Carbon song needs a new tune
Posted on | March 25, 2010 | No Comments
The folk singer and famous Canadian Joni Mitchell once said that not being at the legendary Woodstock music festival of 1969 gave her ‘a unique perspective on events’. Holed up in her New York hotel room, watching television as the weather closed in, she penned her eponymous anthem to the ‘Age of Aquarius’ taking shape in upstate New York.
Trouble is, the era that followed the ‘three days of peace and music’ was far from sweetness and light and Ms Mitchell’s song now stands as something of a high water mark of idealism.
There is still some optimism to be found in the lobbies and committee rooms of MEPC 60 but it too, is fragile and failing. But from a detached perspective, say Connecticutt to London, the process must look more akin to Altamont than Woodstock.
There is some progress. Barring a wind over the Atlantic, a US/Canada Sulphur Emission Control Area will be signed off by week’s end. This is actually a pretty big deal but not strictly speaking new news.
Elsewhere, chairman Andreas Chrysostomou succeeded in getting plenary to agree to an expert group to look at market-based mechanisms to mitigate CO2 emissions and the Greenhouse Gas working group has at least been convened.
But the rest is noise. The weather having cleared enough for your correspondent to get to Albert Embankment by Wednesday, the overall mood was already one of resigned failure. Sources lined up to say that they ‘never expected anything to come out of this’, which is strange given how important it is.
An intercessional meeting is scheduled to sign off amendments to the EEDI in July but such is the level of dissent against this and other technical/operational measures that a robust framework cannot be taken for granted.
So MEPC 60 looks like making no progress on market mechanisms and little on technical/operational measures. But according to the timetable issued by the secretary-general at MEPC 59, a decision on a preferred market-based mechanism should be ready by MEPC 61, which would report its progress to the 27th Assembly and seek adoption by MEPC 62 in 2011.
Given that the committee can no longer agree on the issues which we once thought it had in common, it must be judged less than likely that any kind of deal can be done on a market-based solution for greenhouse gases.
This gifts the initiative to the UNFCCC, the European Union and anyone else who stands to gain from suggesting that shipping has failed to grasp the sense of its own destiny that MEPC 60 represents.
One bright spot amid the gloom: MEPC 60 is the first ‘paperless’ meeting of this committee, requiring attendees to turn up with memory sticks rather than box files for the customary reams of paper. It is a worthy development: after all, they are here to save the planet…
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