Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MS JENNIFER
MORGAN, PROFESSOR
TOM BURKE
AND DR
BENITO MU
LLER
4 MARCH 2008
Q60 Mr Chaytor: May I amplify the
question? I think the concern of some of us who have attended
the climate change conferences—not only at Bali but at previous
COP events—is that there seems to be a significant disconnection
between the machinery of negotiation and the political will. I
think this is a source of increasing frustration amongst parliamentarians
and legislators around the world. How do we close that gap?
Professor Burke: I think you are
exactly right about that. That is why the recent decision by the
Foreign Secretary to up the status of climate change in terms
of the Foreign Office's priority and to focus on helping to build
the political conditions under which an agreement of a sufficient
level of ambition can be reached in Copenhagen is so important.
It would be very good if there were other countries that were
focusing on the same thing. At the end of the day, what the negotiators
can agree is determined by what the domestic constituencies in
each of the key countries will actually accept. So it is a politically
determined process, but not necessarily in the negotiating room.
It is determined by the politics at home. I do not think everybody
in this country, let alone in the rest of the world, fully understands
that point. I do not think within our own government structure
all the bits of the government fully understand that if you do
not work hard on building the political conditions, you have pre-limited
what can be agreed in Copenhagen. We have put much more effort
into shaping the text and focusing on the text until very recently
than we have into building those political conditions. The campaigns
that the Foreign Office is now gearing up I think are crucially
important to us being able to reach the level of ambition that
we are looking for to meet what the IPCC certainly requires but
which many people—and I am struck by Jim Hansen's statement—think
is not ambitious enough and that we have to go further. Getting
a broader understanding of the importance of mobilising domestic
constituencies in the key countries is a really central part of
achieving the objectives that we have set ourselves for Copenhagen.
Q61 Mr Chaytor: In terms of domestic
political conditions, what are the two or three most important
things that you think this Government in the United Kingdom could
do to improve the domestic situation?
Professor Burke: The single most
important thing that this Government could do is to be seen much
more aggressively to walk the talk. I think this country is seen
as a leading country, and justifiably, in terms of pushing the
debate and the politics of climate change forward, but there is
always a price to leadership. If I had to focus on one thing that
would make a difference, it would be approving the Kingsnorth
power station, but doing it only on the condition that carbon
sequestration and storage is installed. Being willing to pay for
that would transform the politics of climate change very considerably,
that aspect anyway of it. So I think walking the talk is the single
most important piece of what we must do in this country to shape
political conditions elsewhere because every other effort we make
is measured up against what we are doing ourselves. As I have
said to this committee before, particularly on carbon sequestration
and storage but on other things too, there are times when our
approach looks lethargic.
Dr Muller: All I can give
you is an anecdote. About a year ago, India had a new joint secretary
who was in charge of climate change. He was brand new and he came
from Assam. They rotate their officials. He did know anything
of what was going on but he sat in one of the rooms where the
G77 was meeting on his own. I walked by and he called me in, and
he said, "Dr Muller, if this is all so urgent, why
are we not doing anything? Why are we sitting here talking about
commerce?" So the sentiment to some extent is not just with
parliamentarians; it is even with negotiators that there is not
enough political will in many cases.
Professor Burke: May I put a slight
gloss on that? A large part of successful completion of negotiations
in Copenhagen will depend on the belief that developing countries
have that we really are willing to drive forward on things like
technology adaptation and on financing those things. It is very
hard to imagine that, if they look at our strength and unwillingness
to finance actions domestically, they would really believe there
is much expectation that we will finance things internationally.
Q62 Mr Chaytor: Jennifer Morgan,
you have drafted the very detailed original submission from E3G.
I am interested in your observations, particularly on other IPCC's
report and the various targets that it sets. Is this a realistic
set of targets and objectives as a basis of negotiation for the
developed countries?
