Bali Bulletin: Dramatic Final Hours

This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali and background on the meetings.

As I prepare to send this account to New York by email, we know how it all ended.

But I had to suffer through 40 hours of nearly sleepless sturm, drang, chaos and emotional suspense to find out. I’ll take you through some of that, too.

The skirmishing got really serious Thursday night. The U.S. churned out another obfuscatory proposal late in the evening and the E.U., to everyone’s surprise, pulled themselves up on their hind legs and said that if the U.S. wouldn’t work to produce a roadmap in Bali, then the E.U. would pull out of the White House-sponsored Major Economies Meeting in January.

This in turn stimulated a spasm of fulmination by White House aide James Connaughton at a press briefing. When challenged on the quality of U.S. leadership by a reporter, he blurted out: “We will lead. The U.S. will lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.”

For a volatile collection of delegates, press and NGOs seething with ten days of frustration, this was the match thrown on the kerosene. This remark fueled both widespread anger and some hilarious satire for 24 hours, including a demonstration by young people with signs bearing Connaughton’s infamous quote and another other sign saying, “The world is leading – the U.S. should follow”.

I attended meetings with Mayor Bloomberg of New York and former Vice President Gore during these closing 48 hours. Both addressed plenary sessions of the delegates, and offered a dramatic contrast not only with the official U.S. delegation, but with a lot of the orotund ministers who seem to drift in and out of oratorical trances.

Bloomberg asked us to host a luncheon for him with some NGOs. Interpreting this mandate liberally, we assembled a group that included leaders of independent Hong Kong and Indian NGOs dealing with climate; the Chair of the Energy and Environment Committee of the Indonesian Parliament; the Governor of Mato Grosso, one of Brazil’s largest Amazonian states; and a senior executive of the Steelworkers’ Union, among others. The discussion was riveting – broad-scale, coherent expositions of how the challenge of global warming looks from different parts of the world, and a lot of listening as each tried to understand constructively what was motivating the others.

Gore met with a group of American NGOs Friday morning and offered to be of help in the days and weeks ahead as we work to move the international agenda forward. Fresh from being Nobelized in Oslo and buoyed by the strong response to his speech here, he was in full-voiced enthusiastic mode. He thinks the rest of the world and the Congress are beginning to move, but expects nothing from the Bush administration on climate from here on out.

After we’d spent considerable time on the minutiae of midnight maneuverings, I turned the discussion to more metaBalic subjects in order to stimulate some thinking about how we could avoid totally wasting 2008 on the international negotiation dimension, if what we got at Bali was a tattered laundry list instead of a road map. Some very interesting thoughts surfaced; I will review them with Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp before broadcasting them more widely.

And now, back to the main event:

6:20 pm Friday evening: A deal is reached on RED (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation).

6:40 pm: China and the E.U. reach agreement on Technology Transfer, which puts pressure on everyone else to come along.

8:15 pm: Our Russian connection reports that Russia continues to agree to nothing.

9:10 pm: Rum begins to flow at the Caribbean party down the hall from our post.

11:15 pm: We receive word that talks among the ministers have completely fallen apart.

11:25 pm: Key ministers meet again in private. Small Island States break out the liquor and put up a sign that says: “We Are Drowning Our Sorrows Before We Drown”

3:00 am Saturday: Informal ministerial meetings break to allowing time for consultations with capitals. Announcement that plenary will resume in morning.

3:30 am: Environmental Defense team goes back to hotel to sleep.

7:00 am: Environmental Defense team arrives in Convention Center to secure “base” positions inside and immediately outside Plenary Hall. New draft text distributed by conference secretariat.

9:00 am: Jim Connaughton of White House summons U.S. NGOs to describe the U.S. position. He says the U.S. reached a compromise with E.U. and has support of Japan, Canada and Russia on new draft text.

10:00 am: India indicates it has problems with the draft. G-77 (a group of about 130 developing countries) recesses to discuss their varying degrees of unhappiness.

10 am to 1 pm: Informal meetings among ministers.

1:15 pm: Plenary session reconvenes. President of Indonesia and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon lecture the delegates on importance of coming to agreement. China chastises Secretary-General of UNFCCC for allowing scheduling of two meetings simultaneously to interfere with orderly progress of meeting. Secretary-General, who is exhausted, breaks down and leaves meeting. There follows one of the most extraordinary sessions of an international negotiation any of us have ever seen.

India presents a new text stating how the undertaking of developing countries to participate in the preparation of a global plan of carbon limits will be formulated, which has been arrived at by the G-77 in their caucus. The U.S. rejects it.

All this is happens without any scripting or planning, in open session, on the floor, with NGOs and press filling the sides and back of the room.

One by one countries and blocs rise to support India. South Africa. Papua New Guinea asks the U.S. to lead or get out of the way. China. The EU. The Small Island States. One by one they rise to ask the U.S. to yield to the new language. Frankly, the new language is not sensational, but it represents for the first time the entry of the developing countries together into the global preparation of a plan for carbon limits, and it is their language. Canada is silent. Japan speaks, and no one can figure out what they mean, possibly including themselves. Not one voice among 190 countries is raised in support of the U.S.

3:10 pm: The pressure is like a huge, crushing weight in the room. And finally the U.S. asks for the floor – and yields. The room bursts into wild applause, and the Bali Roadmap is adopted.