What the big 16 emitters can do on global warming

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 09/27/2007 3:27 PM | Opinion

Michael Richardson, Singapore

High-level officials from the world's 16 biggest emitters of global warming gases will meet in Washington on Thursday and Friday in an attempt to agree on ways to combat climate change. It seems like a sensible approach by the United States to bring together negotiators from the countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa that produce 90 percent of greenhouse emissions.

After all, it is much easier to reach agreements among a small group of nations than in a forum like the United Nations, with over 190 member states. Countries invited by President George Bush to the Washington conference include five leading Asian economies, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Indonesia. He has also invited senior representatives of the UN and the European Union to attend.

U.S. officials say that the Washington talks, which are intended to be the first of a series of such meetings, will complement the UN's slow moving climate change negotiations. These have been beset by deep disagreements on setting emission targets, and sharing and paying for them. The U.S. officials argue that if the largest polluters cannot agree, there is no hope of reaching a broader international accord.

In fact, America wants to find common ground with other big polluters to set the agenda and determine the outcome of a meeting in Bali in December of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It will be hosted by the Indonesian government. The Bali gathering of UN member states is supposed to agree on a two-year roadmap for strengthening action to curb global warming when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.

The 1997 Kyoto pact requires 36 industrialized nations to reduce their 1990 greenhouse emissions from power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources by an average of five percent by 2012. To encourage a new global deal, the European Union is offering a unilateral cut in EU emissions of 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. This could be deepened to 30 percent if others countries show reciprocal interest in the UN round of negotiations.

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, a former environment minister, has gone as far as to say that developing countries should be allowed to increase their emissions per capita while industrialized nations cut theirs, until both sides reached the same level. In theory, this is the ultimate equitable solution. But it is not clear how long it would take to arrive at this balance or what state the global environment would be in when it was reached.

Moreover, the credibility of EU offers is being undermined because some of its member states are failing to meet their Kyoto targets. The U.S. and Australia (which will also take part in the Washington meeting) refused to join the Kyoto treaty. They argued that it would damage their energy-intensive economies and was unworkable because it did not include newly industrialized and developing countries like China, which will soon overtake the U.S. as the largest source of global warming emissions if it has not done so already.

For their part, China and other members of the Group of 77, a bloc of developing nations, insist that industrialized economies are responsible for 70 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today and should cut their greenhouse emissions by 80 percent by 2020.

Until late last year, Bush refused to accept that the warming of the planet was largely man-made and that this was melting ice sheets and glaciers, raising sea levels and contributing to extreme weather, thus confronting the Earth with a catastrophic future. But other leaders in the U.S. were much quicker to acknowledge the dangers facing world and Bush now belatedly says that he recognizes the challenge.

So he has called together the group of 16 big polluters, most of whom agree with the U.S. that large and mandatory emissions cuts, and thus big reductions in economic growth, are unacceptable. Instead, they will opt for voluntary national targets to bring down emissions, as well as initiatives to reduce pollution in sectors of their economies that burn a lot of fossil fuels and pump huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, such as power generation, transport, steel and cement making.

The development and deployment of clean technologies, in close cooperation with the private sector, is another key theme of the U.S. approach. There is no doubt that advances in science and technology, harnessed by companies, will be critically important in meeting the climate change challenge. Improvements in energy conservation and efficiency will also be vital.

Yet neither innovation nor greater efficiency will be fully effective without an agreed framework of global rules that oblige governments to penalize pollution and provide incentives to encourage clean development.

The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a security specialist at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.

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