Ms Morgan: My sense is that there
was a fair amount of progress in 2007 on the understanding at
the national level of the intensity of the impacts and the viewing
of those impacts as issues of national security and issues that
are in the national interests of countries, such as China, South
Africa and India less so. The new Prime Minister in Australia
has read the IPCC report, the summary report of the policy makers.
I think that we moved from a rather high level of abstraction
into something much more fundamental. That played a large role
in the politics of Bali that you had large developing countries
coming forward and saying they are ready to start negotiating
because it was no longer an issue of global concern but an issue
of national concern. The ranges and the types of targets and whether
they are voluntary or mandatory, and if you then have to go country
by country to see what comes through, that the IPCC has put forward
are of reducing emissions 25 to 40% below 1990 by 2020 for developed
countries. I think we need to be on the higher end of those ranges
to stay below 2 degrees. Those ranges are based on not that many
studies. There is quite a need for further research on those ranges.
The dynamics of the Bali meeting were such, which I think is important
because as Professor Burke said the politics are just what can
be carried home and what can be put forward in an international
meeting, that things that were impossible the first week became
quite possible by the end of the second week. So you have Australia
and Canada coming forward and supporting those ranges. From a
negotiating dynamic, I think that will be the focus for industrialised
countries. The key question of course is where the United States
comes in on this in the next Administration, and in my view really
moving away from concentrating on this Administration and into
the next.
Q63 Colin Challen: The EU like the
UK was trying to take a leadership role, particularly in Bali,
and has stated that it would aim for a 20% cut in emissions by
2020 and would go 30% if other countries did likewise. Should
we not really go beyond that now, given the IPCC's report that
we should have a 25 to 40% cut in emissions by 2020 to have anything
like a chance of success?
Ms Morgan: I think so. The current
proposal by the Commission that focuses first of all on 20% unilaterally
should be, first of all, at 30% and then scaling that up accordingly.
Those are the types of dynamics. I think that the European Union
needs to start preparing itself to do more in order to get an
efficient deal in Bali from looking at what every country is going
to have to do in order to stay below 2 degrees to get that range.
Europe is likely to have to go further.
Professor Burke: I agree with
what Jennifer has said, but I think we need to add an extra note
in that this is not just about pain and how you share out the
pain. The fact is that if we are going to be living in a prosperous
and secure world in the 21st century, essentially we have to render
the global energy system carbon neutral by about the middle of
the century. That is what staying not just below 2 but staying
within the 2 to 3 range will require. To do that is a massive
opportunity and those countries that are better adapted and better
prepared to make that transition and take a lead in making that
transition have the opportunity to make a very significant move
or advantage now. I do not think that is an argument that will
carry a huge amount of weight inside, if we are just looking at
the United Kingdom because it is too small to influence global
perspectives. But if you take that in the European context, the
extent to which Europe is driving forward to a low carbon economy
as part of that debate and as part of creating the political conditions,
and that is seen as an opportunity to guarantee the prosperity
and security of 450 million people, it will help make and allow
for a higher level of ambition in the negotiations. So you have
to see the negotiation process and the political process as running
in parallel and not necessarily with the same kind of discourse.
The discourse on the politics has to be about opportunity, not
just about pain.
Q64 Colin Challen: If you are talking
about opportunity, will that overcome the problems that we face
in the developed world because recent history has shown that in
trying to meet our Kyoto targets I think only two or three Annex
1 counties have done that. One could argue that one of those,
ourselves, has done it by accident; one could argue that another,
I think the Netherlands, is doing it by buying credits; and other
countries, like Canada, have gone about 30% in the opposite direction.
What are the opportunities that can overcome the rather modest
scale of the challenge so far? How can we convince people that
those opportunities will outweigh the cost, the investment, that
is required up-front?
