The Road to Copenhagen Goes Through Middle America

The United Nations climate process is an obsession with a subset of the environmental community, the only route by which global warming can be tackled on the scale it requires. It can be vague and confoundingly policy heavy, with jargon and acronym-laden language impenetrable to outsiders.

That process is now coming to a defining moment. With the Obama administration moving rapidly to turn the old Bush climate policy on its head, it would appear that the stars are aligning for a global climate treaty to be crafted with the United States on board, an accomplishment that escaped the Kyoto Protocol.

However, the road to Copenhagen goes through the American Midwest, and it appears to get rocky.

Senators from Midwestern manufacturing and coal-using states have pushed back on the idea of an international climate treaty. As dirty industry leans on senators whose states are facing rising unemployment and shuttered factories, the debate of climate vs. economy is still alive and well, despite the appointment of Van Jones as a White House adviser on green jobs and reports like McKinsey's outlining how stabilizing emissions has a close to net zero cost.

The only way for the Obama administration to pull together the votes to bring the United States on board for Copenhagen may be by tying it to a successful push for clean energy in the Midwest, and that hinges largely on the work of young people, labor groups, and innovative clean energy projects in the region.

Washington: Midwest's Mind is Made Up

The Kyoto Protocol was never brought to the U.S. Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to pass a treaty. A resolution aimed at attacking the treaty had passed 95-0, and the only senator that Vice President Al Gore thought he could bring on for sure was the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.).

Now, it appears, as environmental and industry lobbyists head to the Hill to clash over a climate treaty, there is a growing strand of Washington thought that promotes delaying domestic legislation until after the Copenhagen conference.

The Guardian recently published an article titled, “Barack Obama May Delay Signing up to Copenhagen Climate Change Deal” highlighting the role of “as many as 15 Democratic senators who represent 'rust belt' states dependent on coal mining, steel production and heavy manufacturing, all big emitters of carbon.”

I sat through a talk at the Brookings Institution, a heavyweight beltway think tank, where Carlos Pascual said: “We can’t let the calendar defeat us.” He urged a longer-term outlook, due to the same roadblock role of Democratic senators from the rust belt and the Midwest. It was a textbook portrayal of Washington ‘conventional wisdom’ being established on an issue. The concept that the political calculus may shift in the Midwest was never even considered, let alone the role of the emergence of a broad-based citizen’s movement on global warming.

Two days before, I was in the middle of the largest lobby day on climate in history, as the participants of Power Shift 2009 – including student leaders from each of the states those senators represent – came to visit their representatives, capping off an extraordinary conference where participants included a seemingly endless array of administration officials.

Yet, in Washington, the global climate treaty is seen as a matter for experts, lobbyists, and academics, not citizen activists.

Many large US-based environmental organizations have siloed their staffs, with an international climate team staying focused on the UN Process, while field teams focus on domestic legislation. Almost all of them rely on a skeleton crew at the Climate Action Network, where a few staff members in a small walk-up office juggle the process both of developing a coherent policy position for environmental organizations at the UN level, as well as coordinating joint communications, southern capacity building, and logistics.