Reproduced from THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — The historic announcement by President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China that they will commit to targets for cuts in their nations’ carbon emissions has fundamentally shifted the global politics of climate change. The agreement has given a fresh jolt of optimism to negotiations aimed at reaching a new international climate treaty next year in Paris, where the American and Chinese targets are expected to be the heart of the deal.
“For the world’s biggest emitters to be coming together and announcing concrete numbers, serious numbers, sends a signal to the world,” said David B. Sandalow, who was Mr. Obama’s assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs until May 2013. Nearly two decades ago, the world’s first climate change treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, failed to stop the rise of planet-warming carbon pollution in large part because of a standoff between China and the United States, which never signed the deal.
But experts and negotiators cautioned that the emissions reductions targets now put forth by the two countries will not be enough to prevent an increase in global atmospheric temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit. That is the point where scientists say the planet will tip into a future of dangerous and irreversible warming, which will include the loss of vast stretches of arable land, rapid melting of Arctic sea ice, rising sea levels, extreme droughts, storms and flooding.
Under the Kyoto plan, developed economies, including the United States, were to slash their fossil fuel emissions, while developing countries like China were exempt. The United States refused to ratify the treaty, while China went on to become the world’s largest carbon polluter. In the following years, the superpowers remained at an impasse over climate change. Many other governments also refused to cut emissions, arguing that if the world’s top two polluters were not acting, they shouldn’t have to, either.
A series of scientific and economic reports have concluded that in order to avoid the 2-degree temperature rise, the world’s largest economies will have to drastically cut carbon emissions within just a few years — a rate far more rapid than what the United States and China have offered. At the same time, experts negotiating the Paris deal say that an essential component of the treaty will be a tax on industries for their carbon emissions — an idea that remains a political nonstarter in the United States.
Many experts also criticized China’s target of reaching a peak in its carbon emissions by 2030 as little more than business as usual.
Many other major emitters — including Australia, India and Russia, as well as petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, whose economies depend on continued markets for fossil fuels — do not appear likely to offer up similar targets anytime soon.
As a result, architects of the Paris agreement are adjusting their expectations. Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador to the United Nations and a central figure in efforts to forge the Paris deal, said that she does not expect the Paris deal to resemble a traditional top-down United Nations treaty. Instead, she anticipates that it will resemble a collection of targets pledged by individual countries, along with commitments from each government to follow through with domestic action.
Rather than a treaty, Ms. Tubiana said she envisions a deal called the “Paris Alliance” — a name that she said conveys “all the countries working together.” She also said that she does not see the 2015 Paris deal as the final effort on climate change. Rather, she hopes that it will be the first in an ongoing series of summit meetings at which alliance members reconvene to pledge further reduction targets.
Negotiators are also acknowledging that in failing to stave off a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise, a 2015 deal must include provisions to help poor countries adapt to the consequences of climate change, such as droughts, floods and extreme weather. When Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, she pledged that the United States would help mobilize the flow of $100 billion annually from rich countries to poor countries by 2020 for a United Nations Green Climate Fund.
Rich countries will meet next week in Berlin to formally announce their pledges, but so far they are far short of the $100 billion goal.
In the meantime it remains unclear how the agreement between the United States and China will influence other major emitters.
In India, the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, the government of President Narendra Modi has signaled that it will not announce a target for specific emissions cuts. India has long maintained that it should not be required to commit to such cuts.
“I doubt the Indian government is going to change anything at this time,” said Rajendra M. Abhyankar, a former Indian ambassador to the European Union and a professor of public diplomacy at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. “The action by China might create a notional pressure, but I doubt it will be a great pressure.”
Still, Mr. Abhyankar pointed out that Mr. Modi is, like Mr. Xi, interested in pursuing economic growth fueled by low-carbon energy — if that energy can be obtained cheaply. As the negotiations for the Paris deal play out, India is expected to pressure the United States to provide cheap or subsidized access to renewable energy technology.
China has long argued that it should not have to commit to cutting carbon pollution, since its energy consumption helped fuel the rise of its poor rural population to the middle class. But Mr. Xi has laid out a strategy of economic growth that is not directly tied to fossil fuel consumption, in hopes that his country could begin to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário