Expectations

White House reins in expectations for Paris

A deal is likely to come from the climate summit, but it won't lend itself to heroic narratives.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere and Andrew Restuccia

Some deal will almost certainly emerge from the worldwide climate negotiations that President Barack Obama will kick off here Monday. The White House’s dilemma: making it seem big enough to match the time and legacy aspirations he has invested in it.

Obama has steadily raised the stakes for a climate deal throughout his second term, amping up his talk about the dire threat of global warming and the need to unite the world toward solving it. He’s the one who drew a direct connection to Paris when he rejected the Keystone XL pipeline three weeks ago, and when he rolled out a series of contentious climate regulations in the past two years. He’s the one who welcomed Pope Francis to Washington to try turning climate action into an international moral imperative.

But the two-week summit is unlikely to give Obama the world-saving, wall-of-the-presidential-library-defining achievement that he clearly wants. Even the best-case scenario won’t make sense to most people — there’s no easy headline or heroic narrative to be had in a patchwork of nonbinding pledges by 200 nations that may or may not eventually limit the rise in global temperatures to around 2 degrees Celsius.

The real-world effects of such an agreement could be huge in terms of avoiding the worst of the rising seas, droughts, extinctions, epidemics and mass migrations that scientists predict would result from uncontrolled climate change — and would be a major breakthrough in the stubborn, decades-long United Nations negotiations process. But its effects wouldn’t be felt until decades after Obama leaves office.

“Our task in Paris is to secure a long-term framework in which countries set successive rounds of targets into the future, beyond 2030, and ratchet down their carbon emissions over the course of the coming decades in the context of strong transparency and accountability provisions,” said Paul Bodnar, senior director for energy and climate change at the National Security Council.

The long-term nature of the hoped-for deal, which wouldn’t go into effect until 2020, will frustrate some climate advocates who demand immediate action.

“If you believe that we really have to do something quickly, it’s going to be a disappointment probably,” said Harlan Watson, who was a U.S. climate diplomat during the George W. Bush administration. But he added, “You’re talking about turning around the whole global economy. That’s going to take some time.”

And White House staffers aren’t even sure how much they’ll want to be talking about the climate talks at all. Unlike 2009, when Obama showed up at the end of the Copenhagen climate talks only to have them nearly collapse as he tried to urge negotiators into action, this time around he’s speaking at the beginning of the conference. Aides say there’s a preliminary plan to have Obama himself, Cabinet officials and the White House communications operation dispatched to amplify the message about the significance of an agreement — what the United States is actually doing, what it means to people as Americans and as global citizens — but they’re wary of getting too far ahead of a result that may yet blow up in their faces.

Managing measured expectations is how a White House aide described the planning.

The Obama administration and top United Nations officials have known for months, even years, that the end-product of the Paris negotiations wouldn’t be ambitious enough on its own to tackle climate change, and they’ve been working to set realistic expectations about what the talks will accomplish.

Scientists warn that countries must limit the increase in average global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The collective domestic climate plans put forward so far by more than 170 countries are projected to put the planet on a path toward a 2.7-degree increase. That’s a huge improvement from the havoc the Earth would face in a business-as-usual scenario, which could see temperatures rise by 4 degrees or more, but it’s still a long way from what the science says is needed.

As climate studies became more dire and a steady stream of United Nations summits produced lackluster results, officials decided to rethink global warming diplomacy. Instead of imposing stringent emissions mandates on countries, they decided to put in place a process that would allow individual nations to write their own plans for tackling climate change.

That bottom-up approach has so far won more buy-in for the agreement because countries like China and India aren’t being forced to do anything they don’t want to do. But that’s meant abandoning what would have been more forceful, top-down efforts to make big polluters slash their emissions — an approach that had long been the the European Union's preferred strategy.

And still, the pressure to get a deal, any deal, is raising worries among climate advocates that negotiators will settle for the lowest common denominator.

“We will have a deal in Paris,” Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union’s climate and energy commissioner, told reporters in Brussels. “But my worry is that we may end up having a minimalistic agreement and the European Union wants a good deal, an ambitious deal, not just any deal for the sake of it.”

Chistiana Figueres, the top climate official at the United Nations, has jokingly threatened reporters with bodily harm if they pepper officials in Paris with questions about why they aren’t doing more to meet the 2-degree goal.

“I will chop the head off the person who asked that question," she deadpanned at a recent news conference, "because I have been saying for at least a year, if not more, that that is impossible."

Longtime observers of the negotiations say the administration has done a better job of managing expectations ahead of Paris than it did in the months before the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, which suffered from the false notion that Obama could overcome deep divisions and secure a game-changing deal. The Copenhagen summit ended with a non-binding document that was widely panned by developing countries.

“I think actually, expectations going into Paris are more real,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a veteran of U.N. climate negotiations.

In a stream of background briefings, news conferences and presentations, government officials and private groups have made the case that the Paris conference is more about putting in place the infrastructure of a long-term regime to dramatically cut emissions. The agreement should lay the foundation to save the planet over the next several decades, they say.

“One of the greatest challenges going into the Paris climate conference is the inflated expectations,” said David Sandalow, who served as a top climate and energy official in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “The Paris climate conference can make a big difference, but it can’t solve the problem.”

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the mechanism through which countries negotiate global warming agreements, operates on consensus and it’s nearly impossible to get 196 countries with starkly different national interests to agree on anything.

Advocates of a climate agreement say the current process isn’t ideal, but the collapse of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the disappointment of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit have convinced many of them that this is the only way forward.

Administration officials say the final agreement will be a success if it incorporates ambitious climate change plans from every country; includes provisions that pressure nations to review those plans every five years with an eye toward increasing ambition over time; includes transparency measures; encourages more public and private financing to help poor countries get the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to cope with climate change; and prods subnational groups like cities and corporations to take steps to slash emissions.

But developing countries like India could derail the agreement if wealthy nations don’t fork over enough money to help them transition off coal. Activists worry that fossil-fuel-dependent nations like Saudi Arabia could sabotage the deal. And island nations might demand a level of ambition on which other countries aren’t prepared to deliver.

Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s top climate negotiator, told reporters that he is cautiously optimistic that the Paris summit will be a success.

"We have this opportunity,” Stern said. “We have this moment.”