West stalls bid to check global climate crisis

Link

Diwakar | TNN

L’Aquila (Italy): Attempts to forge a global consensus to battle the mounting challenge of climate change has suffered a serious setback.
Developed countries are trying to wriggle out of any short-term commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions and are instead demanding that developing economies like India and China accept emission reducing targets.
At a meeting of the Major Economies Forum in Rome on Tuesday evening, the developed countries tried to renege on their commitment to use 1990 as the base year for reducing emissions or to spell out what quantum of commitments they would accept in the run-up to 2020.
The developed nations insisted that India, China and other emerging economies like Brazil and SA agree to a long range target for reduction of GHGs with the burden-sharing formula remaining quite ambiguous.
The 17 members of MEF who will discuss the issue here on Thursday account for 75% of emissions, and a pact among them could have fastpaced the global response to a deepening crisis resulting from changes in the climate.
Sources termed the deliberations as “tense” with India and China having to join hands to counter pressure from the developed world. The India-China partnership had staved off a similar challenge at the Bonn climate talks where discussions failed to make any headway. India upset at G-8 failure to settle climate change row
L’Acquila (Italy): The failure of the participants at the G-8 nations summit to arrive at a consensus on climate change has upset developing countries.
Indian sources called the development a step backwards. It was only last month that US and Mexico at the MEF meeting in Mexico had sponsored a draft that recommended an “aspirational” goal of halving emission levels by 2050. An aspirational long-term goal for all without a roadmap of how the emission reduction burden would be shared was even then strongly opposed by India and China.
India is not keen to let the negotiations progress only on the long-term goals which would bind them without the industrialised nations putting on table numbers for the commitments they would take in the second phase of Kyoto Protocol as the first phase expires in 2012. However, the intransigence of developed countries during the tense deliberations has reduced the draft to a bland statement of the professed intensions of the global community to take on the threat of climate change, without any mention of either timeframe or targets. The decision to come out with the draft at all, after the clash between the developed and developing countries, was taken after the US representatives at the Rome meeting cajoled participants into agreeing to put one out. The US insistence was because of the anxiety to organise a face-saver for President Barak Obama who in his capacity as chairman of the MEF is to release the draft on Thursday to coincide with the ongoing G-8 summit.
The MEF meeting, US had hoped, would become an important prelude to UN Climate Conference in Copehenhagen in December.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, 36 industrialised countries known as Annexe 1 countries are obliged to reduce their emissions by fixed percentage below 1990 levels between 2008-2012. However, barring UK, Germany and a couple of others, they have failed to meet the commitment. Instead, they are seeking to shift the goalpost. Japan has already argued that 2005 be used as the base year in place of 1990 under the Kyoto Protocol.