The European Union has agreed to drop specific target figures for reducing carbon emissions by 2020 at global climate change talks in Bali, a move aimed at appeasing the United States.
Talks at the international conference had bogged down because of the EU's proposal to include a reduction goal of 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 in an agenda that will help determine how to hold down rising temperatures. The U.S. favored voluntary reductions with no specific goals. A compromise agreement would break the deadlock.
Conference President Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia's environment minister, proposed revised language that dropped specific goals, but reaffirmed that emissions should be reduced at least 50 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.
Witoelar's draft "Bali Roadmap" did not guarantee any level of binding commitment by any nation.
Participants at the Bali conference had aimed to launch negotiations for guidelines on deeper emissions reductions that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrial nations to cut output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012.
The United States is the only major industrial nation to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The Bush administration instead favors a voluntary approach where each country will decide how it can contribute, as opposed to internationally negotiated and legally binding commitments.
Elections May Impact U.S. Policy
The international community has tried to persuade the U.S. to adhere to the international mandates. Now, however, many are resigned to wait for a change in White House leadership after the November election.
In a series of landmark reports this year, the U.N.'s network of climate scientists warned of severe consequences — from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction and other effects — unless there are sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.
To avoid the worst, the Nobel Prize-winning panel has said emissions should be reduced 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020.
The Kyoto Protocol nations have accepted that goal, and the numbers were written into early versions of this conference's draft final decision — not as a binding target, but as a suggestion in the document's preamble.
The U.S. delegation immediately opposed any inclusion of such numbers, complaining they would "drive the negotiations in one direction," as U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson put it.
Environmentalists accused the U.S. of trying to sabotage future talks.
"The United States, in particular, is behaving like passengers in first class in a jumbo jet, thinking a catastrophe in economy class won't affect them," said Tony Juniper, a spokesman for the environmentalist coalition here. "If we go down, we go down together, and the United States needs to realize that very quickly."
U.S. Pushes Voluntary Reductions
The draft final document also called for developing countries to take new steps toward restraining growth in their emissions. The exemption of such fast-growing economies as China's and India's from the Kyoto pact was a major U.S. complaint.
Such actions by China, Brazil and others — not envisioned as legally binding by the draft "Bali Roadmap" document — would be important to winning broad acceptance of deeper, mandatory cuts among richer nations.
The EU had threatened to withdraw from separate U.S.-led climate talks if Bali didn't endorse the 25 percent to 40 percent emissions-reduction guideline.
In those "Major Economies" talks, opened by President Bush in September, Washington is seeking pledges from 16 other nations — responsible for 80 percent of global emissions — to curtail greenhouse gases according to each country's formula.
The Europeans and others showed little enthusiasm for this voluntary approach, and environmentalists denounced it as an effort to subvert the U.N. climate treaty process. It remains to be seen whether EU countries will attend the next meeting, which is to be held in Honolulu in late January.
From NPR reports and The Associated Press
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