Clinton Leads
Apr 27th, 2009 by Richard
Diplomats from the world’s biggest GHG polluters are meeting at the US State Department this week trying to make progress on the Road to Copenhagen. The two-day meeting of major economies is meant to jump-start climate talks, and hopefully lead to a new international understanding in advance of the December deadline, when a new climate agreement will need to be ratified. The current Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and recent climate change summits have made little progress.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton open the conference, with a mea culpa, stating that the US recognises that industrialized countries bear a major responsibility for the warming that has already occurred. She added that she wants China and India to continue to grow. “We want people to have a higher standard of living.”
Clinton also stated that this is the gravest problem facing the international community, and that “[t]he facts on the ground are outstripping the worst-case scenario models.”
Hopes are high that climate change leadership — from Secretary Clinton and President Obama — will create a new spirit of cooperation. Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, declined to specify what the United States needs to bring to Copenhagen in December to demonstrate US leadership, but noted the Obama administration’s approach differs markedly from that of the Bush team.
“They were not fundamentally looking for an international agreement,” Stern says. “We are looking for an international agreement, and we’re looking for cooperation at a significant, we hope, transformative level.”
Summit participants include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Denmark, and the United States.
