Global Climate Talks Divided on Emissions Targets
	Dec 12, 2007	New York Times
	By THOMAS FULLER This article was reported by Thomas Fuller, Peter Gelling, and Andrew C. Revkin, and was written by Mr. Fuller. NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Dec. 11 — As a United Nations conference on global warming here entered its final stretch, the United States and the European Union remained deadlocked today on whether countries should commit now to including specific cuts in climate-warming emissions in a new climate pact that will not be fully negotiated for at least two more years. Officials from the United Nations, backed by the European Union and many developing countries, have offered a draft “road map” for talks over the next two years that includes a commitment by industrialized countries to cut such emissions 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020. This year’s studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that centuries of warming, rising seas, and species extinctions would likely result without sharp curbs in emissions. “Logic requires that we listen to the science,” Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s environment commissioner, said today. “I would expect others to follow that logic.” The Bush administration opposes including hard targets at this stage in the talks. Other countries, including Canada, are beginning to side with the United States on the need for any new climate agreements to include meaningful steps by fast-growing countries like China and India. And calls for concrete limits have consistently been refused by those nations. “We don’t think it’s prudent or reasonable to start off with some set of numbers,” Harlan Watson, the United States’ chief negotiator on climate change, said here on Monday. “That’s what the negotiations are going to be for.” The meeting in Bali is part of a set of negotiations over ways to invigorate a faltering 1992 treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to replace the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 addendum that requires three dozen industrialized countries to cut emissions below 1990 levels by 2012. That agreement is also in trouble, with many adherents failing to stay on track toward achieving cuts. The dispute over targets symbolizes the growing cleavage between the Bush administration and most other developed countries represented here, which say the numerical targets are necessary to add urgency and structure to future negotiations. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, urged delegates today to act quickly. “The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial and human costs would increase dramatically,” he said. Countries had a choice between a comprehensive climate change agreement or “oblivion,” he said. The main purpose of the two-week meeting, which runs through Friday, is to establish a game plan for negotiating a global agreement to address the warming of the planet. Delegates from 190 countries are taking part. There appears to be broad consensus that 2009 will be chosen as the deadline for the talks, but many disagreements remain over such issues as whether cuts in emissions should be mandatory or whether China, which has just passed the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and is adding a new coal-fired power plant each week, should be obligated to make similar cuts in emissions as developed countries. Delegates say negotiators are calculating that if they fail to overcome United States resistance to specific emissions cuts at this meeting, they may prevail after President Bush leaves office in 2009. “The image is of a family standing around the bedside of an expiring administration,” said Philip Clapp, deputy managing director of the Pew Environment Group, the conservation arm of the Pew charitable trusts in the United States. Mr. Clapp, who has attended United Nations climate change conferences for the past decade, says he senses a growing willingness by developing countries to “step up to the plate.” “The next 50 years is going to be about decarbonizing the world’s energy economy,” he said. “Developing countries realize that they are going be under increasing pressure during that time to decrease their emissions, too.” But Eileen Claussen, a former Clinton administration official who now works for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change (a different group than Mr. Clapp’s), said it is vital that Bali negotiators not try too hard to nail down hard deadlines and targets. It would take a new president in 2009 months just to assemble a foreign-policy team, let alone meaningfully engage in the climate talks, she said, adding that Congress — including many Democrats — still will be unlikely to support any new treaty unless it meaningfully engages China and other emerging giants, as well as today’s industrialized nations. In the end, she said, an effective treaty update will have to have elements pushed both by Europe and the Bush administration, including substantial initiatives aimed at advancing and spreading non-polluting energy technologies. “Europe thinks if you set targets the technology will come,” she said. “The U.S. view is, give a boost to the technology and you don’t need targets. Both of those are really wrong. You do have to push the technology but you also need something that pulls it into the marketplace.” In the meantime, the Bush administration, in an approach irksome to environmentalists and some European negotiators, is continuing to move ahead with parallel talks over new “aspirational” goals for limiting climate dangers. Representatives from the world’s largest countries, in economic terms, have agreed to meet in Hawaii in late January under that separate process. Mr. Bush has said he plans to forge agreement among these countries on long-term and short-term — but nonbinding — goals for limiting greenhouse gases before leaving office.