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It's hard to imagine an upset in one U.S. Senate race could derail plans for a new international climate change treaty. But that may be the case. The U.S. Democratic party's loss of a long-held Senate seat in Massachusetts this week, to Republican Scott Br
It's hard to imagine an upset in one U.S. Senate race could derail plans for a new international climate change treaty.
But that may be the case. The U.S. Democratic party's loss of a long-held Senate seat in Massachusetts this week, to Republican Scott Brown, means getting key climate change legislation passed in the United States just got a lot harder. And without willingness by the U.S. - the world's historically largest carbon emitter - to commit to ambitious cuts in emissions, few other nations will feel pressure to be ambitious in their own plans.
Brown has campaigned against a U.S. "cap and trade" system to reduce carbon emissions - the heart of the proposed U.S. climate bill - arguing it would cost business and consumers too much. And his victory means Democrats in the U.S. Senate no longer have a crucial majority needed to overcome Republican roadblocks and push legislation through.
The truth, though, is that aims of producing an ambitious new international treaty to curb carbon emissions may have died at Copenhagen anyway.
Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, insisted in a press conference Wednesday that U.N. negotiations would forge ahead, now with the aim of creating a new international climate treaty at negotiations in Mexico City in November 2010.
"I don't think that any political development in the United States means turning back nine years on the climate change agenda," he said.
But a growing number of environmental and political analysts say the need for consensus decision-making in the U.N. process - even one nation can reject wording the others agree on - makes reaching an ambitious climate deal virtually impossible, particularly when at least a handful of nations clearly prefer sabotaging a deal to signing one.
Altering the rules of procedure to allow proposals to be approved by a majority, rather than consensus, would be one way of reviving the process, climate activists say, though bringing about the change would surely be a challenge.
Observers say a more achievable aim, at least for the time being, may be to broker multilateral emissions-cutting agreements among a handful of the world's biggest carbon emitters, particularly those eager to push ahead with cuts as a way of gaining an upper hand in emerging world markets for renewable energy.
If concerns about the perils climate change may bring aren't enough to push through emissions cuts, they argue, perhaps the potential for green jobs, new avenues of economic growth and greater energy security will be.
The U.S. Senate upset "won't derail the bipartisan push for clean energy and climate legislation that will make our economy stronger and our country more secure," Frances Beinecke, president of the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council, promised in a typically optimistic statement Wednesday.
Individual national, regional and state emissions cutting programs and agreements brokered among just a few countries - the emerging focus of efforts to curb climate change - aren't likely to lead to the ambitious cuts needed to hold global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius, the level U.N. scientists consider the safe cutoff.
But they may at least be a better start than the alternative: Endless rounds of U.N. climate change negotiations that produce as many frustrations as results.
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