Nations Appear Headed Toward Independent Climate Goals
by Juliet Eilperin and Colum Lynch
Several world leaders on Tuesday gave the most decisive indication in months that they will work to revive floundering negotiations aimed at securing a new international climate pact. But the vision that President Obama and others outlined at the United Nations climate summit — in which countries offered a series of individual commitments — suggests that a potential deal may look much different from what its backers originally envisioned.
Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in which nations would agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the auspices of a legal international treaty. But recent announcements by China, Japan and other nations point to a different outcome of U.N. climate talks that will be held in December in Copenhagen: a political deal that would establish global federalism on climate policy, with each nation pledging to take steps domestically.
“Many of the jigsaw pieces of an agreement lie across the board, but we have to put them together,” said British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Miliband, adding that negotiators are looking for a solution in which “every country is satisfied that every country is taking action” on climate change.
The world’s biggest carbon emitters took pains Tuesday to highlight what they have already done to curb their footprint and what they will do in the future. Obama recounted how his administration has made major investments in clean energy, set new fuel economy standards for vehicles and pressed for House passage of a bill to cap emissions and allow companies to trade pollution permits. Less than an hour after he spoke, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had finalized rules requiring facilities that emit the equivalent of 25,000 metric tons of carbon or more annually to report their pollution to the agency each year.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, for his part, said his country will establish “mandatory national targets” for the reduction of emission-intense energy sources and said the government will increase the size of the nation’s forests. He said his country will place climate change at the center of its long-range plans for economic and social development, and he vowed to “endeavor to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020 from the 2005 level.”
Julian L. Wong, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said Hu’s proposal is the “clearest signal yet that China is willing to take on responsibilities that are commensurate with its resources and global emissions impact.”
Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, renewed his pledge to reduce his country’s emissions by 25 percent by 2020, the most ambitious commitment to curbing greenhouse gases by an economic power. But Japan’s commitment, he said, is conditioned on the willingness of other industrial powers to sign on to similar commitments.
“I am resolved to exercise the political will required to deliver on this promise by mobilizing all available policy tools,” he said. “However, Japan’s efforts alone cannot halt climate change, even if it sets an ambitious reduction target.”
Several leaders of other nations — both rich and poor — tried to ratchet up the political pressure for more ambitious greenhouse gas reductions. The United Nations offered Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed a prime speaking spot after Obama; Nasheed sounded weary at the prospect of playing the role of climate change’s poster boy for disaster for yet another year.
“On cue, we stand here and tell you just how bad things are. We warn you that unless you act quickly and decisively, our homelands and others like it will disappear beneath the rising sea before the end of the century,” he said. “In response, the assembled leaders of the world stand up one by one and rail against the injustice of it all. . . . But then, once the rhetoric has settled and the delegates have drifted away, the sympathy fades, and the indignation cools, and the world carries on as before.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been working behind the scenes to craft a joint negotiating position with Brazil for Copenhagen, called on industrial leaders to hold a summit in mid-November to increase pressure on countries to strike a deal by December. “The time has passed for diplomatic tinkering, for narrow bargaining,” he said. “The time has come for courage, mobilization and collective ambition.”
“That’s the real power of the U.N.,” said Ned Helme, president of the Center for Clean Air Policy. “It’s all about the view of everyone. You stand up and say what you’re going to do.”
