WikiLeaks Cables: EU President Predicts Cancun Failure

While the world has been transfixed for a week by the release of thousands of secret diplomatic cables by whistle blower website WikiLeaks, official transcripts are now emerging that inform us how EU leaders privately think about climate negotiations, confirming allegations of hypocrisy we made in previous articles.

According to the Guardian, EU President Herman van Rompuy was quoted as saying that negotiations in Copenhagen had been "an incredible disaster", and talks in Cancun would be little different.

The cables are not so much notable for their insights, as for the fact that this is the first time our suspicions are confirmed in public. The fact that it took the largest leak of official documents in world history to bring out the truth makes it all the more embarrassing for the EU.

As the Guardian writes:

[President van Rompuy's] first [EU summit] in February amounted to a Copenhagen postmortem of why the EU, proudly branding itself the world pioneer in combating climate change, had been snubbed by the US and China at the talks in Denmark, delivering a blow to prestige from which the EU has yet to recover. ... Van Rompuy complained bitterly that the Europeans had been "totally excluded" and "mistreated" in Copenhagen and said he was only lucky that he had decided to stay away.

Yet while the documents are deeply embarrassing for the EU and President van Rompuy in particular, one positive indication of the leaked transcripts is that -- at least privately -- the realization may be dawning on European leaders that the Kyoto framework is structurally flawed to begin with:

In public the EU is talking up the case for reviving climate change agreement hopes in Cancun, but last December Van Rompuy was dismissive and pessimistic, both about the Cancun negotiations and about the very format for the talks. "Van Rompuy said he has 'given up on Mexico'," the American reported, while his chief of staff, Van Daele, likened the Cancun talks to the repeat of a bad film and said: 'Who wants to see that horror movie again?'

Van Rompuy strongly criticised the unwieldy format of the talks, with too many players involved. He urged a concentration on the US, the EU and China, focusing his efforts towards a European-American breakthrough at their summit planned for last May, which in the end did not take place.

"Multilateral meetings will not work," Van Rompuy is quoted as saying. The diplomat went on: "Rather than waiting for a failure at Mexico City he intends to address Copenhagen issues with the United States at Madrid; he envisioned engaging China thereafter. In his mind talks with the US would have to focus on Madrid and not Mexico City."

Read the full article here.