Bonn Negotiations Yield Minimal Progress
Representatives of 150 governments meeting in Bonn from February
25 to March 7 to begin drafting a text for a future international
agreement on global warming, agreed to a "broad outline for
further talks." They did not agree, however, on any specific
targets or timetables for industrial nations to reduce greenhouse
gases.
This round of talks is part of the process begun at the Earth
Summit in Rio five years ago with the approval of a framework
convention on climate change. Action since then has been disappointing
with very few countries showing a decline in greenhouse gas emissions
and with continued use of energy in an unsustainable fashion.
The negotiating text produced in Bonn combined a range of proposals
but few particulars on what gases should be reduced, by how much
and according to what timetable. A final paper is to be circulated
by June 1 and talks will reconvene in late July and again in late
October, in preparation for a third conference of the parties
to the framework convention in Kyoto from December 1 to 12. The
chairman of the group, Raul Estrada-Oyuela of Argentina, has stated
he is confident that a pact with targets and timetables will be
reached by the time of the Kyoto meeting. He has said that any
targets for reduced emissions which the delegates adopt would
have to be binding. Only Australia has opposed the setting of
binding targets.
Despite differences among members, the European Union managed
to break a deadlock and agree on a goal: to cut emissions on a
"basket" of greenhouse gases - CO2, methane and nitrous
oxide - by 15 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. (Originally the
goal had been a reduction of 20 percent by the year 2005, a figure
which seems improbably unattainable at this point.) Commitments
by EU members varied from a 30 percent reduction by Luxenbourg
to a 40 percent increase by Portugal.
The proposal presented by the US at Bonn emphasized a high degree
of flexibility:
-
each country would meet the treaty requirements in its own
way
-
each could meet the cap by reducing other greenhouse emissions,
such as methane, nitrous oxides and halocarbons
-
the targets could be for groups of years rather than a single
year (This would avoid the difficulty of weather or business
cycles causing spikes in emissions.)
-
while there would be a cap on emissions in each time period,
countries would be allowed to "borrow" from the
next period, but would have to pay back in "interest,"
reducing the allowed emissions in the next period by an even
greater amount
-
an international system for banking and trading emission
allowances could be set up
-
requirements for developing countries would be stronger than
any other proposals so far. They would have to take "no
regrets": actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
and would have to accept increasing responsibility for controlling
their emissions as they became industrialized. The developing
countries have said they will not make any commitments to
reducing targets even though they will be responsible for
70 percent of CO2 emissions by the year 2025.
The White House has set up a Climate Change Task Force to coordinate
and win support for its position. It will try to get information
for economic modeling which will be the foundation of its protocol.
The US proposal has run into a barrage of criticism: for being
too weak and evading its responsibilities, for succumbing to pressure
from the energy industry, for being too complicated, for not setting
concrete targets and timetables, and for being too slow (poor
nations may face devastating natural disasters caused by global
warming if industrial nations don't act faster to reduce emissions).
Global warming skeptics fault it for not examining existing climate
commitments before pushing for stronger measures. Labor leaders
in the US are opposed to the agreement because they feel if industries
accept emission limits, they might trim the output of US plants
and shift it to countries not operating under caps, diminishing
US jobs. They feel countries such as China and Brazil should not
be excused from setting limits.
The AFL-CIO Executive Committee called upon the US to renegotiate
the Berlin Mandate to ensure that any agreements signed at Kyoto
apply to developing countries as well as industrialized ones.
Richard Gephardt, House Democratic Leader, and John Dingell, ranking
Democrat of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have expressed
similar views. The 1995 Berlin Mandate exempted developing countries
from additional commitments, and few seem likely to give up this
immunity.
An emissions protocol with legally binding targets would be construed
as a new treaty and would require ratification by two thirds of
the US Senate. Prospects of such action seem distinctly uphill
at this point, even if modeled after the Clinton administration
position.
The likelihood of a protocol without participation of the world's
leading producer of greenhouse emissions has caused some to look
for alternatives that might still ensure North-South cooperation
in limiting emissions.
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