Obama says 'unprecedented' deal reached on climate

Michael Casey And Jennifer Loven, Associated Press Yahoo News 19 Dec 09;

COPENHAGEN – President Barack Obama said the United States, China and several other countries reached an "unprecedented breakthrough" Friday to curb greenhouse gas emissions — including a mechanism to verify compliance — after a frenzied day of diplomacy at the U.N. climate talks.

The agreement, which also includes the developing nations of India, South Africa and Brazil, requires each country to list the actions they will take to cut global warming pollution by specific amounts, a senior Obama administration official said. The official described the deal on the condition of anonymity because specific details had not been announced.

The deal reiterates a goal that eight leading industrialized nations set earlier this year on long-term emission cuts and provides a mechanism to help poor countries prepare for climate change, the official said.

But it falls far short of committing any nation to emissions reductions beyond a general acknowledgment that the effort should contain global temperatures along the lines agreed to by the leading economic nations in July.

A European Union news conference to announce the EU reaction was postponed and an official said an overall agreement involving those nations not included in the deal that Obama announced was still being negotiated.

Obama suggested that the five-nation agreement would be adopted by the larger summit in its closing hours.

"I am leaving before the final vote," he said. "We feel confident we are moving in the direction of a final accord."

If the countries had waited to reach a full, binding agreement, "then we wouldn't make any progress," Obama said. In that case, he said, "there might be such frustration and cynicism that rather than taking one step forward we ended up taking two steps back."

Obama spent the final scheduled day of the climate talks huddling with world leaders, including Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in a bid to salvage the global warming accord amid deep divisions between rich and poor nations.

In announcing the five-nation deal, Obama said getting a legally binding treaty "is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time."

"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he said.

The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet."

The deal as described by Obama reflects some progress helping poor nations cope with climate change and getting China to disclose its actions to address the warming problem.

He said the nations of the world will have to take more aggressive steps to combat global warming. The first step, he said, is to build trust between developed and developing countries.

The five-nation agreement includes a method for verifying reductions of heat-trapping gases, the official said. That was a key demand by Washington of China, which has resisted international efforts to monitor its actions.

"It's not what we expected," Brazilian Ambassador Sergio Barbosa Serra said. "It may still be a way of salvaging something and paving the way for another a meeting or series of meetings next year."

Obama had planned to spend only about nine hours in Copenhagen as the summit wrapped up. But, as an agreement appeared within reach, he extended his stay by more than six hours to attend a series of meetings aimed at brokering a deal.

New Zealand's climate change ambassador Adrian Macey called it "a modest deal."

"I see Kyoto as a first step," Macey said. "This another first step, a global first step."

More than anything, Macey found the U.N. process on climate change "appalling."

The two-week, 193-nation conference has been plagued by growing distrust between rich and poor nations. Both sides blamed the other for failing to take ambitions actions to tackle climate change. At one point, African delegates staged a partial boycott of the talks.

"We are ready to get this done today but there has to be movement on all sides to recognize that is better for us to act rather than talk," Obama had said in an address to the conference, insisting on a transparent way to monitor each nation's pledges to cut emissions.

Abandoning any hope of reaching a comprehensive deal, a group of about 25 countries had sought agreement on a two-page political statement setting out critical elements, key among them the mobilization of $30 billion in the next three years to help poor countries cope with climate change and a scaling up to $100 billion a year by 2020.

As negotiations evolved, new drafts of the document, titled the Copenhagen Accord, emerged with key clauses being inserted, deleted and reintroduced with new wording.

In the end, the statement set no overall emissions targets for rich countries.

South Korea's chief negotiator, Rae-Kwon Chung, said one of the sticking points was a clause saying the combined emissions of rich and poor countries should be cut in half by 2050. Some developing countries opposed that target, fearing it would "define their carbon space," he said, declining to identify them.

With the climate talks in disarray, Obama and Wen met twice — once privately and once with other world leaders present — in hopes of sweeping aside some of the disputes that have barred a final deal. Officials said the two leaders took a step forward in their talk and directed negotiators to keep working, but the degree of progress was not immediately clear.

Wen skipped a high-level meeting a second time and sent another envoy instead.

Later Friday, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held talks with European leaders, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Reporters asked how negotiations were going as Obama walked into the meeting. "Always hopeful," he replied.

Many delegates had been looking to China and the U.S. — the world's two largest carbon polluters — to deepen their pledges to cut their emissions. But that was not to be.

Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren, negotiating on behalf of the 27-nation European Union, blamed the impasse on the Chinese for "blocking again and again," and on the U.S. for coming too late with an improved offer, a long-range climate aid program announced Thursday by Clinton.

