Leaders’ Acknowledgment That Agreement Won’t Be Reached Next Month Raises Concerns About Prolonged Delay

By: Jonathan Weisman, Spencer Swartz and Stephen Power
November 16, 2009

An acknowledgment by the world’s biggest governments that they won’t reach a climate-change agreement by next month underscores the political challenges of negotiating such a deal — and raises questions about when they might do so.

Leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum over the weekend conceded that the United Nations conference on climate change, to be held in Copenhagen in December, wasn’t likely to reach a legal agreement imposing hard caps on countries’ greenhouse-gas emissions. By doing so, the leaders tacitly acknowledged that neither the U.S. nor China — the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases — was ready to commit to such a deal. The two countries have been locked in a standoff for years over the issue, with each wanting the other to shoulder more of the burden of cutting emissions.
World leaders now say they hope to use the Copenhagen meeting to forge a “politically binding” agreement, with specific commitments by countries to reduce emissions and to help poor countries fight climate change. The leaders would seek to reach a formal, legal agreement at a second conference, but the timing of that remains uncertain.

Some longtime observers of climate negotiation expressed concern that by tamping down expectations for next month’s summit, world leaders have eased pressure on concluding a deal anytime soon. They said a protracted delay would make it harder to reduce carbon emissions down the road, because wind and other alternative-energy producers want to see political and legal commitments in public policy before making additional investments.

In the interim, energy companies are likely to continue relying on cheaper but dirtier fuel sources, such as coal-fired power plants, to meet rising energy needs. Newly built projects could operate for decades.

“Alternative producers need to see the right signals from policy makers before they will make decisions to invest billions of dollars in alternative-energy sources,” said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which acts as an adviser to industrialized nations like the U.S. “Copenhagen is where those signals need to come from.”
The Copenhagen announcement also illustrates the political difficulty of negotiating limits on industrial greenhouse-gas emissions, as countries grapple with a weak global economy and concerns that emission caps could drive up energy prices.

During the U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama pledged to push for legislation capping U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, raising hopes among environmentalists that Copenhagen would produce an agreement. In Japan, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s election brought to power a new government that pledged to make deeper emissions cuts than its predecessor. And Chinese President Hu Jintao proposed in September to adopt “carbon-intensity targets,” which would set the amount of carbon released per unit of economic output.

But political opposition in the U.S. Senate to Mr. Obama’s climate-change proposals and continuing resistance among developing countries to binding emissions-reduction targets have slowed consensus ahead of the Copenhagen summit. China’s offer to set targets has failed to mollify some U.S. lawmakers, with Republicans arguing that China’s emissions would to continue to rise, albeit at a slower rate.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen over the weekend laid out new goals for the Copenhagen summit. He said leaders should produce a five- to eight-page text with “precise language” committing developed countries to reductions of emissions thought to be warming the planet; and with provisions on adapting to warmer temperatures, on financing such adaptation and combating climate change in poor countries. It would include pledges of immediate financing for early action.

“We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook,” Mr. Rasmussen told the leaders. “We are trying to create a framework that will allow everybody to commit.”

But the leaders didn’t specify when a final summit would be convened to ratify such a treaty.

Greenpeace International accused Denmark’s government of “caving in” to the U.S. and complained that industrialized countries “continue to postpone important decisions into eternity.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce applauded Mr. Rasmussen for making what it said was a smart, pragmatic move.

Source: www.wsj.com