New climate draft would forgo treaty in 2010
By Juliet Eilperin, Anthony Faiola and Debbi Wilgoren
COPENHAGEN — With time running out to forge a comprehensive climate agreement, negotiators at the U.N.-sponsored talks are considering a new draft agreement that would not require a binding treaty by 2010 but would lay the groundwork for a more ambitious target in limiting the rise of temperatures around the globe.
The decision to remove the 2010 deadline is significant, because scientists have warned that the longer nations wait to make deep greenhouse gas emission cuts, the harder it will be to avert dangerous climate change.
Many environmentalists, as well as leaders from both Europe and the developing world, have said they are disappointed there will not be a legally binding treaty finished here in Copenhagen. To delay it until 2012, as the new drafts states, could cause a major outcry from some groups.
The proposal, a political statement labeled “the Copenhagen Accord,” also lacks the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries than the United States and others are insisting on. It calls upon the world’s nations to collectively reduce their emissions 80 percent by 2050.
At the same time, it calls for a reassessment of the accord by 2016 that would “include consideration of strengthening the long term goal to limit the increase of long term global average temperature to 1.5 degrees” Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the more ambitious climate target many vulnerable nations had been seeking as part of an agreement here.
The draft, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, emerged from a frenzy of last-minute negotiations on what is supposed to be the final day of the 12-day, 193-nation summit. Earlier Friday, President Obama warned world leaders gathered here that their collective will to address global warming “hangs in the balance” and urged both developed and developing countries to compromise in the interest of forging a meaningful pact.
After addressing the morning plenary session, Obama met for nearly an hour with Premier Wen Jiabao of China, the nation that other leaders have said poses the greatest challenge in forging a global pact. China has strongly resisted proposals for independent monitoring of each county’s claimed emissions cuts, but the United States has said such scrutiny is integral to a meaningful deal.
A White House official called the discussion between Obama and Wen “constructive” and said that the two men touched on the monitoring issue, as well as how to elicit commitments from all key countries to cut emissions and how to establish financing from richer nations to help poorer ones cope with global warming.
“They took a step forward and made progress,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters. The official said Obama and Wen then instructed their negotiating teams to continue talking after the session, “to see if an agreement can be reached.”
While one group of U.S. negotiators launched a new round of talks with China, the rest of the American team continued to participate in multilateral discussions.
Wen — who declined to attend a pre-plenary emergency meeting with Obama and other world leaders, sending an aide instead — urged delegates at the plenary session to trust his country’s pledge to reduce its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent. “We will honor our word with real action,” Wen said. “Whatever outcome this conference may produce, we will be fully committed to achieving and even exceeding the target.”
Obama said all major economies should announce decisive actions for reducing reduce emissions, adding that many — including the United States — already have. Without a stringent monitoring mechanism, he added, any agreement would be “empty words on a page.”
“We are running short on time, and at this point the question is whether we will move forward together or split apart, whether we prefer posturing to action,” Obama said. “We are ready to get this done today, but there has to be movement on all sides.”
Obama tore up his planned schedule as soon as he arrived in this Danish capital, holding the early-morning emergency meeting with world leaders in what appeared to be an uphill attempt to seal a last-minute deal. The sit-down with 17 other heads of government, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the Chinese representative delayed the opening of the plenary session.
When it began, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pleaded for world leaders to come to an agreement. “I implore you to seize this opportunity,” he said. “Now is the time for common sense, compromise and courage, political courage. . . . The world is watching.”
Obama echoed the urgency in his remarks. “Our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now,” he said. “That’s why I come here today, not to talk, but to act.”
Calling himself “frustrated,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva appeared to scold his fellow leaders for the disarray of the summit on its final day — a time when they should have been finalizing details, rather than wrestling with key issues. He also vowed that Brazil, one of the world’s leading developing nations, would agree to contribute to financing to help poor countries deal with climate change.
“We did we face all these difficulties?” Lula said. “Because we did not take the care in advance to work with the responsibility needed.”
Overnight, negotiators had cobbled together a different draft political statement on climate change that they hoped world leaders would be able to endorse. The statement outlines several general goals, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post, , but it falls short of the specificity that many leaders have said is essential for a final deal.
It provides a way for industrialized nations to commit “aggregate reductions of greenhouse gases” by 2020 and allows for this number to by judged based on both a 1990 baseline–which the European Union has insisted is the most meaningful date–and a 2005 baseline, which the United States, Japan and other developed countries have endorsed. The draft text includes all the near-term emission-cut pledges that industrial countries have made and would establish a 2050 target for reducing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions that would include all countries.
The draft also offers some provisions for independent monitoring of the emissions reductions that individual countries report, but the measures fall short of the stringent level of scrutiny that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said is critical for America’s participation in any global warming pact.
It links financial assistance for developing countries to the transparency the United States and others are demanding. It would codify the idea of mobilizing $10 billion a year in public and private financing to help poor countries cope with climate change over the next three years, with a long-term goal of getting to $100 billion annually by 2020.
Advocates for nations struggling to adapt to global warming’s impacts said leaders would have to strengthen the draft’s language in order to ensure these vulnerable countries would be protected in the years to come. “It leaves lots of questions unanswered,” said David Waskow, climate change program director for Oxfam America.
Clinton worked with roughly 40 world leaders until 2 a.m. Friday on the political text, which technical staff spent the next six hours fleshing out. But nations remained deadlocked on several key issues early in the day, and U.S. officials, activists and others said the prospect of a robust agreement seemed to be in jeopardy.
“What’s blocking things? A country like China, which has trouble accepting the idea of a monitoring body,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters, according to Reuters news service. “India has trouble accepting a target for limiting its carbon emissions . . . and then there are grotesque positions from a country like Sudan.”
