U.S., China Object to UN's `Strange Meal' Draft Climate-Change Agreement
The U.S., China and Brazil joined dozens of nations criticizing a draft climate treaty issued in Bonn, leaving in place divisions holding up a United Nations agreement on global warming.
The negotiating text eliminates some potential targets to limit climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, paring back alternatives from a document published in May. As two weeks of talk concluded today, delegates voiced concerns and urged the diplomat who produced it, Zimbabwe’s Margaret Mukahanana- Sangarwe, to revise it.
“There is something wrong with your kitchen,” Mohammad Al Sabban, Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator, said at the meeting. “The recipe we have discussed over the last two weeks has been taken by you, and you gave us a very strange meal.”
The document is intended to guide discussions leading up to an eventual treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from factories and power plants. It also would channel aid to nations most at risk and encourage the spread of clean energy technologies such as wind and solar power.
“The text contains a number of ideas that the United States could not accept in an agreed outcome,” U.S. negotiator Trigg Talley said.
Chinese delegation chief Su Wei called the text “unbalanced.” Yemen, which spoke on behalf of the G-77 group of developing nations, objected along with India and Brazil. So did Spain, speaking for the European Union’s 27 members.
“A number of countries are critical of the text, they find it unbalanced,” said Yvo de Boer, who supervises the talks as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary. “It isn’t the perfect final document.” He said it’s still an advance and a basis for future talks.
Copenhagen Failure
These are the last talks de Boer will steward since he announced in February he was stepping down. Costa Rica’s Christiana Figueres replaces him on July 8. He failed in an attempt to martial more than 190 nations into a treaty at a UN summit in Copenhagen in December, which was attended by 110 world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama.
The current proposal seeks to limit warming since industrialization began to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), or 1.5 degrees. It eliminates a prior option of keeping the temperature gains to 1 degree.
In Bonn, advances were made in two areas that may help unlock a wider deal, said Jake Schmidt, climate policy director for the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. They are the governance of climate aid and how to measure, report and verify -- MRV in UN jargon -- emissions reductions made by developing nations such as India and China, he said.
‘Baby Steps’
“There have been some baby steps and some emerging signs of progress,” Schmidt said in an interview. “MRV and finance are the keys to unlocking other issues having some kind of conclusion in Cancun,” the site in Mexico for the next major UN climate summit, to be held in November and December.
Delegates meet again in Bonn in August. Bangladeshi envoy Quamrul Chowdhury said the new document postpones decisions to the UN’s year-end summit in 2011 in South Africa, rather than this year’s meeting in Cancun, Mexico.
“The text is really watered down, and it’s biased against the least developed countries,” Chowdhury said in an interview. “It shows us the way not to Cancun, but to South Africa, with all major decisions shipped in a deliberate way to South Africa, which is tragic.”
Draft Text
The draft calls on developed nations to reduce emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020. It doesn’t give a base year and eliminates previous options for greater reductions. It calls for global emissions to peak by 2020 and scrubs reference to goals for 2015. Global emissions reductions would total 50 percent to 85 percent from 1990 levels in 2050.
Earlier today, delegates spent half an hour condemning the treatment of Saudi Arabia after a leaflet was circulated showing the country’s nameplate broken and in a toilet, under the caption “Feeling a bit blocked?” Lebanese delegation chief Roula el Cheikh said the Saudi flag was also disrespected.
Yesterday, the world’s biggest oil exporter blocked a request by island nations for the UN to study the impacts of a 1.5-degree temperature-rise. Non-governmental organizations attending the talks frequently stage protests against countries they say are holding up progress. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat said it’s investigating the incident.
Kyoto Successor
Without a global agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s limits on greenhouse gases for more than 35 nations expire in 2012, ending the only global restrictions on heat-trapping gases that scientists link to rising global temperatures.
Today’s text, while leaving open the question of whether a final accord will be legally binding, would assign new targets for countries that signed up to the Kyoto treaty.
The proposal also would establish a separate agreement that draws in the U.S., the only major developed nation that rejected Kyoto, and developing countries, which have no gas targets. It leaves open the prospect of eliminating the Kyoto accord, according to Bolivian envoy Pablo Solon, who said it ignores many demands made by his and other countries.
“How are we going to negotiate if we have such an unbalanced text?” Solon said to reporters. “If this document is going to be the outcome of Cancun, then the future of humanity, of mother Earth, is really in danger.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in Bonn at amorales2@bloomberg.net.
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