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Glasgow’s COP26 is crunch time to save the world from disaster

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

Peering back through the tunnel of three frustrating decades, it’s hard to believe that, as the 1990s opened, the world expected to quickly agree on effective action to tackle climate change.

Back then, the stars did seem to be aligned. In 1988, a top climate scientist, Jim Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, had finally thrown off the caution of the scientific community and told the US Congress that global warming was 99% certain to be taking place.

His statement – made on a June day when temperatures conveniently topped 101°F (37°C) in a room where the organisers had deliberately closed all the windows to ensure that the legislators felt the heat, literally as well as metaphorically – moved the issue from mere scientific discussion to a matter of policy.

Three months later, Margaret Thatcher (of all people) became the first world leader to call for action on climate change. And two months after that, the elder George Bush was elected as the self-styled “environment president”, appointing the leading conservationist, William K. (known as Bill) Reilly, as head of his Environmental Protection Agency.

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And, most importantly of all, the world had just successfully agreed to defuse another big threat to the atmosphere, adopting the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone layer in September 1987.

That had been a tough negotiation, even after the 1985 discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, and the final agreement was so delicate that the text could not be translated from English into the other five official UN languages, lest their nuances upset the consensus. But the world then moved fast to strengthen and implement it, and by 1990 it was already clear that it would be the most successful ever environmental treaty.

It had been based on the work of a group of atmospheric scientists, so in 1988 the UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a similar foundation for a climate treaty. Then, in a barnstorming speech – delivered on the very day in 1990 that Michael Heseltine launched his bid to unseat her – Thatcher persuaded the UN’s World Climate Conference to call for a climate convention treaty within two years.

That was achieved, but with even greater difficulty, for opposition to action was already mobilising, especially in the US, grouped around Dan Quayle, Bush’s vice president, and John Sununu, his chief of staff.

Clinton and Gore’s inaction

Reilly did manage to get a treaty drafted, with invaluable help from another British right-winger, Michael Howard, then environment secretary. It was signed at the giant 1992 Rio Earth Summit. However, as Bush’s cabinet warred, it was unclear until the last minute whether he would join in.

The president arrived with two alternative speeches in his pocket – one, as a member of his cabinet then described it to me, as an “in your face” one, the other endorsing the treaty. Eventually he delivered the latter (as it happens, one of the key sentences in it was mine).

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) pledged to “stabilise” emissions of greenhouse gases at levels that would avoid dangerous climate change but contained no specifics. In light of the Montreal Protocol, though, it was believed that they would not be long in coming.

Soon afterwards, in 1992, prospects looked even brighter as Bush and Quayle were succeeded by Bill Clinton and his vice-president Al Gore. The latter was a longstanding champion of action who had published a bestselling, radical environmental tome, Earth in the Balance, shortly before becoming elected. But those hopes were soon dashed: at meeting after meeting, US delegates dragged their feet. “Has Gore,” participants joked, “read his book?”

Yet the treaty’s first COP (Conference of the Parties), which was held in Berlin in 1995, again involved important progress – largely thanks to Angela Merkel in her first big outing on the international stage. As the recently appointed environment minister of the host country, she stitched together an agreement that governments would meet two years later in Kyoto to agree on a protocol containing specific measures. (When she was elected German chancellor in 2005, the climate change sceptic, George W. Bush, tried to enlist her, as a fellow conservative, in his rejection of the resulting 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Merkel drew herself up to her full 5 foot 4 inches and replied: “Mr President, I am responsible for the Protocol.”)

The Kyoto meeting (COP3) often came perilously close to breakdown, with the US – led by Gore – originally insisting that the world should aim not to reduce, but merely stabilise emissions of greenhouse gases.

Two men saved it. One – Raul Estrada Oyuela, the Argentinian chairman of the main negotiating committee – became known as “the miracle worker”, for forging consensus when it scarcely seemed possible. The other was John Prescott.

Then Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister, he became “the walking and talking man”, spending the last days (and nights) of the conference doing one or the other – usually both at once – round the conference centre, as he and his deputy, Michael Meacher, forged a political deal.

Prescott slept one hour in the final 48. So relentless was he that the Japanese hosts vainly asked Blair to get him to relax his pressure.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/glasgows-cop-26-is-crunch-time-to-save-the-world-from-disaster/
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