ALTHOUGH THEIR speeches were lacking in specifics, both presidents Barack Obama and China’s Hu Jintao yesterday managed to inject some badly needed hope and political will into the tortuously slow climate change negotiations that are supposed to culminate in Copenhagen in December.
Yesterday’s UN special summit in New York heard Mr Hu for the first time pledge significant curbs on China’s emissions in the next decade, while Mr Obama renewed his country’s moral commitment to a successor agreement to the Kyoto climate change agreement. But on a key issue of difference with the EU, the scale of resources the rich will have to provide to the developing world to assist with climate change, he acknowledged a US obligation but failed to quantify it. Europe wants rich countries among the G20 to commit some $10 billion annually for the developing world as an advance payment towards reaching a climate deal this year.
Although the politics of Copenhagen have been radically transformed by Mr Obama’s election and commitment to international agreement on greenhouse gas emission curbs, he is hamstrung by the requirement that Congress endorse his negotiating mandate. Progress in this regard in the House of Representatives has not been matched in a Senate preoccupied with healthcare reform and its majority leader Harry Reid said last week that such legislation might not be acted on until next year. The EU’s ambassador to the US, John Bruton, has complained that: “Sometimes in this country the greatest deliberative body in the world acts as though it is the only deliberative body in the world and that we should wait until it gets its healthcare passed . . . The world cannot wait on the Senate’s timetable”.
European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso warns that talks are “dangerously close to deadlock” and French president Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday called for a new November summit to help the process. But there will also have been a broad welcome for Mr Hu’s pledge that China would vigorously develop renewable and nuclear energy and that emissions would grow slower than economic growth. “We will endeavour,” he said, “to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020 from the 2005 level.” By how much, he did not say.
China’s move and strong hints from India that it is also willing to embrace mitigation measures represent significant signs of engagement by the countries who, with the rest of the developing world, will produce two thirds of world emissions by 2020 and whose absence from the Kyoto process has been a serious impediment to agreement. In the US in particular, Congress has been adamant that it will not countenance a deal without them. Although not a cap on emissions, a “carbon intensity” or efficiency target would allow Beijing to argue its way out of legally binding targets for cuts in emissions at Copenhagen in December while insisting that it is making a contribution to global efforts. That should allow others to edge closer to a possible agreement.