US vows to take lead on setting carbon emissions caps

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THE United States next year will spring back into the world arena for tackling climate change, where it will lead by example by setting caps on its carbon emissions, Senator John Kerry said at UN talks yesterday.

Kerry — asked to report back to president-elect Barack Obama — listed Obama’s pledges to reverse policies that have left the US sidelined for years on global warming.

“The United States under President Obama’s leadership is determined to rejoin the world community in its efforts to deal with this issue,” Kerry told reporters.

“It is determined to lead in that effort, and it will lead not just rhetorically but by example in the policies that we adopt at home.”

Kerry said he met yesterday with UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and ministers from China and Sweden.

The senator said Ban gave him a message to take back to Obama but he refused to give details, saying disclosure was a matter for the UN chief or Obama himself.

The effort to craft a new global treaty for tackling climate change has been hamstrung in part by President George W Bush’s refusal to sign up to mandatory caps on emissions.

“I said this to the Chinese delegation, I said it to the secretary general: the United States is prepared, and will under the leadership of President Obama, do its part,” said Kerry.

“The United States will assume responsibilities, I am confident, for mandatory reductions. The president-elect has said this.”

Obama has set the goal of returning US emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 level by 2020. They are 16% above that threshold, and reducing this margin will incur costs in improving energy efficiency or switching to clean, renewable sources.

The Poznan conference under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) wraps up today after a 12-day effort to move forward with negotiations for braking the growth in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Less than a year is left for the pact to be concluded, in the Danish capital of Copenhagen in December 2009.

“We believe it is vital to keep the Copenhagen date on target and that talk of not meeting it, or of somehow not being able to, is entirely premature and inappropriate,” Kerry said.

“The way to meet the goal in Copenhagen is to have heads of state pick up this challenge and attempt to meet it.”

But Kerry warned no treaty would be ratified by the US Senate, where he chairs the foreign relations committee, if big emerging economies failed to make commitments of their own.
By Richard Ingham Poznan, Poland