By Henry Lamb
(November 24 2000)
Sometime after midnight, Jan Pronk, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and President of the Hague climate change conference, released his own draft of the proposed agreements delegates from 180 nations must adopt in order to move the Kyoto Protocol further toward implementation. For two weeks, the delegates have been gridlocked over major issues left unanswered when the Protocol was adopted in Kyoto in 1997.
In Kyoto, no agreement had been reached by the final day. The delegates went into a closed session, and emerged near daylight with an agreement in hand.
Once again, the delegates have failed to reach agreement during the regular negotiating sessions. Once again, the conference leaders have produced a draft in the middle of the night. Once again, selected negotiators will go behind closed doors and will likely negotiate until some kind of agreement is reached.
This is the what the United Nations calls an open, transparent, democratic process.
All week, Pronk has warned the negotiators to "remove the brackets," which refers to clauses in the draft on which there is disagreement. He promised that if the negotiators failed to compromise, he would write his own draft. He did.
Friday morning of the second week is supposed to be dedicated to celebrating the agreements reached during the two-week negotiating session. Friday afternoon is supposed to be devoted to packing up, preparing to leave on Saturday.
Many of the delegates will have to pack up on Friday and leave on Saturday too, because their travel arrangements require it. If an agreement is reached late Friday night or Saturday morning, it will be without the review of observers, and without the participation of many of the delegates.
Pronk has said that his draft will force all nations to bear the pain equally. What that really means is that only the developed nations will bear the pain - 150 developing nations are not bound by the Protocol. Should the U. S. delegates sign such an agreement, they would be deliberately ignoring a unanimous Senate Resolution that says the Senate will not ratify a treaty that fails to bind all nations.
Delegates are confronted with only two choices: accept some version of Pronk's draft, and pretend that it represents a great victory for diplomacy, or to reject the agreement, admit failure, and watch years of effort unravel. Smart money is on some kind of agreement.
Failure to reach real agreement, after five years of negotiations, should send a pretty strong signal that there may be some fundamental flaws in the basic document. The most basic flaw was incorporated in the original Berlin Mandate at the first Conference of the Parties in 1995 - the decision to exclude 150 developing nations. The second basic flaw was also included - the decision to make the Protocol legally binding, with absolutely no idea how to make it legally binding, or what the penalty might be for non-compliance. A third fatal flaw was the decision to set a firm time line for implementation.
The time line began in 1995 in Berlin, by declaring that a Protocol would be adopted in Kyoto in 1997. In Kyoto, the delegates declared that the rules for implementation would be agreed at the Hague in 2000, in order to achieve full implementation by 2002 - to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development where the original Climate Change Treaty was adopted.
The Kyoto document was premature, incomplete, ill-conceived, and adopted anyway. The vacuous deficiencies of the Kyoto document have been compounded by efforts to shape rules for implementation of unclear or undefined objectives.
Any agreement adopted under the circumstances that prevail at the Hague is bound to do more harm than good. The unintended consequence of such an agreement will be nothing more than the empowerment of a U.N. body to do what the representatives of 180 nations could not do - write the procedures through which the United Nations can dictate the energy policies of 38 developed nations.
This is precisely what 150 developing nations want, and it is precisely what the United Nations wants. The primary objective of the United Nations is to force what it calls "equity" on all nations. The United Nations intends to be the equalizer, the manager of the earth's resources - to ensure that all people enjoy the benefits of the earth's bounty equally.
This is the classic, utopian dream of socialism. It fails to recognize a fundamental principle in nature: benefit from the earth's resources must be earned. Benefits acquired by any other method are either a gift, or theft. Forced equity is not a gift.