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After Applause Dies Down, Global Warming Talks Leave Few Concrete Goals
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The leaders of developed and developing countries, including President Bush, and international officials on Wednesday in Toyako, Japan, on the last day of talks on climate change and other issues.

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By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: July 10, 2008

Nearly everyone had something to cheer about on Wednesday after the major industrial powers and a big group of emerging nations pledged to pursue “deep cuts” in emissions of heat-trapping gases in coming decades.
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President Bush, who had insisted that any commitment to combat global warming must involve growing economies as well as the rich nations, recruited China and India to the table and received rare accolades from some environmentalists for doing so.

The developing countries received a promise that the rich countries would take the lead in curbing emissions. And environmentalists said the agreements renewed chances of reviving two ailing climate pacts, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

But behind the congratulatory speeches on Wednesday, some experts said, was a more sobering reality. The documents issued by the participating countries had very few of the concrete goals needed to keep greenhouse gases from growing at their torrid pace, they said.

The statement issued by the industrialized Group of 8 pledged to “move toward a carbon-free society” by seeking to cut worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases in half by 2050. But the statement did not say whether that baseline would be emissions at 1990 levels, or the less ambitious baseline of current levels, already 25 percent higher.

Mentions of mandatory restrictions on emissions were carefully framed. Caps or taxes were endorsed where “national circumstances” made those acceptable. The statement urged nations to set “midterm, aspirational goals for energy efficiency.”

There were new commitments to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from coal combustion could be captured, compressed, and stashed permanently underground. But experts have said that process would have to work at the scale of billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year within a decade or two to avert a huge rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, while proposed projects are all measured in millions of tons.

The Group of 8 statement also pledged to increase aid to help developing countries improve energy efficiency or cut their vulnerability to climate risk. But developing countries have noted that in the past those pledges have gone unfilled.

“I would characterize this outcome as ‘talking the talk’ rather then ‘walking the walk’ on climate change policy,” said Michael E. Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has co-written many papers on climate policy.

Dr. Schlesinger and others said that neither this week’s statements nor the two previous climate treaties seemed likely to significantly slow the rise over decades of heat-trapping gases, most notably carbon dioxide — an unavoidable byproduct of burning fossil fuels and forests.

Beyond any vagueness in this week’s statements is the challenge that climate policy must compete with other pressing global problems, particularly rising prices for energy.

This reality was on display in Japan in the days leading up to the leaders’ formal sessions. Gwyn Prins, an expert on climate policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, was there for discussions preceding the formal talks and noted that current concerns about energy security were already clearly interfering with discussions aimed at climate stability.

One day, in particular, he said, was “gloriously incoherent.” At a meeting in the morning, participants focused on finding ways to reduce gas prices, he said, while a session that afternoon focused on raising them through caps or taxes on fossil fuels.

The most discouraging aspect of the statements out of Japan, for many experts, was seeing the persistent gap between what science is saying about global warming and what countries are doing.

The United States appeared to regain some credibility at the meetings, but some environmentalists still found an opportunity to criticize President Bush. David G. Victor, an expert on climate policy at Stanford University, said that the power of any American president was limited, and that another barrier to cutting emissions was Congress.

“Nearly every government is looking beyond Bush, and while they are hopeful that the next president will surely be more constructive on this issue, they don’t know what the president can really bring to the table,” he said. “It is hard for the U.S. president to negotiate with strength when his ability to offer commitments hinges on national legislation that he does not control.”

Cutting emissions in half is just the first step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere, once it is released. That means that later in the century, emissions must drop nearly to zero, or large-scale techniques must be developed to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

Making a bit of lemonade from lemons, Dr. Victor saw a bright spot in the disagreements at the meetings. “Inability to agree is a sign that governments are actually getting serious,” he said.

He concluded: “People are working hard and pursuing many avenues; in time, they will find routes that work. This is quite unlike the Kyoto process, which was marked by very rapid negotiations that produced agreements that looked good on paper, but didn’t really reflect what important governments, such as the U.S., could actually deliver.”