The UN climate change conference in Copenhagen next month will fail to produce an agreement to combat the threat of global warming, British officials have warned. They forecast here yesterday that a deal could take another 12 months to strike.
This gloomy assessment of the latest state of play was delivered at an off-the-record briefing by senior members of Britain's delegation at the latest round of climate talks in Barcelona, which were meant to pave the way for an agreement in Copenhagen.
Effectively, they were abandoning hope that a legally-binding agreement along the lines of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, could be concluded in the time available, given the wide gaps that still exist. This was "regrettably unavoidable", one official said.
EU negotiators are not quite so pessimistic, saying it could take another six months to bridge the gaps.
On Wednesday in Washington, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt – current EU president – said a Copenhagen deal was "simply impossible to deliver". He was referring to the lack of any real movement on the crunch issues of how deep developed countries would be prepared to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and how much aid they would provide to developing countries for adaptation and mitigation.
Mr Reinfeldt would also have got a real sense in Washington of the dilemma facing President Barack Obama, who must wait for the US Senate to pass new climate and energy legislation before his climate negotiators can put any "numbers on the table".
With only 30 days left to the opening of the Copenhagen conference on December 7th, the chances of passing the Bill in advance are rated as remote to non-existent.
Antonio Hill of Greenpeace, which staged a noisy demonstration outside the Barcelona conference centre yesterday morning, said it was clear Britain had made a "judgment call" about the prospects, because of the "sequencing issue" in the US.
But he warned that it was "dangerous" to assume developing countries would go along with any postponement. "They've made it clear that they want the developed countries to set [emission reduction] targets and, two years on, they haven't."
Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea special envoy for climate change and director of the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, said the British briefing was simply "expressing something that we all knew or feared but were afraid to admit".
