Disputes Entangle Climate Talks

By JEFFREY BALL, STEPHEN POWER and ALESSANDRO TORELLO

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Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Kenyan professor Wangari Maathai and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon attend a meeting on the ninth day of the U.N. Climate Change Conference.

COPENHAGEN -- The United Nations' effort to muster global action against climate change appeared to move backward Tuesday, as the world's leading economies traded barbs over the most basic questions about how to divide responsibility for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Even as world leaders began arriving for the climax of the two-week U.N. climate conference in the Danish capital, disagreements deepened among negotiators for the U.S., the European Union and a bloc of developing nations led by China.

Environmental reporter Jeffrey Ball reports from the Copenhagen climate conference where tensions are flaring between developed nations and emerging countries over interpretations of arcane details.

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In an attempt to salvage a deal by the Friday deadline, several heads of state, including U.S. President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, have begun calling their counterparts in various countries, according to people familiar with the calls.
The disagreements cover elemental issues: the size of emission reductions that individual countries should take on, the amount of money rich countries should pay poor countries to help fund a cleanup, and the extent of monitoring that countries should have to accept so other nations can verify they actually are implementing whatever environmental steps they promise to take.
A new draft agreement circulated Tuesday moved backward from an earlier proposed framework -- lacking any targets for carbon cuts and financing. The new draft said only the provisions were "to be elaborated" with reference to a draft issued Friday that contained a range of emissions targets.
The latest draft agreement said developed countries were historically responsible for most global emissions of greenhouse gases and so "must take the lead in combating climate change" by abating their carbon emissions and providing money and technology to poorer nations. That was a bow to developing nations, following a protest Monday by members of the Group of 77, which includes poor countries as well as large emerging economies like China, India and Brazil, whose representatives briefly walked out of the talks.
"This is not a climate-change negotiation," said Janos Pasztor, director of the U.N. secretary-general's climate-change support team. "It's about something much more fundamental. It's about economic strength." Countries, he added, "just have to slug it out."
Anger and resentment that have been building over more than a decade of climate diplomacy have spilled into the open, revealing deep distrust.
An existing climate-change treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, requires developed countries that ratified it to cut their emissions by a collective 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. But that accord doesn't curb greenhouse gases from the world's two biggest emitters, which together account for 40% of greenhouse-gas emissions. China, as a developing country, isn't required to cut its emissions, and the U.S. didn't ratify the treaty. The purpose of the Copenhagen conference was to come up with some way to rein in emissions world-wide.

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The U.S. and China each announced specific pledges to address greenhouse-gas emissions before the Copenhagen conference started. But the two have been locked in a standoff over the U.S.'s insistence that China commit to a legally binding agreement—a step China has resisted—and the degree to which China's actions should be open to international review.
Developing countries argue that wealthy nations have reneged on past pledges to address climate change. In particular, China says the U.S. has failed to honor its agreement under a broad document called the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change to stop U.S. emissions growth and to provide money for developing countries to curb their own greenhouse-gas output. The U.S. was a party to the 1992 accord, even though the U.S. didn't ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which grew out of the framework.
Wealthy countries have "only put down beautiful words about helping developing nations," but they are "not willing to take any real action," Xie Zhenhua, the head of China's delegation at the talks."
As a result, Chinese officials have argued in recent days, China shouldn't now be expected to commit legally to a specific emission-reduction target. Moreover, China says that if it uses its own money for emission-reducing moves -- as it plans to do under the targets it announced last month -- it shouldn't have to submit to international verification of whether it is meeting those targets. China argues that the framework convention protects it from such verification.

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The U.S. says it has lived up to its commitments under the framework convention. At issue is a seemingly arcane detail that has taken on great symbolic importance in the climate talks: the fact that the U.S. changed the year against which it measured its emission-reduction pledges. It moved that "baseline" year to 2005 from 1990, in effect giving itself a higher emissions ceiling from which to reduce.
Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate negotiator, agreed the U.S. made that change, but he said it wasn't important and wasn't technically a violation of the framework convention.
"It's only in the hermetically sealed world of global climate-change negotiations that measuring your reduction from" 1990 instead of 2005 "would be treated as sacrosanct," he said. "The reality is we didn't become part of Kyoto, and the framework convention has a 1990 baseline. But it was in a nonbinding, aspirational context."
European leaders are concerned that the U.S. and China will try to opt out of any binding deal to cut emissions and contribute significant funds to poor countries by blaming each other's failure to offer ambitious proposals.
European leaders are trying to push negotiators to focus on a short list of core issues, including what China and India will commit to do to cut emissions, how much money wealthy nations will provide and what the U.S. will agree to do, according to officials familiar with the European stance in the talks.
Mr. Stern said Friday's scheduled gathering of world leaders, including President Obama, will increase pressure on negotiators to reach some sort of agreement.
"Everybody who's got their boss coming is particularly keen to have things in as good a shape as possible. So I think it's putting pressure, but I think probably pressure of a salutary kind," Mr. Stern said.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com, Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com and Alessandro Torello at alessandro.torello@dowjones.com