The National Wildlife Federation’s Jeremy Symons said that the only way to produce a meaningful deal in Copenhagen was for world leaders, who are more focused on climate change now than they have been in decades, to take the matter into their own hands.
“The heads of state need to rise above the limitations of the negotiating process,” he said. “There are leaders from all over the world who actually understand the issue, not only because of the environment, but also because of their economic future.”
Behind the scenes, European leaders have been pressing both the United States and China to raise their near-term climate targets in an effort to secure global emission commitments that would provide at least some chance that future global temperature rise would not exceed the 3.6 degrees threshold.
The European Union has pledged to raise its 2020 emission target, which is now 20 percent below 1990 levels, to 30 percent if other nations also commit to ambitious cuts.
“Europe is completely united,” Sarkozy said, according to Reuters. “A large part of Africa agrees with us completely; the United States is very close to our position.”
The United States has said it will agree to cut its emissions “in the range of 17 percent” compared to 2005 levels, but the House-passed climate bill includes a few provisions that could boost this target considerably. The World Resources Institute has estimated that these additional elements, including funding to preserve tropical forests, would translate to total emission reductions of between 28 and 33 percent by 2020. But both Clinton and Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, said this week they would not include these measures as part of the overall climate target that the United States would aim for in a global pact.
Washington is pressuring developing countries to agree to emissions cuts along with the industrialized world for the first time and insisting on transparent monitoring of those reductions. The United States on Thursday tried to jump-start negotiations with an offer of significant new aid to help poor nations cope with the effects of global warming. High-ranking U.S. officials were assuring nations behind the scenes that after years of resistance, Washington is also serious about reducing emissions at home.
In a private meeting, Clinton told Brazilian officials that a climate change bill that was passed by the House would set aside billions to help preserve tropical rain forests in developing countries. U.S. negotiators also labored to distinguish themselves from George W. Bush’s administration, which did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, U.S. officials added, the new administration is taking steps with or without Congress to reduce carbon emissions through new fuel standards and other measures. “They are saying, ‘Trust us that we can do better,’ ” said Brazil’s climate change ambassador, Sergio Serra, who attended the meeting with Clinton on Thursday.
The new U.S. commitments came after comments by major participants in the talks, most notably China, that chances of even a modest deal were fading. The United States backed what amounts to the single biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor nations for any one cause — in a sense offering compensation for decades of warming the Earth.
Clinton pledged that the country would help mobilize $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 — an amount that is almost equal to the total value of all developmental aid and concessional loans granted to poor nations by the United States, Europe and other donors this year. She did not specify how much the U.S. government would commit to giving, but a senior administration official said it would be 20 to 30 percent. Administration officials said they envisioned most of the money coming from private sources, or from revenue generated by a cap-and-trade scheme, but other sources could include redirecting existing subsidies or a tax on bunker fuel.
‘Transparency’ is key
Clinton emphasized that any new assistance — as well as Obama’s signature on an agreement here — would depend on “transparency” and “monitoring” of emissions cuts. Clinton said the historic talks must result in an international accord that includes reduction commitments from developed and major developing countries; financial and technological assistance for poor nations; and a way to independently verify the cuts all countries make. Such language is essential to U.S. senators, who have yet to pass climate legislation and would vote on ratification of any climate treaty.
The ultimatum appeared to sway many of the small island states, which are vulnerable to sea-level rise and have been demanding a legal treaty that would aim to prevent the average global temperature from rising higher than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. In a meeting between Clinton and representatives from 30 island nations, according to a participant, delegates said they would accept a higher temperature threshold of 3.6 degrees but expected the United States to offer more money for adaptation in the short term. Clinton said that would happen.
The current emissions cuts that would be incorporated as part of any future pact have come under fire as too weak to curb dangerous global warming. An internal U.N. analysis that surfaced Thursday afternoon predicted that even under the most ambitious targets countries have pledged, future global temperature rise is likely to exceed 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Clinton specifically warned that China — which has resisted attempts for international verification of emissions cuts and told officials here before Clinton spoke that a global pact seems unlikely — must agree to monitoring if a deal is to be reached.
Though a failure of talks here could embarrass the leaders of the 193 countries attending the summit, many heads of state have suggested it would be worse to sign on to a bad agreement.
“Coming back with an empty agreement, I think, would be far worse than coming back empty-handed,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
Unlike many international summits, where most of the major details are typically worked out by lower-level diplomats before the leaders arrive, Obama landed here with big issues still in contention. He will continue to meet with other heads of state throughout the day, and the White House said his departure time has not been set because it is not clean when or how the conference will wrap up.
‘A big risk’
To a large extent, the administration’s gestures Thursday ahead of Obama’s arrival amounted to an elaborate trust-building exercise, in which officials assured their overseas counterparts that they will deliver on promises in a way the United States has not done in the past. In private meetings, Clinton bluntly told foreign leaders that her husband had negotiated and signed Kyoto, but could not persuade senators to approve it. That inaction, she said, was followed by eight years in which the Bush administration did little to push for movement on climate change.
Other delegates said that while they appreciate the White House’s willingness to embrace a long-term financial package for the developing world, they wonder why the administration waited so long to announce it.
“It could have been a lot better if it was done earlier,” said Rae Kwon Chung, South Korea’s climate change ambassador.
Senate Republicans were quick to question the move. Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.), who was on the ground in Copenhagen for three hours Thursday, said in a statement, “Given the current state of our economy, it is shocking that the Obama administration is pledging to hand over billions of dollars to developing nations for a global warming fund.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said that no matter how the money is generated, it will “come out of the pockets of American taxpayers.”
