When world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Monday for negotiations on a new agreement to combat the threat of catastrophic climate change, their success or failure will ride on economics, not environmental science.

Theoretically, the two-week conference will focus on limiting the heat-trapping gas emissions blamed for global warming. But its major debates will all center on money, including questions of how emissions limits would affect major industries and the jobs they provide ? and how a new climate treaty could reshape the global economic playing field.

Those issues sharply divide some of the most important players at the conference.

For China and nearly all of Europe, the issue offers tempting opportunities to expand industries and create jobs by developing and selling new technologies for wind, solar, nuclear and other low-emission energy ? especially if there is a strong agreement to move away from the carbon-based energy sources that have powered the developed world for more than a century.

Many of those nations, particularly the Chinese, devoted huge chunks of their recent economic stimulus measures to low-emission energy technology. “You’re seeing a shift in developing countries,” said Ned Helme, a climate policy veteran who is president of the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington. “Rather than looking out and saying, ‘how do we protect our old cement kilns,’ they’re looking forward to clean energy as their new market.”

Meanwhile, the most immediate concern of nations such as the United States, Canada and India is the potential economic and political cost of imposing tighter limits on greenhouse gas emissions limits ? particularly for domestic coal, oil and manufacturing industries.

For example, the Obama administration’s push to combat climate change and create “clean energy” jobs ? which included more than $80 billion in stimulus dollars for energy technology ? has been slowed by resistance in Congress from representatives of parts of the country that produce coal and oil or depend on those energy sources for power and manufacturing.

Tension between the possibilities and pitfalls of a low-carbon energy future runs through every major negotiating topic, including how deeply individual nations will cut their emissions and how much richer countries are willing to spend to help poorer countries adopt cleaner energy sources and adapt to a warming world.

“One of the reasons that this negotiation is difficult is it really does involved issues of competitive and comparative advantage between countries,” said Nick Main, the global managing partner for climate change and sustainability at the analyst firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

“I don’t think there will be any science debate of any substance,” he added. “This is really an economic debate of, how do you pay the costs?”

In the dozen years since the first climate treaty was signed in Kyoto, partisans on both sides have fought pitched battles over the science of global warming ? how serious the threat is, how rapidly conditions are changing and what role carbon emissions play in the problem.

Their war of words intensified in recent weeks following the release of thousands of e-mails between leading climate scientists that skeptics say undercut the evidence of man-made climate change.

But over the same time period, the leaders of the world’s largest and fastest-growing nations have reached a broad consensus on the fundamentals:

With rare exceptions, the negotiators in Copenhagen agree that the earth is warming; that humans are largely to blame; and that current trends in greenhouse gas emissions will likely result in flooding, drought and death in many parts of the world.

While some of the debate at the conference will focus on how much emissions must be reduced in order to lower the probability of catastrophic warming, the big disagreements center on what to do about the cost of change.

Poorer countries want the developed world to help finance their energy transition. That could mean tens ? or by some proposals, hundreds ? of billions of dollars a year in direct aid and technology transfer from nations such as Japan and the United States to less developed nations.

By some reckonings, that could result in U.S. dollars flowing to China ? a politically unpalatable prospect.

How much money Obama is willing to pledge for developing countries will be one key to the negotiations, said Abe Haspel, a lead climate negotiator during the Clinton administration who is now president of the Cogent Analysis Group.

“And can he sell the notion that a lot of that money is going to China or to India?” Haspel asked.

Another issues is whether the various emissions reduction targets that individual nations are proposing would some an unfair edge. Europe is already on its way to steep cutbacks. The Obama administration has pledged much more modest reductions for the United States.

China and India say they will emit less as a share of their economies, but because both countries are growing so fast, their emissions could still rise overall. A group of Senate Democrats considered swing votes on a climate bill ? most of them from manufacturing states ? warned Obama in a letter this week that “reciprocal commitments are essential” to any international agreement.

Environmentalists insist that the potential for clean-energy jobs will change the dynamics of the coming negotiations.

“This is the first time that a president will negotiate a deal in an atmosphere of economic cooperation, instead of economic fear,” Jeremy Symons, a senior vice president at the National Wildlife Federation, said this week.

jtankersley@latimes.com
Jim Tankersley Washington Bureau