Global warming deal decades away as ‘dysfunctional’ U.S. delays commitment

By Alex Morales, Kim Chipman and Jim Efstathiou Jr.
Dec 12, 2010 9:00 PM PT

Delegates at the United Nations climate talks stayed up two nights in a row last week to agree on a proposal to slow global warming. Next year’s negotiations may be even tougher. The plan approved on Dec. 11 creates a climate fund to channel as much as $100 billion a year in aid to developing nations by 2020, protects forests and outlines methods to verify cuts in fossil fuel emissions. No new targets for curbing greenhouse gases were set, and debate on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which limits emissions by developed countries until 2012, was put off until the next meeting in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011. With President Barack Obama struggling to salvage his energy agenda and richer and poorer nations in conflict over extending Kyoto’s emission limits, a new worldwide climate treaty may be 20 years away, said Tim Wirth, who in 1997 led the U.S. delegation in Kyoto, Japan. Such a delay endangers the future of $2.7 billion a year in pollution credits sold under a UN program based on the Kyoto agreement. “We have a dysfunctional Congress and an administration without policy,” Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, said in an interview during two weeks of UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. “The U.S. doesn’t have an energy strategy. You can’t sign up to an international treaty unless you know what you are going to do at home.” … “The U.S. does have to take a lead because, if the U.S. sits there and does nothing, then the world will not react, especially the developing world,” Dow Chemical Co. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Liveris said in an interview in Cancun, where he joined other CEOs lobbying countries to take action. …  “The reality is the talks will struggle unless and until the U.S. can bring something more substantial to the negotiation table,” said Mark Lewis, a carbon market analyst based in Paris for Deutsche Bank AG. …

Global Warming Deal Decades Away as `Dysfunctional’ U.S. Delays Commitment via The Oil Drum