Professor Burke: In a sense I
rather look to you about how we persuade the public to join in
on these things. I am very impressed, by the way, by the way in
which GLOBE and parliamentarians have played an increasingly significant
and helpful role in that. If you look at what we have to do and
the kind of arguments you have to make, if we are going to install
carbon sequestration and storage as the norm for fossil fuel-fired
generation and we are not going to avoid having fossil-fuel fired
generation, and if we want the Chinese and the Indians to have
carbon-neutral fossil fuelled generation, we had better do it,
and then installing the infrastructure to do that is going to
be exactly equivalent to installing the motorway system in the
20th century. That will provide a massive amount of jobs and opportunity
creation, provided we are prepared to finance that. Nobody would
have thought that road pricing would have financed building the
motorway network, and nor should be think that a carbon price
on its own will finance building that infrastructure. The Secretary
of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform made a
big play about the fact that offshore in Britain there is 33 GW
of wind power generation available to the United Kingdom and invited
people to make bids for it. Unless we put in the infrastructure
to bring that power ashore, it will not happen. There is no way
that an individual enterprise will want to take that risk. Once
it is built, then you can start to say, "How do your re-finance
it through tolls and so on?" but getting it built will not
happen unless we are prepared to put in the money. If you build
those kinds of infrastructures, I have no doubt at all that the
private sector will play its part in terms of contributing the
other sides of the investment to do it, but without that initial
investment, the risk is going to be too high for most private
sector enterprises to take it on. Those are the kinds of opportunities.
I look at how we are getting left behind because we have been
rather lethargic, as I have said before, on some of these issues.
The forecast for the projected amount of wind power to be generated
globally by 2012 is 252 GW. Leman Brothers made that forecast
yesterday. That is their forecast for the growth out to 2012,
and we are not going to have any part of that because we have
been too lethargic in taking up opportunities with which we are
well endowed.
Q65 Mr Chaytor: Does your argument
about the state's responsibly for financing the infrastructure
apply to all forms of low carbon energy?
Professor Burke: "All"
is a very big word. It certainly applies to the renewables and
the carbon sequestration and storage, which are the two priorities
where the infrastructure is necessary. If you look at the European
scale, the idea which has been postulated of building a super
grid, as it were, for direct current is exactly what we need to
unlock the potential that is there. It is exactly the same logic
for that in a low carbon economy as there was for the TENs (Trans
European Networks) in the 20th century economy. We have to see
it that way if we are to have any hope of arriving at the kind
of levels and targets that we need to meet inside the negotiating
process. Of course the more serious we are seen about driving
for that, the more we help to create political space in the negotiations.
Q66 Colin Challen: This would drive
a coach and horses through the Government's stated policy of letting
markets decide. The Government has said that it does not want
to determine what the mix will be, whether you have 20 or 30%
nuclear or 20 or 30% CCS or 20 or 30% renewables. The market will
decide. What is stopping the market from deciding?
Professor Burke: I was surprised
to see an account in the newspapers, which of course means it
may not be accurate, that the Secretary of State for Business,
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform thinks it ought to go to 30%,
which is deeply inconsistent with the Government's stated policy,
but it is probably not the only area where there are inconsistencies,
not only indeed for this Government, but most governments have
inconsistencies in their policy. I do not think it necessarily
drives a coach and horses through the idea that markets have not
only a role but a central one to play in doing this. What it does
say is that markets do not exist unless somebody provides the
fundamental conditions for them. In the case of the renewables
and the carbon sequestration and storage, unless the public provides
those fundamental conditions and finances the provision of those
conditions, markets cannot do their job. I agree with you in the
sense that I think there are some people in the policy-making
community who seem to be more interested in making a market conform
to some theoretical model than actually solving the problem of
climate change, and that is very dangerous and silly to do that.
What is much more important is to focus on identifying what exactly
is the role for markets, particularly in making technology choices,
but what is the role for the public sector. In a sense, the Commission
proposals have given us the opportunity for that and indicated
the direction in which they think the financing of that should
go when they said in the package that 20% of the proceeds from
auctions should be available to finance these kinds of developments.
