The United States and many other major pollutant-emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced.
Instead, representatives at the Copenhagen meeting are likely to announce a number of interim steps and agree to keep talking next year.
“There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who leads the
Negotiators have accepted as all but inevitable that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks will not resolve the outstanding issues in the time remaining before the Copenhagen conference opens in December. The gulf between rich and poor nations, and even among the wealthiest nations, is just too wide.Continue reading the main story
Representatives of the 16 largest emitting countries and the
They also said they had settled some questions on the “
Yet expectations remain high for a meeting that carries important weight not just for the environment but for a broad range of international issues, including trade, security, economic development, energy production, technology sharing and the survival of some vulnerable island nations.
So officials are now narrowing expectations and defining the areas where there is agreement, such as the need to halt and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, although how and by which nations remain the subjects of intense dispute. Negotiators are also discussing what form any declaration that emerges from Copenhagen might take and how to ensure that any promises made there are kept.
Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen is Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the
The chief American climate negotiator, Todd Stern, has said that he will not go beyond what Congress is willing to endorse. His deputy, Jonathan Pershing, affirmed this last week at a negotiators’ meeting in
Administration officials and Congressional leaders have said that final legislative action on a climate bill would not occur before the first half of next year.
European officials have been pressing hardest for some form of binding treaty modeled on the
American officials have said that no agreement in Copenhagen is better than a bad deal that cannot be ratified or enforced. And they note that it took four years after the initial negotiation of the Kyoto accord to complete it.
There is general agreement among international negotiators and knowledgeable observers that the parties to the Copenhagen talks, held under the auspices of the
The rest of the outcome, even the form it may take, remains uncertain. The world’s biggest economies agreed at a meeting last summer in L’Aquila,
Also likely to be included is a statement that wealthy nations should cut their emissions below certain benchmarks and that emerging economies should reduce their rate of emissions growth below a business-as-usual curve. No numbers were attached to either of these pledges, and that remains the stickiest of issues.
Another unresolved issue is the financial structure of any international climate accord. The wealthy nations have agreed in principle to support low-carbon growth in the developing world and to help those countries hardest hit by climate change to adapt. But the amounts of money, the programs and the countries that would qualify for that support and for cost-sharing among donor nations are highly contentious issues unlikely to be settled in Copenhagen.
There will probably also be a promise to create an international system to monitor, report and verify emissions reductions, although there is no consensus yet on who would perform these tasks and what penalties would be assessed for failure to comply.
There is also likely to be a commitment by most nations to produce and publish economic growth plans based on lower carbon emissions and an agreement by advanced nations to share clean new energy technology with developing countries.
“The most likely form any agreement will take will be a political declaration,” said Nigel Purvis, a former State Department climate negotiator in the administrations of
“It could be a statement by senior leaders, or it could be adopted by the parties as a formal decision,” he said. “That does not make it legally binding, but it sends a signal to the world of the direction the negotiations are going and give guidance to negotiators as they continue their work.”Continue reading the main story