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Climate Plan Reached After Change in US Position

Climate Plan Reached After Change in US Position

Dec-15-07 12:27 pm

The UN conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia reached agreement on a process timetable after a shift in US policy under the Bush administration. Today's New York Times reports that after a tense final session upon which the roadmap was agreed, change in the US position was represented by the US easing its request for binding targets. What will eventually test the Bali agreement is both equal committment and implementation on the parts of developed and developing countries. The following excerpt explains in greater detail this significant milestone in international cooperation over climate change:

In a tumultuous final session at international climate talks in which the United States delegates were booed and hissed, the world’s nations committed Saturday 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 dramatic finish to the negotiations came after a last-minute standoff during a day of see-saw emotions, with the co-organizer of the conference, Yvo de Boer, fleeing the podium at one point as he held back tears and the representative from Papua New Guinea telling the American delegation to lead, follow or “please get out of the way.”

The standoff started when developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact not only measure poorer countries’ steps, but also the effectiveness of financial aid and technological assistance from wealthier ones.

The United States did capitulate in that open session, which many observers and delegates said included more public acrimony and emotion than any of the treaty conferences since 1992, when countries drafted the ailing original climate pact, the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In a broader sense, the closing session of the two-week negotiation here was the culmination of a profound shift over the course of months by the Bush administration from insisting that the 1992 treaty, signed by President Bush’s father, was sufficient on its own to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate.

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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 next two years of talks.

Those targets remain in the agreement — including a possible cut in rich countries’ emissions of up to 40 percent by 2020 and overall emissions cut in half 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 overall from its most staunchly defended goal, which was that it would only agree to a comprehensive new accord that maintained flexibility, allowing nations to agree on a rough goal for global emissions, but using any mix of means at the national level to get there.

Post by: Brendan P. Geary

Tags: climate change United Nations environmental law

About the editor:

Anthony Clark Arend

Professor

Commentary and analysis at the intersection of international law and politics.

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» Learn more about the M.A. in International Law and Government at Georgetown University.

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