That is going to be opposed tooth and nail, certainly by the Treasury
but possibly by others in government, too.
Q67 Colin Challen: When we were in
Australia, we heard a bit about Professor Gardner's work and his
interim report came out shortly after our visit. He seems to be
of the view that we should, first of all focus, on a cumulative
emissions budget and not get too bogged down in short-term targets.
Clearly the two things may not be incompatible but how much freedom
do we have between different countries or regions to pick and
choose particular targets, which some people may say have not
been properly thought through between themselves or may not go
far enough?
Ms Morgan: My sense is that the
issues of fairness and comparability will be the key issues at
the international level moving forward and of course ambition
is the primary one. I think we have learned that a bottom-up pledge
and review type of approach is not going to get us where we need
to go. You just need to look at the Rio Treaty and look at why
we then tried to put in place the Kyoto Protocol with its binding
targets and timetables. All right, some have been more successful
in implementing those than others, but that gets back to your
question on how to create the conditions to make this an opportunity
rather than a burden. This round of negotiations will be very
much, especially on the developed country side of things, needing
to have a level of ambition and a consistency of the types of
commitments that countries will take on. You can look at budget
periods; the Kyoto Protocol currently has a five-year budget period.
My view is that you need both the short term and the longer term,
that we need to have a five-year budget period but also give longer
term certainty of where we are trying to aim for on a longer timeframe
and get to a situation where Australia can say, "these are
the opportunities that we have and this is the type of commitment
target that we are ready to take on", and Japan can say,
"we are able to do this". This will be the discussion
over the next years, but I think we need to have a consistency
in the type of commitments for developed countries. I am of the
view that we need to continue the Kyoto Protocols qualified emission
reduction limitation obligations, targets and timetables.
Dr Muller: I would agree
with Jennifer, and in particular what we cannot have is negotiations
every five years, but we need the five-year periods. What we need
is a multiple result for a couple of periods. Why do we need the
intermediate ones? If we do not have those, we will have countries
that basically will say that there is time. By the time we have
reached 15 years hence, they will be so far up that it will be:
oh, no, we cannot do it now. That is happening with Canada and
the US. It is too late and for them to go to minus 20 right now;
to my mind that would be absolutely impossible, but we must not
let it get there. We do need the intermediate flagpole positions
and to have a trend so that there is certainty for investment
on where we are going. Those two elements have to be combined.
Q68 Colin Challen: Do you think the
major economies' conferences will help or hinder achieving a global
consensus?
Dr Muller: I have a personal
experience in terms of having talked to participants from China
and from India. To be honest, they think it is a complete farce;
it is a waste of precious time at the moment to have a monthly
meeting with no expected outcomes and for the long term no expected
outcomes. They go because they say it would be impolite not to
go because it is the Americans who actually invite, but they do
not expect anything. I am not saying that a major economies' conference
would not useful but not what we have right now; it has to be
substantially different from what we have.
Professor Burke: This illustrates
a point that Jennifer made earlier, which it is easy to overlook,
and that is the importance of thinking about the next US Administration
and not the current US Administration. I think there has been
something of a tendency in the British Government, partly old
habits really, to pay far too much attention to the present Administration
and not enough to the future Administration and, as a result,
we have tended to lend rather more legitimacy to the main process
than it should have. I agree with Benito's assessment of it. I
think it is quite important that we should understand that it
is primarily the objective of the members to create the right
headlines in the United States for President Bush. That is probably
not our objective.
Ms Morgan: Just to give a specific
issue that is under discussion, which is the long-term targets,
I know that there are a number of countries—the UK and even
Germany in this instance—who want to be supportive of Japan
and seemingly this White House in coming to an agreement on the
long-term target this summer, which I do not see any point in
doing. You have all the presidential candidates in the United
Stated supporting 80%, or both Democrats, by 2050 for the US.
