At Poznań, Where Does the U.S. Stand?
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which kicked off Monday, is the fourteenth meeting of the Parties to the Convention. Additionally, the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol agreed that they would have an effective response to climate change by the next time they meet in Copenhagen at the end of next year.
Who is in attendance? Governments, research institutions, environmental organizations and industry groups. Industrial countries and developing countries alike are going to have to make trade-offs, unless – as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in his opening remarks – we want the slow rise in temperatures to cause irreversible changes that destroy our ecosystem.
Already, Yu Qingtai, China’s special representative for climate change talks, has told Reuters that he is not optimistic about negotiations to seek a global treaty on climate change. Yu says the climate pact could fail because rich countries are failing to deliver on promises of technological and financial assistance to poorer countries. China and the developing countries want rich, industrial nations to pay for the technology and technical assistance to help them develop sustainably.
However, industrial nations won’t play unless China and India promise to make concessions in the speed and type of their development plans.
Once again, the U.S. could be an important arbiter in the process, although it is not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. President-elect Obama has committed himself to preventing climate change, telling voters that he recognizes global warming as real and dangerous.
Obama has pledged to reduce U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and then a further 80 percent by 2050. To do that with the smallest economic impact, Obama favors a cap-and-trade program.
In the next few days, the participating parties will review a distillation of proposals each country has made for an agreement. The summary is 82 pages long, and will be broken down further until it becomes a series of points that can be negotiated before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009.
