Obama Leaves For Copenhagen Summit Thursday As U.S. Makes $100 Billion Announcement

December 17, 2009 8:29 a.m. EST

Topics: United States, Politics, Environment

Kris Alingod - AHN Contributor

D.C., Washington, United States (AHN) - President Barack Obama leaves for Denmark late Thursday to attend the last two days of contentious negotiations on climate change. Talks are at an an impasse over disagreements about the size of emissions cuts and financing, which Obama sought to fix with a pledge of gathering $100 billion to help developing nations battle climate change.

Developing nations are asking for stronger commitments from developed countries, and China said to have rejected an agreement sought by Obama over monitoring carbon emissions.

Obama departs for Copenhagen at 7:05 pm ET for the tail-end and most crucial negotiations in the Dec. 7-18 conference.

Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Copenhagen that the United States would lead rich nations in raising $100 billion by 2020 to support developing nations adapt to a low-emission growth economy.

"The President is hopeful that his presence can help that, and hopeful that, again, we leave Copenhagen with a strong operational agreement, even as we work towards something even stronger in the future," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a Wednesday briefing.

Asked about the deadlocked talks, Gibbs said he believes the short-term financing goals proposed by U.S. and other developed nations "can be met."

He added that a main concern of the President and American negotiators is "the transparency of any operational agreement, ensuring that what makes an agreement operational is able to be verified so that we know people are living up to those agreements."

About the same time in Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a press conference, "I still believe it's possible to reach a real success but must say in that context the next 24 hours are absolutely crucial and need to be used productively."

The operational agreement being sought by Obama has been reportedly rejected by China. The state-run Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday that Beijing had protested "an attempt by the Danish presidency of the Copenhagen climate talks to put forward draft outcome texts without consulting other parties."

The climate change website of Denmark, the host of the talks, said the Danish presidency of the conference had given up on gaining consensus on a text that would have served as the foundation for a climate accord.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen last month proposed working on a binding political agreement instead of a comprehensive treaty. "A Copenhagen Agreement could be constructed to serve the dual purpose of providing for continued negotiations on a legal agreement and for immediate action," he had said.

The negotiations in Copenhagen consist of two tracks: one concerning the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol and another on the long-term cooperative action among the 190 member nations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

China says nations had agreed "that the only legitimate basis for discussion on the outcome of the Copenhagen talks" will be proposals made under the two-track negotiations, according to Xinhua.

"China also has to take a higher moral ground and face the contradiction between it requiring international scrutiny of the greenhouse gas inventories of other nations while declining it for itself," Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF's global deal, said in a statement.

Earlier in the week, African nations walked out of the summit due to dissatisfaction over talks on the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally binding agreement among nations to control carbon emissions, but it does not require the world's top emitters such as the United States and China to curb emissions. Ratified in 1997, the accord requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce emissions from 2008 to 2012 by an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels. It expires in 2012.

The United States has pledged to an emissions target of 17 percent below 2005 in 2020, while China has made a specific pledge to cut back emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020.

Another key point of the talks in Denmark is about funding. The European Union and Japan have pledged to provide $10 billion a year by 2012 to help developing countries fight climate change. The amount is two-thirds of what is needed.

Whether Clinton's announcement of $100 billion will result in an agreement among nations is unclear, but the WWF hailed it by saying, "It bridges the needs of the developed and developing worlds and changes the game in these global talks. All that remains is an agreement between the US and China about how they will define transparency."

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