The U.S. got its share of blame.

"President Obama was not very proactive. He didn't offer anything more," said delegate Thomas Negints, from Papua New Guinea. He said his country had hoped for "more on emissions, put more money on the table, take the lead."

Obama may eventually become known as "the man who killed Copenhagen," said Greenpeace U.S. Executive Director Phil Radford.

Money to help poor nations cope with climate change and shift to clean energy seemed to be where negotiators could claim most success. Pollution cuts and the best way to monitor those actions remained unresolved.

China and the U.S had sought to give the negotiations a boost Thursday with an announcement and a concession.

Clinton said Washington would press the world to come up with a climate aid fund amounting to $100 billion a year by 2020, a move that was quickly followed by an offer from China to open its reporting on actions to reduce carbon emissions to international review.

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Associated Press writers John Heilprin, Arthur Max, Seth Borenstein and Karl Ritter contributed to this report.

Climate summit clinches deal
Stephen Collinson and Richard Ingham (AFP) Google News 19 Dec 09;

COPENHAGEN — World leaders finally clinched a climate deal at the end of marathon talks Friday but admitted it would not halt global warming and campaigners denounced the outcome as an abject failure.

US President Barack Obama said a "meaningful" agreement had been reached during exhaustive meetings involving about two dozen presidents and prime ministers gathered in Copenhagen. Even Obama admitted however that it did not go far enough.

And the deal still have to get the approval of the 193 UN members states, including small island nations most at risk from the warmer Earth's temperatures that bring rising sea levels and the risk of more droughts, storms and floods.

"Today we have made a meaningful and unprecendented breakthrough here in Copenhagen," Obama told reporters.

"For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change."

The agreement foresees US contributions of 3.6 billion dollars in climate funds for the 2010-2012 period while Japan would contribute 11 billion dollars and the European Union 10.6 billion.

It also includes a commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) -- well short of the demands of island nations.

But a decision on targets for reducing carbon emissions by 2020 was put off until next month, a European diplomat said.

And unlike earlier drafts, the new accord did not specify any year for emissions to peak.

The US president said before leaving Copenhagen that what had been billed as one the most important summits since World War II would be the starting gun for a much stronger effort to combat global warming.

"Going forward we are going to have to build on the momentum we have achieved here in Copenhagen. We have come a long way but we have much further to go."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was the only one that could be reached after the summit had revealed deep rifts.

"The agreement is not perfect but it's the best one possible," Sarkozy told reporters, adding that another global warming summit would be hosted by Germany in mid-2010.

The deal was hammered out in talks between Obama and the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa as well as key European countries, diplomats said.

There was no immediate word on Russia's stance. President Dmitry Medevedev was one of the first to leave Copenhagen, having voiced frustration at the negotiation process overseen by the Danish government.

China had bristled at anything called "verification" of its plan to cut the intensity of its carbon emissions, seeing it as an infringement of sovereignty and saying that rich nations bore primary responsibility for global warming.

Disagreements between the United States and China had been at the core of the divisions holding up a deal.

But even if Washington and Beijing have now come to an understanding, the deal will still have to get the approval of the 194 UN members in attendance in Copenhagen.

The emergence of a deal came at the end of a day in which several drafts agreements were knocked back, with leaders themselves taking over the task of redrafting the exact wording of three pages of text.

Different versions of the document showed the leaders particularly split over whether to fix a firm date for finalising a legally binding treaty in 2010, and a commitment to slashing global carbon emissions in half by 2050.

Scientists say failure to curb the rise in Earth's temperature will lead to worsening drought, floods, storms and rising sea levels.

The agreement was met with dismay by campaigners.

"By delaying action, rich countries have condemned millions of the world's poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates," said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, calling the outcome "an abject failure".

"The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations."

The WWF environmental group voiced concern that the Copenhagen does not bind nations to action.

"A gap between the rhetoric and reality could cost millions of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and a wealth of lost opportunities," said Kim Carstensen, the leader of the WWF's Global Climate Initiative.

Obama reaches climate deal with emerging powers
Pete Harrison and Jeff Mason, Reuters 18 Dec 09;

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - President Barack Obama reached agreement with major developing powers on a climate deal on Friday, a U.S. official said, but he said the accord was only a first step and was insufficient to fight climate change.

The official said Obama, China's Premier Wen Jiabao, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and South Africa's President Jacob Zuma had reached a "meaningful agreement," after a day of deep divisions between leaders of rich and developing nations.

Brazil also approved the deal that appeared to bypass other participants at UN-led climate talks in Copenhagen. The accord did not have guaranteed approval from all 193 nations. Noticeably, EU nations were absent from the meeting.

