Hopes Fade for Comprehensive Climate Treaty

With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it now appears there is little chance that the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December will produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming.

The United States and a number of other major emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced. Instead, representatives at the Copenhagen meeting are likely to announce a number of interim steps and agree to keep talking next year.

“There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who heads of the United Nations climate secretariat and serves as the de facto overseer of the negotiations, said late last week. “But I hope it will go well beyond simply a declaration of principles. The form I would like it to take is the groundwork for a ratifiable agreement next year.”

Negotiators have accepted as all but inevitable that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks will not resolve the outstanding issues in the brief time remaining before the Copenhagen conference opens in mid-December. The gulf between rich and poor nations, and even among the wealthiest nations, is just too wide.

Yet expectations remain high for a meeting that carries important weight not just for the environment but for a broad range of international issues, including trade, security, economic development, energy production, technology sharing and the very survival of some vulnerable island nations.

So officials are now narrowing expectations and defining the areas where there is agreement, such as the need to halt and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, although how and by whom remains the subject of intense dispute. Negotiators are also discussing what form any declaration that emerges from Copenhagen might take and how to ensure that any promises made there are kept.

Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen is Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.