The Climate Summit at Copenhagen was a supreme example of collective European negotiating incompetence:
Copenhagen was a startling example of how this big tent approach to agreeing global issues is unworkable. It predictably slumped into an uncontrolled haggle which as each day passed grew more and more detached from respectable scientific and long-term economic calculations.
The mass of participants had no real interest in being responsible.
Those who hoped for a carrot had every incentive to keep pushing up the price.
The relatively few countries both wealthy enough and inclined to pay into a collective new pot could not write a blank cheque; they needed guarantees that they would be getting a reasonable return on their investment, which meant above all buy-in from the fastest-growing mass emitters, namely China and India.
And China and India saw that for the first time in centuries things were going their way – was it really so risky to them to priori
In other words, the negotiating psychology framework was all wrong.
The ‘stick’ waved by those wanting a deal was far too remote: incalculable and uncertain climatic problems decades down the line.
The carrots offered by the few countries prepared to offer carrots (in the form of large new development funds to help poorer countries cooperate with expensive climate change policies by making the transition to cleaner technologies all the faster) were too small to deal with the problem as they themselves had defined it.
Plus many would-be recipients could read news reports of horrible pressure on government spending in the Western democracies, and no doubt suspected that a lot of the promised ‘new’ money would be funding rebadged from existing development budgets, much of which in any case would end up in the coffers of Western consultants.
In other words, because the EU promised the main developing polluters money (but not enough money) to pollute less, the developing polluters simply bid the price up.
The lesson? That it is hard to persuade another side to agree with you if they have no immediate downside from not agreeing.
Therefore what?
Therefore the time has come to stop being silly about these issues and be a lot more pragmatic instead. It looks as if Germany will be leading the way, as described by Kai Konrad:
Konrad: Germany and Europe are inviting freeloaders. It's a mistake to believe our noble behavior will so greatly impress others in these talks that it will move them to make concessions in return...
We need to make clear to China, the United States and the large developing nations that Germany and Europe are no longer going to try to save the climate alone. Instead of avoiding CO2 at any cost, we should prepare ourselves for continued global warming. It's a credible threat. Everything we know suggests that Central Europe will suffer comparatively little from global warming. Berlin will simply have the temperatures that Rome does today. The adjustments we will have to make are quite manageable.
SPIEGEL: But Western, industrialized nations are responsible for the high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Don't we have a debt to repay to China, for example?
Konrad: That may be. But it won't advance the negotiations if we make so many concessions to China's position that there is no more movement at all.
SPIEGEL: Environmental organizations expect Germany to contribute generously to climate funds for helping developing countries address climate protection. Rightly so?
Konrad: Here, too, it would be smart not to put up these funds at the very start of the negotiations, without asking for something in return.
What? Making it clear that if others want a deal they have to make some concessions too?
Whatever next?