Climate talks stalled amidst rows

Talks between the EU and the US on the subject of climate change have broken down in Bali with the US and Canada opposed to any idea of firm cuts in emissions being written into the final text. Europe wants the final text to include a specific commitment that industrialised nations should cut their emissions by 25-40% by 2020.

The Indonesian hosts of the climate summit have been trying to bridge the gulf between the two sides with a text that reportedly excluded firm numerical targets for 2020, but did contain acceptances that greenhouse gas emissions need to be stabilised by the end of the next decade and that rich nations should play the major part in the effort.

Neither the EU nor the US has formally accepted the compromise wording.

This news comes on the same day that Al Gore writes on the front page of The Independent in an article entitled "The World Can't Wait For George Bush":

Just this week new evidence has been presented. I remember years ago listening to the scientists who specialise in the study of ice and snow express concern that some time towards the end of the 21st century we might even face the possibility of losing the entire north polar ice cap. I remember only three years ago when they revised their estimates to say it could happen halfway through the 21st century, by 2050.

I remember at the beginning of this year when I was shocked to hear them say it could happen in as little as 34 years and now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as five to seven years.

He goes on:

Despite a growing number of honourable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill used in 1938 when he described those who were ignoring the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. He said, and I quote: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that. But my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that. Just in the last few days, on the eve of this meeting, I have received more than 350,000 emails from Americans asking me to say to you: "We're going to change in the United States of America."

During this upcoming two-year period there will be a national election in the United States. One year and 40 days from today there will be a new inauguration in the United States.

If you decide to continue the progress that has already been made here on all of the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions; on the hope (and with the expectation) that, before this process is concluded in Copenhagen, you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States) then you can make great progress here.

Gore then proposes that the Bali Conference proceed as if Bush is not the American President and start making plans based on the hope that whoever comes next in that job will have more foresight than the current inhabitant of the White House.

When even Howard eventually left office in Australia admitting that climate change was real, then Bush is left looking like a Luddite, admitting that there is a problem but hoping that new technology will provide the answers rather than any practical steps we need to take ourselves. That is, in reality, a proposal to do nothing and hope for the best.

Gore's main point is right. We might never get this Luddite President to see what is so obvious to the scientific community, but the Bali conference should continue to do all it can with deforestation plans and other practical ways to confront this problem.

The current President won't always be there, and the world can't afford to wait until he has gone to develop plans.

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