On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, Joseph Catron wrote:
> Doug, unless I've missed something at the link, your subject line is a
> wildly unfair attribution. The closest Sachs comes to saying anything of the
> sort is:
No, it's more than that. Sachs gives a list of failures that culminates in Obama. I think the problem is that this article was edited down too drastically by the Project Syndicate. But Sachs (and Doug) are hearing it in light of what Sachs wrote a few days ago in the FT.
Here's the overlapping sequence of failures from today's Sachs article:
<begin excerpt>
Responsibility for this disaster reaches far and wide. Let us start
with George W. Bush, who ignored climate change for the eight years of
his presidency, wasting the world's precious time. Then comes the UN,
for managing the negotiating process so miserably during a two-year
period. Then comes the European Union for pushing relentlessly for a
single-minded vision of a global emissions-trading system, even when
such a system would not fit the rest of the world.
Then comes the United States Senate, which has ignored climate change
for 15 consecutive years since ratifying the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change. Finally, there is Obama, who effectively abandoned a
systematic course of action under the UN framework, because it was
proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics.
<end excerpt>
That last bit is a huge thing for Sachs. For him, it's the final nail in the coffin. Everything else, while making it worse, could have been redemeed here.
Sachs is saying that the rich countries, led by Obama (I'll return to this at the end) have (a) broken international law, and (b) avoided and destroyed the obvious and simple solution. Thus, this was the crucial moment, and they blew it big time and perhaps irrevocably.
Below is what he means aboaut this being the crucial moment and a simple solution and a legal obligation. This is from his article a few days ago in the FT, when the conference was still going on, and when doing the right thing was still a theoretical possibility:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e361fa90-e9e2-11de-ae43-00144feab49a.html
December 16 2009 Financial Times
Hold the rich countries to their word By Jeffrey Sachs
<snip>
Climate financing needs a formula.
The governing law is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in 1992. It is unambiguous. "The developed country Parties . . . shall provide new and additional financial resources to meet the agreed full costs incurred by developing country Parties in complying with their obligations" under the treaty. Moreover, "developed country Parties . . . shall also assist the developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects". The treaty emphasises the need for "adequacy and predictability in the flow of funds".
<snip>
Political leaders of the developed countries did not speak frankly with their own citizens, nor did they deign to negotiate with the poorer countries. President Barack Obama has not breathed a word to the American people about the financing responsibilities of Americans to the developing countries under long-agreed international law.
Rich-country leaders want to sneak by on minimalist commitments eked out of recalcitrant parliaments back home, not ones consistent with global needs or international obligations. That may be clever politics on an election-to-election basis, but it is wrecking the prospects for a rational approach to global crises.
<snip>
Copenhagen is the occasion to fix a broken system. We need to end the no-spreadsheet tactic that dominates financial transfers to developing countries. The draft climate text circulated on December 11 has the key phrase, though it is currently stuck in brackets, indicating a lack of agreement among the parties. The phrase is "an assessed scale of contributions".
We need, in short, an assessment formula. Member states of the International Monetary Fund pay assessments based on an agreed quota formula; likewise, the UN requires member states to pay an assessment for its budget. We need clear formulas as well for development and climate financing.
In the case of climate change, a formula stares us in the face. Countries should be assessed according to their greenhouse gas emissions, on the "polluter pays" principle. Not only would this be transparent, proportionate and aligned with proper incentives, but it would also be administratively manageable. Governments will in any event be collecting revenues through carbon taxes and auctions of emissions permits. They would then devote a modest fraction of those revenues to their responsibilities under international law, keeping the rest at home. Mexico, Norway and Switzerland have proposed emissions-based assessments along these lines.
The developed countries currently emit about 15bn tons of carbon dioxide a year from fossil fuel and industrial processes. An assessment of a bit over $3 a ton, roughly a fifth of the market price of emissions permits, would yield $50bn a year, a reasonable flow of financing for the next few years. Since China and other major middle-income economies have reached, or are quickly reaching, income levels where they too should agree to pay for the poorer countries, the base for assessments would grow over time to meet growing needs. Of course, today's low-income countries will also graduate from the need for transfers over time, so that this assessment system will phase out in a few decades. Principles for graduation could be established along the lines used at the World Bank.
A greenhouse gas assessment would be a major step forward in rationalising climate financing.
<end excerpts>
But what Obama did instead is pretty much exactly the opposite according to Sachs. Again, from today's article:
<begin excerpt>
Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli...
<end excerpt>
One can argue with Sachs, but I don't think Doug's subject line misrepresents what he thinks.
michael