Climate delegates call on US for robust policy
By Arthur Max
BARCELONA, Spain — The United States came under increased pressure Monday to come up with a plan for fighting climate change and to offer an internationally acceptable policy for curbing pollution hastening global warming.
As U.N. climate talks reconvened, countries stepped up calls on Washington for specific commitments on reducing carbon emissions and contributing to a global climate fund to help poor countries deal with the damage already being caused by climate change.
The five-day negotiating round in Barcelona is meant to prepare the text of a global warming pact to be adopted at a major U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen.
The deal would replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but require both industrial countries and developing countries to rein in emissions of carbon and other heat-raising greenhouse gases. Kyoto applied only to industrialized nations, and was rejected by the United States.
Delegates to the Barcelona talks were showing frustration that after two years of talks, the U.S. has been unable to make firm commitments because it is waiting for Congress to enact legislation.
“We expect the United States to be able to deliver on one of the major challenges of our century,” said Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard, who will chair the meeting in the Danish capital.
Hedegaard noted that President Barack Obama, cited for raising hopes of a more peaceful and climate friendly world, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in nearby Norway on Dec. 10 – just as the decisive climate conference is under way.
“It’s very hard to imagine how the American president can receive the Nobel Prize … and at the same time has sent an empty-handed delegation to Copenhagen,” said the Danish minister.
U.S. chief delegate Jonathan Pershing said the U.S. intended to be part of a deal, but would ensure that any deal it signed would be accepted by Congress. “We don’t want to be outside an agreement,” he said.
He said the U.S. would avoid the mistake of 1997 when its delegation signed onto the Kyoto Protocol, but found unanimous opposition in Congress and was not submitted for ratification.
In an indirect slap at Washington, Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate secretariat, said countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea were moving faster on climate change than the wealthy industrial countries.
“China is probably the world leader in limiting greenhouse gas emissions,” de Boer said.
Scientists say poor countries will be hardest hit by climate change. They say coastal areas will be threatened by rising sea levels, countries will be hit by more severe storms as well as more frequent drought, and tropical diseases and warm weather pests will spread.
Earlier, de Boer warned that the Copenhagen agreement must have legal force because developing countries do not trust promises from the wealthy nations.
The legal status of the agreement and whether nations will face consequences for failing to meet their commitments are contentious issues in the talks.
“We live in a world of broken promises,” de Boer told The Associated Press. Developing countries are concerned the rich countries “will commit to targets and not deliver.”
Pershing, in a separate AP interview, said compliance with the agreement in Copenhagen should rest with the domestic laws of each country, which can be very strong.
Countries should register the actions they intend to take to lower the growth rate of carbon emissions, which would then face international inspection. But they would not face punishment for failing to meet their promises, he said.
“I don’t think people here are talking about sanctions at all. That’s not the discussion,” he said.
But many countries want tough compliance measures to be part of any agreement.
The question of financing for poor countries also was on the delegates’ agenda. Thirty of the draft agreement’s 180 pages deal with financing.
The European Union on Friday called for euro5 billion to euro7 billion ($7.5 billion to $10.3 billion) in climate change aid to poorer nations over the next three years, scaling up to euro100 billion, or nearly $150 billion a year, by 2020.
De Boer called the EU proposal a good step, but said it lacked specifics. The EU also failed to specify how much it would contribute to the fund.
“I don’t think the EU put enough on the table,” he said.
In Stockholm, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said EU leaders wanted Obama to clarify the U.S. position on climate change this week as they meet in Washington.
Reinfeldt – whose country holds the rotating EU presidency – will be traveling to Washington along with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Click Here to Read More >>