It is one of my worries that we put ourselves in a dynamic whereby
we give much more credence to this Administration and are not
preparing for the next, because there are already feelers out
there from the campaigns, and we need to take those up and get
in early.
Q69 Colin Challen: Turning to the
G8 this year, what hopes can we place on that in moving the agenda
along? Japan appears to have rejected the EU's 2 degrees objective
and has not agreed to emissions targets. Is the G8 this year going
to be of any value at all, do you think, given this period we
are in of the dying days of the Bush Administration too?
Ms Morgan: I think the most important
part of the G8 this year is to change the Japanese position. That
is what the G8 is about. Prime Minister Fukuda is trying, in my
view, to do that. He is trying to move beyond the voluntary only
approach. He is trying to change the politics within their industry.
The coalition which is immensely powerful has taken a small step
in doing that in Davos in a speech and will evidently give another
speech in April. I think that our diplomatic efforts should be
to surround him and support him in moving towards a mandatory
cap for Japan. My experience of the G8, and I was quite involved
last year with the Germans, is that it is mostly about the atmospherics,
so to speak, the financial real initiatives that can come out
and be implemented. There are some efforts on energy efficiency
that could come forward. My focus would be on Japan really at
the moment and the way that Japanese politics works is that international
opinion will play a role in how they move forward.
Professor Burke: What that illustrates,
if you look again, as Jennifer has just said, is the issue of
domestic constraints on any government in negotiations. What is
the conversation in our industry, which has been a leader on climate
change in our major companies, that they should be having with
their peers in Japan to support these efforts? My experience is
that, by and large, just as politicians listen most to other politicians,
businessmen listen most to other businessmen. Those peer things
work in all realms. It is really quite important for us to be
thinking through how we create a conversation in Japan and in
Canada and in other places that is business-to-business—Jennifer
is deeply involved in creating NGO-to-NGO conversations—so
that you are helping to support that. That is what I think the
Foreign Office is now gearing up to do and I think it is very
welcome, but it needs to really drive that forward and be encouraged
to drive that forward very fast.
Q70 Colin Challen: To get a little
perhaps you have to give a little, and the problem with the politics
I suppose is that we might end up giving too much. For example,
might we have to give way on a baseline year for a post-Kyoto
agreement, not 1990 but, as the Japanese I think have suggested,
2004. Is that acceptable? Could it ever be acceptable?
Ms Morgan: In my view, the 2 degrees
target is not negotiable. As for the baseline, you can do the
calculation; if you move your baseline, then your target has to
be much bigger. This will be one of the core elements of the negotiations
over the next two years because countries like Japan feel very
wronged with the 1990 baseline and the United States. This is
a fairness debate but the goal, the driving force, has to be to
get the level of effort high enough to stay below 2 degrees and
I do not think the European Union can blink on that.
Dr Muller: My hopes for
the G8 are that it is not going to be counter-productive. If you
look at Heilingendamm, what happened with the G5 was a catastrophe.
You do not hand round an agreement and then present it to the
developing world—here, take it or leave it. It was a very
bad process in that respect and I hope that was a learning process
and that they will be more engaged in future.
Q71 Mr Stuart: The recent GLOBE forum
in Brasilia was very useful in so far as the developing countries
were brought together with the developed countries and were able
to get that dialogue going. I suppose the other further good news
from GLOBE is that this Thursday will see the first GLOBE CEOs
forum based in London by BP bringing together some of the largest
companies in the world, again, very much trying to push that dialogue
among the largest companies in the world. Can I ask you about
developing countries and how we bring them in? When we were in
China I was struck—I do not know if all members of the committee
were struck—by the fact that the Chinese Government was
quite clear that it accepted the science; it was quite clear that
the threat was a grave one for China and that it might be the
largest loser in the world from the impacts of climate change.
Although it was sticking to its desperate desire to hang on to
the differentiating role rather more than the common in terms
of obligations, there was a real sense that China was on the move.
