US & Australia to battle allies over global warming

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US & Australia to battle allies over global warming

Reuters
November 27, 2005

Washington will battle with its allies over how to slow climate change beyond 2012 at UN talks in Canada this week that will also test developing nations' willingness to do more to fight global warming.

Up to 10,000 delegates from 189 nations meet in Montreal from November 28-December 9 for the first annual climate talks since the UN's Kyoto Protocol on curbing heat-trapping gases, mainly from human use of fossil fuels, entered into force in February.

Many Kyoto nations want Montreal to launch negotiations, likely to last years, on setting new curbs once Kyoto's goals run out in 2012. Kyoto is a bid to slow climate change that may trigger more hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels.

But the United States and Australia, which have rejected Kyoto as a straitjacket threatening economic growth, do not want to discuss binding commitments.

"I can't see the United States joining international negotiations about what happens after 2012," said Paal Prestrud, head of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

"It's hard to imagine a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol without the United States and Australia," he said.

Any deal excluding the United States and Australia could hand them a competitive advantage because of costs of complying with Kyoto, which seeks a shift from burning coal, oil and gas to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar power.

Montreal will also be a test of how far developing nations such as China and India are willing to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases when wider use of energy -- like supplying electricity for homes or industry -- is key to ending poverty.

NO TIME TO LOSE

Environmentalists say Kyoto backers should go ahead and plan long-term targets to curb emissions, reasoning Washington might sign up after President George W. Bush steps down in 2009.

"It's clear from the mounting evidence of climate change that much deeper cuts in emissions will be needed from 2012," environmental group Greenpeace said. It wants a 2008 deadline for negotiating a successor treaty for after Kyoto.

On one front-line of climate change, about 2,000 people on the Cantaret Islands off Papua New Guinea have decided to move to nearby Bougainville island after a losing battle with rising sea levels that have washed away homes and poisoned fresh water.

And businesses and investors in a new European Union market for trading emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, also urgently want to know what the international rules will be after 2012.

The Montreal talks will involve senior officials with environment ministers attending the last three days. Under Kyoto, about 40 nations have to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

After pulling out of Kyoto in 2001, Bush has stressed investments in new energy technologies like hydrogen or ways to bury carbon dioxide below ground.

"Technology alone is not enough. This has become very clear from the policy that the United States is following," EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas of Greece said last week.

U.S. emissions were 13.3 percent above 1990 levels in 2003, according to UN data. Yet some Kyoto backers -- including Spain, Canada and Greece -- were even further above 1990 levels.

The conference is a parallel meeting of the UN's 189-nation 1992 climate convention which oversees Kyoto, in which Washington and Canberra are full members, and of the 156-nation Kyoto Protocol, where they are mere observers.

Among other tasks, Montreal will try to streamline a Kyoto scheme for green projects in developing nations, like tapping the energy from methane gas released by rubbish dumps in Brazil.

The project, known as the clean development mechanism, has been hit by bottlenecks. "There's a huge amount of interest, but the people supposed to be supervising the process are part-time," said Steve Drummond, managing director at carbon dioxide brokers C02e.


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