Nusa Dua, Bali - The United Nations praised on Thursday a step by a U.S. Senate committee to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the world`s top carbon emitter even as Washington reaffirmed opposition to caps.
"That`s a very encouraging sign from the United States," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said at 190-nation U.N. talks in Bali, Indonesia, of a vote by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
His comments rubbed in the isolation of President George W. Bush`s administration at the Dec. 3-14 talks. Australia`s new government ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Monday, leaving the United States as the only developed nation outside the pact.
In Washington, the Senate committee voted 11-8 on Wednesday for legislation outlining a cap-and-trade system for industry, power generators and transport. The bill is headed for debate in the full Senate.
"It will not alter our position here," U.S. chief climate negotiator Harlan Watson told reporters in Bali of the vote. Bush has opposed mandatory caps on emissions, favouring instead big investments in clean technologies.
And Watson said Washington was pushing ahead with its own track by inviting big economies to Honolulu, Hawaii, next month for climate change talks after a first Washington meeting in September. He said he believed the dates were Jan. 29 and 30.
BALI TO HAWAII
Bush wants 17 big emitters, accounting for more than 80 percent of world greenhouse gases, to agree to new climate goals by the end of 2008 -- just before Bush leaves office -- and feed into a new U.N. pact meant to be agreed by the end of 2009.
"Things are going well here," de Boer said of the negotiations that are seeking ways to bind all nations, including the United States and developing nations such as China and India, more tightly into a fight against climate change.
Bush says Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy and wrongly excludes goals for developing nations until 2012.
Separately, more than 200 climate scientists from around the world urged nations at the Bali talks to make deeper and swifter cuts to greenhouse emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
They said governments had a window of only 10-15 years for global emissions to peak and decline, and that the ultimate goal should be at least a 50 percent reduction in climate-warming emissions by 2050.
"We appreciate this is a significant challenge for the world community," Professor Andy Pittman, from the University of New South Wales in Australia, told reporters in Bali.
"But it is what is required to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change, and that is what we are all trying to do here."
Professor Diana Liverman of Britain`s Oxford University said the world was already seeing substantial impacts from global warming, but a warming of 2 degrees Celsius would have severe impacts in Africa, Australia, the polar regions and the Pacific Islands.
Outside the Bali conference centre, eight activists dressed as polar bears -- threatened by a melt of Arctic ice -- added a twist to the climate debate by holding banners reading: "Humans need help too".
Separately, the WWF conservation group said that 55 percent of the Amazon rainforest could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030 by a "vicious feedback loop of climate change and deforestation".
It said the effects of warming could cut rainfall and aggravate current trends in farming, fires, droughts and logging in the world`s largest tropical forest.
The Amazon basin is a giant store of carbon dioxide -- trees soak up the main greenhouse gas as they grow and release it when they rot or are burnt.
(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle in Bali, Deborah Zabarenko in Washington and James Grubel in Canberra)
Source: thestar.com.my (6 Desember 2007)