#Climate Summit: Obama's UN speech broad rather than deep

by Emily Gertz

category: International Action

Published September 22, 2009 @ 07:20AM PT

President Obama's speech to the UN Climate Summit was, in a way, a coming-out moment, an opportunity to sweep aside any remaining tatters of the Bush administration's refusal to get with the international program on dealing with climate change.

But the president's remarks were, perhaps predictably, long on generalities and short on substance. He may be saving the big rhetorical guns for the meeting of the Group of 20 leading economies later this week.

Still, there were a few potentially significant signals woven into in his remarks:

• The industrial nations that have caused most of the damage to the climate to date "still have a responsibility to lead" -- very broadly, this could refer to Europe, the US, Canada and other industrial powers committing to deeper greenhouse gas pollution cuts than developing nations.  One figure that is in circulation is an 80 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2050 (with a targeted 50 percent cut overall, across all nations).
• Rapidly-growing developing nations, which will produce nearly all the growth in global carbon emissions going forward, must also commit to strong emissions reduction targets and meet them.  The developing world's two greatest emitters, China and India, have balked thus far at being held to any emissions reductions targets, since they are still combatting widespread poverty in their quests to expand their economies.
• "We cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution act together. There is no other way." The largest emitters in the world are the USA and China, with India, Brazil and Russia coming up from behind. A hint that the US may break from the Kyoto Protocol's architecture, which makes different demands on industrial and developing nations regardless of their actual emissions?
• Leading industrial nations "have a responsibility to provide the financial and technical assistance needed to help these nations adapt to the impacts of climate change and pursue low-carbon development." Just how, and by how much, the developed nations will help poorer nations cope with and mitigate global warming is one of the most divisive debates happening on the road to December's climate talks in Copenhagen.
• Development and growth can happen in concert with a global transition to low-carbon energy: Perhaps a tiny jab at conservatives opposed to climate policy reform in Congress, who have been asserting that slashing dependence on fossil energy sources will kill the economy, vaporize jobs, and leave families across the nation huddled and shivering in dark, unheated living rooms.