|
Copenhagen summit shrinks Pacific Rim leaders give up on ’09 climate-change treaty; ‘rescue’ effort under way; Canada insists on moving in lock-step with U.S. Gary Park For Petroleum News
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation countries met in Singapore on Nov. 15 to seek common ground on a new climate change treaty.
They found it.
Leaders of the 21 Pacific Rim nations, including the United States and Canada, acknowledged there will be no final deal in Copenhagen in December at the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Now world leaders are desperately trying to find a broad political agreement to avoid turning the Copenhagen summit into a total failure.
Leaders unlikely to show But even those prospects are fading as the leaders themselves indicate they are unlikely to show up in Denmark for what environmentalists had portrayed as the last best chance to agree on a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice is now likely to lead the Canadian delegation to Copenhagen while Prime Minister Stephen Harper, along with other global leaders, passes up the chance to attend.
Prentice, before attending a two-day meeting in Denmark with other senior government officials from around the planet in a last-ditch attempt to develop a “rescue package” for the United Nations’ summit, said Copenhagen was never likely to achieve more than a framework of agreement.
“The purpose of the conference is not for each country to table its domestic policies,” he told the Globe and Mail. “What we are trying to do in Copenhagen is to try and replace (the Kyoto Protocol) with an overall international framework.”
Prentice said the objective for Copenhagen is to reach an international consensus, not an international treaty.
U.S. decision needed He said Canada cannot start regulating greenhouse gases until other countries, especially the United States, decide how they will tackle climate change.
“If the U.S. does not make a substantial effort going forward, there is nothing Canada can do. Our own mitigation efforts will be futile,” he said.
“In the absence of an international understanding and in the absence of an international framework, it is difficult for any country to finalize domestic policies and put in place its domestic approach, whether that’s regulatory or cap-and-trade, or something else,” Prentice said.
“In the specific case of North America, there is no doubt that matters are complicated by the fact that there continues to be uncertainty about whether the United States Senate will pass a cap-and-trade system or not and, if they will, when they will.
“The challenge at this time (for Canada) is to harmonize on a continental basis with the United States and, to do that, we are clearly going to have to know where the United States is headed on those critical questions.”
Prentice, in suggesting that Canada will also have to wait for a global climate-change deal to be brokered, said the “international policies, the North American policies and Canada’s own policies have to all fit together in a coherent way if we are going to get the environmental outcome we want and protect the economy as well.”
The looming deadlock forced APEC leaders to acknowledge that Copenhagen will result in little more than a “political agreement,” but they insisted a binding treaty is still achievable by the end of 2010 and urged a timetable and deadline to keep negotiations moving ahead.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the United Nations summit, is working on a “political accord” to keep a rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, while giving lawyers more time to work on a complex international deal that could be advanced in upcoming United Nations meetings in Germany in June and Mexico in December.
“Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries, we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible,” Rasmussen said,.
Based on discussions at the APEC summit, Harper said there is a “fair consensus … that a broader political agreement is still achievable in Copenhagen.”
The APEC leaders — who gave greater priority to economic recovery and heading off protectionist trade measures — promised to “rationalize and phase out over the medium term fossil fuel subsidies, while providing those in need with essential energy services.”
The Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based research and lobby organization, said that despite Prentice’s emphasis on “harmonization,” the United States is “quickly pulling ahead of Canada. While the U.S. is actively debating comprehensive climate change legislation, Prentice has yet to publish a cap-and-trade plan for Canada.”
Although the Canadian government aims to lower greenhouse gases by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020, it has yet to introduce a start date or regulations.
| 