I wonder whether you could comment on how you think we can bring
the developing counties in and will they go for binding targets?
My own view is that next year with a new Administration in America,
China and America, hard-headed, sitting down in their own national
interest could just transform the landscape. Do you think that
is possible?
Dr Muller: I did write a
piece on that after the conference in Bonn about a year ago. There
was a Russian proposal, which you may remember, that is precisely
about non-binding targets. There was a UNFCCC workshop. The Chinese
at the close of the workshop said that this was a workshop, only
a workshop, the topic is closed for them and that they did not
even want the report. The chair had to say that the report had
been agreed. I am saying that there is such a huge distrust in
terms of it being voluntary now and there is some way in which
you—i.e. industrialised countries—are going to make
it into a binding target, which would be completely unacceptable.
To my mind, there is a type of non-binding target which we do
have and which they have accepted and it is the CDM. Basically,
the target is business as usual. I think, given the huge degree
of distrust and the fact that after a long period of being distrustful
of the CDM, this has been accepted as something, we should make
use of that and enhance it and make it better because that is
something which they have embraced. The non-binding target of
some other forum will be flatly rejected to my mind.
Ms Morgan: I am a bit more optimistic
perhaps. I was in China last week on this trying to get a sense
of post-Bali. I think that they are not yet really understanding
that a new US President could transform this issue and they would
want to move away from hiding behind the current US Administration
and much more into the spotlight. I think to move the Chinese
into a place where they are ready to do more, they have to continue.
They are quite worried about food security and food prices and
instability in all of these things, so it is in their national
interests, as you were saying. I think we have to build their
confidence that they can meet their targets nationally. They have
their ambitious national goals and it look like this year they
will do better on their 20% of their goals than they did last
year but China will never sign up to a global agreement that they
do not believe they can meet or to a review. They are all very
concerned about what is measurable, affordable and verifiable
means. An area where there is tremendous opportunity, but we are
not yet there, is the EU-China relationship and really scaling
that up. We were just part of a little consortium of institutes
doing some work on this, looking at whether we could create low
carbon economic zones in China and between China and Europe, looking
at how do we really use trade to remove tariff barriers and create
investment conditions and do technology co-operation and intellectual
property rights on a scale that is manageable on a bilateral level
to accelerate it and build confidence in China and moving to a
low carbon economy. One of the top economists was at our event
last weekend; he is not in the negotiations and he was one of
the most refreshing voices from China I have heard for a while.
He was very bullish, very much looking at their zones and how
they can make them low carbon, their challenges and implementations.
I think that is how to bring developing countries in is to create
the capacity for them to scale up, to build the political conditions
in China and other countries so that they believe that this is
possible and that it has tremendous benefits for them on the prosperity
narrative and to get Europe into a place where we have this triangular
conversation with the US, China and Europe and figuring out how
to do that quite quickly.
Q72 Mr Stuart: Contraction and convergence:
they have not bothered to sign up to that. Obviously they felt,
as you said, a lack of trust that they would get diddled. Fundamentally,
do you think some form of UN arbitrated global cap on a per capita
basis would give short term financial and economic gain to the
likes of China? The cap would bite later, in the long term, and
they would see benefits in the short term.
