BALI, Indonesia — In a hushed conference hall, as envoys from 186 nations looked on, the world’s lone superpower took a tongue-lashing from its most powerless, nation after poor nation assailing the U.S. “no” on the document at hand. Then the delegate from Papua New Guinea leaned into his microphone.
“We seek your leadership,” Kevin Conrad told the Americans. “But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.”
The U.N. climate conference exploded with applause, the U.S. delegation backed down, and the way was cleared Saturday for adoption of the “Bali Roadmap,” after a dramatic half-hour that set the stage for a grinding two years of climate talks to come.
“This is the beginning, not the end,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who made a plea here for action, later told The Associated Press. “We will have to engage in more complex, long and difficult negotiations.”
The Bali conference, a contentious two-week affair that lapsed over into an extra day, was charged with launching negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. That pact requires 37 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gases by a relatively modest 5 percent on average in the next five years.
As the “roadmap” talks begin, the focus again will fall on the United States, the lone major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. Many will be looking to next year following the election of a new American president, one that may be more willing to deal on deeper, mandatory emissions cuts than President Bush, who favors only voluntary approaches to reining in greenhouse gases.
What those negotiators decide by 2009 is likely to help set the course of global warming and climate change for decades to come.
In a series of pivotal reports this year, a U.N. network of climate and other scientists, warned of severe consequences — from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction and other effects — without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.
To avoid the worst, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Those numbers, endorsed by the Europeans and other Kyoto-ratifying nations, were written into early versions of this conference’s final decision — as a guideline, not a binding target. The U.S. delegation, led by Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, managed to get the figures expunged.
But it was a separate issue that precipitated the riveting, 11th-hour floor fight.
India sought to amend the document to strengthen requirements for richer nations to help poorer with technology to limit emissions and adapt to climate change’s impacts.
Dobriansky objected. “We are not prepared to accept this formulation,” she said, setting off loud, long boos in the hall.
Next, delegate after delegate took aim at the United States. Dobriansky’s intervention was “most unwelcome and without any basis,” the South African said. “We would like to beg them” to relent, the Ugandan said. Then Conrad delivered his sharp rebuke of U.S. “leadership.”
America’s isolation was complete. No one spoke in support. And Dobriansky capitulated, withdrawing the U.S. objection, to general applause.
She later told reporters the delegation dropped its opposition because it was reassured that developing nations would make a contribution to emissions reductions under the Bali Roadmap.
Hans Verolme, World Wildlife Fund climate campaigner, offered a different interpretation. “We have learned a historical lesson: If you expose to the world the dealings of the United States, they will ultimately back down,” he said.
The Bali Roadmap plan does ask for more from the developing world, calling on negotiators to consider “mitigation actions” — voluntary actions to slow emissions growth — by poorer countries, including such fast-growing economies as China’s and India’s.
Their exemption from the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory caps has long been a key complaint of American opponents of the U.N. climate treaty process.
On industrial nations, the Bali plan instructs negotiators to consider mitigation “commitments,” mandatory caps as in the Kyoto deal. But the lack — at U.S. insistence — of ambitious numerical guidelines troubled many environmentalists.
“The people of the world wanted more. They wanted binding targets,” said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil.
Climate policy analyst Eliot Diringer, of Washington’s Pew center, looked on the positive side.
“It puts no one on the hook right now for emissions reductions,” he said. “What’s important, though, is that it lets no one off the hook either.”
The Bush administration, in its last year, will emphasize its own climate talks. Those so-called “Major Economies” meetings, among a handful of “major emitter” nations, is supposed to produce an array of voluntary emission reduction pledges by mid-2008, but European and other invitees have shown little enthusiasm for the idea.
In the U.S. election campaign, meanwhile, the Democratic candidates, and even some Republicans, have endorsed the Kyoto-style idea of mandatory caps on emissions.
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