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    US Rejects Stiff 2020 Greenhouse Goals in Bali
    By Emma Graham-Harrison
    Reuters

    Monday 10 December 2007

Washington wants two more years of negotiations.

    Nusa Dua, Indonesia - Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a "roadmap" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

    "It's prejudging what the outcome should be," chief negotiator Harlan Watson said of a draft suggesting that rich nations should aim to axe emissions of heat-trapping gases by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

    He said that Washington wanted the December 3-14 talks, of 190 nations with more than 10,000 delegates, to end on Friday with an accord to start two years of negotiations on a new global climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

    A draft final text by Indonesia, South Africa and Australia says evidence by the U.N. climate panel demands cuts of 25-40 percent by rich nations to avoid the worst impacts of climate change such as more droughts, floods and rising seas.

    "We don't want to start out with numbers," Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on "many uncertainties" and a small number of scientific studies by the U.N. Climate Panel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

    Other countries such as Japan are also opposed, fearing such stiff goals would choke economic growth.

    The Bali talks are trying to agree the principles for a successor to Kyoto, which binds 36 industrial nations to cut emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by five percent below 1990 by 2008-12.

    "Our opinion about Kyoto has not changed," Watson said. President George W. Bush opposes Kyoto, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and wrongly excludes 2012 goals for developed nations, such as China, India and Brazil.

    Bush says he will join a new global pact.

    Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate secretariat said that the 25-40 percent range would be "critical issue" at the talks. He said he considered the figure an important signpost to show where the world should be heading in curbing warming.

    De Boer also said that all industrialized nations agreed on the need to agree a Kyoto successor at U.N. talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. Developing nations, wary of any commitments that might hit their drive to fight poverty, are undecided.

    Environmentalists urged action.

    "This is the week the world has been waiting for," said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based climate E3G think-tank.

    On the margins of the main talks, about 40 deputy finance ministers held unprecedented talks about ways to ensure that efforts to slow climate change do not derail the world economy.

    "Having the finance ministers meeting ... itself is a breakthrough," Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The meeting will prepare for talks by about 20 finance ministers in Bali on Tuesday.

    "The role of the finance ministers is to lead this discussion so that we have wider policy options," Indrawati said, referring to taxes or incentives for green technologies such as wind, solar power or "clean coal."

    Trade ministers also met at the weekend, the first time the annual U.N. climate talks have expanded beyond environment ministers. The trade ministers failed to ease splits between Brazil and the United States over green exports.

    The U.N. Climate Panel, which will collect the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday in Oslo with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, has said that the strictest measures to offset warming will slow annual world growth by 0.12 percentage point at most.

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    With extra reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison and Rob Taylor in Canberra; writing by Alister Doyle; editing by David Fogarty and Rosalind Russell.

 

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    Kerry Sells Democrats' Green Message in Bali
    By David Fogarty
    Reuters

    Monday 10 December 2007

    Nusa Dua, Indonesia - Senator John Kerry swept into climate talks in Bali on Monday saying an administration run by the Democrats would mean the difference between night and day on policies to fight global warming.

    Kerry said the Democrats want to do everything President George W. Bush doesn't to fight climate change, namely back mandatory emissions targets and pass a bill to create a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions.

    "I am convinced the politics of 2009 in the United States are going to be just night and day, different from where we have been before," he told a news conference.

    Republican Bush's falling approval rating with voters and a Democratic victory in midterm elections last year have given the Democrats high hopes of recapturing the White House in the November 2008 presidential poll. Kerry himself ran for the presidency in 2004.

    "On behalf of us in the Senate and Congress who have been pushing for action on climate change, we believe that it is critical here in Bali to have a roadmap that has a strong mandate, based on science, which sets a date," he said.

    Kerry spoke for nearly 30 minutes at the press conference, and stressed the United States, particularly individual states, and numerous large corporations, had already taken steps to curb emissions.

    At one point his microphone cut out.

    "Not even the (Bush) administration can be blamed for this," he said to laugher from the audience.

    The U.N.-led talks are seeking to agree on the ground rules for launching two years of negotiations on a broader climate change pact involving all nations to succeed or replace the Kyoto Protocol from January 1, 2013.

    About 190 nations are meeting in Bali.

    Kerry stressed the need for all countries to be brought on board and said transferring clean energy technology was a crucial way to cut burgeoning emissions from developing nations. He noted that China's emissions would soon surpass the United States' carbon pollution.

    "The message we bring is that the United States is willing to be at the table, the United States is going to lead, the United States is going to embrace significant change in policies in order to deal with climate change."

    "This has to be driven by science, not politics," he said of global negotiations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

    He was confident an energy bill to be presented to the Senate and which lays out guidelines for a cap-and-trade system would become law.

    "By 2009, if we haven't been able to pass it next year, we're going to pass this. This is going to pass and we are going to get a cap-and trade regime in the United States," he said.

