

Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who has long studied climate policy and diplomacy, told me last year that the way forward must involve much more of what legal scholars call “soft law” than old-style treaty making aimed at legally binding instruments like the fading Kyoto Protocol. Schelling was favoring the soft approach nearly 20 years ago, by the way.

The latest word from Todd Stern, the lead United States official in talks aimed at building a new climate treaty, powerfully supports Schelling’s view. At a briefing for reporters after the close of the latest meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Climate and Energy, he described how the United States is only willing to go forward on legally binding steps to limit greenhouse gases if fast-growing developing countries — aka India and China — are similarly bound.

Listen to Stern in the short clip above to get the idea. Then re-read my post on China’s “blunt ‘you first’ message on CO2” and a related piece on ChinaDialogue.net.

Watching the climate talks in Copenhagen last year was something like witnessing the derailment of a slow freight train on a curve that could be seen to be too sharp well ahead of time.

There’s sufficient merit in engaging the north and south, rich and poor, precautionary and libertarian, environmental and industrial factions in discussions every year that the talks under the original climate treaty — the Framework Convention on Climate Change — remain worthwhile.

But it may be time for some world leader (President Obama?) to cut to the chase and say, from the outset, that propelling meaningful action to constrain emissions in the middle of a global growth spurt (and a lingering financial mess) requires a fundamental reboot.

The meetings of major emitters, first conceived under President George W. Bush and built on by Obama, are a smart step, but without more concrete goals and deadlines they, too, threaten to dribble off to inconsequentiality.

In the meantime, it’s probably wise to split the climate issue into its component parts — for instance pursuing international partnerships for energy innovation and building resilience in vulnerable places to any climate hazard. Trying to hash out such initiatives in one forum is simply impossible.

Besides, the framework convention has hardly any focus on building partnerships aimed at bold research and large-scale demonstration of new energy technologies. And its language on climate adaptation creates big challenges because the treaty only applies to impacts from human-driven climate change.

Who’s going to judge which countries deserve adaptation money when many of the world’s vulnerable places already experience climate extremes as the norm, and where anticipated impacts from the greenhouse buildup are not readily distinguishable from what’s already happening?

This week, John Ashe of Antigua and Barbuda, a leading figure among diplomats from developing countries, told me that when there is real adaptation money to spend — instead of pledges of billions — there will be real fights along these lines.

One bright spot is Christiana Figueres, the new executive secretary of the framework convention. I met her this week as she ran around Manhattan between United Nations and Clinton Global Initiative events. She appears remarkably candid, clear-eyed and pragmatic. My guess is that those traits will be helpful in Cancun and beyond. Watch her in this video from the Clinton event, via Treehugger:

Also, click back to an April Dot Earth post on the idea of “shifting from climate-centric diplomacy to a slate of efforts aimed at advancing the human condition in ways that limit climate-related risks.”

The “Hartwell Paper: A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009,” is well worth exploring. The Project on International Climate Agreements at Harvard’s Belfer Center has been churning out important work, including a recent paper on the value of an agreement for sequestering carbon in forests. (Some form of REDD is not dead.)

Also read Joshua Busby’s Council on Foreign Relations report “After Copenhagen: Climate Governance and the Road Ahead.”

Finally, don’t forget to read the papers on the “super wicked” nature of climate diplomacy from 2009 and 2007, respectively:

As I’ve said before, to my mind, the complexities of limiting climate risks as humanity’s growth spurt spikes goes well “beyond super wicked.”