Published in Island Tides January 2015:

On Sunday, December 14 at 3:30 AM the 20^th Conference of the Parties (COP20) in Lima Peru limped across the finish line. The “official” adjournment had been scheduled for Friday afternoon.  The Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal had chaired a session that attempted innovative approaches.  

He actually chaired expecting negotiators to show up on time and conclude their work to deadline. He tried to maintain on-going consultations in various backrooms.  But the sub-group negotiating the key text (the so-called ADP group standing for “Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform”) held protracted sessions which amounted to collecting comments more than shifting positions. Pulgar-Vidal attempted to find the right balance through his consultations and a re-write.  When his text was presented Friday it was met with massive unhappiness from developing countries. For the next 36 hours the COP teetered on the brink of falling apart. 

It is one of the moments that horrifyingly brings home to me that I have been working to arrest the threat of climate change a very long time – and not succeeding.  In June 1988, I worked within Environment Canada to organize the first international scientific climate conference in Toronto. It made an impact and that same year the United Nations created a scientific organization to keep politicians informed of the growing threat – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The world community appeared to be off to a pretty good start back in 1992 when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed by every nation on the planet in Rio at the Earth Summit.     

Procrastination, corporate lobbying and lack of political will has led to a tragic loss of more than two decades when actions would have been easier, greenhouse gasses could have been reduced before hitting the current 400 parts per million (ppm), before condemning glaciers and sea ice and coral reefs and other ecosystems to dangerous levels of damage.  Over the previous one million years, carbon dioxide concentrations have never exceeded 280 ppm.  We have already changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water is changing the acidity of our oceans.

The process of negotiating a treaty to move the world to a low-carbon future has been on-going since 1992.  The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) took place in Kyoto, giving the protocol its name.  Kyoto in its second phase still exists, but Canada dealt it several mortal blows.

The next big negotiation deadline was 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen.    That COP was a train wreck of an event.  It sowed deep seeds of distrust as President Barack Obama took a handful of big industrialized countries, plus China, into a hotel room – outside the integrity and transparency of the UN process – and cooked up the bogus “Copenhagen Accord.”  The targets were not legally binding but “politically binding.” It was accompanied with a blatant attempt to bribe the developing world into not protesting rising seas and droughts by providing a new Green Climate Fund, to ramp up to $100 billion/year by 2020.  It was primarily designed to give Obama political cover in Washington to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill. But in the end, the White House pulled its support for Waxman-Markey.  By then the bill was so riddled with compromise, no one could really mourn its loss.  Plus trying to give that hopeless bill cover sabotaged global negotiations.

So here we are five years later in Lima at COP20.  The deadline for the acceptance of the treaty that failed in Copenhagen will be next year at COP21 in Paris. The tensions created by Copenhagen are still with us.  As is the distrust. Stephen Harper’s pledge to cut emissions has been ignored by his administration and we have no hope of reaching it based on current plans. Last year at COP19 in Warsaw the failure to meet promised Green Climate Fund commitments took over the COP, with the popular button of the conference being “WTF?” – “where’s the financing?”

At COP20, industrialized countries wanted the developing world to be happy with texts that leave out such annoying promises, while giving the developed world a weak set of self-selected targets of dubious enforceability.  The Lima negotiations went into overtime hours, adjourning more than 36 hours late. The deadlock was predictable and the compromise only slightly improves a weak Lima decision. For years I have been the only opposition MP at COP.  Before next year’s COP in Paris, Canada’s elections will likely deliver a new Prime Minister with a Parliament with a greener hue -- more Green MPs committed to working cooperatively.  It is imperative that at least one opposition party MP know the negotiated trail that got us to this point. Despite the tortuous path and dashed hopes of other COPS, we have no alternative. There is no other forum to navigate a course to global action for a carbon neutral world. We need to see our way through the thicket to reach the clear, aggressive and equitable climate treaty the world needs.