Dan Baxter

My colleague Dan Baxter, who toils away in Brussels for Fleishman Hillard, agreed to a quick interview on the issues confronting the delegates at the Climate Conference in Durban.  Typically pithy and insightful.

Q: How will Durban be different from previous UN Climate Change Summits?

Baxter: After Copenhagen, the world’s political elite really backed away from the COP summits – it seems they felt they had over-promised, or at least failed to manage expectations – and since that time, there has been little appetite for bold political statements in this area. COP conferences have now been handed back to the ‘environmental elite’ – and as such, this conference is likely to be as technical as it is political.

It is also special timing vis-à-vis the end of the Kyoto Protocol, which in effect ends in 2012. There will be quite a lot of talk in Durban about what, if anything, replaces it; while it is generally viewed as an outdated tool for managing global climate change, there seems to be little consensus about how to update and replace it. So this will undoubtedly be a focus, and that will, I suspect, only add to the political nature of the talks.

Q: What are the two greatest obstacles to progress in addressing climate change?

Baxter: I would say that the first obstacle, broadly, is ideological agreement. Put crudely, there are many different versions of climate change – whether it exists, what its impacts are/will be, and the extent to which it is controllable – and history has shown that it is very difficult to get international agreement in the absence of a common definition of the problem. Added to that, the ‘who pays for what’ card, which pits developed against developing countries and climate change ‘winners’ against those who will bear the harshest effects, is something that may need to be resolved before we can move on.

Secondly, I have always said that the key to global climate negotiations is a deal between the US and China. The two biggest polluters in the world need to agree politically that this is a problem and that they need to take steps to address it. Without these two countries, no initiative will have credibility, regardless of its intentions. But it is far from clear to me that either country has the ambition or political will to come to such an agreement. At least we’ll know quite soon…

The lack of public input pretty much guaranteed that this would not turn out well. It is turning into an environmental and social disaster. It has aggravated a long term drought and the people now blame the dame for the entirety of the drought, as though a dam could control the weather, but also for earthquakes and other natural calamities.

So, we see in China and phenomenon that we also see in the U.S., beliefs on the part of the public that are politically convenient and address some grievances, but that are logically unsustainable.

But what is also amazing is that the public is expressing those beliefs very aggressively. It shows that this so-called authoritarian government is not as controlling as some in the West may think.

Still, whatever the misguided convictions of the affected Chinese people, this dam is a classic man made disaster that shows the limits of authoritarianism.

Check it out:

http://wapo.st/kftYtG

Since the Global Times is an official organ of the Communist Party, I find it interesting how critical the story is of the local officials.  It seems clear to me that this is a way that the national government influences the behavior of provincial leaders.  It praises public protests and criticizes unresponsive local officials.

Two years of complaints and petitions against the pollution caused by the chemical plant were met with two years of silence by local authorities, culminating in a crowd of villagers marching to local government and police offices in late July.

The story describes the steps taken, presumably by the national government, to address the concerns of the local people.  These include compensation and free healthcare.  It then concludes with a blanket condemnation of recalcitrant local governments by an academic observer:

Zou Ji, deputy director of the School of Environmental Studies at Renmin University, attributed the negligence to the authorities’ lack of solutions or compensation.

“Local governments responded either wrongly or insufficiently, or didn’t act at all when it comes to dealing with public complaints,” Zou said, adding that the possibility of corruption can’t be ruled out.

“We can’t view Liuyang as an isolated incident, as the number of pollution-related mass incidents is increasing,” Zou said. “It would be a strategic mistake if the government doesn’t allocate resources to solve it.”

Kerry seems to have a different view in setting climate change as above all else:

“On climate change, perhaps the single greatest challenge we face, more could have and should have been achieved,” Kerry said at a National Press Club luncheon.

Still, Kerry tries to be modest in his expectations as to what China needs to do:

“They don’t have to do the same thing, but they have to show their good faith with major reductions to get them on a path where we all join up somewhere down the near-term future,” he said. “That’s the key to success in Copenhagen.”