Although international negotiations on tackling climate change crashed horribly in December's talks in Copenhagen, they did not come to a complete standstill. The first significant post-Copenhagen deadline looms this weekend: by Sunday (31 January), countries are supposed to submit their emission-reduction pledges to the United Nations climate secretariat.
The EU came out of Copenhagen bloodied and bruised. The Union's part in the debacle is still disputed, but one dominant account is that the deal that emerged in Copenhagen was put together by the US and China while the EU was left out in the cold. EU strategists have begun contemplating a world dominated by this G2; it is a narrative that will be worked over (and over-worked) at the World Economic Forum in Davos in the coming days.
But to claim – as some do – that the EU “disappeared in Copenhagen” is an exaggeration. The EU's fingerprints are to be found on some elements of the (unsatisfactory) accord that did emerge from Copenhagen: a commitment to restrict global warming to 2°C, and an acknowledgement that, by 2020, developing countries will need $100 billion each year to adapt to climate change (the EU's original proposal put it, rather more generously, at €100bn). But the hard truth is that the EU – either acting as individual member states or together – did not count for much. All that talk of ‘leading the way' had a fundamental weakness: nobody wanted to follow.
This weekend's deadline was an opportunity for the EU to re-think its climate diplomacy. But for the moment the member states have decided to stick with the strategy brokered by Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, in March 2007, when EU countries pledged to cut emissions by 20% by 2020 and by 30% if others joined in. This ‘pledge-and-extend gambit' was a reasonable idea at the time, but it has not worked. Nobody was interested in the EU's 30% pledge in Copenhagen. Those countries that have upped their pledges, such as Japan, did so for domestic reasons, not because they were swapping stakes with the EU.
The EU is clearly struggling to get other countries to sign up to the legally binding, target-laden agreement that it wants. There are no easy answers, but it would be wise to recognise that the world has moved on since March 2007. The EU has to get itself out of a negotiating rut.
The reality check of Copenhagen, a big recession and more bad news on the quickening pace of climate change call for a refinement of the EU's approach. Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council's president, has posed the right question for an informal summit of national government leaders on 11 February: how does the EU translate its climate-change goals into global negotiating power?
Abandoning the fixation with 30% as a lever would help. The EU should have the courage of its convictions and step up its emissions pledge to a 30% cut without waiting for others to follow.
The EU's current climate diplomacy is undermined because the political targets do not match the scientific needs. A 20% cut by a rich-country bloc is not enough to keep within the 2°C target. This damages the EU's credibility, especially with developing countries. Nor is a 20% cut deep enough to trigger the kind of changes that are necessary if the EU is to become a low-carbon economy.
Despite the protests of big manufacturers, a 30% cut would probably be better for the economy than a 20% cut. If the EU does not set a demanding emissions-reduction target for 2020, Europe will lose out in the battle to develop green technologies and to produce electric cars.
The move to a low-carbon economy will not be pain-free and it will be particularly hard for the most polluting industries and their employees. But Europe's politicians should face up to these difficult realities now.
Blaming other countries is one possible response to Copenhagen, and it is easily done. But the EU should not allow itself to be held hostage to whatever the least-ambitious Republican in the US Senate wants.
