Global warming science

Who gets credit for climate accord? W, that’s who

The U.S. president who doubted global warming science merits a spot in the history books for the upcoming Paris climate accord. 

By Darren Samuelsohn and Andrew Restuccia

The Paris climate talks are expected to conclude next month with a celebrated new international accord ratcheting down greenhouse gas pollution from the world’s richest and poorest countries. It could be a Kumbaya moment for President Barack Obama and his contemporaries as they tout their work trying to save the planet.

But someone else also deserves some of the credit for what’s coming from the French capital: George W. Bush.

You read that right. The very same Republican president who doubted global warming science and fought new Environmental Protection Agency climate policies all the way to the Supreme Court merits a spot in the history books for kick-starting the very same negotiations that are about to bear fruit in Paris.

That may come as a shock considering modern-day Republicans are bent on derailing the Paris negotiations and overturning pretty much all of Obama’s green agenda. But Bush did indeed have a big imprint near the end of his presidency — at a tropical resort on the Indonesian island of Bali. The president himself wasn’t there for the late 2007 negotiations. In fact, for two long weeks as the talks lolled along, the U.S. administration actually served as a convenient punching bag for pent-up global diplomatic futility. Al Gore, fresh off accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, had flown halfway around the world to deliver a speech digging at Bush and urging the negotiators to “save an open, large, blank space” in their documents for the next U.S. president to sign. On the conference floor, typical decorum disappeared when Bush officials were loudly booed in the session’s closing hours.

Yet what emerged from all that chaos stands today as perhaps the most important breakthrough in more than 20 years of international global warming talks. For the first time ever, countries of all shapes, sizes and economic means pledged to pony up commitments to address global warming. The agreement came with a very wonky sounding name — the Bali Action Plan — and it provided only a very rough outline of where future negotiations would need to go. But what the Bush administration helped create in Bali stands to this day because it eliminated perhaps the biggest political albatross blocking major action in the United States and around the world on international climate policy: Finally, fast-growing developing countries like China, Brazil, India and South Africa were on record saying they would submit cleanup plans of their own.

That small flame lit in Bali has several times been nearly extinguished. Outsized expectations surrounding Obama — fueled by his own Nobel award less than a year into his first term — nearly capsized the entire U.N. process when the president and more than 100 other world leaders traveled to Copenhagen in 2009 aiming to wrap up a major new agreement. They swung and missed in Denmark, and it took two more years before negotiators could get the original Bali game plan back on track during another climate conference in Durban, South Africa.

There are still devilish details to be worked out in Paris on how to induce developing countries to make emission reduction pledges through tens of billions of dollars in technical help that kick-starts their use of cleaner sources of energy and their adaptation to an already changing climate. The foreign aid is also designed to get countries to make even stronger commitments that can be both measured and verified. But at its fundamental core, the concept enshrined in Bali that all countries will engage collectively in the climate crusade is the strongest sign yet that the upcoming talks in Paris will be a success.

“I very much look back at Bali as a turning point,” said Yvo de Boer, the former top U.N. climate official who helped lead the Indonesian conference. “In fact, it’s often surprised me how often people have forgotten that turning point and its significance.”

For outsiders, deciphering the meaning of a U.N. climate conference is no easy feat. Even experienced eyes often can be overwhelmed by the legal jargon, technocratic acronyms and political rhetoric that don’t easily translate into everyday English. These summits have taken place annually since 1995 and often the host country is in desperate need of some kind of accomplishment on paper to show the whole affair was worth it. Often what they end up touting sounds eerily similar to what was widely trumpeted as a victory in an earlier year.

But the truth is that each session builds on its predecessors — and there’s also all manner of extra grunt work happening at side meetings around the world and in more formal gatherings every couple of months at U.N. climate headquarters in the old West German capital of Bonn.

On occasion, a U.N. conference can become something bigger than itself. The treaty that started it all was negotiated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992; George H.W. Bush, eager to campaign as the “environmentalist president,” traveled to Brazil to sign it. In a sign of just how different times were, the Senate ratified the treaty in October of that year without any objections. Bush was nonetheless booted from office a month later.

