Seeking the Strategy Behind Kerry’s Climate Speech in Indonesia

koUpdates below | I’m hoping that someone can identify some smart strategic angle behind Secretary of State John Kerry’s climate speech in Jakarta on Sunday pressing Indonesia, in essence, to forsake its ample reserves of fossil fuels in its push to develop its economy. I can’t.

You might say the aim was to push the tropical country to curb deforestation, but that issue was barely mentioned. The speech focused mainly on coal and oil. There was an unsubtle dig at the World Bank’s stance on coal there: “[G]overnments and international financial institutions need to stop providing incentives for the use of energy sources like coal and oil.”

But the long speech was mainly focused on Indonesia itself and had a chiding tone that I can’t see doing anything to further Kerry’s goal of leading efforts to craft a new international climate agreement by late 2015.

Here’s a slightly expanded version of a Tumblr item I posted when I caught up with the speech earlier tonight: 

Diplomacy? Secretary Kerry pushes Indonesia to decarbonize as energy use in the United States emits 17.2 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, Indonesia, 1.8.

Quote: “It’s not enough for one country or even a few countries to reduce their emissions when other countries continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon pollution as they see fit.”  

I have no idea how this could be seen as remotely compatible with developing countries’ longstanding interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” of rich and poor countries under the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Try to reconcile this line…

It’s absolutely true that industrialized countries – yes, industrialized countries that produce most of the emissions – have a huge responsibility to be able to reduce emissions, but I’m telling you that doesn’t mean that other nations have a free pass. They don’t have a right to go out and repeat the mistakes of the past.

…with this one:

The fact is that I recognize the responsibility that we have to erase the bad habits that we have, which we adopted, frankly, before we understood the consequences. Nobody set out to make this happen. This is the consequence of the industrial revolution and the transformation of the world, and many of the advances that we made that have changed the world for the better came from these steps.

Okay for us, not for you.

Update, Feb. 18, 6:23 a.m. |  Kelly Sims Gallagher, the director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, sent this thought overnight:

Having just read the speech, I see your point as the tone is long on lecture without much appreciation for the unique circumstances of Indonesia, which is so totally different from the United States in terms of its emissions profile and the structure of its economy.  What I think I detect in the speech, however, is a growing enthusiasm on the part of Secretary Kerry to build a coalition of the willing for an agreement in Paris, if not before.  I was beginning to worry that Secretary Kerry would not personally engage in this issue in time to make a difference given his self-evident deep commitment to the Middle East peace process and focus on Syria.

Maybe I’m looking too hard for good news here, but it also seems from this speech and other news reports that his meetings went well in China.  If that is the case, then he might have traveled to Indonesia even more enthusiastic and buoyant about the potential prospects for cooperation in Indonesia, another major developing country, than was warranted.   It would be a stretch to equate China and Indonesia.  In my judgment, the Chinese government has been inexorably marching towards serious domestic climate change policies ever since its 11th Five Year Plan.  The rampant air pollution is now reinforcing and amping up the political will to tackle pollution of all kinds. China may indeed be ready to have a serious negotiation with the United States.  While I’m much less expert on Indonesia, I doubt very much that its government is as far advanced as China’s is in its thinking about how to tackle the challenge of climate change.

I’m less bugged by the [speech]. I don’t know the inside story on the speech and haven’t checked, and thus my comments are based on logic and some speculation. But for too long basic logic has been scarce in climate diplomacy, and the good news in this speech is that it reflects a new, smarter logic. Since the early 1990s we have made basically no progress in cutting global emissions—in part, as Kerry says, because the conversation about climate change policy strategy hasn’t really changed.

Half of the speech is about climate science and impacts—especially impacts. That’s important because it is fear of impacts that will drive serious policy. And the most vulnerable countries—notably the less developed nations like Indonesia with huge coastlines and fragile ecosystems—should be in the driving seat.

For my taste, the stuff about the climate denialists is overboard—the whole climate science and policy community is spending too much time thinking about the denialists and imagining that if we could just muzzle or convince these outliers that policy would be different. That’s not right—in part because the denialists aren’t such a hearty band and in part because the real barriers to policy are cost and strategy…. But that complaint about the speech is a quibble.

The strength of the speech, in my view, is that it tries to set aside the question of historical responsibilty and focus, instead, on the common need going forward for all nations (notably the big emitters) to cooperate. I doubt that effort will be full successful because many developing countries make hay about historical responsibility and use it as a cover for demands of compensation and for inaction. But at least the US is making an articulate, serious and strategic effort to move the debate into a new and more productive space. And at least Kerry is doing what few others have tried seriously, which is the spadework with the big emitters to create a coalition of the willing. (I call them “clubs” in my 2012 book Global Warming Gridlock in part because that aligns with some important academic work on how small groups of players can successfully cooperate on complicated problems. Also, “coalition of the willing” got used for other purposes a while back and it didn’t end well.)

I can appreciate what appears to be your concern, Andy, which is that the tone is a bit strident and it is shockingly thin on what Indonesia should do. There’s more in the talk about China than Indonesia, but I take that as evidence that the main audience for this speech isn’t Indonesia. It’s other governments, especially the emerging economies such as India, whose participation is key and who so far have been really skittish about engaging in climate diplomacy. Indonesia is actually, in my view, a positive story—notably because of the big funds mobilized by Norway, Britain, the US and a few others to help Indonesia manage deforestation. In parallel, private initiatives aimed at the palm oil industry also seem to be helping. But if you want to get serious about Indonesia you need to talk about corruption and about the fact that Jakarta basically doesn’t govern much of the country—including huge swaths where deforestation and other perverse land use practices are rampant. It’s pretty hard to have that serious conversation in public while standing in the country’s capital. Thus the speech is oddly silent about how Indonesia really can get its act together and play the most helpful role in climate diplomacy. And in today’s strapped budget environment I doubt the US has anything new to offer Indonesia to ramp up its anti-deforesatation efforts. Thus we must rely on others—watch Norway among others who have been very strategic in this space—to do the heavy lifting. And thus we must rely on Indonesia coming to the view that it is in its own self interest to slow global warming—hence all the talk about climate impacts at the top of the speech.

My big concern about the speech is that it over-sells renewables and under-sells how difficult and expensive it will be to make really deep cuts in emissions. Even with serious, sustained efforts and smart strategies—all basically absent for the last two decades—this will be really hard, slow and probably expensive until radical new technologies come into place. Kerry’s point that the “technology is out there” isn’t correct. And I suspect that he and his team know that, but it makes for better copy and a more optimistic spin to pretend that the solution is in our grasp. Can’t fault optimism if it is backed by a serious diplomatic effort to engage countries, and so far I think we are seeing that diplomacy unfold.