The Lima Climate Change Conference closed with a deal this week – just barely. The difficulty of those negotiations, which ended up lasting two days longer than originally scheduled, proves that there are stark limits to the progress shown by the joint U.S.-China announcement on climate change. It took a great deal of political will to get that bilateral agreement finalized; it will take even more to negotiate a global climate change agreement ahead of the 2015 conference in Paris.
At heart, the Lima talks ground to a halt because of long-standing disagreements over how to allocate the burden of mitigating climate change. Developing countries, including China, continue to insist that the developed world should bear the lion’s share of the responsibility – and, more importantly, the cost – for preventing catastrophic global warming. China’s willingness to commit to an emissions cap by 2030 in its joint announcement with the U.S. does not indicate that Beijing will accept a responsibility on par with those taken up by the developed countries. On the contrary, Chinese officials continue to emphasize “common but differentiated responsibilities” as the guiding principle for a climate change deal.
As has become traditional since the 2009 conference in Copenhagen, the U.S. served as a de facto leader for the developed world, while China took up a similar role for the developing countries. Thus, a month after their ground-breaking joint announcement on climate change, Washington and Beijing found themselves at loggerheads at Lima.
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