Climate negotiations: 30 years of melting hope and US power
Thirty years ago there was hope that a warming world could clean up its act. It didn’t.
The United States helped forge two historic agreements to curb climate change then torpedoed both when new political administrations took over. Rich and poor nations squabbled about who should do what. During that time Earth warmed even faster. Hope melted, along with 36 trillion tons of ice, scientists calculate.
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Since 1992, when world leaders first came together to address global warming, humanity has spewed more than a trillion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into the air. The world got 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) hotter. As climate negotiators gather in Egypt to try to limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree long-time officials and historians see recurring themes in past efforts that still echo today. Those themes involve the outsized footprint of the United States and the tug-of-war between nations that got rich thanks to fossil fuels and yet-to-develop countries that feel disproportionate pain from climate change and are being told not to develop much coal, oil and natural gas.
“The U.S. has been the absolute dominant force throughout all of this,” said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge of the University of Cambridge in England. “I’m afraid the U.S. has been both the best and the worst thing, really, about negotiations.”
It started on a high note. In 1992, five years after a historic environmental agreement to ban ozone-munching chemicals, world leaders signed a treaty in Rio de Janeiro at the “Earth Summit. ” It started the formal United Nations process to negotiate dial back carbon emissions. The world recognized that climate change “is going to affect us all and we all have to deal with it,” recalled the first UN climate secretary, Michael Zammit Cutajar. Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation in New York, decades later called it the greatest meeting he attended: “There was a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something … There was a lot of hope there.”
Inger Andersen, a young United Nations development official at the time, said the summit got three different programs going and nothing was going to stop them.
“I mean this was it. We fixed it,” recalled Andersen, now the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.
In 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, the United States negotiated a deal that would have developed nations reduce their heat-trapping gas emissions to 1990 levels and below. Cutajar had the most hope of his career. It was a step in the right direction that would be followed by even more steps, he figured.
Negotiators literally danced in celebration.
Again, a new Republican administration, this time the president was Donald Trump, pulled out of the deal. Then Joe Biden put the U.S. back in again and negotiations resume with the United States now balking about the idea of paying for the damage done to poorer countries that didn’t spew much carbon pollution.
