Chris Otton Yahoo News 18 Dec 09;
COPENHAGEN (AFP) – Hopes for the last day of UN climate talks Friday were raised by a US pledge to a climate finance fund, but leaders still warned of failure amid debate on sharing the burden of carbon-emissions cuts.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brightened a grim summit mood by saying the United States would contribute to a long-term fund worth 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to help poor countries fund cleaner technology and shore up defences against worsening floods, drought, storms and rising seas.
The pledge was contingent on an ambitious overall deal being completed at the talks, however, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned Thursday faced a looming disaster in the wake of the divisive emissions debate.
"There is less than 24 hours. If we carry on like this, it will be a failure," Sarkozy cautioned angrily from the conference podium. "Failure at Copenhagen would be catastrophic for all of us."
An internal UN memo seen by AFP meanwhile showed national pledges for reducing greenhouse gas output would doom the world to warming of as much as three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times. Emissions pledges fall way short: leaked UN memo
Scientists say such a rise would be disastrous, condemning hundreds of millions of people to worsening drought, floods and storms. Nations most at risk from rising sea levels have been pushing for commitments to limit the rise to no more than 1.5 C (2.7 F).
More than 120 leaders, including US President Barack Obama, are due to attend the summit on Friday, although few at Copenhagen's Bella Center held out hope of a deal that could transform the 12-day parlay into a last-minute triumph. Scene in Copenhagen: UN climate talks run on adrenaline, caffeine, fading hopes
"Coming back with an empty agreement would be far worse than coming back empty-handed," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs before Obama left Washington.
Clinton, in Denmark, accused developing nations -- without naming them -- of backsliding on pledges to open their promised controls on carbon emissions to wide scrutiny.
The question is "a deal-breaker for us," she said.
China and India say they are willing to take voluntary measures to slow their surges in heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions.
But they are reluctant to accept tough international inspection and insist rich nations shoulder the main burden by accepting huge reduction targets.
"We should not continue to dwell on these issues that are dividing us. We should narrow our differences, otherwise we are facing a failure," Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told reporters.
The sole glimmer of hope in the darkening mood remained the progress on climate finance funding.
In response to Clinton's announcement, the G77, the major bloc of developing countries, said the US proposals were "a good signal" but still not enough.
The European Union called for all parties "to urgently go to the outer limits of their flexibility" so that talks could advance, and called for an emergency meeting of "relevant players" late Thursday in a bid to break the deadlock.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon tried to talk up the prospects of an agreement, saying he had "not seen anything that indicates we cannot seal a deal."
"There are more than 130 leaders here. If they cannot seal a deal, who can?"
After earlier expressing doubt that the summit would pin down an agreement to cap global warming at two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), German Chancellor Angela Merkel said leaders could forge a deal but added that "we will not be able to work out all the little details".
The United States was widely condemned for foot-dragging on climate change under former president George W. Bush, and Obama is hoping his presence at the finale here will be evidence of a transformation of policy.
EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said he expected Obama to announce further US action to push things forward "because if they don't do it, others will find an excuse also not to move."
A senior Obama administration official said he did not expect the president to unveil more specific commitments on financing.
Opposition lawmakers in the US Congress also fired a warning shot at the administration and the global community, reminding that the president "does not have authority to bind the United States in any international agreement."
Republican Senator Jon Kyl underlined that the US Constitution requires Senate ratification of treaties, and that measures that affect government revenues typically need companion US legislation to be enforced.
Analysis: Climate talks a halting step toward goal
Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press 17 Dec 09;
COPENHAGEN – The Copenhagen climate conference "failed" long before it even opened. It may not "succeed" until long after it ends. For the moment, then, negotiators must satisfy themselves with something in between, an "outcome," one whose shape Thursday was in the hands of the United States and China.
A pivotal meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 set a two-year timetable for the world to produce a grand new agreement to cut even deeper into the greenhouse-gas emissions largely blamed for global warming.
Every one of the thousands attending that U.N. conference saw the problem, however: The U.S. administration of President George W. Bush had blocked progress on climate change for seven years, and would do so for one more.
When President Barack Obama took charge last January, he had just 11 months to work with international partners to negotiate a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which had imposed modest emissions cuts on industrialized nations, and which the U.S. had rejected.
With time so short, the new U.S. leadership needed a long run of luck. But its luck ran out with this year's drawn-out and distracting U.S. health-care debate. Legislation that would cap U.S. carbon emissions for the first time was delayed, and those international partners grew wary of entering any new deal without that firm U.S. commitment.
By this fall, expectations for Copenhagen were lowered. Even U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, whose job is to be upbeat, was dismissing hopes for a treaty binding nations legally to commitments on greenhouse gases.
Negotiating work still awaited the thousands of delegates from 193 nations who gathered here Dec. 7 for the two weeks of talks. They could at least clear away more technical unresolved issues — on saving forests, on exchanging clean-energy technology, on new ways to raise and distribute money to poorer nations for dealing with climate change.
Those talks made only fitful progress, however, and by Wednesday were bogged down. In a reprise of a perennial theme at the annual climate conferences, negotiators from the developing world complained the "north" — wealthy nations — was trying to impose its views on the conference's concluding documents.
It is now time for the "political phase," as environment ministers took over the backroom bargaining, in preparation for the arrival of the top ranks: Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of more than 100 other nations. In the diplomatic world, that means the table will be set.
"One hundred leaders of the world aren't going to fly in here and declare defeat," observed ex-U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth, a longtime climate campaigner and head of the U.N. Foundation.
Two factors should enable leaders to smile when their group photo is snapped Friday: The developing nations, unhappy though they are, need their richer negotiating partners to help finance efforts to deal with coastal erosion and other effects of global warming; and diplomats and lawyers, under pressure, may show remarkable skill in finding the right words to paper over differences.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, upon arrival Thursday, generated new hopes with an announcement that the U.S. would join others in raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations cope with global warming. It was more money than has previously been promised. But the pledge was contingent on a broader agreement, including some kind of oversight to verify China's emissions of greenhouse gases.
Her offer followed that of Japan, which on Wednesday announced a $15 billion, three-year contribution to a "prompt-start" fund to support poorer nations' adaptation to climate change and their switch to clean energy. That was added to some $11 billion pledged earlier by the European Union.
"The United States must recognize it has a special historical responsibility for climate change," the U.N.'s Ban told an elite dinner gathering here Wednesday, referring to the past U.S. role in overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
Many expect the Americans to up their "prompt-start" bid to around $3 billion in the first year. To show U.S. good faith, they may also point to a variety of efforts — including new powers of the Environmental Protection Agency — to supplement the legislative proposal to reduce U.S. emissions, relatively weak in the early years of reductions.
But the Americans, in turn, will look toward the Chinese for help in reaching some agreement here. The Beijing government, which offers restraint on emissions but isn't likely to be legally bound under a future treaty, has resisted calls to submit its emissions actions to some kind of international oversight. That's an area where it may give some ground by Friday.
Despite the expectations in 2007, the "Bali Action Plan" actually did not call for a treaty at Copenhagen 2009, but rather an "agreed outcome." That outcome on Friday may look thin on substance, but will represent another halting step in a long process of failures, successes and in-between results extending far into the future, as the world grapples with a problem that won't soon go away.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley has covered climate for The Associated Press since 1997.
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