Small steps on climate change

The Copenhagen talks won't yield a breakthrough, but progress is still possible.

FOR TWO YEARS, the Danish capital of Copenhagen has been a beacon for environmentalists seeking a breakthrough international treaty on climate change. But with the long-awaited Copenhagen conference now just weeks away, it has become clear that the talks will not produce a grand, new accord mandating global reductions in carbon emissions. The United Nations' envoy conceded as much last week in Barcelona, the site of the last formal talks before Copenhagen.

According to some, the letdown can be explained in three words: the U.S. Senate. The United States is the only developed country that hasn't offered a carbon-reduction target. Though the House passed major climate-change legislation over the summer, the full Senate hasn't yet acted and almost certainly won't before the Copenhagen conference opens on Dec. 7. With reason, American negotiators are loath to agree to a binding commitment without Senate approval.

Blaming the Senate, or the United States, is unfair -- and potentially self-defeating. Other governments are far from consonant on a range of issues, such as how to structure a regime for verifying countries' adherence to promised carbon reductions. And anti-American finger-pointing will only make it harder to extract the climate-change legislation from the Senate.

Even so, U.S. negotiators probably have to decide between two courses, neither of which will fully satisfy many of their counterparts.

One option is to offer no firm emissions target at the conference. That could still allow for a modest political declaration by the 192 participating countries announcing agreement on certain details of a new climate treaty, while pushing off formal negotiations for perhaps another six months. Ideally, work would proceed on some sort of framework into which future national commitments carrying the approval of national legislatures could be entered. This risks deeply disappointing the rest of the world.

The alternative is for American negotiators to offer a provisional target for reducing greenhouse gases based on the work Congress completes before the conference. If developing nations are ready to deal, the result could be a nonbinding but substantive agreement. The work of setting up institutions to monitor emissions, provide financing to poor countries and transfer green technology could begin immediately.

Some observers worry this path will result in less international pressure to reach a legally obligatory agreement later on. But at least the parties' commitments would be credible, unlike those enshrined in the binding Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which countries flagrantly violated -- and which the Senate refused to ratify.

There are good arguments for pursuing a big international agreement on climate change. Not least of them is that many countries' commitments are contingent on others taking similar actions. But even if negotiators eventually succeed in producing a binding treaty, the commitments to emissions cuts now on the table are probably inadequate to prevent an unacceptable rise in global temperatures over the next several decades. That's a problem the world will have to revisit, even if Copenhagen is a ringing success.