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U.S. prevails on climate draft, Ban says
Alan Zarembo and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times
The U.N. chief asserts that the text emanating from the Bali summit won’t include specific targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
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NUSA DUA, INDONESIA — As the United Nations climate conference here was drawing to its conclusion, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday acknowledged that the United States’ goal of deleting specific emission reduction guidelines from a draft agreement had succeeded.
“Realistically, it may be too ambitious if delegations would be expected to be able to agree on targets of greenhouse gas emission reductions” here in Bali, he told reporters. “Practically speaking, this will have to be negotiated down the road.”
(13 December 2007)
Canada will try to stop declaration on greenhouse gas reduction
Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service
NUSA DUA, Indonesia — Canada will try to stop the international community from recognizing the “unequivocal scientific evidence” that developed countries must drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to prevent “the worst impacts of climate change,” Environment Minister John Baird said Tuesday.
The warning was drafted into a pair of declarations under negotiation at the annual United Nations climate change summit that concludes Friday on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. But Baird said the language is unacceptable since it calls for the industrialized countries to collectively reduce their emissions of heat-trapping gases by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels.
He said Canada only would consider the proposal if it included the notion that developing countries also would have a role to play in the fight against global warming.
(12 December 2007)
Rich, poor countries at odds over Bali climate deal
Geoffrey York, The Globe and Mail
NUSA DUA, Indonesia – Deep divisions between wealthy countries and developing countries are threatening to scuttle an agreement at the Bali climate conference, with only two days remaining to bridge the gap.
Negotiations on one key issue – the question of how to transfer clean technology from the rich countries to the developing world – broke down and collapsed in an acrimonious dispute in the early hours of this morning.
“Our partners don’t seem to live up to their rhetoric about their desire for a maximum Bali outcome,” a leader of the G77 group of developing countries complained today.
An equally stubborn stalemate was continuing over whether the Bali conference should produce a “road map” with ambitious guidelines to shape a final agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by wealthy countries 25 to 40 per cent by 2020.
Canada and the United States are leading the opposition to the European proposal, arguing that it would “prejudge” the results of future negotiations.
(12 December 2007)
Hard Choices on Climate Can Wait for Next President, Aides Indicate
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
U.S. officials at U.N. climate negotiations here said Tuesday that they would not embrace any overall binding goals for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions before President Bush leaves office, essentially putting off specific U.S. commitments until a new administration assumes power in 2009, according to several participants.
… “We’ve been very pro-active, we’ve been very collaborative, very constructive,” said James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality and is in Bali this week to participate in the talks. “What we’re looking for is a broad negotiating agenda in a road map so we can cover a range of topics the president articulated earlier this year” on climate change.
Several environmental activists said that although the administration’s position is somewhat more flexible now than it was two years ago — when it essentially rejected the idea of conducting any formal dialogue on replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate with a new binding agreement–its stance leaves all tough decisions on how to address global warming up to the next president.
(11 December 2007)
Poor Hit Hardest by Climate Change
Associated Press
Surrounded by rising seas and short of water, the glitzy city state of Singapore has built one of the world’s largest desalination plants and is paying Dutch experts tens of millions of dollars to devise ways to protect their island.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, is digging out from a cyclone that killed at least 3,200 and left millions homeless. The impoverished country wants to build up its coastlines to ward off the potentially devastating impacts of global warming, but has no money.
The disparities between the rich and poor in adapting to encroaching oceans and the floods and droughts that are expected to worsen with rising temperatures have dominated the U.N. climate conference on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali.
(12 December 2007)
Paying other nations to be green
Alan Zarembo, Los Angeles Times
Some at the Bali summit see carbon credits as a way to save the rain forests and reduce greenhouse gases. Others have doubts.
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NUSA DUA, INDONESIA — The fight against global warming has given a new boost to a long-stymied environmental cause: saving the rain forests.
Under a scenario that has gained widespread support, developing countries would be paid billions of dollars a year to not raze their trees.
The money would come from rich industrial nations, which would pay to offset their voluminous greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
“Every single effort that has been attempted to conserve tropical forests for the last 35 years has failed,” said Don Melnick, a Columbia University biologist who is advising a coalition of rain forest countries. “We’re looking at perhaps one of the last great opportunities.”
The idea has the backing of environmentalists and some of the world’s most voracious destroyers of forest, including Brazil and Indonesia. Getting the idea launched would be a major achievement of the negotiations underway here on Indonesia’s Bali island to create a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But it has also faced concerns that it could evolve into a multibillion-dollar crusade that will do little to save the forests or reduce carbon emissions.
(12 December 2007)
