Michael Casey, Associated Press, Yahoo News 2 Dec 07;
At best, analysts believe, Bali could lead to a two-year negotiation in which the United States under a new administration, the Europeans and other industrial nations commit to deepening blanket emissions cuts.
Government leaders started arriving Sunday for what are expected to be lengthy and contentious negotiations on how to fight global warming, which could cause devastating sea level rises, send millions further into poverty and lead to the mass extinction of animals.
Delegates from more than 180 nations will attempt to jump-start talks during the Dec. 3-14 meeting on how to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. They also will consider whether cuts in carbon emissions should be mandatory or voluntary, how to reduce deforestation, and ways to help poor countries, which are expected to be hardest hit by worsening droughts, floods and violent storms.
"There is a very clear signal from the scientific community that we need to act on this issue," said Yvo de Boer, the general secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. "We have to turn the trend of global emissions in the next 10 to 15 years ... The political answer has to come now."
The Kyoto pact signed one decade ago required 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other the heat-trapping gasses emitted by power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources. It set relatively small target reductions averaging 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
A new agreement must be concluded within two years to give countries time to ratify it and to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted transition.
De Boer said industrialized nations, which have pumped the lion's share of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere to date, should take the lead in reducing emissions. So far the United States, the No. 1 offender, says it will refuse any deal that calls for mandatory reductions.
"Since developing countries are just beginning to grow their economies, it's not reasonable at this stage to ask them to reduce their emissions," he said, referring in part to China and India, which oppose caps and any other measures that will impinge on efforts to lift their people from poverty.
"They can be asked to limit their growth."
The European Union wants Kyoto's replacement to limit global temperature rises at 3.6 degrees above the levels of the preindustrial era. The EU, Canada and Japan have endorsed a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2050 to meet that goal and avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The United States, which along with Australia refused to sign Kyoto, said ahead of the Bali talks that it was eager to launch negotiations and sought to deflect criticism Washington was not doing enough.
President Bush said a final Energy Department report showed U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, declined by 1.5 percent last year while his economy grew.
"Energy security and climate change are two of the important challenges of our time. The United States takes these challenges seriously," Bush said in a statement. "This puts us well ahead of the goal I set in 2002."
Still, the United States will find itself isolated at the conference, given that Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd, whose party swept to power in general elections just one week ago, immediately put signing the Kyoto pact at the top of his international agenda.
Last month in Spain, a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. network of scientists issued a capstone report after six years of study saying that carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline.
Without action, they said, temperatures will rise, changing the world.
The Arctic ice cap melted this year by the greatest extent on record. Scientists say oceans are losing some ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, the chief industrial emission blamed for warming. And the world's power plants, cars and jetliners are spewing out carbon at an unprecedented rate.
At best, analysts believe, Bali could lead to a two-year negotiation in which the United States under a new administration, the Europeans and other industrial nations commit to deepening blanket emissions cuts. And they say major developing countries could agree to enshrine some national policies — China's auto emission standards, for example, or energy-efficiency targets for power plants — as international obligations.
Bali talks to seek global climate deal in 2009
Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn, Reuters 2 Dec 07;
BALI, Indonesia (Reuters) - Delegates from about 190 nations gathered in Bali on Sunday to try to build on a "fragile understanding" that the fight against global warming needs to be expanded to all countries with a deal in 2009.
The U.N.'s top climate change official told thousands of delegates that the eyes of the world would be on their Dec 3-14 talks in an Indonesian beach resort, saying time was running short to avert ever more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas.
"We're already seeing many of the impacts of climate change," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference on the eve of the meeting in the tightly guarded venue. "We are on a very dangerous path."
The Bali meeting, of senior officials with 130 environment ministers attending the final days, will try to launch formal negotiations ending with a new U.N. climate pact in 2009 that will include outsiders led by the United States and China.
So far, only 36 industrialized nations in the Kyoto Protocol have caps on greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, running to 2012. Most governments agree on a need for more action but disagree about how to share out the burden.
"More discussions will be needed to build on this fragile understanding and explore how it can be put into practice," according to a U.N. report to be submitted in Bali.
The report, summing up two years of talks about new ways to fight climate change, said some countries were willing to make deeper cuts in emissions, others said existing promises should be kept and still others wanted incentives to join in.
"We heard no dispute that developed countries need to keep taking the lead," wrote Howard Bamsey of Australia and Sandea De Wet of South Africa, the authors of the report.
OPENNESS, FLEXIBILITY
Prospects for a global deal have been boosted by a decision by President George W. Bush for the United States to take part beyond 2012. Bush opposes Kyoto as a threat to U.S. economic growth and said it unfairly excluded goals for poor nations.
"We'd like to see consensus on the launch of negotiations. We want to see a Bali roadmap," said Paula Dobriansky, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs.
"We will go to Bali with openness, flexibility."
The United Nations wants a new global pact to be agreed at U.N. talks in 2009 in Copenhagen, giving good time for governments to ratify before Kyoto's first period ends in 2012.
De Boer said Bali's goal was simply to agree to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, leaving details for later. "Millions of people around the world...will be focusing their attention on what is going to be the response of the politicians," he said.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a phone conversation on Sunday that China would adopt an "active, responsible and constructive" approach in Bali. But he urged rich nations to help.
"While taking the lead in greatly cutting emissions, developed nations should also help developing nations improve their ability to respond to climate change," the foreign ministry Web site paraphrased Wen as saying.
"Developing nations should adopt relevant policies in accordance with their capability, in order to make as much of a contribution as they can to combating climate change," it said.
Rich nations want developing nations at least to brake the rise of their emissions -- China is opening a new coal-fired power plant at the rate of more than one a week.
And developing countries will push for a new system of credits to help slow the rate of deforestation. Trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when they grow.
(Extra reporting by David Fogarty and Adhityani Arga, Chris Buckley and Emma Graham-Harrison and Jason Subler in Beijing, Editing by David Fogarty)
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