At its very end, the Copenhagen climate summit turned into a potboiler thrill ride with a surprise ending.
Late Friday night, President Obama burst into a conference room to talk verification turkey with the Chinese premier and apparently was as surprised to see three other developing country leaders closeted in the room as they were to see him.
The surprise five-way summit made for a political agreement among the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, and China (the latter four have been dubbed the BASIC countries) to reduce emissions and subject their progress to “international consultation and analysis.”
Had the deal not come together, the likely alternative denouement to the summit would have been a chaotic, colossal failure. Still, it’s a dishwatery sort of deal. It illustrates that it was probably too much to expect representatives of 193 countries, each with their own interests and political agendas, to agree, in only two weeks, to a detailed, legally binding plan for transforming the energy foundation of the global economy.
It won’t deliver the regulatory certainty that business executives, including utility CEOs like Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers and Pacific Gas & Electric’s Peter Darbee, have been pressing hand-wringing lawmakers in DC to deliver. That must come from those very same lawmakers managing, against all the narrow political instincts that compel them otherwise, to forge a bipartisan deal to put a price on carbon.
Put a price on carbon, the executives are saying, and we’ll deal with it. We’ll invest in the low-carbon technologies of tomorrow, including technologies that can be sold to China and the other developing world behemoths whose leaders know that it is in their interest to prevent climate change risks from entering a red zone of danger.
And for those who can’t shake their doubts about climate change science, a price on carbon is an exit ramp off the dangerous road of oil dependence. That’s a road fraught with strategic liabilities that no rational American leader should countenance, if they know, as they should, that perpetuating oil dependence means playing a risky game in which exporting countries with unfriendly agendas hold the high cards.
No more surprises. Give American businesses the certainty they need to develop cleaner, safer energy technologies that we need and other countries will want to buy. Congress, put a price on carbon.
