U.S. Transition Hampers Talks on Climate Change

POZNAN, Poland — As ministers from 189 countries gather here in the coal mining regions of Poland to hammer out a new climate treaty, progress is being sorely hampered by the transition under way in American politics, delegates and experts here said. President-elect Barack Obama to attend these meetings — he has said there is but one president at a time, and the United States is still represented here by the Bush administration. But the anticipation of his presidency has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo. “It has affected the meeting in a fairly significant way,” said Gus Silva-Chavez, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, who has been observing the closed negotiations. “A lot of people think: ‘This is not the time to put our cards on the table. Let’s wait for the new administration. Why agree to anything now?’ ” This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the European Union is itself struggling to finalize its own climate package this week — hampered by the global economic turndown — and so its delegates have been unusually quiet here.

The current negotiations are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009, to take effect in 2013. It will replace industrialized nations’ commitments to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The United States never ratified that agreement.

It seems like there is a lot more work to do and that this meeting was a great opportunity to take a step forward that again, has been missed.

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U.S. Transition Hampers Talks on Climate Change