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Speaking on the sidelines of the Delhi Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer, Jonathan Pershing, US deputy special envoy for climate change told Financial Chronicle and a couple of other reporters, “I am confident we will certainly have legislation. But we have to see when.”
The US senate had rejected the Kyoto protocol overwhelmingly thus keep the world’s leading economy out of the need to reduce carbondioxide emissions or the clean development mechanism to offset emissions. He said the Senate had set up three committees to look into climate change, and three of them had finished their deliberations. “The administration is commited to work with the Senate to pass legislation,” he said.
But many experts are sceptical whether this will happen. Benito Muller, director of energy and environment at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, part of the Oxford University, said the approval by the US Senate would be very difficult, though Europeans were very keen to get the Americans on board, which was the right thing. “But we may end up with an empty paper. If we bend so far backwards to get a Senate ratification whether what remains is viable as a multilateral treaty.”
He said it would be better if on get the Americans to sign in through a different format which would not need a Senate ratification as the Obama admistration is keen to see an agreement in Copenhagen. “The question is how to get 67 votes” in the upper house, he said.
In December, 192 countries are to meet in the Danish capital to work out a comprehensive agreement on how to mitigate or adapt to climate change. Developing countries have said that without an effective and substantial fund for mitigatin and adaptation, there won’t be an agreement.
On the second day of the climate conference, several speakers spoke about the mechanism to strengthen the Kyoto protocol on reduction of green house gases which expires in 2012. There was talk of getting a Kyoto II signed where the commitments made by signatories, including most European countries would continue with the addition of commitments by the US and others who had stayed out. Some other speakers wanted a whole new mechanism to be set up under Copenhagen meeting.
The co-chair of Montreal Protocol Technology and Economic Assessment Panel Stephen Oliver Andersen suggested that a hybrid arrangement could be attempted by allowing Montreal Protocol to look after the production and consumption of other green house gases, which reduction of CO2 emissions could be looked after by Kyoto II or Copenhagen.
The Montreal Protocol was set up to remove the use of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs which were said to be damaging the ozone layer, thus allowing harmful rays of the Sun to pass through the troposphere. Andersen told this newspaper that the protocol had achieved almost 97 per cent of its target while spending only $2.5 billion in the past twenty years. “Montreal knows how to get the things done because it has this body of experience for such a long time. They did mitigatin with a vengeance taking out almost all the ozone depleting chemicals from the world.”
Discussions on extending Kyoto Protocol veered around to the efficacy of the carbon market and clean development mechanism (CDM) under which developed countries can offset their excess CO2 production by setting up green projects in developing countries or buying credits from companies which had obtained these by reducing emissions.
Some experts were of the view that the CDM had not worked well. “The mechanism had not worked or worked badly,” said Thomas Charles Heller
Shelton Professor of International Studies at Stanford Law School in California, adding that “it allows actors in developed countries to do less at home but doesn’t produce any significant activity in developing countries.”
He said it was a very inefficient way to transfer resources from the first world to the third world and the CDM or financing needed to be changed drastically.
