[NYTr] Env: At Bali, US urges abandoning 2020 goals

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Reuters - Dec 10, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1064001320071210

U.N. climate talks under pressure to drop 2020 goals

By Emma Graham-Harrison

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - The United States has urged a tough 2020
target for rich nations to axe greenhouse gas emissions to be dropped
from a draft text at climate change talks in Bali, delegates said on
Monday.

The December 3-14 meeting is seeking to launch two years of talks on a
new pact to slow global warming but is split about whether to include
guidelines such as a cut in emissions by rich nations of 25-40 percent
below 1990 levels by 2020.

"The numbers are still in the text. There has been a lot of pressure to
take them out," one delegate with intimate knowledge of the draft
negotiations said. He corrected an earlier statement that the numbers
had been removed.

Other delegates also said the draft, put together by delegates from
Indonesia, Australia and South Africa, still included the numbers
despite pressure to take them out by countries including the United
States, Canada and Japan.

Washington said goals for 2020 should be negotiated over the next two
years rather than fixed in advance as part of a fight against rising
temperatures that could bring more floods, droughts, melt Himalayan
glaciers and raise sea levels.

"It's prejudging what the outcome should be," chief U.S. negotiator
Harlan Watson said of 2020 targets. "We don't want to start out with
numbers."

Watson said that the 25-40 percent range was based on "many
uncertainties" and on a small number of studies examined by the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

NOBEL SNUB

"This is unacceptable," Hans Verolme of the WWF environmental group said
of efforts to cut out goals, noting that the IPCC was to collect the
Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in Oslo with former U.S. Vice President Al
Gore.

"It's trying to slash out the science," he said.

The Bali talks are trying to agree the principles for a successor to the
U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial nations to cut
emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by five percent below 1990
by 2008-12.

"Our opinion about Kyoto has not changed," Watson said. President George
W. Bush opposes Kyoto, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and
wrongly excludes 2008-2012 goals for developing nations, such as China,
India and Brazil.

Bush says he will join a new global pact.

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate secretariat said the 25-40 percent
range would be a "critical issue" at the talks. He said he considered
the figure an important signpost to show where the world should be
heading in curbing warming.

De Boer also said all industrialized nations backed the need to agree
on a Kyoto successor at U.N. talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.
Developing nations, wary of any commitments that might hit their drive
to fight poverty, are undecided.

On the margins of the main talks, about 40 deputy finance ministers held
unprecedented talks about ways to ensure that efforts to slow climate
change do not derail the world economy.

"Having the finance ministers meeting...itself is a breakthrough,"
Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said. The meeting will
prepare for talks by about 20 finance ministers in Bali on Tuesday.

The IPCC has said that the strictest measures to offset warming will
slow annual world growth by 0.12 percentage point at most.

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on:

blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(With extra reporting by Gde Anugrah Arka in Bali, Rob Taylor in
Canberra; writing by Alister Doyle; editing by David Fogarty)

) Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.