Richest Nations Pledge to Halve Greenhouse Gas

NY Times
July 9, 2008

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

RUSUTSU, Japan — President Bush and leaders of the world’s richest nations pledged Tuesday to “move toward a low-carbon society” by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, the latest step in a long evolution by a president who for years played down the threat of global warming.

The declaration by the Group of 8 — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — was the first time that the Bush White House had publicly backed an explicit long-term target for eliminating the gases that scientists have said are warming the planet. But it failed to set a goal for cutting emissions over the next decade, and drew sharp criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity.

On Wednesday, leaders of developing nations took up the climate change issue and said that they too supported “a long-term global goal for emission reductions,” but they were not specific and fell short of supporting the Group of 8 declaration.

In a sense, the Group of 8 document represents an environmental quid pro quo. In exchange for agreeing to the “50 by 2050” language, Mr. Bush got what he has sought as his price for joining an international accord: a statement from the rest of the Group of 8 that developing nations like China and India, which have not accepted mandatory caps on carbon emissions, must be included in any climate change treaty.

European leaders, who have long pressed Mr. Bush to take a more aggressive stance on global warming, said the declaration could enhance efforts to reach a binding agreement to reduce emissions when negotiators meet in Copenhagen next year under United Nations auspices.

“This is a strong signal to citizens around the world,” the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, told reporters. “The science is clear, the economic case for action is stronger than ever. Now we need to go the extra mile to secure an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen.”

The leaders of the eight industrialized countries, who gathered on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido for their annual meeting, spent months debating the language of Tuesday’s communiqué in lower-level talks. Critics said it was short on specifics, and that developed and developing countries would need to make much sharper cuts in emissions to head off the worst effects of global warming.

The statement left unclear, for instance, if the cuts made by 2050 would be pegged to current emissions levels, or 1990 levels, as many advocates had hoped.

A 50 percent cut from current levels would result in a smaller decrease by 2050 than Japan and European nations had envisioned under the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate agreement that the Bush administration rejected after it took office. Kyoto and earlier agreements had set 1990 as the baseline for cuts. The United States emitted about 20 percent more carbon dioxide in 2007 than it did in 1990.

“It is one step forward from the U.S. point of view, because President Bush has agreed that the United States, for the first time, must be bound by an international treaty,” said Philip E. Clapp, director of the Pew Environmental Group, who is here monitoring the negotiations. “But the emissions reduction goal is extremely weak; the language in the communiqué is almost meaningless.”

The White House painted the document as a victory.

“The G-8 is giving a lot, but the G-8 is also suggesting that others need to be part of that equation,” said James L. Connaughton, Mr. Bush’s top environmental adviser. “And that’s a very important shared statement.”

Mr. Bush did not speak publicly about it, although Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany raised the issue when she appeared briefly before cameras with the president, before the document was released. Mrs. Merkel, who has been pushing Mr. Bush to take a stronger stance on global warming, pronounced herself “very satisfied.”

Yet already, there are signs that the document could produce a rift between rich and poor nations. South Africa’s minister of environmental affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, issued a blistering critique of Tuesday’s communiqué, calling it a concession to “the lowest common denominator” and expressing concern that it “may, in effect, be a regression from what is required to make meaningful change.”

Cutting emissions in half is one step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere, once it is released. As long as more is being emitted than the oceans or plants can absorb, its concentration will rise. And fuel emissions are projected to rise relentlessly, driven by quickly expanding economies in Asia.

For Mr. Bush, with just six months left in office, Tuesday’s declaration was part of a concerted effort to salvage his legacy on climate change. His reputation as an outlier on the issue was set in the earliest days of his administration, when he abandoned a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and refused to join the Kyoto Protocol because it did not apply to developing nations.

But over time, Mr. Bush’s stance has shifted. In 2005, he surprised Europeans when, on a trip to Denmark, he stated unequivocally that humans caused global warming.

Some advocates credit the Group of 8 with Mr. Bush’s shift. “The peer pressure on issues like climate change has helped,” Dennis Howlett, coordinator of the Canadian advocacy group Make Poverty History, said Tuesday.

On the way to last year’s Group of 8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany, Mr. Bush proposed his own process for grappling with global warming: a series of meetings involving so-called major emitters, including the developing nations China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, dubbed the Outreach Five.

Those leaders have been meeting this week in Sapporo, also on the island of Hokkaido, and on Tuesday they issued their own declaration, pledging, without specifics, to work toward reducing emissions in “a deviation from business as usual” if developing countries offered them financial assistance to do so.

“This is a positive answer to the G-8 leaders’ demand for action by all major emitters,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “That’s news.”

Tuesday’s communiqué was not the end of the discussion here. On Wednesday, the Outreach Five leaders and their counterparts in South Korea, Indonesia and Australia joined the Group of 8 for a second round of talks and a declaration from the entire group was issued suggesting they believed developed countries should share the biggest portion of the climate change burden.

Alden Meyer, who is tracking the negotiations for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Tuesday evening, “Developing countries want the industrialized world to do more.”

The climate paper was among a series of communiqués issued Tuesday on matters as varied as the rising food prices, the global economy, aid to Africa and the political crisis in Zimbabwe.

Environmentalists’ feelings were perhaps best summed up in an ad in The Financial Times on Tuesday, placed by Avaaz.org, an international online advocacy group. It showed the faces of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada pasted on the Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty.

“Hello Kiddies,” the headline read. “Be a grown-up. Set 2020 climate targets now.”