White House shaping plans for U.S. warming summit
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As the White House draws up plans for President Bush’s global warming summit, some officials are hopeful that the fall meeting might kick start international talks on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.
“The feeling I get is that there is a new sense of momentum,” Chris Dodwell, a top environmental official for the United Kingdom, said yesterday following meetings with senior Bush administration officials in Washington. “There does seem to be a shift in approach.”
Dodwell, deputy director on international climate change issues for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, visited with Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and two of the State Department’s top climate officials, Paula Dobriansky and Harlan Watson.
Following the meeting, Dodwell said the administration is in a critical but early stage of preparing for the fall meeting — a characterization echoed by several others in contact with top U.S. officials. “There’s sort of light and darkness,” Dodwell said in an interview.
To much fanfare, Bush announced plans in July for a meeting with about 15 of the world’s largest polluters. The administration has since rephrased the summit as one involving the world’s “major economies.”
But the White House has so far released few details about the meeting.
U.S. and foreign officials tracking the event say they expect the meeting will be held in late September or October, with the date shifting as the administration juggles several other major international events on climate change — the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit scheduled for Sept. 8-9 in Sydney, Australia, and a United Nations General Assembly meeting on global warming on Sept. 24.
The cultural needs of a diverse guest list also have slowed down the process. India, for example, celebrates the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi on Oct. 2. The administration also does not want to schedule its summit too close to the official round of United Nations’ negotiations on a post-Kyoto agreement. That meeting runs Dec. 3-14 in Bali, Indonesia.
A White House spokeswoman last week could not say if the meeting would occur in Washington or elsewhere.
While an official guest list has not been released, a White House Power Point presentation obtained by Greenwire shows the following nations are being considered: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea “and others.”
Dodwell said European officials have settled on a delegation for the U.S. meetings that includes the continent’s four members of the Group of Eight — France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom — as well as Portugal, the current president of the European Union. The leader of the European Commission — Jose Manuel Barroso — also will likely receive an invitation.
Connaughton is expected to chair the event, though it also is possible Bush will attend the start of the summit.
Three-part agenda
According to the White House presentation, the United States has divided its summit into three sections.
Atop the agenda is developing a plan for a new international agreement that can go into place upon the expiration of Kyoto in 2012. Bush’s deadline: just before the end of his presidency in 2008.
The summit will try to get participating countries to set their own “national midterm goals” for the 2020 and 2030 time periods, with a simultaneous focus on sector-specific programs among the electric utility, steel, cement, building and transportation industries.
Bush also hopes to incorporate a “pledge and review” process for the participating countries that could feed into the broader U.N. effort, which hopes to complete a post-Kyoto agreement by the end of 2009.
Other components of the U.S. agenda include attempts to increase global funding for research and development of major new energy technologies, as well as a stronger emphasis on existing global warming programs that deal with land use, adaptation and energy efficiency.
Big picture, the White House document emphasizes a “bottom up, sector-based” approach for climate change. It concludes, “One size won’t fit all: national/regional strategies are most realistic.”
Bush’s perspective has long been debated in academic circles. But it also runs in contrast to the view of the European Union, among others, which supports a “top-down” strategy that emphasizes hard emission targets for both industrialized nations and developing countries.
In an E&ETV interview last month, Connaughton defended the Bush approach.
“What this is intended to do is actually accelerate the conversation and do it on a more practical level,” Connaughton said. “It’s a lot easier to initially start the conversation with 10 to 15 countries than it is to start the conversation with 189.”
He added, “We are the countries that actually have the obligation to address the economic needs of our citizens as well as the environmental footprint of those choices, including carbon. So this is the group that ultimately has to find some common ground.”
‘No great shift’
Environmental groups are nervous about giving Bush too much credit for his plan, especially after more than six years of debate over scientific censorship and disagreements over mandatory limits on carbon dioxide.
Bush has not moved on his long-held position against cap-and-trade legislation to control emissions, sparking concern the White House may just be trying to steal thunder from the Democrat-led Congress that plans to advance such legislation around the same time as the summit.
“This was no great shift in the administration’s position,” said Phil Clapp, head of the National Environmental Trust. “The words ‘binding commitments’ were distinctly omitted.”
Others welcome the Bush administration’s move and caution against prejudging the summit’s outcome. “The important thing before you have dinner is to get everyone to the dining room table,” said Robert Stavins, head of environmental economics at Harvard University. Stavins dismissed critics who say the Bush summit is a cynical move to divert attention from its past positions on climate change.
“That’d be self defeating,” he said. “If they didn’t want to do anything, they shouldn’t have said anything.”
Jeff Holmstead, former director of EPA’s air office during Bush’s first term, said he expected the White House to hold a deliberative review that ends with a major declaration for long-term global warming planning. “This administration is not going to just pick a number out of a hat unless they have some buy in from [the Energy Department] and others that there’s a technology pathway that actually gets us there. I think such a number probably exists.”
Filed by Maria Robson under The Environment, Climate Change