Obama's Vision Spurs Hope at COP14 Global Climate-Change Conference
Delegates, activists and researchers assembled in Poznan, Poland yesterday, for the opening of the fourteenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14). The meeting is the fourth of its kind this year. And even though the U.S. delegation in Poznan will be comprised of the outgoing Bush team, the pending change in American leadership has energized the global climate conferees who see president-elect Barack Obama ushering in a new era of U.S. leadership on the environment.
The Poznan conference is the halfway mark in a two-year negotiation to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which ‘required’ 37 industrial countries to slash carbon emissions below 1990 levels by an average 5 percent by 2012. Delegates have set a deadline of December 2009 to enact a new agreement to reduce worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases.
"It's a very exciting time. It's a moment we have been waiting for, many of us, for some period of time; we intend to pick up the baton and really run with it," Democratic Senator John Kerry told reporters, as he prepared to head to international climate change talks in Poland.
Obama has been "very, very clear that after eight years of obstruction and delay and denial, the US is going to rejoin the world community in tackling this global challenge," he added.
Although no member of Obama's transition team will be at the UN talks, Kerry is heading to Poznan, Poland, as an observer for the December 1-12 conference.
He said the US message will be "that America is back, we are back in a position of participation, of respecting views and having real discussions and trying to find the best framework for all of us."
The United States, which is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, walked away from the Koyto protocol under the administration of President George W. Bush.
President-elect Obama’s plan of cutting back on CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, with a further 80 percent by 2050 has impressed those involved in the UNFCC process, especially as compared to the position of outgoing President George W. Bush, who gave little serious attention to the matter diplomatically.
"But I think the president elected sent a very clear signal of what to expect in his statement last week when he said returning US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. That is what he will try to deliver. "It won't be easy but it can be done."
According to Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the history of the growing public awareness of climate change and its impact has occurred in four phases: Sachs dated the first phase to the scientific discovery of climate change in 1896. The second phase he described as spanning the late1970s through the 1980s, when the first models of anthropogenic CO 2and other gases were made public. The third phase he dated as “Katrina.” As Sachs explained, Katrina showed the world that “Climate change is real, ongoing, persuasive, and documented.
Katrina served as the shocking wake-up call that climate change can pack a devastating punch to the United States.” He further suggests that the U.S. government’s inability to respond to the crisis demonstrated both a lack of preparedness and further underscored the urgency to address the root cause. Sachs is optimistic that all countries, including China and India, will work together to curb greenhouse gas emissions and “reach a meaningful settlement on climate change by 2010.”
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Comments