#G8 Global Warming Fail? Sands shift under feet of climate treaty talkers

categories: Environmental Justice, Greenhouse Gas, Humanitarian Relief, International Action, Policy & Legislation, Politics

Published July 08, 2009 @ 09:11AM PT

G8 heads as cooks stirring CO2 into earth soup

Word is emerging that the "Group of 8" world's major industrial nations has failed to create a consensus on slashing human-propelled greenhouse gas pollution (GHGs) by 2050.

G8 climate change negotiators, meeting this week in L'Aquila, Italy, have given up on a proposal that would have comitted most nations to cutting GHGs by 50% by 2050, and industrialized nations to 80% cuts by 2050. They're putting off the hard talk until December's international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.

(Others are framing this as keeping the overall global temperature change by 2100 to no more than +2 deg. Celsius, or 3.6 deg. Fahrenheit.)

A proposal to establish a $400 million fund to help developing nations adapt to the impacts of climate change, including expansion of their own low- and no-carbon energy sources, seem to have been tabled as well, for now.

Is the failure "unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks," as Peter Baker in The New York Times reports?

Probably not quite so dire. Not yet.

Just as the US previously held back global efforts to stop global warming, we're now a heavy presence in negotiations on how to make progress, and that's shaking up delicate international alliances formed (in essence under fire) during the atmospherically dark days of the Bush-Cheney years.

Now that the Obama administration is on the move on climate action, there's a growing fear that the US and China are forming an action axis. The world's two greatest emitters of GHGs could effectively set the terms for carbon caps worldwide, possibly outside the established international treaty and carbon market system, and possibly at a level that's too weak to do enough good.

Again at The Times,reporter James Kanter blogs some useful context:

Europeans [fear they] could be forced to downgrade the importance of their flagship policies – including their system for capping greenhouse gases and trading emissions permits – if they lose control of the negotiating agenda over the coming months.

To bolster their Emissions Trading System, which has suffered bouts of volatility and has been criticized for ineffectiveness since its creation four years ago, the Europeans want all rich-world nations like the United States join a global carbon market by 2015, and for fast-emerging economies like China to join by 2020.

But the Chinese are fiercely averse to capping their emissions for the foreseeable future, and that has stoked fears among Europeans that the Americans and Chinese would reach a lowest-common-denominator agreement with widely divergent goals for reducing greenhouse gases even among wealthy nations.

That, in turn, could jeopardize European efforts to link its carbon trading system with other cap-and-trade systems under development in countries like the United States and Australia.

As downbeat as the news out of L'Aquila seems to be, there are still reasons to be optimistic:

It's inevitable that powerful polluters like the US, China, and India are going to play out the time and the situation as long as possible, in order to get the greatest advantages (as they see it) in the end.

This gives climate negotiators and activists room to maneuver as well.

The final act of US climate policy has yet to be written in Congress; that will send a huge signal to the rest of the world on whether the US is a strong actor and ally in stopping global warming, or still an mpediment to contend with. And to the Obama administration on just what its parameters for action will be, realistically.

There's still time for the public and climate action advocates in this country time -- nonprofit and in business and industry -- to influence that outcome. Not that it won't be difficult.

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