[Update 16 Nov 2009:
APEC leaders kill Copenhagen treaty hopes]
Fading hopes for the Copenhagen climate conference will be reinvigorated by the news that Barack Obama may arrive to inject himself personally into the talks in the latter stages. The US President says he is prepared to attend to help reach a global deal on new climate treaty if enough progress has been made in the first stages of the two-week meeting.
Obama’s conditional commitment comes on the back of a UN announcement that 40 heads of state and government have indicated to Danish organisers they would attend. The presence in Copenhagen of the leaders of key nations from the developed and rapidly-industrialising world is perhaps the only chance left for the conference to deliver the outcome set for it under the Bali Roadmap two years ago – a successor agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, which runs out at the end of 2012.
Negotiations under the UN climate convention and at various high-level forums in that time have made very little progress on the key sticking points holding back a new agreement. The last round of UN talks before Copenhagen ended in Barcelona on the weekend. The result was broadly the same as the previous eight meetings since Bali – scant progress on the nuts and bolts of a new treaty text and no movement on the big questions. Despite the best efforts of negotiators to work towards a deal, they are simply not given the scope for making substantive progress by their governments.
It’s clear that the movement needed from big-emitter nations to bridge the gaps on medium-term emissions targets and climate financing for poorer countries in order to secure a new agreement requires a significant circuit-breaker. Positions are so entrenched that heads of government meeting together are the only hope of a breakthrough. In recognition of this, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown last month
sent out a call for leaders to make the trip to the Danish capital in December. But key to any breakthrough will be the United States and the role of Obama.
"If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over edge then certainly that's something that I will do," Obama told Reuters yesterday.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on Friday he couldn’t name the 40 leaders who had signaled their attendance. However, Gordon Brown, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Lula Inacio da Silva have already said they would be there while Germany’s Angela Merkel has now said she will go. That leaves Hu Jintao of China and India’s Manmohan Singh as the other critical players required.
The US’s position on climate action lies largely in Congress’s hands currently, and slow progress on the development of legislation that would cap carbon emissions and institute emissions trading means Obama’s hands are somewhat tied. It is clear now that a final bill won’t be voted on before Copenhagen. That leaves the Nobel Peace Prize winner with a major challenge in bridging the big divide between international expectation and domestic inflexibility.
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