Climate jostlings intensify

Angela Merkel, freshly re-elected as German chancellor, and thus the elected leader with the longest political life-expectancy, lost no time in making clear who’s really in charge of the European Union these days. First she met up with French president Nicolas Sarkozy to drive the last nails into the crumbling coffin of Tony Blair’s ambition to become EU ‘president’. Without even mentioning Blair, she announced that the new figurehead of the union would have to come from the centreright block of parties in the European Parliament. Then she set the tone at an EU summit which took place in Brussels at the end of October, where leaders were trying to agree on a common policy for the upcoming 15th annual ‘Conference of the Parties’ on climate change at Copenhagen this month. In this area she can claim to be the most experienced leader by far. As the federal minister for the environment under chancellor Helmut Kohl in the years 1994–1998, Merkel hosted the first UN climate conference at Berlin in 1995 and led the German delegation at the Kyoto negotiations in 1997. One can safely assume that she knows all there is to know about climate change (being a physicist may help as well), and that she also knows how to handle negotiations leading to a successful treaty. The Kyoto Protocol has now been signed and ratified by 184 states, with the US as the most significant non-signatory. The onus is on the developed world to cut their emissions. At the Brussels meeting, EU leaders agreed that a global budget of 100 billion euros per year would be needed in the long term to help developing countries cope with the effects of climate change. As the vast majority of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been produced by the industrialised countries, but the most severe effects of climate change on human populations are expected to occur in the tropical, mostly developing world, the traditional polluters including the EU have a moral obligation to foot the bill. Moreover, the developing countries will insist on such aid payments in exchange for any commitment to refrain from ramping up their own pollution to European levels. But how much of this cost should the EU carry? On this question, the Brussels summit failed to find an agreement, although a range of 22 to 50 billion euros was set for payments from the developed world lumped together. While still fairly unspecific, this is an initial signpost that could be developed further in the Copenhagen negotiations. The rest of the 100 billion euros bill would have to come from carbon trading schemes, the leaders expect. UK prime minister Gordon Brown, who had first initiated this costcounting exercise, called for a narrower range of 30 to 40 billion euros but didn’t prevail. Coming out of the Brussels summit, Brown declared himself optimistic about the Copenhagen meeting, while Merkel sounded warning bells. “It is realistic to say that in Copenhagen we will not be able to conclude a treaty but it is important to lay down a political framework which will be the basis of the treaty,” she told the press. While Merkel moved on to Washington, to EU–US consultations on climate change, experts from around the world met up in Barcelona for the last pre-Copenhagen set of