Professor Burke: I do think that
contraction and convergence is an outcome of solving the problem,
not an input to solving the problem. The idea that we can solve
this problem by agreeing by some mechanism that nobody set out
to share out the per capita burden is frankly very idealistic
but I am not sure it is very practical. If you cannot get people
to agree to the things that we are already suggesting are difficult
and would take you nowhere near a contract and converge situation,
why would you think that they would agree to something that is
a lot more difficult and even harder to work out how you are going
to deliver? Personally, I am pretty sceptical about contract and
converge. Any of these ideas are fundamentally about how you share
the burden. When your discourse is about burden sharing, people
retreat into saying "you first, me later" and what you
have to do is get into a mode where the conversation is "me
too" and where we are following. That is what Jennifer was
just referring to, the importance of the EU-China piece. It is
really important to see solving this problem as an opera, not
a song. It has lots of parts in it and lot of bits in it and they
have to come together. Singing a single note song about which
target you are going to have in this negotiation is not, at the
end of the day, going to solve the problem. That is why that opportunity
side is so important. On this idea of harnessing, there is nothing
that will generate the patter of quite heavy feet up Constitution
Avenue to The Hill than the fact that American business thinks
that European business is stealing a march on getting into the
low carbon economy because we have a good relationship with China,
and we have built that. I think we have started to recognise that
in this country. The Foreign Secretary visited China last week.
I think this was part of the message that he was taking to the
Chinese. That is not instead of the tough stuff you do in the
negotiations but you have got to do it as well.
Q73 Mr Stuart: Last February, a year
ago, at the GLOBE forum in the US Senate, Senator Kerry was there
saying how he had got it and he ended up by lecturing the Chinese
that he was going to show global leadership, that America would
show global leadership but when China had gone first. It was extraordinary
for a man who had apparently got it. I take on board your point
about not being able to do it. I do not think this fractured,
fragmented approach does not seem to be getting us anywhere either;
maybe we need more idealism. Will the US accept binding targets
with a new Administration if they do not see China doing so?
Dr Muller: One of the key
things which came out of Bali to my mind, if you followed the
negotiations, was that at the very end there was a circus almost.
It ended up with the question of measurable, reportable, verified
or something, but the developed countries said "mitigation
actions in developing countries" in paragraph (b)(2). The
developing countries said: all right, but only if they are mirrored
by measurable, verifying, reportable financing and technology
transfer. To me, this is the key. There is symmetry there which
we forget. If we want mitigation commitments from developing countries,
binding commitments, we will only get them if we take on binding
commitments on financing and technology transfer, otherwise we
will not. There is a route out if it is necessary. Personally
I believe, with Jennifer, that large scale, bilateral joint ventures
is probably the route to go, but if we think we need the international
regime to come up with binding targets on major developing countries,
it is only going to work if we also agree ourselves to have binding
targets in terms of finance and technology transfer.
Q74 Mr Stuart: I totally take on
board your adaptation point. When we went round China we were
struck that the mantra for all of them was about technology transfer.
It is very hard to put your finger on what exactly they mean here.
You are repeating it and everybody repeats it and it is easy to
repeat but it does not seem to mean anything. What sort of technology
transfer are we talking about and is there something in this or
should we dismiss it as a red herring?
Dr Muller: We finally managed,
in the negotiations, to have technology transfer as an agenda
item on the subsidiary body for implementation. So far, all we
had talked about was new measurements and new studies. We were
afraid to even talk about implementing the issue. I agree with
you that it is very abstract term. To many people in the north
it means exports, first of all.
Q75 Mr Stuart: The Chinese go on
about wind energy. They are implementing wind energy on a great
scale. It is not a high tech industry. Implementation is where
they are going to learn; they will be selling us the technology.
We have struggled to find out what it is they want that we have
got that is not owned by some company that is quite happy to sell
it to them.
Ms Morgan: I think China wants
to move into being an innovation economy. They want to move from
producing kits into actually producing high product goods, and
they want to have the capacity in their economy to produce it
themselves. First, we have to understand what can we do through
a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and on technology
transfer and what can we not do? Thinking that we are going to
be able to do everything there is not going to happen. We know
that we need things like standards to drive technology. We know
that we will have to look at some technologies and some stages
of development where intellectual property rights do play a difference,
and we need to look at the connection between, for example, how
Europe hopefully gets 12 CCS demonstrations up and running and
funded and what relation that has to doing that together in China.
