CANCUN, Mexico — The latest international deal on climate, reached early Saturday after hard days of bargaining, was described by exhausted delegates as a “step forward” in grappling with global warming. If they step too far, however, they’re going to bump into an elephant in the room.
That would be the U.S. Republican Party. Nobody at the Cancun meetings wanted to talk about the impending Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. It essentially rules out any new, legally binding pact requiring the U.S. and other major emitters of global-warming gases to reduce their emissions.
In hours of speeches at the annual U.N. climate conference, the U.S. political situation was hardly mentioned, despite its crucial role in how the world will confront what the Cancun final documents called “one of the greatest challenges of our time.” Not everyone held his tongue. Seas rising from warming got Pacific islanders talking. Marcus Stephen, president of Nauru, spoke of “governments deadlocked because of ideological divisions.” Enele Sopoaga, Tuvalu’s deputy prime minister, referred to the “backward politics” of one unnamed developed nation.
A U.S. friend, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, told a large gathering here, “The key thing for us is not whether the American Congress is controlled by this or that party,” but that richer nations help the developing world with financial support — for clean energy sources, new seawalls, new water systems and other projects to try to stem and cope with climate change and the droughts, floods, disease and extreme weather it portends.
“Which party” does matter, however. Many Republicans dismiss scientific evidence of human-caused warming, citing arguments by skeptics that the large majority of scientists are wrong or that the consequences of warming are overstated.
Early in the two-week conference here, four Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton demanding a freeze on about $3 billion in planned U.S. climate aid in 2010-11.
The senators said some findings of the U.N.’s climate- change panel “were found to be exaggerated or simply not true” and said that at a time of record U.S. budget deficits, “no American taxpayer dollars should be committed to a global climate fund based on information that is not accurate.”
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming called the fund an “international climate change bailout.”
The Cancun plan calls for $100 billion a year in U.S. and other international climate financing by 2020.
The Cancun deal
Chief elements of Saturday’s decisions of the annual conference of parties to the U.N. climate treaty:
GREEN CLIMATE FUND: To establish a Green Climate Fund to support developing nations in obtaining clean-energy technology to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and to adapt to potentially damaging climate change by shifting agricultural practices, for example, and building seawalls against rising seas. Richer nations have promised $100 billion a year by 2020, but the Cancun decision does not identify specific sources of financing, which will be subject to continuing talks.
DEFORESTATION: To promote efforts in poorer nations to protect their climate-friendly tropical forests, with the prospect of financial compensation from richer nations.
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: To establish a Technology Executive Committee under the treaty to analyze needs and policies for transfer to developing nations of technology for clean energy and adaptation to climate change, and a Climate Technology Center to build a global network to match technology needs and suppliers.
