US, Under Fire, Eases Its Stance in Climate Talks

By Andrew C. Revkin
The New York Times

Saturday 10 December 2005

Montreal - The United States dropped its opposition early Saturday morning to nonbinding talks on addressing global warming after a few words were adjusted in the text of statements that, 24 hours earlier, prompted a top American official to walk out on negotiations.

At the same time, other industrialized nations that have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty binding them to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, agreed to start meeting to set new deadlines once the existing pact's terms expire in 2012.

Such is the nature of progress in the 17-years-and-counting effort by the world's nations to act in the face of scientists' conclusions that emissions from burning essential fuels like coal and oil are raising temperatures and could potentially disrupt climate patterns and inundate coasts.

The United States and China, the world's current and projected leaders in greenhouse gas emissions, still refused to agree to mandatory steps to curtail the emissions as the talks drew toward a close early Saturday.

But there was a growing sense that some longstanding barriers, particularly between developed and developing nations, were starting to erode under the weight of evidence that climate was shifting in potentially dangerous ways.

In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.

The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.

At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.

Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. "This shows just how willing the US administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.

In the end, though, some adjustments of wording - including a shift from "mechanisms" to the softer word "opportunities" in one statement - ended the dispute.

In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said the administration was determined to achieve greenhouse-gas reductions not through binding limits but through long-term work to develop cleaner technologies.

"If you want to talk about global consciousness," he said, "I'd say there's one country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused on cooperation, and that is focused on helping the developing world, and that's the United States."

There were still a few more details involving Russia that were being worked on, but delegates and participants among the 9,000 people in the halls were confident the overall deal would hold.

The amount of progress is still achingly slow, many environmentalist say. The world's major sources of greenhouse emissions - the United States, big developing countries like China and India, and a bloc led by Europe and Japan - remain divided over how to proceed under both the 1992 treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, an addendum that took effect this year.

The original treaty - since ratified by 189 nations, including the United States - has no binding restrictions. The Kyoto pact does impose mandatory limits on industrialized nations, but they do not apply to developing nations, including China and India. The United States and Australia have rejected that pact.

On Friday, countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol were close to agreeing on a plan to negotiate a new set of targets and timetables for cutting emissions after its terms expire.

But under pressure from some countries already having trouble meeting Kyoto targets, the language included no specific year for ending talks on next steps, instead indicating that parties would "aim to complete" work "as soon as possible."

Early in the afternoon, Mr. Clinton gave a hastily arranged speech to the thousands of delegates in which he sketched a route around the impasse that included gentle rebukes of those seeking concrete targets and also of the Bush administration.

Mr. Clinton said that, given the impasse over global targets for emissions, countries might do better to consider specific, smaller initiatives to advance and disseminate technologies that could greatly reduce emissions in both rich and poor countries.

"If you can't agree on a target, agree on a set of projects so everyone has something to do when they get up in the morning," he said.

In a comment clearly directed at the Bush administration, he declared to waves of applause that just as the United States had taken a precautionary approach in its fight against terrorism, "there is no more important place in the world to apply the principle of precaution than the area of climate change."

"I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future," Mr. Clinton said. "We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we know we have an alternative that will lead us to greater prosperity."

The Montreal talks have yielded significant new signs that developing countries are beginning to consider ways to promote economic growth without increasing emissions.

Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and Brazil all proposed ways to add incentives for reducing destruction of rain forests to the climate agreements. China agreed to additional discussions under both the 1992 and Kyoto treaties about ways to involve big developing countries in projects that could curb the heat-trapping pollution - as long as they did not involve binding limits.

But even if new talks under the Kyoto treaty lead to new targets for industrial nations, some scientists said Friday that they would not be enough to stem harmful warming without broader actions by the biggest and fastest-growing polluters.

In a statement from London, Lord Martin Rees, the new president of Britain's Royal Society, an independent national scientific academy, said the disputes among wealthy nations over how to reduce emissions were distracting them from carrying out steps to make the cuts.

Environmental campaigners insisted that the Kyoto process would eventually force other countries, particularly the United States, to act. These advocates predicted a growing market for "cap and trade" credits, in which businesses acquire credits by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions below a required level, then sell those credits to other businesses or even other countries, which can then increase their output of emissions above the target level.




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US Isolated After Climate Talks Walkout
By David Adam
The Guardian UK

Saturday 10 December 2005

Others press on with post-Kyoto deal.
The US administration was facing condemnation last night after it refused to sign up to a UN statement intended to reopen worldwide talks on how to tackle climate change.

The American move, at a high-level summit in Montreal, after two weeks of talks appeared to renege on a commitment made at the Gleneagles G8 summit, and promised embarrassment for Tony Blair, who has spent 18 months trying to woo George Bush back into the debate on global warming.

Undeterred, more than 150 other countries were poised last night to take the Kyoto protocol into a second phase, extending the international agreement to cut emissions of greenhouse gases when its first phase expires in 2012.

Washington, which has refused to sign up to Kyoto, signalled that it did not want to be drawn into broader negotiations on climate change when, after days of tension, Harlan Watson, the chief US negotiator, walked out of talks early on Friday.

He objected to a formulation in the UN statement that suggested dialogue on climate change with no binding commitments which he said would be tantamount to opening fresh negotiations. According to one minister present, Mr. Watson walked out after telling the meeting of ministers: "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it's a duck."

Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, said: "President Bush personally agreed at Gleneagles that the Americans would be part of discussions here. It would be a great pity if the US thought for whatever reason that it could not be part of a move forward."

One EU insider said moves were afoot in the US camp to redraft the UN statement, but said the changes were "trivial" in nature.

America's isolated stance on climate change drew thinly-veiled criticism from former president Bill Clinton, who dismissed as "flat wrong" Mr. Bush's argument that Kyoto would damage the US economy.