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Climate deal prospects dimming
Written by: Dan Smith
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A labourer works at a coking factory in Changzhi, Shanxi province. REUTERS/Stringer
September's UN Climate change summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appears not to have succeeded. It was a good try and could have worked if national leaders had stepped up to accept the challenge. But most of them haven't. The regular conferencing to prepare the Copenhagen summit in December has resumed in Bangkok and the acrimony is at an unprecedented level. Everything suggests we should give up on expecting leadership from the Obama administration on climate for the rest of this year. Following the remark by U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid that the Senate probably won't pass a climate law this year, President Obama's energy adviser Carol Browner has been reported as saying the White House accepts that political reality. So that's that for some solidly grounded leadership from the US in time for Copenhagen. That's not the only problem, however. The acrimony in Bangkok is because the U.S. is charged with pushing for a change in the basic approach to reducing carbon emissions, replacing the current effort to get a legally binding agreement by a series of individual national pledges. The U.S. negotiating team in Bangkok hasn't responded to the charge at the time of writing, so it is not clear if this is really an accurate depiction of the position. But at this point, two months before Copenhagen, lack of clarity is as big a problem as actual open opposition to agreement. WHO LEADS? The issue remains: Who leads? Certainly not the U.S., for the moment at least. And through Ban the U.N. has done what it can at summit level. Apart from that, the U.N. - through the secretariat of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change - can only provide a forum and technical back-up. The EU has yet to get it together, the U.K.'s Gordon Brown has done his bit, so what about President Hu of China? China has coordinated its critique of the U.S. position with the views of the G-77 group of developing countries. The beginnings of strategic leadership on the issue or just tactical political maneuvering? The next two months may tell us.
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