World leaders 'could boycott failing Copenhagen talks'

[David Guyatt]

From The Times

December 15, 2009

World leaders 'could boycott failing Copenhagen talks'



(Christian Charisius/Reuters)
Protesters hold banners during a demonstration in Copenhagen
Philippe Naughton in Copenhagen
European ministers worked to salvage a deal at the Copenhagen climate summit today as fears grew that some world leaders, scenting failure in the negotiations, could decide to stay away.

The past several days have been marked by increasingly bitter exchanges between the world's two biggest polluters, China and the United States, and a five-hour walkout by African delegates. The conference chairwoman, Connie Hedegaard of Denmark, today asked a group of European ministers to lead "informal" negotiations on the key blockages.

"It's just like schoolchildren," Ms Hedegaard said today. "If they have a very long deadline to deliver an exercise they will wait for the last moment ... it's basically as simple as that."

It was a remark unlikely to endear her to delegates after a ham-fisted Danish attempt to impose a draft accord at the start of the negotiations.

Gordon Brown is due to arrive in Copenhagen tonight, two days earlier than originally planned, hoping to help break the deadlock. Also arriving in the Danish capital is Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, who has been asked by the Danish premier Lars Rasmussen to act as a "friend of the chair", an intermediary to help keep negotiations moving.

One climate change expert warned, though, that other world leaders could change their travel plans unless there was some progress soon in the ministerial negotiations.

"These are the critical eight hours," said Nick Mabey, chief executive of the UK-based non-profit group E3G. "If they don't make progress people might stop their heads of state coming and that would be a disaster."

The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, who has also been co-opted as a "friend of the chair", arrived in Copenhagen this morning having warned that "time is running out" for a deal.

The summit reaches its climax on Friday when 120 heads of state, including President Obam, meet in the Danish capital.

The main stand-off at the conference is between major emerging economies such as China and India, whose emissions are expected to soar over the coming decades, and the United States, which never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and is insisting that any deal must involve sacrifices by newly industrialised economies.

A new draft text released today showed the scale of the deadlock: it lacked any figures on emissions targets nor did it propose a firm date for the "global peaking" of emissions. Britain argues that emissions must start falling by 2020 if a global temperature rise of above 2C is to be averted.

Delegates say that behind-closed-doors negotiations have been marred by bitter exchanges between the Americans and Chinese, with Beijing accusing Washington of "playing tricks". African and many Asian delegates have complained that they have been virtually excluded from the negotiations as China and India throw their weight around inside the developing country bloc.

One Western diplomat said that Ms Hedegaard, the former Danish Climate Minister, was moving too fast for a painstaking, consensus-forging process.

"We shouldn't try and dance ahead of the music. We've got to go a bit more slowly so that the negotiations can move on from the ministers to the heads of state, otherwise we'll get a repeat of yesterday," he added, referring to the African walkout.

The hosts have also been shown up by organisational failures, with thousands of people stranded outside the conference venue for up to eight hours because their accreditations could not be processed quickly enough.

Inside the Bella Centre the consultations began this morning with the Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, teaming up with the Ghanian Environment Minister, Sherry Ayittey, to co-chair talks on the long-term financing agreements that are needed to form part of any deal.

Other groups focused on the emissions cuts that developed countries must make under a seven-year extension of the Kyoto Protocol and the action that developing countries should take to play their part in averting catastrophic global warming.

Despite an unfortunate intervention yesterday by Al Gore, who was criticised by a US scientist for exaggerating his research on the melting of Arctic ice, there is a broad international consensus on man-made global warming and its knock-on effects on sea levels and delicate ecosystems.

Meanwhile, the chief US negotiator, Todd Stern, went out of his way today to defend President Obama's offer to start cutting emissions against European complaints that it did not go far enough. Mr Obama offered to cut US CO2 emissions by 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020 — which the EU says equates to a cut of just 3 per cent on the 1990 levels used as a baseline in the Kyoto Protocol.

Mr Stern said that by most measures the US offer was more ambitious than what the Europeans have offered, especially as it increases its emission cuts between 2020 and 2030.

"It's only in the hermetically sealed world of climate change negotiations where a baseline year of 1990 would be treated as sacrosanct," he told reporters. "The US is doing a lot."