US President Barack Obama will take a 2020 emissions reduction target “in the range of 17 per cent below 2005 levels” to next month’s UN climate conference, the White House has announced. It also confirmed that Obama will go to Copenhagen in the early days of talks to help the push for a global climate agreement.
In a statement outlining the target, the White House added that it remained subject to Congress’s final position in energy and climate legislation currently under development. Slow progress of climate legislation in the Senate has prevented the Obama administration from being able to make a firm commitment on cutting emissions, at the heart of stalemate in global climate talks.
The target is in keeping with the range of targets in play in Congress cap and trade bills debated this year. The Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the House of Representatives in June, legislated for a 17 per cent cut below 2005, while the leading draft bill in the Senate currently calls for a 20 per cent cut. This range, however, remains well below the range demanded of all developed countries by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the developing world.
That range is 25 to 40 per cent cuts below 1990 levels. Obama’s 17 per cent is against 2005 levels and equivalent to just 3.5 per cent below 1990 levels.
But the US announcement does bring an end to a decade-long wait for the world’s biggest economy, and for most of that time the largest greenhouse emitter nation, to re-commit to the international framework on climate action and put numbers on the table for carbon emissions reductions. After signing the Kyoto Protocol under the Clinton administration, the accord was never submitted to Congress for ratification and was then rejected outright by the Bush administration.
But the question now is whether or not the US target range is enough to break the deadlock in global climate negotiations that has existed ever since and drive a meaningful agreement on an extension or replacement of Kyoto to cover a new commitment period from 2013 to 2020.
Hosts Denmark say there are now 75 national leaders planning to attend the conference, although most will arrive in the final week days after Obama has left for Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize with no announced plans to return. But his return can’t be ruled out. The White House has previously said the president would be willing to go in the final days if it might help push an agreement across the line.
Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has proposed that negotiators aim for a political agreement in Copenhagen and leave the detail required for a legally binding treaty to be finalised in 2010. President Obama has since met the other key player in a climate deal, Chinese President Hu Jintao, and expressed a desire to see a comprehensive agreement struck in December with “mmediate operational effect”.
Reuters, Bloomberg 25/11/09
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