Late US reversal yields pact on climate change
Emissions accord to be sought for '09
NUSA DUA, Indonesia - In a tumultuous final session at international climate talks in which the US delegates were booed and hissed at, the world's nations committed yesterday to negotiating a new accord by 2009 that, in theory, would set the world on a course toward halving emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2050.
The finish to the negotiations came after a last-minute standoff during a day of high emotions, with the co-organizer of the conference, Yvo de Boer, fleeing the podium at one point as he held back tears.
The standoff started when developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact measure not only poorer countries' steps, but also the effectiveness of financial and technological help from wealthier ones.
The United States capitulated in that open session, which many observers and delegates said included more public acrimony than any of the treaty conferences since 1992, when countries drafted the original climate pact, the now-ailing Framework Convention on Climate Change.
That change followed a more profound shift by the Bush administration, which agreed during the two-week conference to pursue a new pact fulfilling the unmet goals of the original treaty; the pact would take effect in 2012 when the only existing addendum, the Kyoto Protocol, expires.
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Although many observers described the United States change as a U-turn, it was the culmination of months of movement by the Bush administration, which had for years insisted that the 1992 treaty, signed by the first President George Bush, was sufficient to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate.
While accepting the need for a new agreement, in the end the United States retained the flexibility that it had sought at the outset, fending off European attempts to set binding commitments on emission reductions. US negotiators said this was vital to gain global consensus.
That success, though, was bemoaned by some observers. Professor Andrew Light, a scholar on environmental ethics at the University of Washington who was in Bali, said that by keeping targets out of the two-year negotiating plan, the Bush administration had, in essence, rejected the foreboding climate projections of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"We could have moved on from here with a confident range of future cuts," Light said. "Instead we have to move on with the same continued uncertainty."
The US administration voiced reservations about future talks. Negotiators "must give sufficient emphasis to the important and appropriate role that the larger emitting developing countries should play," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
Somewhat obscured by the focus on the US delegation was another important shift: China, which has now surpassed the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, agreed for the first time to language that could commit developing countries to pursue emissions cuts that are "measurable, reportable, and verifiable."
In May, President Bush signaled the change in his stance most powerfully when he announced his own parallel set of meetings with the countries accounting for 85 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions. In Bali, European delegates threatened to pull out of those talks unless the Bush delegation agreed to keep some semblance of concrete targets in the outline for the talks.
Those targets remain in the agreement - including a possible cut in emissions of up to 40 percent below 1990 levels by rich countries by 2020, and a 50 percent cut in emissions globally by 2050 - but they are now a footnote to the nonbinding preamble, not a main feature of the negotiating "road map."
In all of this, the Bush administration did not, in the end, have to shift substantially from its most staunchly defended goal, which was that a comprehensive new accord would maintain flexibility.
Still, the administration did not win everything it wanted. Other negotiators were looking beyond the current US administration and insisted that the next two years of talks proceed on two tracks. The second would build on the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 update to the original treaty that requires specific emissions reductions in all major industrialized nations, but has been rejected by the United States.
The United States team in Bali had fought against that, demanding that any new agreement encompass all the world's major polluters and have sufficient flexibility, and no hard targets, to do that. But in the end the United States agreed to two tracks to avoid a breakdown of the talks. 