COPENHAGEN, (Reuters) – An enhanced version of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol is set to be part of the fight against global warming until 2020, according to a draft text by Denmark which is hosting talks on a new climate agreement.
“Parties to the Kyoto Protocol … decide that further commitments for developed countries should take the form of quantified (greenhouse gas) emission limitation and reduction objectives,” according to the text, intended as the possible basis for an agreement at the Copenhagen talks, which Reuters obtained yesterday.
The Kyoto Protocol, agreed in 1997, obliges all industrialised nations except the United States to cut greenhouse gas emissions until 2012. In Copenhagen, 190 nations are puzzling over how to work out a wider deal involving all countries in combating global warming until 2020.
Many rich nations favour a single United Nations pact to succeed Kyoto. But poor nations, which say the rich want to “Kill Kyoto”, prefer two tracks — Kyoto with deep emissions cuts for the rich and a new, less binding accord for the poor.
The four-page text, dated Nov. 30, suggests that the Kyoto Protocol may survive the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen, alongside a new pact that would spell out obligations by developing nations and the United States, the only industrialised nation outside Kyoto.
The text said that international emissions trading and other mechanisms under Kyoto, including a scheme for promoting green technologies in developing nations, should be “enhanced”.
Denmark says it is consulting many countries with a variety of texts but not making formal “proposals” yet before a summit of 110 world leaders on Dec. 17-18 at the end of the talks.
The document leaves blank a list of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developed nations by 2020 as part of the fight against global warming that may cause more extinctions of species, rising sea levels, wildfires and desertification.
Another document, also dated Nov. 30, outlines actions by all nations to fight climate change including a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The document is little changed from one dated Nov. 27 reported by Reuters last week. Many developing nations oppose a goal of halving emissions, saying that rich nations must first do far more to cut their emissions by 2020.
“Denmark has not published any proposals. Whether we will do so depends on the coming days’ negotiations,” Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Danish TV2 News yesterday in response to publication of the Nov. 27 document on a website.
An extension of Kyoto would have to be without Washington.
“We’re not going to become part of the Kyoto Protocol,” U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern said on Wednesday in Copenhagen.
Former President George W. Bush said Kyoto was a straitjacket that unfairly omitted greenhouse gas curbs for developing nations led by China. President Barack Obama has no plans to rejoin even though he wants to step up U.S. actions to fight global warming.
