Bali climate standoff extends into final day

The United States and Europe faced off into the final day of the UN climate conference yesterday deadlocked over how ambitious the goal should be in negotiating cutbacks in global-warming gases after 2012.

The outcome may help determine how high the planet’s temperatures rise for decades to come - stakes high enough to draw UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon back to Bali from an east Timor visit to help resolve the impasse.

Delegates sparred over the wording of a conference final document until 2:30 a.m., said the U.N. climate chief, after which drafters retired to craft new formulations in contentious passages - most notably the European Union’s suggestion of a goal of 25-to-40-percent emissions reductions.

“I’m still very concerned about the pace of things,” the U.N.’s Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press. “We really need to have a sense of urgency about things.” But he also struck an optimistic note, saying, “I think everyone is working toward a result.”

Ban, who departed for East Timor early Friday after three days here, will return to Bali to assist in “the very critical phase of the negotiating process,” said spokeswoman Marie Okabe.

The task before the annual assembly was to launch negotiations for a regime of deeper emissions reductions to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrial nations to cut output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The United States is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. The Bush administration instead favors a voluntary approach - each country deciding how it can contribute - over internationally negotiated and legally binding commitments.

For years, the rest of the world has sought to bring the Americans into the framework of international mandates. At this point, however, many seem resigned to waiting for a change in White House leadership after next November’s U.S. election.

In a series of landmark reports this year, the U.N.’s network of climate scientists warned of severe consequences - from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction and other effects - without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.

To avoid the worst, the Nobel Prize-winning panel said, emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The Kyoto Protocol nations have accepted that goal, and the numbers were written into this conference’s draft final decision - not as a binding target, but as a suggestion in the document’s preamble.

The text also calls for “comparability of efforts” - that is, U.S. cuts comparable to those of other industrial nations. The U.S. delegation immediately opposed any inclusion of such numbers, complaining they would tend to “drive the negotiations in one direction,” as U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson put it.

In a counter-move, the Americans early Friday submitted amendments that would introduce the idea of voluntary cutback programs. Environmentalists accused the U.S. of trying to wreck future talks.

“The United States in particular is behaving like passengers in first class in a jumbo jet, thinking a catastrophe in economy class won’t affect them,” said Tony Juniper, a spokesman for the environmentalist coalition here. “The reality is very different. If we go down, we go down together, and the United States needs to realize that very quickly.”

The European Union stuck to its position, and threatened to withdraw from separate U.S.-led climate talks if Bali didn’t endorse the numbers, which advocates dubbed a “destination” for the “Bali roadmap.”

“I wouldn’t know what we should talk about if there is no target,” Germany’s environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said Thursday.

On Friday morning, the German said the Americans were being constructive on some issues in the latest meetings, but Russia was now arguing against the target range. Russia, Japan and Canada have often sided with Washington at these talks.

Gabriel was referring to U.S.-initiated talks, opened by U.S. President George W. Bush in September, at which Washington is seeking pledges from 16 other nations - responsible for 80 percent of global emissions - to curtail greenhouse gases according to each country’s formula.

The Europeans and others showed little enthusiasm for this “voluntary” approach, and environmentalists denounced it as an effort to subvert the U.N. climate treaty process.

The draft final document also calls for developing countries to take new steps toward restraining growth in their emissions. The exemption of such fast-growing economies as China’s and India’s from the Kyoto pact was a major U.S. complaint.

In the closed backroom talks here, the Europeans were said to be pressuring China to accept language pointing toward further nonbinding commitments. Such actions by China, Brazil and others would be key to winning broad acceptance of deeper cuts among richer nations.

BALI, Friday, AFP