Todd Stern, I Feel Your Pain

You gotta feel sorry for Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, as the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen gets under way this week.

At least I do, having personally coped with huge international conferences — in my case, as deputy head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations for two-plus years, and top U.S. delegate to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review in Geneva in 1985.

Diplomacy in all circumstances is tough. It gets tougher when expectations are dampened from the start. Recently, U.S. President Barack Obama admitted that slim pickings will come out of Copenhagen, besides some prep work and a call for another grand multinational climate conference to take place next year.

The diplomat-theorist George F. Kennan once quipped that the problem of reaching a good outcome equals the square of the number of participants. With 192 countries participating at Copenhagen, squaring that yields a mighty big number. At large multinational conferences, successful diplomacy is nigh unto impossible.

In the 1980s, we had to contend in nonproliferation negotiations with a couple dozen fewer countries, but even with fewer players the main problems remain. First, diplomats take over from the wonks. Although a marvelous group — remember, I was among them — they tend to know little of the substance. Real experts get shoved aside, or accommodated, while the "comma futzing" (that’s a euphemism) begins. So, loads of people spend loads of time negotiating over a topic on which they themselves could say little of merit.

Second, the diplomatic accord heads for the heavens. Striving to find compromise, hence consensus, language either drives the rhetoric into the netherworld — so abstract as to be virtually meaningless — or into the depths — so obtuse as to have contradictory — or zero — meanings.

Hence, such linguistic contortions arise as the classic "flexible freeze" from the 1980s (during the height of the popular "nuclear freeze" movement). The phrase was intended to express one thing (stop any increase in nuclear weapons), but actually mean another (allowing an increase in the weapons, to balance Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe at the time). In the end, nothing was frozen, save perhaps the human mind struggling to comprehend such a notion.

Soon, Stern will need to negotiate with 191 other countries. But a bigger hurdle lies at home. He must also deal with key parts of the U.S. government, as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I believe, is now undercutting his diplomacy. For the EPA is proposing to set standards that make any success he could conceivably have inadequate, almost pointless.

Granted, the EPA is only one part of the sprawling government apparatus with some stake in climate change agreements. But it’s the one with potential for crippling regulations. Other agencies mostly coordinate and kibitz.

Thus attention must be paid to the EPA, above all, as it is now writing regulations to control carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs), under the Clean Air Act. For the new rules to take effect, the agency would conclude that current concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere endanger public health and welfare. They would claim so not because the controlled emissions are toxic, like other pollutants, but rather because they trap heat. This adds to warming and thus potentially endangers Americans’ health. So runs its argument.

Although reasonable folks have concluded that GHG emissions could, conceivably, lead to a global atmospheric concentration that poses an environmental risk, the EPA’s pending regulations run far ahead of much convincing evidence. And its stance undercuts both Stern’s already-precarious diplomacy and that of the responsible U.N. agency.

To reach the U.N. goal of restraining rises in global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has set a goal of cutting carbon emissions to 450 parts per million. Now, along comes the EPA to proclaim that this U.N. target, 450 ppm, would itself endanger public health and welfare. The agency seeks to hold emissions to nearly 20 percent below that level.

Granted, this wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. government couldn’t coordinate its act on climate change. Recall Kyoto 1997, when Vice President Al Gore flamboyantly signed the Kyoto Accord on behalf of the United States. After that triumph, his boss President Bill Clinton refused even to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification because 95 senators passed (unanimously) a resolution expressing their disapproval.

The Kyoto Protocol, it was said, was seriously flawed. It put a big onus on the United States to cut its emissions, while letting the most promiscuous emitters today, India and China, do nothing. The world’s two most populous countries, and biggest future polluters, wanted no part of any accord. And their wishes were deferentially granted, with no real admonishment. For the United States, signing the treaty would have meant economic hardship.

The position of India and China is an understandable one. As the bumper sticker prescribes, they are indeed "thinking globally but acting locally." They make grand speeches in global forums, but they act based upon local considerations — to foster, and not hinder, their own burgeoning prosperity. At the end of the day, the Obama administration may well end up in the same place. Given the precarious U.S. economic outlook with its already 10 percent unemployment and anemic recovery, the president won’t want climate-change restrictions that could seriously thwart economic recovery. And the EPA’s regulations seem to be heading in that direction.

Hence, someone in the White House looking out for that economic recovery and the welfare of the United States’ working middle class has to slow or even stop the agency’s proposals. And someone looking out for the country’s international reputation, like the secretary of state, should whisper to the EPA’s leaders that its current stance is undercutting U.S. diplomacy. 

It is time to think globally — and yield to great rhetorical flourishes during those great international gatherings — but at least act locally by doing what’s good for the United States.  "Yes we can" do better than this.