President Barack Obama’s pledge that the U.S. will lead the way in forging a global climate-change agreement may be stymied by discord five months before the deadline for the new accord.
Obama arrived in L’Aquila, Italy, today for a Group of Eight nations summit and a meeting he will lead tomorrow of the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters, marking his first major appearance in international climate-policy negotiations.
Talks hit an impasse as China and India said industrialized countries must be willing to cut emissions 40 percent by 2020 if they expect emerging economies to agree to long-term reduction goals, an official familiar with the talks said. The objections led the larger group of nations to drop a vow to slash gases 50 percent by 2050, with developed countries reducing by 80 percent, said an official who attended their meetings.
The last-minute changes have provoked speculation that a G- 8 statement on climate change will now be altered as countries such as Russia, Japan and Canada may want to strip out language about industrialized nations cutting emissions 80 percent, said Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based advocacy group.
“It’s an open question now,” Meyer said in an interview today.
Positions Don’t Match
Chinese media officer Jiang Xiaoyan in Rome declined to comment.
U.S. and European officials have said that while developing nations such as China are doing a lot domestically, they must do more as part of a worldwide pact.
“The major developing countries are going to need to move into a place where they are prepared to do a fair amount,” said Todd Stern, the U.S.’s special envoy on climate change, in an interview last week. “That’s a big challenge.”
The European Union, the largest bloc of industrialized countries in negotiations, has asked for a 30 percent drop in the three decades through 2020. Legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would trim discharges 17 percent in 2020 from 2005 levels, or about 5 percent compared with 1990.
Obama, in one of his first public policy statements after being elected president last year, vowed to open a “new chapter” for the U.S. on climate change by leading global cooperation on the issue in a way that would also help pull his country out of its economic crisis.
Kyoto Lesson
His comments were welcomed by officials from the United Nations, European Union and elsewhere who were frustrated by former President George W. Bush’s position on the issue. He opposed any global climate accord imposing mandatory caps on emissions of gases blamed for global warming that wouldn’t demand the same from emerging economies such as China and India.
U.S. lawmakers also opposed a treaty on these grounds. In 2001, Bush walked away from the international Kyoto Protocol, saying a limit on carbon emissions would hurt the economy and cost jobs.
Yesterday Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said that China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse-gas pollution, is hindering negotiations.
“There are some problems,” Berlusconi said at a news conference in Rome. “There is very strong resistance from the Chinese president.”
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh countered yesterday that developed countries must bear “historic responsibility” for climate change.
‘High-Consumption Lifestyles’
“What we are witnessing today is the consequence of over two centuries of industrial activity and high consumption lifestyles in the developed world,” Singh said in a statement before leaving for the G-8 summit.
Obama has said mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, domestically and internationally, are a crucial part of moving to a low-carbon energy economy, reducing U.S. reliance on foreign oil and saving the planet from dangerous climate change.
“Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change,” then President-elect Obama said on Nov. 18.
For all the talk of new cooperation, wrangling between the different countries over how much each one should do to help tackle climate change may be as strong as ever.
Critical Moment, Year
“This is a critical moment in a critical year,” said Elliot Diringer, who oversees international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia, in an interview. “There won’t be a new accord without broader agreement and stronger leadership from the U.S. and other major economies.”
The climate meeting tomorrow is intended to help bolster the United Nations negotiating process by laying the groundwork for success at UN-led climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.
Almost 200 countries are scheduled to gather in the capital of Denmark to debate terms for a new treaty to combat rising temperatures and sea levels.
The president comes to the climate meetings fresh off a victory in the Democratic-controlled Congress, where the House of Representatives approved the bill last month that would seek to control greenhouse-gas pollution by creating a market-based trading system for emissions.
Questions remain about whether the legislation, and a subsequent climate treaty, could win approval in the Senate. As a result, the White House may be limited in what it is willing to agree to in the climate talks, said analysts such as Rob Bradley, director of the Washington-based World Resources Institute’s International Climate Policy Initiative.
“The big lesson that all the State Department folks have drawn out of the Kyoto process is do not go ahead of Congress,” Bradley said in an interview.
Stern said his goal from the start has been not to “bring back a dead-on-arrival treaty” from Copenhagen.
