The UN holds the first Cop climate conference in Berlin – archive, 1995 - The Guardian

The UN holds the first Cop climate conference in Berlin - archive, 1995 | Climate crisis | The Guardian

US challenged on global warming

By Paul Brown in Berlin

6 April 1995

Germany and Britain challenged the United States and other rich countries yesterday to commit themselves to cutting air pollution, as delegates struggled to break a deadlock at the United Nations climate conference.

“A signal must go out from Berlin that there will be further limitation and reduction after the year 2000 of the greenhouse gases which are damaging the climate,” the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, told delegates from 170 countries.

Dr Kohl was supported by John Gummer, the Environment Secretary, who said: “It is for the European Union, the biggest trading group in the world, to take a lead at these talks, with the UK at the centre of events.”

Mr Gummer said the US had to recognise climate change. The conservative parties of Europe had embraced the concept of conservation and it was a lesson the right in America must also learn. “We are no longer talking about the effect on our grandchildren but on our children, and that means American children too,” he said.

Way open for cuts in greenhouse gases

By Paul Brown in Berlin

8 April 1995

Concessions by the United States and oil-exporting countries have led to a breakthrough on a United Nations mandate demanding a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by industrialised countries.

The 118 countries attending the Berlin conference on climate change have given themselves two years to agree on future reduction targets and timetables for implementing them when the present agreements to stabilise emissions run out in the year 2000.

Aosis, the Alliance of Small Island States, whose 32 members fear that they will disappear beneath rising seas if urgent action is not taken, was disappointed with the deal, but European countries were delighted that a diplomatic disaster had been avoided.

The final document is a fudge, but for the first time it clears a way for hard worldwide negotiations on targets for reducing CO2 emissions. This has been resisted by the powerful and well-organised international fossil-fuel lobby, which had seemed to have persuaded the US not to concede. Continue reading.

No funeral in Berlin: targets and timetables at the World Climate Conference

By Paul Brown

12 April 1995

News editors the world over yawned last week when history was being made at the World Climate Conference in Berlin – and it is not surprising: tedious 6am wrangling over words in square brackets grips readers less than murderers facing the electric chair. Not that there was a lack of passion at the conference; at least millions and probably billions will live or die as a result of the action which will follow the Berlin Mandate, as the final document that emerged is to be called.

If that sounds like hyperbole, then you did not hear the anguished statements from the 32 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). They thought the mandate was not enough: the vested interests of the industrialised world had left them facing extinction as nations by the middle of the next century. The lumbering negotiation process would yield too little too late to stop the worst effects of climate change.

Jokes from the fossil fuel lobby that if these dire predictions prove right and some nations sink beneath the waves it will alter the voting pattern in their favour, did not improve the tone nor the temper of the delegates.

On the last day, when diplomats and ministers from more than 130 countries and lobbyists from more than 500 disparate groups grasped the final document in their hands, the views on what it all meant were as diverse as ever.

What the argument was about was chiefly what was known in Berlin jargon as the “R” word – reductions. It took a week to decide whether the word “reductions” could or could not be included; hundreds of hours were expended by people in corridors trying to persuade them yes, it could be, or no, it could not. A similar length of time and many hours sleep were lost worrying about the two “T” words – targets and timetables.

In the end the “R” and the “T” words were in the final text. The Berlin Mandate talks of reductions in greenhouse gases, targets needing to be considered, and timetables worked out. But there was none of the firm commitments that the hard line greens wanted, or the climate scientists recommended. There was no pledge for a 20% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 2005 that Aosis had proposed.

So what does it all mean? One man with more perspective than most was Richard Benedick. He was once the US’s chief negotiator on the Montreal Protocol, which began the process of saving the world from the menace of CFCs and began the UN on the task of mending the hole in the ozone layer. Last week Mr Benedick was wearing a badge of the International Academy of the Environment.

He remembered 1985, when the environment lobby was enraged and frightened at the hopeless inadequacy of the first meeting in Vienna aimed at curbing the use of CFCs. From that meeting emerged a framework document. Two years later, against original expectations, that document was tightened into the Montreal Protocol. But this too was written off because of its “hopelessly inadequate timetables and targets” for phasing out ozone depleting chemicals. Mr Benedick said the green lobby was in despair.

Only eight years later it’s all over for CFCs and there are timetables for removing other chemicals from industrial use that 10 years ago people did not even know were ozone depleters.

Given that background Mr Benedick read the 1995 Berlin Mandate with a broad grin. “There may be some flabby language, but by accepting this document the whole world is locked into a political process which cannot be backed away from. There is no pulling out by anyone; no one can turn their back on a process like this and expect to survive in the world of international diplomacy.”

Not that Mr Benedick or anyone else thinks the process will be simple. A growling and angry Donald H Pearlman, a United States lawyer, is a testimony to that. Mr Pearlman was everywhere, on first name terms with the Kuwaiti delegate Atif Al-Juwaili, making suggestions about tactics for striking out suggested targets, timetables or reductions from any text.

In the middle of the conference a long article in Der Spiegel, rapidly translated into many languages, was circulated to all delegates. Mr Pearlman was exposed as a “high priest of the carbon club”, the representative of the American oil giants and retained by Opec as an adviser.

The role of the non-government organisations has become a vital and integral part of these conferences. Once they were just confined to the traditional giant green groups like WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but by the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 there were thousands of them. Some, like Mr Pearlman’s Climate Council, have ambiguous names which hide their purpose as a pro-oil industry front. But with the true even-handedness of the UN, they are all accredited with equal rights.

One of the big hang-ups at the conference was joint implementation. This was described as the “holy grail” of climate change, a sophisticated system by which industrialised countries can get credit for doing nothing to home markets but cutting carbon emissions in Third World countries; for example, if the United States pays for installing solar power in Honduras to replace polluting kerosene it can claim a “credit” on Co2 emissions.

The idea is that rich countries can save more carbon dioxide, dollar for dollar, by spending money in a Third World country or eastern Europe than they can at home. Thus the developing world is invited into the climate change process while allowing their economies to expand with cleaner technology than they might otherwise use. The argument against it is that this is merely an excuse for the United States to do nothing at home to halt the over consumption which creates 25 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions on its own. The argument was not resolved in Berlin. Pilot projects will go ahead on the understanding that they are not an excuse for doing nothing at home. The issue of whether any “credits” for these pilots can be given at a later date will be considered in the year 2000.

Berlin was indecisive, but despite the predictable doomy predications of Greenpeace et al, Mr Benedick seemed to have it about right – no one can back out now and the process is, like global warming, probably unstoppable. Perhaps a guide to the success of the event was that Mr Pearlman and the carbon club were pretty depressed at the end and not talking to the press. But that does not mean that he, and others like him, won’t be back in 1996 and 1997, trying to refresh people’s memories about the uncertainties of the science of climate change or threatening that doing anything about it will hit them in the wallet.