Gerard Wynn, Reuters 24 May 09;
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A draft U.S. climate bill did not go far enough to cut greenhouse gases, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Reuters on Sunday, three days after the plan won a key Congressional panel vote.
Ban applauded President Barack Obama's engagement on global warming but said that other countries were doing more, and added that a new global climate pact meant to be agreed in December could not wait for the United States to pass its domestic rules.
"That's what I have been doing and will continue to do," Ban said when asked if he was urging the United States to do more.
The bill passed on Thursday aimed to cut U.S. greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020.
"That's clearly lower than other countries are now aiming, particularly the European Union," Ban said on the fringes of a climate change and business conference in Copenhagen.
"I appreciate President Obama and his administration taking an active role. Now we need to continue to encourage the United States to do more," he said, adding that he welcomed the vote by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee.
The panel's approval moved the draft bill closer to a vote in the full House, which could occur by August. But it is unclear whether it would go through the Senate by December.
"That should not be any conditionality of this global deal in Copenhagen," said Ban, who earlier told reporters that a deal in December "was not an option."
A U.N. General Assembly summit on climate change in September would be the largest forum on the issue and "critically important" to allow leaders to resolve their differences three months before an anticipated deal, he said.
"We will be in a much better position to identify the key sticking points, to sort out at the leaders level. "
"I will try to make this the most interactive debate forum among the leaders so they can exercise ... the commitment and vision to look for the future of the entire planet Earth."
BLAME
Poorer countries say that the developed world has got rich from more than two centuries of industrialization, spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, and so expect the North to act first.
Developing countries led by China and India want rich countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. The goal of the draft U.S. bill is equivalent to roughly no change on 1990 levels.
The United States will try to persuade rich and poor countries to share the burden of fighting climate change this week, holding May 25-26 talks among major economies, including China, the European Union, Russia, India and Japan, in Paris.
Ban identified key challenges to a climate deal in December, and firstly "ambitious targets as scientists tell and as the IPCC (U.N. climate panel) recommends" for developed countries.
Other key objectives included more clarity on funds to help least developed and small island and land-locked developing nations prepare for climate change.
(Additional reporting by Peter Levring; Editing by Charles Dick)
US won't speed up emissions cuts: top climate negotiator
Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 24 May 09;
PARIS (AFP) – Domestic politics will not allow the United States to deepen it commitment for cutting carbon pollution over the next decade despite growing international pressure, Washington's top climate negotiator said Sunday.
"We are jumping as high as the political system will tolerate," Todd Stern said, rejecting China's call this week for rich nations to slash greenhouse gases by 40 percent before 2020, compared to 1990 levels.
"The 40 percent the Chinese have talked about is not realistic," the US Special Envoy for Climate Change told AFP on the eve of a two-day climate meeting of ministers from the world's most powerful economies.
A summit of Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) members -- which together account for 80 percent of global CO2 emissions -- is scheduled for July in Italy, probably on the heels of a G8 summit there, Stern said.
US President Barack Obama proposes to cut US emissions by about six percent by 2020, and by at least 80 percent before mid-century.
Climate legislation wending its way through US Congress would meet both these goals, and perhaps more, if unchanged.
But in the run up to UN talks in Copenhagen in December charged with delivering a new global climate deal, developing countries such as China and India have said that this is not enough.
Their position has been echoed by many climate experts as well as the European Union, which has committed to a 20 percent reduction by 2020, 30 percent of others follow suit.
"It is clear that the United States is going to have to do more," France's environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, told journalists ahead of the MEF meeting.
Stern, however, cautioned that pushing for deeper cuts in the United States could backfire.
"We completely agree it is vital that developed countries get a path that is ambitious and consistent with what science is telling us to do," he told AFP in an interview.
"But perfect is the enemy of good -- you can insist on that, say you really need to have it, and you can end up with nothing."
Even in rejecting China's position, though, Stern said Beijing and Washington had opened a wide range of bilateral channels on climate change.
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in China on Sunday, and is scheduled to join Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry at a clean energy forum in Beijing later in the week.
Several top Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have also beat a path to China with climate issues high on the agenda. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is set to go in June.
Stern himself will take part in a three-day "interagency" trip next month, when he will meet with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua and other officials.
"We mean to have very in-depth conversations with respect to climate change per se, and our hope and intention of developing a very, very robust, high-octane clean energy partnership with the Chinese," Stern said.
Doing so, he added, was critical for the UN process: "It is extremely important that the US and China be working together -- and be seen working together. That is absolutely pivotal for Copenhagen."
The MEF meetings -- initiated by Obama -- group the G8 nations, emerging economies China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, along with Indonesia, South Korea and Australia.
The Paris gathering -- the second this year -- will also include the European Union, a representative from the United Nations, and Denmark, which will host the UN negotiations at year's end.
