National Journal: Are Climate Meetings Too Big to Succeed?

With 45,000 registered conference-goers, Copenhagen tested the limits of such gatherings.

by Darren Goode

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Are mega-conferences such as last month's U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen extravaganza, with its 45,000 registered attendees and countless observers and protesters, the most promising route to achieving worldwide reductions in the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming?

"I think everybody's asking themselves that question right now," said Dirk Forrister, who headed a White House climate-change task force under President Clinton and is now managing director of Natsource, an environmental asset management company based in New York City. "This time the system almost collapsed under its own weight."

In the view of Elliot Diringer, vice president for international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, "Copenhagen was an imperfect test of an imperfect process and exposed many of its weaknesses but didn't necessarily prove them fatal."

Throughout the December 7-18 gathering, formally known as the 15th Conference of the Parties, U.N. and Danish officials struggled with procedural objections from some of the poorest of the 193 countries represented. That problem was compounded by logistical nightmares caused by tens of thousands of protesters -- some of them violent -- and by the fact that the conference site could accommodate only a third of the official participants. Many of the 45,000 attendees were literally left out in the cold.

Ultimately, the two-track process was preserved. But five countries -- Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela -- nevertheless declined to support the political agreement reached during the conference's final hours. Unaminity was preserved by having all 193 nations take note of -- rather than formally adopt -- the Copenhagen Accord. U.N. officials argue that "taking note" has the same effect as adopting the accord.

By January 31, all developed and developing nations are supposed to submit their economy-wide carbon-reduction goals to the United Nations. (The United States, China, and a number of other major countries announced their 2020 goals shortly before the Copenhagen talks.)

Yet to be established are guidelines for how the international community will monitor each country's progress toward its goals. The next official global-warming conference is scheduled for November in Mexico City. But unless participants expect to wrap up a legally binding treaty there, that gathering is unlikely to be as unwieldy as Copenhagen's was.

Much of the climate-change spotlight is shifting to the U.S. Senate, which rejected the Kyoto Protocol but might now fill in some of Copenhagen's missing details about how an international carbon market would work. Haverkamp said that there is "some space there for Congress to set a template for the international process."

Looking back on the Copenhagen talks, U.S. officials insist they were not distracted from the real back-and-forth going on behind the scenes with China and other key nations. "The negotiations themselves don't get caught up in all the hoopla," agreed Stephen Eule, vice president for climate and technology at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy. He was director of the Energy Department's Office of Climate Change Policy & Technology during the Bush administration.

Yet Eule and Diringer say that U.N. climate conferences could perhaps be replaced or supplemented by a forum of major economic powers and key poorer nations. "I'm not saying we should abandon the U.N. process just yet," Diringer added. "The question is whether the process can be made workable. If not, what are the alternatives?"

According to Eule, "It's a Catch-22 situation. If you get a smaller group together, it's not necessarily representative of the larger group. If you get a larger group together, it gets confusing and unmanageable."

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