By Kim Chipman and Alex Morales Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) — The first draft agreement for a climate treaty from the Copenhagen talks calls for the world’s richest nations to make far steeper cuts to their greenhouse-gas emissions than they’ve pledged. The plan, obtained by Bloomberg News, says nations including the U.S., Japan and Britain must jointly reduce heat- trapping gases at least 25 percent by 2020. Their current proposals added up amount to a 10 percent to 17 percent drop. “The developed countries need to speed up the process and come forward with more ambitious targets by 2020,” China’s lead negotiator, Su Wei , said today in an interview in Copenhagen. The document, meant to cap almost two years of United Nations -led talks on steps to slow global warming, has no plan on how to finance poorer countries’ efforts to cope with climate change, leaving out a key facet of the agreement. Envoys for the 192 negotiating nations still have two possible temperature targets to limit global warming, three potential emissions goals for 2050, and three developed-country targets for 2020 as outlined in the blueprint. “It’s really come down to a set of difficult issues,” said David Doniger , policy director for the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in New York. Deadlocks, Pointed Fingers The draft, dated today, is the first sketch produced in the Danish capital after four days of talks that are scheduled to end on Dec. 18. Deadlocked meetings have been suspended, countries have pointed fingers alleging lack of progress, and senior officials came to Copenhagen early in an attempt to smooth over talks before leaders such as U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrive next week. “It’s a lot easier for lower-level negotiators to come to an impasse and go home,” Doniger said. “It’s not easy for senior officials and definitely not easy for heads of government. They have to produce.” The UN document, set for more reviews and final consideration next week, requires nations and their polluting industries to limit the planet’s temperature rise to no more than either 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, according to the two options, in order to “avoid dangerous climate change.” ‘Corral the Forces’ China’s Su, Grenadian envoy Dessima Williams, the lead negotiator for the 43-nation Alliance of Small Island States, and U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband all welcomed the text, which was drafted by Michael Zammit Cutajar , the former UN climate chief who chairs the main strand of talks. “The intention of the chair is to help move the process in a unified form forward,” Williams said in an interview. “It is an incomplete text because we just have to begin now to corral the forces” to produce a final agreement. The top U.S. climate envoy, Todd Stern , said the language describing emissions reductions is “unbalanced in a whole host of ways,” mainly because the draft says industrialized nations must take legally binding action while developing countries “may” have to do so. A second draft proposal was also published today for parties to the Kyoto Protocol , the current climate-protection treaty. That document calls for the pact’s emissions-reduction goals, which expire in 2012, to be extended to at least 2017. “We are concerned about the environmental integrity of these texts and we do not see how they will deliver the 2-degree target,” Anders Turesson , who speaks for the European Union, said in Copenhagen. “Hopefully we will be able to step up our ambitions as we move forward in the negotiations.” Still, while “everything can change” in the documents, they provide a basis for ministers to build on next week, Miliband said. 2 Degrees “They are shorter texts than we’ve had before, which we can negotiate around because the imperative here is to get on with it and get to an ambitious solution,” Miliband said. The EU, U.S. and China have all endorsed a 2-degree target. The alliance of small island and low-lying nations has described such a target as “suicide” for them, and is calling for warming to be kept below 1.5 degrees. The draft from the UN working group that includes the U.S. says industrialized countries as a whole must reduce their combined gas discharges by 75 percent to more than 95 percent during the 60-year period from 1990 to 2050. Developed nations also would be required to take on legally binding, economy-wide greenhouse-gas reduction goals “with a view” to cutting collective emissions at least 25 percent to 45 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Greenpeace, the Amsterdam-based environmental group, has estimated that industrialized nations as a group have made pledges that average 10 percent to 17 percent. ‘Tense Negotiation’ The 27-nation European Union has pledged a 20 percent reduction and says it’s willing to increase that to 30 percent if a deal is reached. Japan also says it’ll cut by 25 percent if Copenhagen produces an agreement while the U.S., the biggest historical emitter, says it’ll cut by about 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, which the European Commission estimates at being a 3 percent reduction from 1990 levels. “It’s going to be a tense negotiation over emissions cuts for developed countries” during the rest of the talks, Jake Schmidt , international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group, said in an interview in Copenhagen. Financing efforts by developing countries to mitigate the damage of climate change, as well as pay for emissions reductions, was absent from the draft. To contact the reporters on this story: Kim Chipman in Copenhagen at KChipman@bloomberg.net Alex Morales in Copenhagen via amorales2@bloomberg.net
