The Bali meeting, and the lessons learned.

There may be a possible positive path for our climate future if we heed the warnings and get to work. But the biggest lesson I see from Bali is that if you stand up to the Bush Bullies they back down. The congressional democrats should take note.
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Where Do We Go From Here?
By Tom Athanasiou
Grist.org

Monday 17 December 2007

The Bali meeting, and the lessons learned.
It's important, this time, to draw conclusions, and to do so publicly. Because Bali has taken us - barely and painfully - over a line and into a new and even more difficult level in the climate game we'll be playing for the rest of our lives. In fact, it's not too much to say that, with the realizations of the last year and their culmination at the 13th Conference of Parties, the game has, finally, belatedly, begun in earnest.

First up, we knew going into Bali that if the old routine continued without variation, we'd really be in trouble. The timing of this meeting alone made this clear. Here we were, after the skeptics, after the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, after Gore's (and the IPCC's) Nobel Prize. We know now how grave the situation is. So it's with great relief that I'm able to say that, judging at least by Bali, the game has indeed changed - except, of course, for the United States.

The most important change was that the G77, the South's negotiating bloc, did not put its unity above all else. This unity was always easy to understand, for the South is weak and the G77's members know all too well that when they don't hang together they hang separately. But it's been clear for years now that the G77's unity can itself be a terrible problem, one that allowed its most retrograde members (the Saudis come to mind) to override the interests of weaker parties (like, for example, the Alliance of Small Island States). So Bali, the COP where China, South Africa, and Brazil stepped forward to announce their willingness to take on binding "commitments or actions," was a real breakthrough, not least because the attached condition - "measurable, reportable and verifiable" assistance from the industrialized to the developing countries - was so widely understood as being both just and inevitable.

Not that we didn't already know that, without southern support for rapid action, there won't be any. But the G77's "flexibility" gave us a different kind of knowledge, concrete knowledge of a deal made and a way forward. While it didn't change everything, it changed a great deal.

Second, there's the matter of money. Money for adaptation. Money for technology transfer. Money for capacity building, and money, most of all, for development, which must go on, albeit in new ways, even in this climate constrained and otherwise strained world. We knew about the money, too, of course. How could we not? But not like we know it today, when the need for rapid global emissions cuts of at least 50 percent has, as Bali made absolutely clear, become the consensus position.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/121807EA.shtml