POZNAN, Poland, Dec 5, 2008 (AFP) - Developing countries most at risk from climate change expressed frustration halfway through a two-week U.N. climate conference that rich countries had not made stronger commitments on cutting greenhouse gases.
More than 10,000 delegates from 192 nations are gathered in Poznan, Poland, to draft a new international climate change treaty, slated for completion by December next year.
The global economic crisis has made already delicate negotiations more difficult.
Many developed nations have shown signs of wavering on earlier promises to slash carbon emissions.
Developing and poorer nations -- including major carbon polluters such as China and India -- say the industrialized world should lead by example, and must help them pay for clean-energy technology and the inevitable impacts of global warming.
The Poznan meeting aims to lay the groundwork for a "shared vision" on how to broaden the fight against climate change after the first round of rich-nation commitments under the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.
But the debate so far looks more like trench warfare, say delegates and observers, and is reminiscent of the old north-south divide that once animated debate over international relations.
"Developing countries have expressed their frustration regarding the still low ambitions of the industrialized countries," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
"They would have preferred that rich nations show the way," said the normally upbeat de Boer, whose role is something akin to a conductor trying to get musicians to play off the same score.
To keep the impacts of global warming manageable, highly industrialized nations -- especially the United States, Japan, and the E.U. -- should cut their own greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent before 2020, compared to 1990 levels, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a report last year.
"On Thursday, China called -- quite forcefully -- for a firm commitment right here in Poznan on a range (of emissions reductions) for 2020, even before (U.S. president-elect Barack) Obama takes office" on January 20, said one European observer.
"This kind of aggressive attitude will not be acceptable for the United States, which has always insisted that commitments by industrialized countries must be accompanied by significant efforts from developing ones," he said.
At the UNFCCC talks in Bali last December, developing economies that are also major carbon polluters were invited to slash emissions in a "significant"
manner.
The IPCC has suggested how that might translate into hard numbers: slowing
CO2 output by 15 to 30 percent by 2020.
"It's not a demand so far," Artur Runge Metzger, a representative of the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive body, said Monday.
But the European Union did manage to annoy a large number of developing countries in Poznan this week by asking the IPCC to explain its calculations.
The E.U., meanwhile, is struggling to pass the action plan that would allow it to meet its own goal of cutting emissions by 20 percent before 2020.
Some members -- notably Italy and Poland -- are balking at the measures, and major industries have threatened to relocate.
"We don't see the same political leadership we saw last year," said Hans Verolme, a consultant for Climate Action Network, a U.S.-based environmental group. "The E.U. is often simply absent."
For Pierre Radanne, a member of the French delegation and a veteran of climate negotiations going back to 1992, the anger of developing countries is "on the whole legitimate."
"After all, they have seen almost nothing since the beginning -- industrialized countries made commitments (in Kyoto), but more than half of them have not kept them," he told AFP.
Nor has it gone unnoticed that rich nations that had been reluctant to invest in the developing nations' fight against climate change suddenly coughed up hundreds of billions to save their own banks, he said.
The problem, he added, is that now those investments truly are harder to come by.
Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse
For Richer or ... Nah, Just For Richer
Old-style ‘North-South’ rift opens at U.N. climate talks 6
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Posted 12:52 PM on 5 Dec 2008
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:29 am
05 Dec 2008
The US could make the world cut its CO2 instantly...with a simple tariff on imported goods that produce a lot of CO2 to manufacture.
Put a tax on anything made at a Chinese factory that pollutes...it will:
Add revenue to the US
Punish Co2 emitters
Level the playing field for domestic/local US producers
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mwildfire Posted 12:14 am
06 Dec 2008
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horvathjm Posted 3:28 am
06 Dec 2008
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guade00 Posted 6:16 am
06 Dec 2008
First, we must insist on environmental protection in general and limiting carbon emissions in specific in any WTO-inspired conversations. Of course, that has to be done in tandem with UNFCCC negotiations. You see the complexity.
And the post by "mwildfire" is certainly novel in its revisionism. The rest of the world is now balking at American climate change leadership? And Africa now is a creditor continent and, along with the Yellow Peril, has all the money? Am I just missing the air of sarcasm here?
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georgia Posted 2:42 am
08 Dec 2008
What we don't need is to be wasting limited resources on reducing or taxing CO2 emissions. There is simply no evidence that there is any connection between CO2 and global temperatures. ZERO. There is only a theory (greenhouse effect), which bears little resemblance to how our atmosphere functions. For a greenhouse to actually represent the earth's atmosphere, it would have to have great big holes in its roof and have large fans and sinklers that go on and off. Conversely, more CO2 in the atomosphere will increase crop yields and increase biomass.
The only thing that controling carbon does is give more power to governments, financial gains to bogus carbon offset companies, and invests our resources in unproductive technologies such as ethanol and windmills.
Feasible additional energy sources will arise if politicians and environmental groups would get out of the way and stop pretending that they know what will work. We have possible new sources in algae, wave propogation, and magnetics to name a few.
So can we get back to focusing on real environmental problems?
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Des Emery Posted 6:54 am
09 Dec 2008
The bad news is that very minor changes in the amounts of CO2,250 parts per million, are related to major interglacial periods. This is much less than the 450 parts per million which scientists have predicted to be the tipping point.
As an aside, is Georgia related to jabailo? Certainly seems to share his pov.
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