Rob Lyons explains why the current meeting in Doha isn’t getting the same media love that earlier conferences have been able to depend upon:
It’s like a fly banging its head against a window pane, desperately trying to get to the other side and uncomprehending as to why it never succeeds. Except this is a 17,000-strong swarm of flies taking part in its annual exercise in futility. Yes, there’s another UN climate conference going on, though you might well have missed it.
The eighteenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — there’s a good reason they call it COP18 — is taking place in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The small Arab state is, by some measures, the richest country in the world per head of population, a position built on the fact that it has the third-largest reserves of natural gas in the world. The conference has been running since 26 November and is due to end on Friday. But no one is predicting any kind of dramatic deal.
Which is a bit of a problem for those who run this peculiar show because another thing that ends soon is the Kyoto Protocol. Signed 15 years ago in Japan, the protocol aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialised countries and the EU to a level five per cent below 1990 levels for the period from 2008 to 2012. There’s no sign of a replacement — which, to be meaningful, really needs to include big developing countries like China, India and Brazil — just endless talks about talks. At last year’s event — COP17 in Durban, South Africa — there was an agreement to negotiate a ‘protocol, legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force applicable to all Parties’ by 2015, to take effect by 2020. As a Greenpeace representative bemoaned then: ‘Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.’
It’s all a far cry from the Copenhagen talks in 2009. US president Barack Obama agreed to attend, which meant that there was real anticipation of a major deal. Yet Obama came and Obama went, and nothing of substance was agreed. And so the process has trundled on in its own, other-worldly way. COP18 sees thousands of the kind of people who think we’re screwing up the planet by flying around the world, flying around the world in order achieve bugger all in a country, Qatar, made rich by the very fossil fuels the delegates want left in the ground. It’s like an absurdist flash mob.
