Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec 10 2005 (IPS) — More than 150 nations agreed early Saturday to launch formal talks on mandatory post-2012 reductions in greenhouse gases at the U.N. conference on climate change in Montreal.

A last minute capitulation by the U.S. to participate in future climate change discussions on a non-Kyoto track led to the final agreement.

“This has been one of the most productive U.N. climate change conferences ever,” said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat.

“This plan sets the course for future action on climate change,” said Kinley in a statement.

“The environmental community is very pleased with the outcome,” agreed Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental NGO.

“Getting the U.S. to agree to something opened the door for some countries to sign on to formal post-Kyoto talks,” Bramley told IPS Saturday morning.

Canada played a key role by being determined to get an agreement, he said.

The U.S. is responsible for 25 percent of the global emissions of greenhouse gases and many countries feel that climate change cannot be tackled without its active participation.

However, during the two week-long climate meeting in Montreal, the U.S. delegation under the George W. Bush administration was defiant in its unwillingness to agree to any future discussion on climate change. At one point, the U.S. delegation walked out of negotiations that would have only committed the U.S. to future talks about emission reductions.

“Countries bent over backwards to accommodate the U.S. but they just spit in their faces,” said Steve Sawyer, climate policy adviser for Greenpeace International.

On Friday, the final day of negotiations, countries were resolved to proceed without the U.S., Sawyer told IPS.

A surprise speech by former President Bill Clinton (1993-2001) in Montreal on Friday may have played a role in the U.S. turnabout.

The U.S. could “meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, [its] economy” with the full application of existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies, Clinton said in his talk.

“There’s no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities,” he said.

There were also large U.S. delegations, including mayors from 190 cities, U.S. senators, and leading business groups in Montreal. All of these groups advocate strong international action on climate change, and most have already taken steps to make reductions at the local and state level.

It was abundantly that clear the U.S. delegation was not only out of step with the international community, it was at odds with the U.S. public and industry.

“Unlike most countries, the U.S. delegation was entirely made of bureaucrats, there is no way to apply public pressure,” said Robert Bradley of the World Resources Institute.

Something shifted the U.S. delegation, although to be clear, the eventual last-minute agreement is relatively minor, he said.

The Montreal meetings comprised two tracks: the first Meeting of the Parties under the Kyoto Protocol and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC gave birth to the Kyoto agreement in 1997 and the U.S. remains a full participant in the UNFCCC.

The Bush administration pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto treaty in 2001. That treaty is in force between 2008 and 2012 and commits participating developed nations to reductions in greenhouse gases to an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels.

In the final Montreal combined session, the 150-odd countries involved in Kyoto agreed to begin formal talks next spring on a new post-2012 treaty. But before that happened, the 190 countries involved in the UNFCCC, including the U.S., agreed to have further discussions, i.e. “a series of workshops to develop the broad range of actions needed to respond to the climate change challenge”.

Another very important outcome of the Montreal meeting is the official adoption of a detailed Kyoto manual and rulebook – the so-called “Marrakesh accords”.

“That ‘rulebook’ took years of negotiations and is a major achievement,” said Bramley.

The next rounds of climate change discussions will have to consider how countries can achieve very deep emissions cuts on the order of 20 to 25 percent, he said.

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s eminent climatologist James Hansen told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week that the world has likely just 10 years to make large cuts in emissions to avoid the very worst of impacts of climate change.

“Although it might not look like it, the world made a critical step forward here [in Montreal] towards deep cuts,” Bramley said.