Doha lets down planet Earth

UN climate talks in Doha Doha – Arabstoday with agencies The fractious debate at UN climate talks in Doha points to a rocky road ahead to a new, global 2020 deal on saving the Earth from calamitous global warming, observers say. A consensus interim agreement that many say is low on substance, was passed after two weeks of intense haggling that deadlocked almost from day one and highlighted deep fault lines between rich and poor nations.
Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, said on Saturday:
“Just three days after Typhoon Pablo (Bopha) hit the Philippines and showed the human cost of extreme weather in vulnerable countries, the decision by politicians not to increase the speed or scale of efforts to cut carbon pollution is inexcusable. The international process limps on, while the crisis accelerates. But with increasing impacts of climate change, pressure will intensify for a serious global deal in 2015.”
The key dispute has remained unaltered for more than two decades -- sharing out responsibility for tackling what UN chief Ban Ki-moon called the climate change "crisis".
The new climate deal is not groundbreaking. "It's less progress than one might have hoped," said German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier.
The resulting agreement extends the Kyoto Protocol, which would have expired just after the end of the year. The extension period is to start on January 1 and will continue until the end of 2020.
Brazil's chief negotiator Andre Correa do Lago was content with the policy's extension, saying it represents the only legally binding contract capable of reducing emissions and offering a blueprint for the new climate agreement.
That new agreement is to be finalised by 2015 and will call on not only industrialised nations but also developing countries to commit themselves to reducing their emissions. The agreement is to come into force by 2020 - after the end of the current extension of the Kyoto protocol.
The developing world places the onus for financing and deep emissions cuts on rich countries which they say got where they are today by pumping the bulk of Earth-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere during the industrial era.
But rich countries led by the United States, which has refused to ratify the emissions-curbing Kyoto Protocol, insist on imposing a duty on poorer nations polluting heavily today as they burn coal to bolster their developing economies.
A slew of recent reports has warned that the Earth is on the road to dangerous warming levels with ever more extreme weather events like superstorm Sandy that struck the US east coast and Caribbean in October and the deadly typhoon that swept through the Philippines.
"We are headed on current plans for likely increases of 3 centigrade degrees or more -- temperatures far outside those that Homo sapiens has ever experienced," British economist Nick Stern, author of a landmark climate change report, said of the Doha deal.
The UN is targeting a limited warming of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Battered and bruised, negotiators applauded as conference chairman Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah of Qatar rushed through a package of deals he called the Doha Climate Gateway on Saturday evening.
Climate activists are not very impressed with the Doha results, though.
"We have put far too few emission reduction targets in this Kyoto protocol," said Ann-Kathrin Schneider of BUND, an environment NGO in Germany. She also pointed out that only a few countries are actually included in the second extension period.
Critics are especially displeased about a deal to let countries roll over parts of their unused emissions quotas from the first Kyoto period. This is of particular interest to countries whose economies suffered a collapse after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many central and eastern European countries have not used up all their emission rights and fought in Doha for having those emissions taken over to the new Kyoto period.
In the end, the Doha deal is a compromise. "A small portion of the unused rights can be used until 2020," explained Martin Kaiser, responsible for international climate politics at Greenpeace. What worries him and his colleagues more, however, is that Russia and the other countries will bring those rights into the negotiations over the climate deal proper.