The UN process

John Key is quoted in the Herald:

Prime Minister John Key returns home this morning from the Copenhagen climate change conference saying a binding agreement could be concluded in Mexico next year but that the negotiating process has to change.

“It’s progress, but there is a lot more to be done if we are going to achieve the outcome that we need,” he said last night from Los Angeles.

“There is a lesson to come out of Copenhagen and that is that trying to build uniform consensus across 193 countries on such a complex issue is not going to work. It is not the right process.” …

“Small countries like Bolivia and Sudan can jump up and down and stamp their feet but they are irrelevant when it comes to solving the challenge of climate change.

There would be no credible response to climate change without the United States and China, coupled with Brazil, India, South Africa and the European Union, the PM said.

Anyone country can veto a line in the agreement under UN rules. This makes agreement painstakingly slow.

As an example, at ICANN meetings you have meetings of the ccTLD managers (ccNSO) and also of the Governments (GAC). In the ccNSO the comminque is usually drafted by two or three of us over a beer, and circulated the next day, and approved basically within 10 minutes.

The GAC will usually spend most of their final day just approving their communique.

The PM is making a similiar point (by coincidence) to the one I made about who are the countries that make up 80% of the emissions. There are only about 20 of them (less if you take the EU as one bloc), and really you just need to get them in a room and get an agreement. The ask the rest of the world to vote to adopt it or not.

They’d be better to remove the negotiations from the UN, and give them to say the G20. The G20 includes 17 of the 20 biggest emitters – only ones left out are Iran, Spain and the Ukraine.