To get back to your other question, we have to change things so
that the United States sees it as fundamental in security interests
that China has a low carbon economy and that driving down costs
for everyone will happen more likely by having goods produced
in China, so that there is joint public good being done through
this type of co-operation and moving things in a different way.
In order to do that, we have to re-frame and engage new constituencies
in the United States and in Europe, I would say, and that is about
security and having US generals come out. A number have said that
we have to reframe our view of China. It is really about understanding
and having a more sophisticated bay in the United States about
the differences between the US and China. My view is that the
second commitment period will not have a national target for China,
but that is looking at a third commitment period, and that a second
commitment period will need, in order to stay below 2 degrees,
to have ambitious policies and measures, potentially sectoral
agreements, that are as binding as we can get them, but asking
China to bind themselves to a national CO2 cap is going to be
counterproductive. We need to organise the negotiations so that
we show that is where they are going. If we do the politics and
do our work, I think that we can get an agreement ratified that
shows that China is taking significant ambition to action and
the United States will as well pull them together.
Q76 Mr Hurd: The debate has been
about the EU, the United States and China, for obvious reasons.
Very quickly, I wanted to get your perspective on another key
player, which is India, whose future relationship with China which
will get increasingly interesting.
Dr Muller: I have just been
to China.
Q77 Mr Hurd: I am asking because
some of the comment coming out of Bali is getting increasingly
concerned about India.
Dr Muller: I was slightly
taken aback by one thing. I was telling my friends earlier in
the corridor about this. It is the acute pessimism of the lead
players about the Bali outcome in so far as they say it is basically
we have agreed on the dismantling of the Kyoto Protocol. Why?
Because in the Annex 1 formula we basically have the option that
countries like Japan and Canada could opt out and have their own
thing. That is their big fear. They feel strongly about the Kyoto
Protocol and the whole UN process. This is something which I was
heartened to hear. As far as what is to be done at home, they
were very clear about how they interpret the Bali outcome for
themselves. They will engage in these measurable actions, but
only those actions which are actually measurably financed will
be counted as measurable actions and verifiable ones. There is
a direct link; it is not that we have actions here and we have
financing here and they are separate. They insist on a direct
link between the two.
Q78 Mr Hurd: Is it: you pay, we measure?
Dr Muller: One of the classical
implementation instruments will be the CDM. The measurability
is there of the action but also the measurability in terms of
finance and technology. It is the direct link which is of importance.
I think there is a growing realisation that it is going to be
a big problem for India. Do not forget that if you look at people
living below $2 a day, these developed counties and the small
island states together have about 520 million people; India has
800 million people living below $2 a day. It is by far the biggest
least developed country, although they would not admit to that
because it is not part of their super-power status. We know that
poor people are more vulnerable than rich people, so they have
a tremendous problem in that respect, and they realise that. They
will be more active in engaging, but on their terms. We should
not try to force them to take on a target. That is not the way
to do it, I do not think.
Ms Morgan: My sense is that the
debate in India is a bit behind the debate in Brazil and China,
partially because you do not have a coherent, scientific message
coming out of the science community in India. It is a bit of this
and a bit of that, partially because you have no real civil society
engagement in a way that makes a difference. I think that engaging
the business community in India and showing how climate change
is an opportunity for India and its hundreds of people who are
thinking about new creative ideas will be absolutely crucial.
What I have seen more and more is India differentiating itself
from China, that the type of commitment that it will take will
be different from that of China, which in some ways goes against
them always wanting to be seen as the same as China, but actually
I have seen a lot of them differentiating on that side of things.
Q79 Mr Hurd: Can you give one example
of that differentiation?
Ms Morgan: For example, I think
in a second commitment period it would be the type of target,
so whether it is a sectoral goal or a policy and measured goal
and the level of ambition and the level of `bindingness'. I think
those are the key criteria to think about on that. There is something
that people talk about, sustainable development policies and measurers
where they might be doing things that are not as measurable and
as ambitious.
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