India: Kyoto in intensive care if not dead

Whether the expiring Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries only, should be continued, expanded or replaced with an alternative agreement still splits the parties.
Rie Jerichow - 16/12/2009 - Global negotiations to extend the Kyoto Protocol have stalled, since developing countries want rich nations to be held to their Kyoto obligations and sign up to a second round of tougher commitments from 2013, Reuters reports.

According to Reuters, India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh said on Wednesday that developed countries were "vehemently opposing" the protocol and some of them wanted a single new accord obliging all nations to fight global warming.

"The sense we get is that Kyoto is in intensive care if not dead," Ramesh told reporters, according to Reuters.

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Climate talks deadlocked as clashes erupt outside Danish police fired pepper spray outside the UN climate conference on Wednesday, as disputes inside left major issues unresolved just two days before world leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to fight global warming.

16/12/2009 - Hundreds of protesters were trying to disrupt the 193-nation conference, the latest action in days of demonstrations to demand "climate justice" — firm action to combat global warming. Police said 230 protesters were detained.

Inside the cavernous Bella Center convention hall, negotiators dealing with core issues debated until just before dawn without setting new goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or for financing poorer countries' efforts to cope with coming climate change, key elements of any deal.

"I regret to report we have been unable to reach agreement," John Ashe of Antigua, chairman of one negotiating group, reported to the full 193-nation conference later Wednesday morning.

In those overnight talks, the American delegation apparently objected to a proposed text it felt might bind the United States prematurely to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, before the US Congress acts on the required legislation. US envoys insisted, for example, on replacing the word "shall" with the conditional "should."

Hundreds of protesters marched on the suburban Bella Center, where lines of Danish riot police waited in protective cordons. Some demonstrators said they wanted to take over the global conference and turn it into a "people's assembly," and as they approached police lines they were hit with pepper spray.

After nine days of largely unproductive talks, the lower-level delegates were wrapping up the first phase of the two-week conference and handing off the disputes to environment ministers in a critical second phase.

The lack of progress disheartened many, including small island states threatened by the rising seas of global warming.

"We are extremely disappointed," Ian Fry of the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu declared on the conference floor. "I have the feeling of dread we are on the Titanic and sinking fast. It's time to launch the lifeboats."

Others were far from abandoning ship. "Obviously there are things we are concerned about, but that is what we have to discuss," Sergio Barbosa Serra, Brazil's climate ambassador, told The Associated Press. "I would like to think we can get a deal, a good and fair deal.

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