http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jh…

The November 29, 2007, Charles Clover’s weekly column on www.telegraph.com takes an inside look at the environment.

The Title Is - “The road to Bali”.

And it starts: Appropriately enough, it is going to be hot at the climate change talks which begin on the Indonesian island of Bali on Monday. Temperatures at this time of year range between 78 and 86ºF (26-30ºC).

And the chief official of the UN climate change convention, Yvo de Boer, has already set the tone by telling the officials from over 170 countries who will be flying there - boosting the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as they do so - that they do not need to wear a jacket and tie, at least until their ministers fly in a week later.

He says this will avoid the need to turn the air conditioning up so high. I suspect it will make little difference.

The world may well wonder what this great junket in Nusa Dua, one of the world’s top holiday resorts, at the height of the holiday season, can actually achieve. It hardly instills confidence to be told that most important business is expected to be conducted at cocktail parties.

As a veteran observer of the enormously slow way the world has confronted the climate issue from Rio, through Berlin, Kyoto, the Hague and now on the road to Bali - without any apparent change in the relentless rise in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions - I, that is Charles Clover, can confidently predict that what Bali will NOT produce is a clear successor to the Kyoto treaty, which expires in 2012. (We at www.SustainabiliTank.info are in complete agreement with above statement.)

The article continues by saying that a senior British official was at pains to point out this week, the media has been rather too successful in raising expectations. The reality is that the best that can be hoped for from Bali is drawing a roadmap towards a global regime for after 2013 that might be agreed in Copenhagen next year - crucially, after the next United States presidential elections.

This last statement is our reason for posting this article because it includes a misstatement that shows graphically how the press has hyped the subject to the point it creates inaccuracies. The facts are that this year at Bali, there will be the COP 13 of the UNFCCC - that is the Conference of the Parties to the Convention - and the second meeting of the MOP, which is the meeting of those countries that are committed to the Kyoto Protocol, but that meeting is not closed to those that are not part of the implementation process of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC.

Copenhagen is the home of COP 15 in 2009 - and not of COP 14 which will be held in Poznan, Poland in 2008. Now, this might seem as a trivial mistake - but we already argued in a previous article that this is rather a sign of the hype of the Press that has completely passed over the existence of a COP 14.

In the wind created by those that want to see results, it became a matter of fact to say that what is started at Bali will bring results already in 2008, so these results will be finalized by 2009. This might be true - but please remember that by time of Poznan, the US will not have had yet a change in Administration, it will have hardly survived a tough election campaign - so it will take at least until Copenhagen in 2009 in order to have a functioning new team in Washington - and without Washington in the lead it is obvious to us that it is not possible to have positive results. We already expressed our optimism many times that the business sector will push ANY NEW PRESIDENT IN WASHINGTON, not just to go along with the Europeans, but more then that - to take real leadership position. This is not just hype - it is our analysis after watching financial interests learning the intricacies of the climate change problematique. It is sad to see that we caught even officials of the UN making the mistake of going directly from Bali to Copenhagen. If this mistake in vision is not corrected it will become a hindrance in the development process of results that can be approved in Copenhagen. In short - the work will be done literally on the way to Poznan and enriched with US participation on the much shorter road from Poznan to Copenhagen with some time reserved for a stop-over in Bonn.

The article continues its analysis again with material, most of which we agree with. It says that President Bush’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty remains the blockage to China and India signing up for legally binding emission reductions after 2012. All his potential successors want to do more, but that is unlikely to mean immediately ratifying Kyoto - because US emissions are wildly above the reductions promised in 1997.

Bali will be a feast of process without finality. With luck, and no filibustering, it will bind together all the potential elements of a post-2012 agreement, including a never-before-achieved plan for avoiding the destruction of the rainforests, which could be tied up with ribbon in Copenhagen.

For some, this will be like watching paint dry. For others, it will be rich with significance and drama, for what is decided in Bali almost certainly will frame the way all industries and all households have to behave decades hence, as far as their use of fossil fuels is concerned.

Will we have scenes of high tension like in Berlin in 1995 when the chairman only just managed to get his gavel down on the consensus before the Saudi delegates could get their objections in ? Will we have 72 hours of sleeping on tables while talks go over deadline as we did in Kyoto?

Will we see a bitter bust-up like the one between John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, and Dominique Voynet, the hapless green French environment minister, whose cheese-paring objections in The Hague led to Prescott walking out saying he was “gutted” and which meant the United States could not ratify Kyoto before the election that sent George Bush to the White House on the basis of a few hanging chads?

We will not know until the protagonists arrive.

One of those, and the only other head of state attending besides the Indonesian president, will be Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia, a former diplomat, who has said he will ratify the Kyoto treaty, thereby removing the United States’s last ally in refusing to do so among developed countries.

As with our own Confederation of British Industry going “green” this week, the old order is slowly changing. What the new one will look like we can only guess.

Business appears now to be ahead of politicians in trying to plan for a future that involves climate change. The CBI’s report Climate Change: Everyone’s Business this week, which included participation from blue chip companies such as BT, Barclays and Tesco, dropped the bombshell that the consultant firm McKinsey does not think the Government has a chance of complying with its 2020 targets for shifting to low carbon technologies, such as wind and nuclear, on the evidence of present progress.

The CBI task force did think, however, that we could get on track by 2030, with the help of at least a dozen new nuclear power stations. The Prince of Wales’s corporate leaders group added their voice to the growing consensus that there must be an international legal framework to guide business activity after 2012.

Cities, too, both in the United States and across the world seem to be ahead of national politicians. Local level initiatives are cutting emissions in Tokyo, which has asked its power plants to publicise their emissions and show how they will shift to renewable energy; in Seoul, where drivers are encouraged to leave their cars at home one day a week and in Copenhagen, where a third of the population cycles to work.

It is clear that the great enterprise of finding an alternative to fossil fuels is just as likely to be a bottom-up process, as a top-down one. The only thing politicians have to do is set a realistic price on carbon by placing a tough enough cap on carbon emissions. That remains the big if.