Obama Won't Go to Copenhagen for Climate Conference

Capturing a bit of news already rankling environmentalists, The Times Online is reporting that President Obama will not be speaking at the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December. For several months, Obama’s presence was considered possible, even likely, but after the president won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month, the White House discovered a small scheduling problem. Since the Nobel award ceremony, which Obama will attend, is on the second day of the conference, senior advisers figured Obama would just convey the U.S.’s climate and global-energy goals from his pulpit in Oslo—a city about 300 miles north that an unnamed administration official described as “plenty close” to Copenhagen.

It wouldn’t have been very hard or expensive to make a side trip to Copenhagen on the way from or back to Washington, but one additional reason Obama will skip the conference likely has to do with the present state of negotiations, which have stalled over the past several months. International negotiators, including those from countries with high emissions like Chinese and India, have failed to agree on emissions limits that would revise the Kyoto Protocol that the U.S. didn’t sign in 1997. The fact that an agreement looks unlikely close to one month before the conference presents a political risk for Obama, who received unexpected criticism after his pitch for the Olympics turned out not to be enough to bring the games to the U.S.

But the lack of progress is exactly what unnerves environmental thinkers. To them, stalled negotiations require a strong-armed rather than sideline-sitting approach. Obama’s rhetoric could light a fire under stagnant negotiations, providing urgency and visibility to the relatively unexciting topic of carbon emissions. Such expectations, however, might be too idealistic for Obama, even though he has been recognized internationally with the Nobel Prize for being able to move mountains. Obama’s broad rhetoric probably wouldn’t be able to identify and negotiate complex regulatory policy. Nor would his country’s own slow movement on climate legislation in the Senate appear as if the U.S. means business when standing up to smaller and higher-emitting countries.

Todd Stern, the administration’s special envoy on climate change who’s been globetrotting to find common ground for much of this year, will attend the conference in place of Obama. It’s possible that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could choose to attend at the last minute as well, although, as the Times reports, what seems more likely is that she (and VP Joe Biden) “only want to be associated with success.”