Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu on Warming
Editorial
Of more than 100 world leaders who gathered Tuesday at the United Nations for a summit meeting on climate change, two mattered most: Barack Obama and China’s president, Hu Jintao. Together their countries produce 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Together they can lead the way to an effective global response to this clear global threat. Or together they can mess things up royally.
In less than three months, negotiations will begin in Copenhagen for a new agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The hope is these talks will produce commitments from each nation that, collectively, would keep temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. That will require deep cuts in emissions — as much as 80 percent among industrialized nations — by midcentury.
And there’s not a lot of time to waste. As Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned on Tuesday: “Science leaves us no space for inaction.”
While Europe and the United States disagree over how quickly developed countries should move, their differences pale in comparison to the historical divide between developed and developing nations, which have argued that the industrialized West should bear most of the burden. For its part, the West has argued that countries like China and India are growing so fast that they can no longer remain on the sidelines, as they did in Kyoto.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu did not bridge that gap, but their governments are listening more carefully to one another. China is no longer pretending that it is a backward country whose need for economic growth relieves it of any obligation to control emissions. The United States — the world’s largest emitter in historical terms — is acknowledging its responsibility to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations reduce emissions without sacrificing growth.
Still, the two leaders have a considerable distance to go.
For Mr. Hu, this means becoming much more specific about his encouraging pledges. On Tuesday, he promised to reduce the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2020 by a “notable margin” — at which point, he implied, China would seek to reduce them in absolute terms. This vague formulation is unlikely to pass muster in Copenhagen. An agreement does not have to be one-size-fits-all, but every country should be obliged to make real and verifiable commitments.
Mr. Obama recognizes the urgency of the problem. He will have to work hard to persuade a Democratic-controlled Senate (the House has acted) to see it as well and to pass strong legislation committing the United States to binding cuts in greenhouse gases.
