The climate conference held last week in Bali was stuck into a quagmire by the delegation from the United States. The United States, which has already refused to sign the Kyoto protocols demanding emissions reductions by 2012, once again threw up road blocks in the negotiation process to create an agreement to succeed Kyoto. The Kyoto agreement, which was signed by every industrialized nation except for the United States, binds all these industrialized nations to reduce emissions to pre-1990 levels by 2012 in an effort to combat global warming.
The United States deadlocked towards the end of the week with the European Union over the guideline that rich countries should cut emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The United States was unwilling to set the levels at the conference and the two superpowers eventually compromised at the wording of “Deep cuts in global emissions will be required” for the preamble of the agreement that will be drafted over the next two years. The original targets of 25-40% that the European Union favored were placed in a footnote for possible inclusion later in the document. The United States negotiators were unwilling to set such exact standards into the preamble. At one point in the conference, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore urged those assembled to continue the negotiations and development of the new agreement without the United States if necessary.
Over the next two years, negotiators will continue to hammer out the remaining specifics of the 2009 agreement in time for governments and markets to make the necessary adjustments to be in place by 2012. While the US delegates were pleased with the results of the conference, many were disappointed with the watered-down nature of the final preamble document. While the guideline for the cuts was removed from the preamble, the quote from the UN Climate Panel that says that around the world emissions will need to be cut by 25-40% by 2020 to avoid the worst of the consequences from global warming was included.
