It's probably wise to lower expectations about how much the Obama administration can bring to the table at UN negotiations on an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty.
Expectations were raised with the departure of the Bush administration which opposed mandatory controls on US greenhouse gas emissions and stiff-armed the UN process. The Obama administration supports GHG emissions controls and has fully embraced UN efforts to reach a post-Kyoto agreement. But it will be a challenge for the Obama administration to be ready with a fully developed and politically supported proposal by December, the UN's self-imposed deadline for reaching a deal in Copenhagen.
"It's an incredibly challenging time-frame we're dealing with," Rob Bradley, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute, told Platts. "The US has only had its senior officials in place for the last two months, maximum, who have to develop positions across a whole range of issues in ways that can garner support from other critical parts of the government and don't run too far ahead of where Congress is prepared to go."
UN negotiations are continuing this week and next in Bonn on a text that UN officials say can serve as the basis for governments to start drafting an agreement for consideration in Copenhagen.
"It's been hard for the US to step straight into these meetings and get a good feel for what it can actually negotiate around," Bradley said. "It's unlikely the US will have a finished law on the table [in Copenhagen]. More likely, it looks like you'll have a House bill and a Senate bill, [reflecting different emission reduction targets] with the US putting on the table something in the spread between those two."
Unless Congress is specifically signals otherwise, "it's not clear that the State Department negotiators will have a mandate to negotiate within that range," he said.
The EU has proposed an emissions reduction target and will negotiate on that basis, Bradley said. Developing countries, such as China and India, are not going to be bringing forward a single target, but rather policies and measures. "The kinds of things they're doing in their climate programs, such as energy intensity targets, renewable energy programs and fuel efficiency standards," he said.
Closing the gap on the US range, and precisely defining what China and India have on the table, "is something that could be done six months down the line" following the Copenhagen meeting, Bradley said.
He noted that the Kyoto treaty was negotiated in 1997 and "it took a further four years of negotiations to figure out what it actually meant."
Leave a comment