SA gets tough on Bush

South Africa got tough on global warming recently, urging United States President George W Bush to commit his country to combating climate change.

President Thabo Mbeki and Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk made strong statements in the US about the slow pace of addressing climate change. ‘The pace of climate change negotiations is out of step with the urgency indicated by science,” Mbeki told the United Nations (UN).

He was speaking at the 62nd session of the general assembly in New York, with the theme, ‘Responding to Climate Change”.

Climate change has leapfrogged other concerns, including terrorism, on the international agenda this year to become one of the most pressing issues in the world. The past two years have seen a flood of doom reports and warnings that if the world continues to ignore the threat of global warming it could be responsible for the biggest catastrophe in modern history.

Mbeki said the starting point for a future climate regime should be equity between developed and developing nations.

‘Any deal on the fair use of the ecological space will have to be balanced by a deal on giving all countries a fair chance in the development space,” he said.

Van Schalkwyk followed Mbeki’s comments with a veiled attack on the US’s failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The protocol sets binding greenhouse gas emissions targets for countries that have signed the agreement, but it ends in 2012. Then US deputy president and climate change activist Al Gore was one of the designers of the protocol in 1997, but Bush withdrew from it.

Bush argues that the caps on emissions exempt rapidly growing economies from the limits, giving them an unfair advantage over already industrialised countries. He says China is on course to become the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and that, until the emerging giant is capped, the US will not come on board.

Van Schalkwyk said climate change negotiations would require participation by all developed countries under Kyoto and added that the US and Australia had to be engaged to come aboard.

‘We [developing countries] are willing to do more,” he said in his keynote address to the International Emission Trading Association in Washington on Wednesday. ‘But the trigger must come from the North. Besides broadening participation to include the world’s largest historical emitter — the US — creating a more empowering technology and financing framework will be a precondition.”

He said that no nation had the ‘inherent” right to hold ‘the future of all nations to ransom”.

The US played host to a number of high-profile international meetings on climate change during what was dubbed ‘Climate Week”. South Africa’s delegation was a lead actor in most. Apart from the UN and the meeting of the International Emissions Trading Association on Wednesday, Bush’s own climate-change meeting was held on Thursday and Friday.

The different US talks come at a time when the scene is being set for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali at the end of the year. The conference is seen as the last attempt to negotiate a new climate change treaty to avoid confusion after the Kyoto protocol lapses in 2012.

Commentators believe a new treaty must be sealed no later than 2009 and that this year’s conference is the last chance to iron out such a treaty.

Both Mbeki and Van Schalkwyk called for a ‘Bali Road Map” to build a ‘strengthened climate regime”. Commentators expect the South African delegation, which Van Schalkwyk will head, to help bridge the differences between developed and developing nations in drawing up this map.

On Monday, the UN’s general assembly heard several submissions on how to fight global warming, but Bush opted to skip the day’s events and arrived only for a statesmen’s dinner. The UN session was scheduled specifically to jump-start the Bali conference.

Many critics viewed the Bush meeting as the most vital, because it would indicate the position the US would take at the Bali talks. The meeting was convened by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and chaired by top White House environmental aide James Connaughton. Others labelled the meeting another attempt by Bush to hijack the Kyoto process and shirk the US’s responsibilities.

‘It’s our philosophy that each nation has the sovereign capacity to decide for itself what its own portfolio of policies should be,” Connaughton said, adding that each nation was required to make a contribution consistent with its national circumstances.