Climate talks close with few new steps

Negotiators, activists express dismay

Chilean Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt (right), shown Sunday at the international climate conference that she chaired in Madrid, said she was “sad” that negotiators failed to agree on rules for the trade of carbon emissions permits. More photos at arkansasonline.com/1216climate/.
Chilean Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt (right), shown Sunday at the international climate conference that she chaired in Madrid, said she was “sad” that negotiators failed to agree on rules for the trade of carbon emissions permits. More photos at arkansasonline.com/1216climate/.

MADRID -- Marathon U.N. climate talks ended Sunday with a slim compromise that drew widespread disappointment, after major polluters resisted calls to ramp up efforts to keep global warming at bay and negotiators postponed debate about rules for international carbon markets.

Organizers kept the delegates from almost 200 nations far beyond Friday's scheduled close of the two-week talks in Madrid. In the end, negotiators endorsed a general call for greater efforts to tackle climate change, as well as several measures to help poor countries respond and adapt to its effects.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was "disappointed" by the meeting's outcome.

"The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis," he said. "We must not give up, and I will not give up."

The final declaration cited an "urgent need" to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases in line with the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate change accord. But the declaration fell far short of explicitly demanding that countries submit bolder emissions proposals next year, which developing countries and environmentalists had demanded.

The Paris accord established a common goal of keeping temperature increases below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and ideally below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, compared with pre-industrial levels. So far, the world is on course for a 5.4- to 7.2-degree Fahrenheit rise, with potentially dramatic consequences for many countries, including rising sea levels and fiercer storms.

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After two nights of fractious negotiations, delegates in Madrid decided to defer some of the thorniest issues to the next U.N. climate summit, to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.

Chilean Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt, who chaired the meeting, said she was sad that no deal had been reached on the rules for international trading in carbon emissions permits.

"We were on the verge," she said, adding that the goal was to establish markets that are "robust and environmentally sustainable."

Economists say that putting a price on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and allowing countries or companies to trade emissions permits would encourage the shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

Carbon-market advocates say trading mechanisms could shave $320 billion a year off the cost of reducing emissions by helping countries and companies identify the most efficient projects.

A deal would have encouraged the spread of carbon cap-and-trade markets like the one established in Europe, which has put a price on pollution for thousands of power plants and industrial plants.

Inaction this year was a blow to developers who participated in the Clean Development Mechanism and other programs that sprang up after the previous major climate pact, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Clean Development Mechanism has fed $138 billion into thousands of climate-related projects, but its credits have become nearly worthless today because of questions about the system's credibility.

Some observers welcomed the failure of negotiations on carbon markets, and the European Union and developing countries had said beforehand that no deal was better than a bad one.

"People all over the world are asking for urgent action, and several countries only offered accounting tricks and cover for climate inaction," said Sam Van den Plas, policy director at Carbon Market Watch, a research group following the talks. "What was on the table here could have been a real disaster for the Paris Agreement. We need carbon markets to increase climate action, not undermine it."

Environmental groups and many nations see carbon trading as a loophole and a method to shift around the responsibility for cutting pollution.

"It symbolizes profits for their private sector and the chance to give the appearance that they are meeting their commitments while continuing to pollute and operate business as usual," said Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands.

Helen Mountford, from the environmental think tank World Resources Institute, said that "given the high risks of loopholes discussed in Madrid, it was better to delay than accept rules that would have compromised the integrity of the Paris Agreement."

CALLS FOR ACTION

The talks in Spain took place against a backdrop of growing worldwide concern about climate change. The past year has seen large protests in hundreds of cities around the world.

The painstaking pace of the talks stood in contrast to the mass demonstrations and impassioned pleas from young activists, some of whom staged protests inside the conference hall and accused world leaders of neglecting the most significant challenge facing humanity.

"This is the biggest disconnect between this process and what's going on in the real world that I've seen," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been attending climate talks since the early 1990s.

"You have the science crystal on where we need to go. You have the youth and others stepping up around the world in the streets pressing for action," he added. "It's like we're in a sealed vacuum chamber in here, and no one is perceiving what is happening out there -- what the science says and what people are demanding."

Delegates made some progress on financial aid for poor countries affected by climate change, despite strong resistance from the United States to any clause holding big polluters liable for the damage caused by their emissions. Countries agreed four years ago to funnel $100 billion per year by 2020 to assist developing nations, but nowhere near that amount has been raised.

Under the Paris accord, countries are supposed to regularly review their national emissions-reduction targets and increase them if necessary. Last week, the EU agreed to a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by mid-century, but the move did little to sway discussions in Madrid about setting more ambitious targets in the medium term, an issue that will be on the agenda again in Glasgow.

In Madrid, a cross-section of small and developing countries accused the United States and others, such as Brazil and Australia, of obstructing key parts of the negotiations and undermining the spirit and goals of the Paris accord. Countries already hit hard by climate change argued that large emitters continue to dawdle, even as imperiled nations face intensifying cyclones, increased flooding and other climate-related catastrophes.

"This is an absolute tragedy and a travesty," Ian Fry, the climate change ambassador from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, told fellow negotiators. Fry specifically pointed to the U.S. as playing a destructive role in the talks.

The U.S. is in its final year as part of the international agreement it once helped spearhead. The Trump administration has said it officially will withdraw from the Paris accord on Nov. 4, 2020 -- the day after the U.S. presidential election.

Scientists said that the longer countries wait to cut emissions, the harder it will be to meet the accord's temperature target.

"The global emissions' curve needs to bend in 2020," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin.

"Emissions need to be cut [in] half by 2030, and net zero emissions need to be a reality by 2050," he said. "Achieving this is possible -- with existing technologies and within our current economy. The window of opportunity is open, but barely."

The U.N.-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year detailed how warming is already threatening food and water supplies, turning arable land to desert, killing coral reefs and supercharging storms. And a new U.S. assessment on Tuesday found that the Arctic might already have crossed a key threshold and could become a contributor to global carbon emissions as huge amounts of permafrost thaw.

Information for this article was contributed by Frank Jordans and Aritz Parra of The Associated Press; by Brady Dennis and Chico Harlan of The Washington Post; and by Laura Millan Lombrana, Jeremy Hodges and Bobby Magill of Bloomberg News.

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AP/Bernat Armangue

A member of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a United Nations agency, is shown on a screen Sunday on the closing day of the international climate conference in Madrid. More photos at arkansasonline.com/1216climate/.


A Section on 12/16/2019

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