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Devil is in detail of UN climate change talks
May 31, 2007 on 2:51 pm | In Money |
UNITED Nations’ talks on climate change are at risk of getting bogged down under the weight of hundreds of amendments from governments and China’s objections to a proposed blueprint for battling global warming.
Scientists and government officials from more than 100 countries are meeting in Bangkok to review a 24-page draft summary outlining ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the costs of preventing damaging climate change.
For it to be considered valid by the UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft must be unanimously approved by the 120-plus governments that participate, and all changes must be approved by the scientists.
But, as with two other reports released this year by the UN climate panel, scientists at the gathering are squaring up with the governments, some of which want to change or water down the latest draft report due for release on Friday.
Chinese officials have demanded a last-minute insertion of a paragraph spelling out that industrialised nations are to blame for most of the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
“They want a statement that the cumulative proportion of emissions due to industrial countries is very high - it’s about 75 per cent,” said a delegate, who did not wish to be identified.
“But they do not want a statement that also says that the proportion is declining. In the 1970s, the proportion of cumulative emissions was 90 per cent due to industrialised countries. Now it’s 77 per cent. They don’t want these two numbers reported. They only want one that is favourable to them reported,” he added.
Such a demand breached IPCC procedures and risked opening the way for other countries to request last-minute details to be inserted, potentially stalling the talks, he said.
“The Chinese have a lot of other things they want to do. They want to gut the report of meaning in lots of different ways. So this is just the start of what they are up to,” he said.
Governments had proposed about 1,500 amendments spanning more than 160 pages and many would be discussed during the week in special contact groups, the delegate said. Talks could run well into the night.
The report estimates that stabilising greenhouse gas emissions will cost between 0.2 per cent and 3.0 per cent of world gross domestic product by 2030, depending on the stiffness of curbs on emissions of greenhouse gases. But sections dealing with this could be altered or even taken out, the delegate said.
Another delegate, a veteran of climate negotiations, said the politicking was normal. “It’s exactly the same as one would expect in these things. Basically what happens is there is a whole lot of fiddling around for the first couple of days and then people get down to work.
“This is standard UN practice,” he added.
He described the Chinese move to insert the paragraph as “nothing new” and posturing ahead of Kyoto Protocol talks in Bali in December at which China, India and other big developing nations will come under pressure to cut emissions.
China is now the world’s second biggest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States, and India is fourth.
The United States and Australia have refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, partly over objections that China and India are not held to carbon pollution reduction targets.
Beijing and New Delhi are excluded from Kyoto’s first phase that ends in 2012, setting targets to cut emissions, but Washington is demanding they agree to curbs.
The US says it doesn’t make sense for the giant economies of India and China to remain outside a global emissions pact.
“China doesn’t want to be corralled into commitments that minimise its freedom of action and questioning the science, and digging in is part of that,” said Paul Harris, an expert on climate change politics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “It wants to put off into the future the serious discussion of accepting mandatory limits.”
The Global Times, a newspaper run by China’s Communist Party, accused Western politicians last week of using “climate terrorism” to undermine China’s quest for prosperity.
Tom Van Ireland, a senior EU climate policy expert, said it was crucial to engage China to cap global emissions.
“We don’t ask India, China and Brazil to do the same things we ask from developed countries, which is taking binding targets to reduce their emissions,” he said.
But it was crucial they adopted cleaner and greener technology to cut emissions, he said.
While the report does not mandate action like the Kyoto Protocol, it could influence negotiations over future climate pacts.
Harlan Watson, the head of the American delegation, said in an e-mail that the US goal is to produce a report that is “useful to the policy community” and is “supported by scientific and economic data.” MAIN CONCLUSIONS OF CLIMATE PANEL’S REPORT
EMISSIONS GROWTH: “Without additional climate mitigation and/or appropriate sustainable development policies global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades,” the report says.
A large portion of this increase is projected to come from developing countries.
TOOLS AND RESEARCH: It says GHG levels can be stabilised using “a portfolio of technologies that are commercially available today and those that are expected to be commercialised in coming decades, provided appropriate incentives are in place”.
These included fuel switching, more efficient power plants, nuclear power, renewable energy, more efficient buildings and building materials and lighting, more efficient appliances and improved agricultural practices.
COSTS: The deeper and more rapid the emissions cuts, the more costly to economies.
By 2030, the costs of letting greenhouse gas concentrations rise are 0.2 percent of global gross domestic product.
Greenhouse gas concentrations are now rising sharply. Carbon dioxide accounts for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions, followed by methane and four others covered by international pacts.
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