U.S. Offer of Long-Term Aid Pushes Climate Talks Forward
By John M. Broder
With time running out, the United States sought Thursday to inject new momentum into talks here aimed at reaching a global agreement to control greenhouse gases, backing a proposal to create an international pot of money for developing countries that could be worth more than $100 billion a year by the end of the next decade.
The offer, made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was the first time that the United States had committed to support multi-year payments totaling hundreds of billions of dollars for countries that are expected to experience the earliest impacts of human-driven warming.
The European Union has already backed the creation of a similar fund; Mrs.
Clinton, while avoiding specifics on the American commitment, emphasized that the money would be “for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.”
Shortly after Mrs. Clinton made her announcement, Yvo de Boer, the United Nations climate chief, suggested that the political and diplomatic pressure to produce a meaningful agreement by the weekend was clearly having an effect as the talks entered their final hours.
“Hold tight,” Mr. de Boer said. “Mind the doors. The cable car is moving again.”
But even as the pace was picking up after more than a week of mostly posturing, negotiators were still bogged down in talks Thursday evening.
Agreement between the United States and China over how to monitor pledges to limit emissions was still elusive, and E.U. negotiators were pressing both the Americans and Chinese to sweeten their bids.
The Chinese vice foreign minister, He Yafei, insisted on no foreign intrusion into his country’s affairs. But, in what analysts said was an important concession, Mr. He said that China would consider “international exchanges” on a voluntary basis to share information about its emissions.
The two-week conference is scheduled to come to a close Friday, although it is widely expected to spill over into the early morning hours of Saturday and perhaps even longer.
Nicholas Stern, the author of an influential British report on the costs of climate change and a professor at the London School of Economics, said there were plenty of ways the talks could still break down.
“We’ve got a good chance, but we could also mess it up,” Mr. Stern said.
“It’s a huge responsibility in these last 24 hours for the political leaders of the world to take us where we know we can go.”
Stoking uncertainty over the outcome of the talks were rumors that swirled through the conference center Thursday that President Barack Obama would not arrive Friday morning as planned because of the danger the talks would fall apart. But Mrs. Clinton sought to quash that speculation by stating that the president was still planning to come Friday.
“Obviously we hope that there will be something to come for,” she said.
Late in the day, environmentalists alerted reporters to the existence of a six-page document, dated Dec. 15, that appeared to be a detailed compilation by the U.N. office managing the talks of all the major countries’ pledges and plans for curbing their emissions, along with a calculation suggesting that they would not hold the global temperature rise under the goal of 2 degrees Celsius goal that world leaders have set.
Without stronger action both before and after 2020, “global emissions will remain on an unsustainable pathway,” the document read, “with the related temperature raise around 3 degrees C.”
People involved in the climate talks confirmed the authenticity of the document. The conclusion that current plans would lead to substantial warming is largely based on recent analysis by Mr. Stern and other researchers.
But environmental campaigners said they were outraged that the document so clearly showed that countries involved in the negotiations are aware of the gap.
“This is truly a smoking gun, and the smoke is from a heating planet,”
said Bill McKibben, an environmental writer.
But with U.N. officials struggling to reach any sort of agreement, the focus was much more on trying to settle the many outstanding issues that continue to divide the participants. While clearly more upbeat Thursday than he was just a few hours earlier, Mr. de Boer still sounded a cautious note, saying that it was important to wait and see whether other nations saw the $100 billion sum as “adequate.” In particular, he called on the Americans to put their own contribution to the global fund on the table.
Another note of caution came from Mrs. Clinton, who underlined the need for “full transparency” on the part of major developing countries to ensure that large emitters like China would keep their pledges in the years and decades ahead.
But in a significant concession to American sensitivity on the question of monitoring emissions cuts, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia said that all countries would benefit from a trustworthy system of measurement and verification.
“Unless we get the numbers right, we will argue in circles and it will be difficult for us to have an effective plan to deal with global carbon emissions,” he said.
Detailed talks were still continuing Thursday afternoon among at least 16 sub-groups on a range of issues, including finance for developing countries and mechanisms to preserve forests — even on whether to keep the Kyoto Protocol or commit to rolling that treaty into a new agreement that would be endorsed here before being finalized at a further conference next year.
Mrs. Clinton’s announcement from the United States seemed to shift the pessimistic tone that enveloped the conference after China signaled overnight that it saw virtually no possibility that the nearly 200 nations gathered would reach agreement by Friday.
Mr. Obama and other world leaders have already said that the Copenhagen meetings are unlikely to produce a binding treaty; some sort of interim political agreement is far more likely, they said.
While China, by far the largest economic power among the group of poorer countries engaged in the talks, has dragged its feet throughout the week, requests from U.S. negotiators have also significantly stalled progress as Washington has sought to avoid the emergence of a global agreement with a structure that is similar to the Kyoto Protocol.
The $100 billion figure proposed by Mrs. Clinton is similar to estimates by the European Union of the needed contributions, although the amount is below the $150 billion or so that experts at the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive body, have pushed for.
Mrs. Clinton said the money would be a mix of public and private funds, including “alternative sources of finance.” Nor did she say what the American share of the fund would be, although typically in such multilateral financial efforts the United States contributes about 20 percent.
She said the money should contain a sizable amount to slow deforestation, which contributes to concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The British government released a statement shortly after Mrs. Clinton’s announcement commending the new U.S. stance, and some analysts said the pledge could prompt further commitments from wealthy states.
But reaction from the European Commission and Sweden, which holds the rotating E.U. presidency, was comparatively muted and suggested that the offer may have fallen short of creating the scope for a breakthrough.
Aid groups underlined that Mrs. Clinton’s offer failed to provided specifics on how much the United States would contribute to this fund, as well as whether the money would be sustainable over the long term.
“Rich countries must also be clear that any money they are proposing comes from public funds and is additional to existing aid budgets,” said Robert Bailey, a senior climate advisor with the anti-poverty group Oxfam.
“Raiding tomorrow’s schools and hospitals to pay for flood defenses and drought-resistant seeds makes no sense,” Mr. Bailey said.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the European Union sought to coax greater concessions from China and the United States by holding out the prospect of making deeper emissions cuts.
The bloc has already committed to reducing emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and says it will go further, cutting by up to 30 percent over the same period, if the rest of the industrialized world makes more concessions.
The E.U. has also been pressing China to increase its target for holding down energy usage, from its current promise that it will reduce the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of economic output by 45 percent to a goal of 50 percent or more.
The bloc has also been pressing the United States to improve its offer, in part by agreeing to new methods of counting emissions from clearing land and forests.