Tensions between China and the United States, the world's two biggest emitters, had been particularly acute after Obama -- in a message directed at the Chinese -- said any deal to cut emissions would be "empty words on a page" unless it was transparent and accountable.

Negotiators struggled all day to find a compromise acceptable to all 193 countries which could avert the threat of dangerous climate change, including floods, droughts, rising sea levels and species extinctions.

A draft text under discussion on Friday included $100 billion in climate aid annually by 2020 for poor countries to combat climate change, and targets to limit warming and halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But it abandoned earlier ambitions for any deal in Copenhagen to be turned into a legally binding treaty next year.

"Today, following a multilateral meeting between President Obama, Premier Wen, Prime Minister Singh, and President Zuma a meaningful agreement was reached," the U.S. official said.

"It is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change but it is an important first step."

"No country is entirely satisfied with each element but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress," the official added.

Under the five-nation agreement, rich and poor nations had agreed to a "finance mechanism," emissions cuts to curb global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and "to provide information on the implementation of their actions."

Earlier, Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh told Reuters December 7-18 meeting was "close to seeing a legally non-binding Copenhagen outcome after 36 hours of grueling, intensive negotiations."

The European Union had pressed for a strong deal to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius and which included tough carbon curbs from other industrialized nations such as the United States.

Scientists say a 2 degrees limit is the minimum to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change including several meters sea level rise, species extinctions and crop failures.

"Given where we started and the expectations for this conference, anything less than a legally binding and agreed outcome falls far short of the mark," said John Ashe, chair the Kyoto talks under the United Nations.

(With reporting by Alister Doyle, Gerard Wynn, Anna Ringstrom, John Acher, Anna Ringstrom, Richard Cowan, David Fogarty, Pete Harrison and Emma Graham-Harrison; Writing by Dominic Evans; editing by Janet McBride)

Climate Deal Announced, but Falls Short of Expectations
Helene Cooper and John M. Broder, The New York Times 18 Dec 09;

COPENHAGEN — Leaders here concluded a climate change deal on Friday that the Obama administration called “meaningful” but that falls short of even the modest expectations for the summit meeting here.

The agreement still needs to be approved by the 193 nations gathered here.

The accord addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle — and if signed, will represent an unprecedented effort by the nations of the world to take concerted steps to address global warming.

But the agreement to leave many of the participants unhappy.

Even an Obama administration official conceded, “It is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change, but it’s an important first step.”

“No country is entirely satisfied with each element,” the administration’s statement said, “but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress.”

The statement added, “We thank the emerging economies for their voluntary actions and especially appreciate the work and leadership of the Europeans in this effort.”

But many of those emerging economies are likely to express displeasure. Europeans said the deal does not require enough of the United States, China and other major emitters and could put European industries at a competitive disadvantage because the European Union is already subject to a carbon emissions constraint program.

The accord drops the expected goal of concluding a binding international treaty by the end of 2010, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiation before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form.

“We entered this negotiation at a time when there were significant differences between countries,” the American official said.

“Developed and developing countries have now agreed to listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines,” the official said.

The deal came after a dramatic moment in which Mr. Obama burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Chinese protocol officers protested, and Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret.

The intrusion led to new talks that cemented key terms of the deal, American officials said.

Sergio Serra, Brazil’s senior climate negotiator here, confirmed that Mr. Obama had “joined” a meeting of Brazilian, Indian, Chinese and other officials, although he did not say that Mr. Obama walked in uninvited.

“After several discussions had taken place they were joined by President Barack Obama,” Mr. Serra said. “Several important decisions were taken — not a few due to Brazilian mediation — that we hope will bring a result, if not what we expected, that may be a way of salvaging something and pave the way to another meeting or series of meetings to get the full result of this proceeding.”

President Obama announced that an agreement had been reached but he left Copenhagen before the assembled 192 nations could study or vote on the accord. Aides said he left to get to Washington ahead of a major snowstorm headed toward the capital.

The agreement may be based on a document that was being edited by high-ranking officials from some two dozen countries throughout the day.

In that draft, developed nations committed to a long-term target of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. No specific midterm target was set. Developing countries, meanwhile, would pursue mitigation efforts of their own, and agreed in general terms to some sort of reporting on those efforts — something the industrialized world had been seeking.

The draft dropped earlier language that said a binding accord should be reached “as soon as possible,” and no later than at the next meeting of the parties, in Mexico City in November 2010. Instead, the draft set no specific deadline, saying only that the agreement should be reviewed and put in place by 2015.