    Harlan Watson, the head of the U.S. delegation in Bali, said on Monday his team had not become irrelevant, despite the Bush administration being undermined by federal and state lawmakers' efforts to fight carbon emissions.

    "I don't feel isolated," Harlan Watson said. He said he had "very cordial" contacts with many delegations.

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    Editing by Alex Richardson.

 

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    Climate Change: Trade, Finance Issues Add to Wrangling in Bali
    By Marwaan Macan-Markar
    Inter Press Service

    Monday 10 December 2007

    Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia - Three poles - trade, finance and the environment - have emerged at a pivotal international conference on climate change, posing a daunting task for leaders to find common ground before the end of the two-week meeting, Friday.

    The pressure to draft a blueprint acceptable to the nearly 10,000 participants at the United Nations climate change conference was confirmed Monday, when leading members of green groups admitted that negotiations could spill over into Saturday. What activists do not want is for the gathering on this resort island to conclude with a document incapable of saving the planet from possible environmental catastrophe.

    While groups like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) agree that an ideal solution lay in bridging ecology with economics, what they are troubled by is a hint of the trade and financial lobbies at the conference muscling their way in to set the tone for a green-friendly future. "At some point, the climate talks will have to get into the realm of trade and finance, but the climate issues should not be subsumed by trade talks," says Shruti Shukla, environment and climate policy coordinator for WWF's India office.

    "The environment has always been the stepsister of the economic priorities that countries have. So this meeting must be an opportunity to reverse that and be used as a confidence building event between the trade, finance and environment ministries," she added in an interview. "This is a chance for the environment agenda to be accepted as the one that will drive the future trade and development agenda."

    A meeting over the weekend on the sidelines of the conference, which runs from Dec. 3-14, confirmed that such worry is not misplaced. It featured trade ministers and senior officials from 32 countries, where the United States and the European Union made a pitch for developing countries to lift their tariff barriers for 43 environmentally friendly products to enter the local markets. Among the products on a list approved by the World Bank are wind turbines and hydrogen fuel cells, 'The Jakarta Post' newspaper reported on Monday.

    "This is a familiar story of the U.S. and the E.U. once again pushing for liberalisation in services in the name of climate change," Nicola Bullard, senior researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank, told IPS. "Developing countries are asking for a technology transfer for a greener environment, but instead they are being asked to reduce their tariffs. The U.S. and the E.U. are trying to profit even after having polluted the world."

    Such a pro-developed countries stance - expected to be echoed again this week when finance ministers arrive to add weight to the climate change talks - is an attempt to shift the responsibility for a healthier earth away from the shoulders of the world's industrialised giants. "The developed world wants to talk about economics here because it does not want the entire burden for a solution to fall on them," says Sanjay Vashist of the Centre for Global Environment Research, a New Delhi-based think tank.

    But as a report released here on Monday confirmed, the developed nations who have emitted the major share of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases (GhGs) into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution cannot turn a blind eye on the havoc these heat-trapping gases are said to cause in national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas in the developing world.

    "More than half the world's protected territory is vulnerable to impacts of climate change, with some regions facing the disappearance of current climatic conditions by 2100 or a transition to conditions not found on Earth in the previous century," warned a study conducted by scientists from Conservation International and from two U.S.-based universities, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland.

    Among the vulnerable countries where "90 percent or more of the total protected territory has climate conditions that will disappear globally or be transformed are at least 11 in Africa. They range from Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi to Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda.

    Asian countries such as Bhutan and Sri Lanka stand to be affected as will Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela in Latin America.

    No wonder an announcement by the Norwegian government on Sunday to grant up to 545 million US dollars a year over the next five years to help tropical countries halt deforestation went down well with the environmentalists. The Norwegian delegation to the Bali meeting, which will include the prime minister, finance minister and environment minister, is expected to lobby other developed nations to follow this financial package that was made in addition to its annual aid budget.

    "The grant that was announced yesterday was a huge victory for the green groups in Norway who had lobbied for it," Lars Haltbrekken of Norwegian section of Friends of the Earth, a global NGO, told IPS. "We hope that other countries follow this lead to do something to stop global emissions."

    Yet there has been a little room for optimism on the other central concerns that the conference has on its agenda in order to reverse the rapidly warming planet, due to the high emission of GhGs, of which the U.S. is the worst violator, responsible for nearly 30 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

    Urgent commitments for mitigation to reduce the GhGs are one of the main issues at the Bali meeting that will serve as marker to gauge its success. Also in the picture are commitments for a global fund for vulnerable communities in the developing world to adapt to the changing environment and for the industrial world to help the Global South with green-friendly technologies.

    According to Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, the bill to fight climate change requires investments of up to 200 billion dollars annually by 2030. "It sounds like a lot, but if you look at global GDP (gross domestic product) figures, it is not."