WHAT OBAMA’S CLIMATE CHANGE TEAM FACES

Obama team debuts at UN climate talks
Arthur Max, March 29, 2009 (AP via DC Examiner)

"President Barack Obama's climate change team made their international debut Sunday at a major U.N. conference — and delegates were eager to find out whether Obama could translate his aggressive domestic agenda into a worldwide deal to fight global warming…With time running out before the pact is due to be completed in December, delegates are trying [in the two-week meeting of 175 countries] to narrow vast differences over how best to fight climate change.

"Issues include how much countries need to reduce emissions, how to raise the tens of billions of dollars needed annually to fight global warming and how to transfer money and technology to poor countries who are most vulnerable to increasingly fierce storms, droughts and failing crops…"

The EU has firm GhG reduction commitments and is developing stronger goals. (click to enlarge)

"The climate change agreement to be concluded in December in Copenhagen, Denmark, is meant to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012 when it expires.

"The United States was instrumental in negotiating Kyoto, but could not win enough support in Congress…[and the] Bush administration refused to reduce carbon emissions…In an upbeat signal to the 2,000 delegates in Bonn, Obama dispatched his top negotiator, Todd Stern…Everyone is waiting for the new team to clarify its stand on a host of issues, from emission targets to finances.

"Obama announced Saturday he would revive a parallel negotiating forum of the 17 nations that emit more than 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, including India, China, Brazil, Russia, Japan and the European Union…[L]aunched by former President George W. Bush, many of the U.N. delegates viewed it as an attempt to undermine the U.N. process. That view seems to have softened…"

The EU has been working on its ETS, a cap&trade system, since 2005. The U.S. is still talking about it. (click to enlarge)

"Diplomats wonder how flexible the new U.S. negotiating team can be, and whether the U.S. has fallen so far behind that it can't catch up…While the European Union is on target to reduce its carbon emissions by 8 percent from 1990 levels, U.S. emissions have grown at least 16 percent…

"Obama has pledged to return to 1990 levels by 2020. But other countries insist that by that time the industrial world should be 25-40 percent below 1990 to avoid a potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth's average temperature…U.S. negotiator Stern says the administration wants to avoid a repeat of the Kyoto debacle, and its policy will be driven by the political realities…Three more meetings — six weeks of actual negotiations — are scheduled this year."