Less Rigid New Climate Deal May Draw Big Emitters
Date: 24-Sep-07
Country: NORWAY
Author: Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
About 80 world leaders will meet at the United Nations on
Monday and major emitters will meet in Washington on Sept. 27-28
to discuss a successor to Kyoto, hailed by backers as a key step
to slow warming but reviled by opponents as a straitjacket.
"The Kyoto world is a world of countries with binding
targets, and other countries without. Perhaps we need more
flexibility, more options," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN
Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters.
Kyoto obliges 36 industrial nations to cut emissions of
greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by at least
5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United Nations wants
details of a new global accord worked out by the end of 2009.
Ideas include paying developing nations credits to slow
deforestation, sharing clean technology such as windmills and
solar power and boosting funds to help them adapt to impacts
such as floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels.
De Boer said that a cornerstone, as in Kyoto, should be
legally binding cuts for industrialised nations to offset
warming and to help drive markets for trading carbon dioxide,
the main greenhouse gas.
Such a policy has so far been rejected by US President
George W. Bush, who says the Kyoto model is unfair because it
does not set 2012 targets for developing nations and would cost
US jobs. Bush has preferred voluntary goals.
"The politics, economics and complexity of the climate issue
are ... probably the most difficult negotiation that the United
Nations would see," said Timothy Wirth, President of the UN
foundation and a US climate negotiator in the 1990s.
BHUTAN TO US
A key problem is how to share out the burden of a global
pact between countries such as Bhutan, where trees soak up more
carbon than its people emit, and rich nations such as the United
States where each person emits more than 20 tonnes a year.
Rich nations have emitted most greenhouse gases since the
Industrial Revolution but the poor are catching up. China,
drawing level with the United Sates as the top emitter, is
opening a coal-fired power plant almost twice a week.
The Club of Madrid, a think-tank grouping former world
leaders, proposed last week that developed nations should cut
emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and rapidly
industrialising nations should cut the amount of energy they use
per dollar of economic output by 30 percent by 2020.
But there are many problems. Kyoto member Croatia, for
instance, is poorer per capita than several countries with no
targets such as South Korea, Argentina, Kuwait and Singapore.
Kyoto's successor could be widened in other ways. "Perhaps
we will be wanting to bring more sources of emissions into a
future agreement," de Boer said, noting that international
aviation and shipping were outside Kyoto.
There will also have to be safeguards to prevent industries
such as steel or aluminium from moving to nations with easier
targets. "If you impose very severe restrictions on them in
countries which have targets it's very easy to get leakage to
other countries that are not imposing targets," de Boer said.
Others say the Kyoto model should be abandoned. Denmark's
Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", said
that Kyoto would cost US$180 billion a year for little effect.
The world should instead spend 0.05 percent of gross
domestic product on developing non-carbon emitting energy
sources, raising spending tenfold to US$25 billion a year, he
said.
"It will be much more politically doable, will have enormous
potential spinoffs and ultimately do much more good than both
Kyoto I and Kyoto II," he said.