Eager to turn international climate policy from a voluntary mission to a mandatory one, Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, signed off in 1995 on the “Berlin Mandate,” which declared that only developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada were legally bound to reduce their emissions, while developing nations, including China and India, got a pass. Two years later in Japan’s ancient capital, Gore helped negotiate the Kyoto Protocol that put the Berlin language into a treaty. The U.S. did score some big wins aimed at making the agreement more flexible, including broad coverage of the six most potent greenhouse gases, rather than just carbon dioxide, and authorization of a cap-and-trade system so industry could make the most economically palatable emission reductions.

But Kyoto was still a political disaster. The Senate had already voted unanimously 95-0 on a resolution from Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) vowing never to ratify a treaty that did economic harm to the U.S. and disapproving of any international climate agreement that exempted developing countries.

Reflecting on Kyoto, several former Clinton negotiators admitted they erred in their push to get developing countries to do more than they were willing to do. After all, China, India and other similar nations blamed the West for causing climate change in the first place through decades of economic growth via unregulated fossil fuel consumption.

“You could cut the hostility in the room with a knife,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. delegation during the Kyoto talks. “We completely struck out with developing countries.”

"The Kyoto Protocol was a little too fast and too complicated,” added Daniel Bodansky, a former Clinton-era State Department climate coordinator. “It proved to be a false start.”

While Clinton signed Kyoto, he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. Still, George W. Bush took the brunt of the political blowback when he pulled the U.S. completely out of all talks related to the 1997 agreement negotiated by his predecessor. International ire only grew with media reports that the Republican White House populated with former oil industry officials had been censoring government science on climate change, as well as Bush’s backtrack from his own 2000 presidential campaign pledge to enact the first-ever cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Bush didn’t relent on climate issues in a substantive way until 2007. By then, Democrats were in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time under the GOP administration, and cap-and-trade advocate John McCain was seen as one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.

International pressure on the U.S. from its allies was growing to map out a different path. “When Bush came in and said we’re not going to do Kyoto, the obvious question was: What’s your alternative?” said Harlan Watson, who served as a lead Bush administration climate change negotiator.

In Bali, consecutive all-night talks resulted in an agreement in which rich nations agreed to set up new mechanisms to help poor nations adapt to climate change and build new clean energy infrastructure. It also “really launched the seriousness of this idea of breaking down the firewall” between developed and developing countries, Watson said.

Close observers inside the U.S. were even caught a bit off guard by the change. Doubts were widespread about the seriousness behind the Bush team’s motivations. “The environmentalists and a lot of Democrats just crapped on us,” George David Banks, a former senior Bush White House environmental aide, recalled. “They said we weren’t being ambitious enough. That we’d undermined the U.N. framework. It was a step back from Kyoto. But it was pretty obvious there was just no way. If you were concerned about the climate issue, just because of the math and the increase in emission levels [counting the world’s major economies], you had to do something different.”

The negotiations since Bali have been anything but smooth. In Copenhagen, Obama and other world leaders saved face amid outsized expectations they could have left that conference with the makings of a legally binding treaty. Instead, they got a more nuanced accord in which rich and poor nations alike promised to keep making pledges on their environmental plans. They punted until later the actual legal framework that would tie the whole thing together — a promise that is finally coming to pass in Paris.

Considering what’s happened since Bali, Banks credited the Obama administration for its adherence to those original 2007 goals and agreed that the Democratic administration’s likely success wouldn’t have come without Bush’s work.

“We were able to break ground for them that they were able to exploit later,” he said.

Even some greens credit Bush’s team with getting the ball rolling and teeing up Paris. “They do deserve credit, coming from a terrible place, undermining the system, to getting things done,” said Kalee Kreider, an environmental group veteran who had been a traveling Gore aide at the Bali talks. “Usually some of these [U.N. conferences] are more about mechanics. And some of them are political tipping points. That was definitely a tipping point moment.”

That Bush could have played such an important role in setting the stage for Paris is a fact lost on the current crop of Republicans. Many leading GOP lawmakers reject mainstream climate science and attack Obama’s agenda at every turn. Earlier this month, they even approved a pair of resolutions aimed at overturning the president’s signature emission rules for power plants. Republicans have also vowed to use every tool at their disposal to undermine the Paris climate talks that their most recent president helped to launch.

“There is a lot of Republican criticism of Paris,” said Nigel Purvis, a Clinton-era climate diplomat, “which is ironic because the Paris architecture is the architecture that conservatives said we needed.”