Delegates split over greenhouse gas guidelines

Climate change delegates from Europe and America went head-to-head today over whether to include guidelines for greenhouse gas emissions in the plan for a new international agreement.

The Europeans and environmentalists insisted targets were vital but they were opposed by the US and others at the UN conference in Bali.

Delegates from 190 nations have been trying to agree a “roadmap” for negotiations for a pact to succeed the Kyoto deal when it expires in 2012.

But countries rich and poor, from starkly different political and social histories, have struggled with the wording for the text.

In one of the first concrete results of the talks, negotiators agreed on the structure of a fund to help developing countries build seawalls and take other steps to adapt to the effects of climate change.

A draft of the final document says there is a widely accepted view that reductions of 25 per cent to 40 per cent in industrialised nations’ overall emissions would be required by 2020, calling for even deeper cuts later.

The US is resisting its inclusion. But Stavros Dimas, European commissioner for environment, said it was crucial to preventing global temperatures from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

“We need this range of reductions by developed countries,” he told said today. “Science tells us that these reductions are necessary. Logic requires that we listen to science.”

The European Union has committed itself to 20 per cent to 30 per cent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020.

Chief US negotiator Harlan Watson has argued against including the targets, saying it would be premature to set goals at the opening of what is expected to be at least two years of negotiation toward a post-Kyoto agreement.

The US is expected to win , since Bali’s decisions require consensus, and the final “Bali roadmap” is expected to be what has been long anticipated, a vague, broad mandate for two years of negotiations on Kyoto’s successor.

Australia, despite its sudden embrace of the Kyoto pact, has shied away from supporting the interim target range, saying it must await the conclusion of a study sometime next year.

“We recognise the need for an interim target,” said Penny Wong, Australia’s minister for climate change. “We have a clear process of scientific and economic analysis to determine what that interim target should be.”

Canada and Japan also oppose inclusion of the suggested figures.

Environmentalists urged them to reconsider.

“This is not the direction we need to be going in. The stakes are too high for this kind of political game,” said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The struggle over targets coincided with the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Kyoto accord on December 11, 1997, in Japan.

The Kyoto pact requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for global warming by an average five per cent below 1990 levels in the next five years.

The US is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto.

President George Bush contended the emissions cuts would harm the American economy, and should have been imposed on China, India and other fast-growing poorer economies.

The rest of the world hopes to enlist the United States in the post-Kyoto phase of internationally binding greenhouse-gas reductions.

Many are hoping Australia, following its decision to sign Kyoto, will play a leading role.