E3G

Christian Science Monitor: Building trust tops global climate agenda

By Jennifer Morgan

To stand a chance of meeting that goal, industrial nations would need to reduce emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80 to 95 percent by 2050, according to the IPCC. Developing countries would have to “deviate substantially” from business as usual. The authors of that IPCC estimate now say that rising emissions and glacial politics “make it almost unfeasible to reach relatively low global emission levels in 2020.”

Meanwhile, the financial crisis in the US – the worst since the Great Depression – has gone global, raising anew the issue of costs of emissions reductions. An IPCC analysis, released Friday, estimates that the cost of cutting global emissions by 25 percent by 2030 is growing. Last year’s estimate put the figure at about $200 billion a year. Friday’s update increased the estimated cost by 170 percent.

During a press conference in Warsaw last week, Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC’s executive secretary, acknowledged that the financial crisis “will throw a shadow over the climate-change negotiations.”

Several climate-policy specialists in the US and Europe note that the election of Barack Obama, along with leadership changes on key congressional committees, may brighten prospects for a new climate pact. Negotiations are expected to begin in earnest in Bonn in March, after the front-door keys to the White House have changed hands. Mr. Obama has argued that the financial crisis marks an opportunity to restructure the economy to emphasize energy efficiency and green technologies.

Yet many remain cautious.

We’ve heard good rhetoric in the past, during the Clinton-Gore administration,” says Jennifer Morgan, climate-change program director for E3G, an environmental think tank and advocacy group in London. “But they didn’t do much.”

A diplomat who keeps close tabs on developing-country delegations sees Obama’s recent pledge to reduce US greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by an additional 80 percent by 2050 as an example of politics as usual. “That’s Obama kicking the can down the road and leaving the leadership for the next president,” he says. The Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions among industrial countries to fall an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, he notes.