Tensions Increase as Poor Nations Stage a Protest

Tempers flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit as poor nations staged a walkout to protest what they called inadequate aid offers from rich countries, and the U.S. and China jockeyed for position.

Environmental reporter Jeffrey Ball reports from Copenhagen, where political clashes are taking place outside and delegates are staging walkouts inside the COP15 Climate Conference.

World leaders, including President Barack Obama, are expected to arrive in Copenhagen later this week, ostensibly to try to seal an international agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and subsidize efforts by developing countries to adopt low-carbon energy technology and adapt to shifts in weather patterns or rising sea levels.

But the talk in Copenhagen is increasingly about scaled-back expectations. One possibility is a very general agreement in which developed countries promise to try to reduce their collective emissions by some amount and to provide a pot of money to help pay for a cleanup in the developing world. But such an agreement would leave the toughest questions — how much each country would cut, and how much each would pay — up in the air.

“Maybe the result you get from here is going to be less ambitious than we would like. But it would be better than nothing,” said Sergio Serra, Brazil’s ambassador for climate change.

The divide between rich and poor boiled over Monday when negotiators for the Group of 77 — which represents developing countries as well as large emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China — walked out of the negotiations in the morning.

They returned to the conference later in the day, but the underlying issues remained unsolved, Swedish Minister Andreas Carlgren said. This prompted a suspension in the official negotiation, and the chairman of the conference appointed two ministers to pursue consultation on how to solve the problem.

China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is casting the talks as a referendum on what it calls the developed world’s failure to clean up its act. Rich countries should “honor the commitments they have made” in the past, said Li Ganjie, China’s vice minister of environmental protection.

At the heart of the disputes in Copenhagen are sharp disagreements over money. An existing treaty intended to curb global warming requires emission cuts from developed countries that ratified it but not from developing countries. That treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, doesn’t demand emission cuts from the U.S. or China, which together produce 40% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, because the U.S. didn’t ratify it and because China is classified as a developing country.

China argues that any new international agreement should continue to make more demands on developed countries than on developing ones. But most studies project that essentially all of the increase in global greenhouse-gas emissions in the next few decades will come from developing countries, with China topping the list, and so the fight is over how to ensure environmental action there.

That is a position that Chinese negotiators are intent on telegraphing back home. The Chinese delegation closed a scheduled news conference Monday to all but Chinese media, because it wanted “to urge the domestic population to support our endeavor” at the climate conference, said Lai Xing, a Chinese delegation spokesman. “We have a message for the domestic audience.”

Speaking to reporters late Monday, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said governments have “a long way to go if we’re going to produce the kind of agreement we need.”

“We don’t have very much time. The clock is definitely ticking,” he said, adding that the walkout hadn’t helped. “Any time that’s lost is not helpful.”

The European Union has pledged a total of €7.2 billion ($10.52 billion) between next year and 2012 to jump-start efforts to curb emissions in developing countries. Officials from developing countries have called that offer inadequate.

“We need to see developed nations give us a plan of what [financial] transfers will come in five years, 10 years and how much over the years ahead, and we aren’t seeing that,” said Mamadou Honadia, who is part of the negotiating team for Burkina Faso.

A Nigerian delegation official said the EU offer of short-term funding was “pathetic.”

That criticism drew indignation from European officials. “We are the only part of the world that has put money on the table, and we’re criticized for it,” said Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner.

Jo Leinen, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, called on the U.S. and China to set more-aggressive targets for controlling their emissions.

The G-77 showed signs of disunity as well. Saudi Arabia and Brazil sparred Monday over carbon capture and storage, technology that the kingdom is pushing to shore up in its own emission-reduction efforts, said an official from a G-77 nation familiar with the matter. Brazil is concerned that carbon capture could dent its biofuels industry, as nations opt to burn more fossil fuel and bury emissions underground, rather than use clean-burning biofuels such as ethanol, of which Brazil is a leading producer.