On this day 35 years ago, the “international negotiating committee” (INC) meeting in Nairobi finished. The progress towards the text of a sign-able international treaty on climate change remained painfully slow.
Below are some clippings from a Foreign and Commonwealth Office telegram from someone who was there. (FCO 33/6909)
Summary
- A Workmanlike session which has carried discussions some way forward. Some hope of achieving an agreed negotiating text at the next session. But no movement on most difficult issues and little expectation of any until much closer to the Rio Conference.
The United States delegation has continued to play a positive role on minor matters while remaining entirely inflexible on the key issues. In private, however, they are aware that the time when they can simply stonewall on finance and emissions is coming to an end, and that work will shortly have to begin in Washington on more constructive positions to which they can move. [This is wishcasting by the author]. Soviet delegation uncertainties about the position at home (and indeed their future jobs) have prevented their generally benevolent approach to the negotiation from being trated into an ability to agree to anything. The G77 remain massively split with saudi Arabia marginalised on the negative wing, the small islands stridently, but lilliputianly, positive, India pulled forward by a wish to exercise influence, and backwards by a visceral mistrust of the west, most of the latins quietly constructive, Mexico mischievous and China showing signs of awareness that its present remote stance may require some reexamination. (It was the shared judgment of a number of western delegations that the Chinese position is now a key obstacle which has somehow to be tackled.)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 355ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that there had been warnings about carbon dioxide build-up – serious warnings – from the mid-1960s. Occasionally the US had mouthed some of the right pieties, but this was a fantastically complicated problem (a wicked problem) and nothing substantive got done, repeatedly.
The specific context was that in 1989 the US had been forced to move from “no treaty, piss off you commie greenie assholes” to pretending to play along. The hard deadline for a treaty was early 1992, ahead of the “Earth Summit” in Rio in June 1992.
What I think we can learn from this is that previously classified diplomatic cables are fun to read.
What happened next The US did not, in fact, shift on the question of emissions targets and timetables, and everyone else blinked first. The UNFCCC text was a very long suicide note for a slow self-immolation. And here we are.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
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Also on this day:
September 20, 1848 – the AAAS is born…
September 20, 1893 – first American-made gasoline-powered car hits theroad.
September 20, 1982 – “Carbon Dioxide, Science and Consensus” event