Climate talks survive US hassles

More than 150 nations agreed on Dec. 10 to launch formal talks on post-2012 mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases at the UN conference on climate change in Montreal. A last minute capitulation by the US to participate in future climate change discussions on a non-Kyoto track led to the final agreement. "This has been one of the most productive UN climate change conferences ever," said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. "This plan sets the course for future action on climate change." "The environmental community is very pleased with the outcome," agreed Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental NGO. "Getting the US to agree to something opened the door for some countries to sign on to formal post-Kyoto talks." Canada played a key role by being determined to get an agreement, he said. The US is responsible for 25 percent of the global emissions of greenhouse gases and many countries feel that climate change cannot be tackled without its active participation. However, during the two week-long climate meeting in Montreal, the US delegation under the George W. Bush administration was defiant in its unwillingness to agree to any future discussion on climate change. At one point, the US delegation walked out of negotiations that would have only committed the US to future talks about emission reductions. "Countries bent over backwards to accommodate the US but they just spit in their faces," said Steve Sawyer, climate policy adviser for Greenpeace International. On Dec. 9, the final day of negotiations, countries were resolved to proceed without the US, Sawyer said. A surprise speech by former President Bill Clinton in Montreal on that day may have played a role in the US turnabout. The US could "meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, [its] economy" with the full application of existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies, Clinton said in his talk. "There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities," he said. There were also large US delegations, including mayors from 190 cities, US senators, and leading business groups in Montreal. All of these groups advocate strong international action on climate change, and most have already taken steps to make reductions at the local and state levels. It was abundantly clear that the US delegation was not only out of step with the international community, it was at odds with the US public and industry. "Unlike most countries, the US delegation was entirely made of bureaucrats. There is no way to apply public pressure," said Robert Bradley of the World Resources Institute. "Something shifted the US delegation, although to be clear, the eventual last-minute agreement is relatively minor," said Bradley. The Montreal meetings comprised two tracks: the first Meeting of the Parties under the Kyoto Protocol and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC gave birth to the Kyoto agreement in 1997 and the US remains a full participant in the UNFCCC. The Bush administration pulled the US out of the Kyoto treaty in 2001. That treaty is in force between 2008 and 2012 and commits participating developed nations to reductions in greenhouse gases to an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels. In the final Montreal combined session, the 150-odd countries involved in Kyoto agreed to begin formal talks next spring on a new post-2012 treaty. But before that happened, the 190 countries involved in the UNFCCC, including the US, agreed to have further discussions, i.e. "a series of workshops to develop the broad range of actions needed to respond to the climate change challenge." Another very important outcome of the Montreal meeting is the official adoption of a detailed Kyoto manual and rulebook–the so-called "Marrakesh accords." "That 'rulebook' took years of negotiations and is a major achievement," said Bramley. The next rounds of climate change discussions will have to consider how countries can achieve very deep emissions cuts on the order of 20 to 25 percent, he said. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's eminent climatologist James Hansen told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco last week that the world likely has just 10 years to make large cuts in emissions to avoid the very worst of impacts of climate change. "Although it might not look like it, the world made a critical step forward here [in Montreal] towards deep cuts," Bramley said.