A U.S. plan to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 was dismissed Thursday as too little, too late by some delegates at 17-country climate talks in Paris while others welcomed it as a first firm U.S. emissions ceiling.
On Wednesday, President George W. Bush unveiled a plan to halt the growth of U.S. emissions by 2025, toughening a previous goal of braking the growth of emissions by 2012. The United States and China are the top emitters.
"The president gave a disappointing speech," the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said in a statement issued in Berlin headlined "Gabriel Criticizes Bush's Neanderthal Speech. Losership, Not Leadership."
Many delegates at the U.S.-led climate talks, being held Thursday and Friday in Paris, said far faster action was needed to avert the worst effects of global warming. Most other developed nations are trying to cut emissions below 1990 levels.
"President Bush recognized the need for mandatory federal legislation to tackle climate change," the European environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said. But Dimas said that what Bush had proposed "will not contribute to the effective tackling of climate change."
"The American administration is starting to awake," the French climate change ambassador, Brice Lalonde, said. "It's a bit late."
Bush will step down in January 2009 and the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, and the Democratic contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have all urged tougher caps on emissions than those proposed by Bush.
"We are looking forward to whoever succeeds the present administration, because we believe we can probably only do better," the South African environmental affairs minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said.
Van Schalkwyk said Bush's speech "takes us backward," because it did not call for mandatory emissions cuts. Such cuts are central to UN negotiations on a follow-up plan to the Kyoto Protocol.
Projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that emissions by rich nations will have to fall by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst effects of more droughts, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels.
"That's the most extreme curve," said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He said there were other, less demanding scientific scenarios for addressing global warming.
"We try to steer away from rhetorical commitments that have no prayer of being met," he said at a news conference.
Previous U.S. data have suggested that U.S. emissions could rise to about 30 percent above 1990 levels by 2025.
The Paris talks involve the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Japan, China, Canada, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa. The European Commission, the current European Union president Slovenia and the United Nations are also attending.
The big economies account for 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions, and Paris is the third meeting in a series begun in September 2007 to work out ways to contribute to a new UN treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
Delegates are also examining the idea of a long-term goal of cutting world emissions by perhaps 50 percent by 2050. Connaughton said Washington had not given up on a 2007 promise to seriously consider such a target.
The United Nations noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reckoned world emissions would have to peak in 10 to 15 years to avert the worst effects of warming - before Bush's ceiling.
"It's good to have something on the table," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said of Bush's plan.
"The science tells us we need to peak emissions in the next 10 to 15 years and then reduce them by half by the middle of the century," he said. "So this needs to be considered in that context."
The meetings in Paris are part of a U.S.-sponsored series of negotiations on global warming, and Connaughton defended the U.S. position at the talks.
"It was a speech directed at domestic audiences," he said. The United States was "way ahead of the curve," on environmental measures like developing biofuels and environmentally friendly technology, he added.
He acknowledged that Bush's speech had caused tensions at the talks, adding, "We will work through that today."
Bush's aides said the speech was aimed at heading off a "train wreck" of varying legislation in the U.S. Congress.
(International Herald Tribune, 04/18/2008)