The draft also included a few hard figures about joint emissions cuts of 50 percent by 2050. It included a dozen or so enumerated points asserting general commitment to the idea that “climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time” and asserted that “deep cuts” in global emissions are required.

It also sought to lay out some framework for verification of emissions commitments by developing countries and to establish a “high-level panel” to assess financial contributions by rich nations to help poor countries adapt to climate change and limit their emissions.

In the draft, many of the specifics remained to be negotiated, however.

In a press conference following the announcement, Mr. Obama thanked other world leaders for their help in reaching the accord — which he nonetheless characterized as being only a start.

“This progress did not come easily,” he said, “and we know that this progress alone is not enough.”

Mr. Obama noted that the United States would not be legally bound by anything agreed to in Copenhagen on Friday, and that, due to weather in Washington, he was leaving ahead of a full vote on the agreement.

But, he added, “I’m confident we’re moving in the direction of final accord.”

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and lead author of the Senate’s climate change bill, said the accord will drive Congress to pass climate change legislation early next year.

“This can be a catalyzing moment,” he said. “President Obama’s hands-on engagement broke through the bickering and sets the stage for a final deal and for Senate passage this spring of major legislation at home.”

Even those environmental groups that have pushed hardest for a deal had to acknowledge that this one is lacking in serious ways.

“The world’s nations have come together and concluded a historic — if incomplete — agreement to begin tackling global warming,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done in the days and months ahead in order to seal a final international climate deal that is fair, binding, and ambitious. It is imperative that negotiations resume as soon as possible.”

The announcement came on a day filled with high brinksmanship and seesawing expectations. On Friday morning, President Obama, speaking to world leaders gathered here at the frenzied end of the two weeks of climate talks, urged them to come to an agreement — no matter how imperfect — to address global warming and monitor whether countries are in compliance with promised emissions cuts.

His remarks appeared to be a pointed reference to China’s resistance on the issue of monitoring, which has proved a stubborn obstacle at the talks and a source of tension between China and the United States, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

After delivering the speech to a plenary session of 119 world leaders, Mr. Obama met privately with China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in an hourlong session that a White House official described as “constructive.”

But Mr. Wen did not attend two smaller, impromptu meetings that Mr. Obama and United States officials conducted with the leaders of other world powers, an apparent snub that infuriated administration officials and their European counterparts and added more uncertainty to the proceedings.

Earlier in the day, in his address to the plenary session shortly after noon, Mr. Obama, clearly frustrated by the absence of an agreement, was both emphatic and at times impatient. “The time for talk is over,” he said.

He arrived here prepared to lend his political muscle to secure an agreement on climate change at negotiations that have been plagued by distrust over a range of issues, including how nations would hold each other accountable.

Within an hour of Air Force One’s touchdown in Copenhagen on Friday morning, Mr. Obama went into an unscheduled meeting with a high-level group of leaders representing some 20 countries and organizations. Mr. Wen did not attend that meeting, instead sending the vice foreign minister, He Yafei.

Negotiators here had worked through the night, charged with delivering a draft of the political agreement by 8 a.m. ahead of the arrival of dozens of heads of state and high-level ministers for the final stretch of deliberations.

An American negotiator, weary from a night of discussions, expressed confidence early Friday that the talks would produce some form of an agreed declaration, even if it lacked specifics on some of the toughest issues.

Mr. Obama injected himself into a multilayered negotiation that has been far more chaotic and contentious than anticipated — frozen by longstanding divisions between rich and poor nations and a legacy of mistrust of the United States, which has long refused to accept any binding limits on its greenhouse gas emissions.

The administration provided the talks with a palpable boost on Thursday when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that the United States would contribute its share to $100 billion a year in long-term financing to help poor nations adapt to climate change.

Mrs. Clinton’s offer came with two significant conditions. First, the 193 nations involved in the talks here must reach a comprehensive political agreement that takes effect immediately. Second, and more critically, all nations must agree to some form of verification — she repeatedly used the term “transparency” — to ensure they are meeting their environmental promises.

China has brought the talks to a virtual standstill all week over this issue, which its leaders claim to be an affront to national sovereignty.

But the Chinese resistance on the issue is matched in large measure by Mr. Obama’s own constraints. The Senate has not yet acted on a climate bill that the president needs to make good on his promises of emissions reductions and on the financial support that he has now promised the rest of the world.

Late Friday night, speaking to reporters at the Bella Center before leaving for the airport, Mr. Obama, looking exhausted and with bloodshot eyes, said that problems long in the making had to be surmounted before a stronger deal can be reached.

“Let’s build some trust between developing and developed countries to break some of the logjams,” he said.