of the agreement. If it is included as a green technology then it will make the already delicate discussion over a technology sharing even more complicated. This is because, as countries who have nuclear weapons know, people get exceptionally paranoid and mistrustful when they're talking about sharing technology that has the potential to totally wipe out life on earth in a such a way that would make climate change completely inconsequential. Therefore I don't think it should be included as a listed green technology especially as there is already quite a controversy over whether an energy source that produces highly dangerous waste products and is not carbon neutral nor will ever become carbon neutral can really be considered a green technology.