China, US leaders to attend UN climate summit
Updated
China's Premier Wen Jiabao is the latest world leader to confirm he'll be attending next month's UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
And, confirming expectations, he'll be unveiling a new target for cutting China's emissions intensity. It's still not clear whether China will sign up to a global deal, as Beijing has been arguing that developing countries should not be subject to imposed targets. Premier Wen will join 58 other heads of state - including US President Barack Obama - who's also announced targets for cuts to America's greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama has also invited Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Washington next week for talks .. making use of Mr Rudd's role as the so-called "friend of the chair" at Copenhagen.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra Correspondent
Speakers: Kevin Rudd, Australian Prime Minister; Jeffrey Bleisch, United States Ambassador to Australia; Simon Crean, Australian Trade Minister; Kumi Naidoo, Director General, Greenpeace International
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MOTTRAM: Barack Obama has thrown his personal and presidential prestige behind the troubled Copenhagen process. Now, China's Premier Wen Jiabao is going too, though his schedule is as yet unconfirmed and there's still no word on whether China will set its own targets. China and the US are lynchpin nations in any climate deal. So President Obama is stepping up the last minute diplomacy. Australia's Kevin Rudd, officially a friend of the chair of the Copenhagen process, has been summoned to Washington next week in just that cause, news he broke during a fractious final sitting for the year of the Australian Parliament's lower house.
RUDD: I wish to inform the House that I've been invited by the President of the United States to meet with him in Washington next Monday following the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of government meeting this weekend in Trinidad.
MOTTRAM: Mr Rudd will have been at that Commonwealth leaders' meeting, which will be the last major leaders summit before Copenhagen.
RUDD: The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is important because it brings together so many small island countries from the Pacific and elsewhere, also in forging a deal in the leadup to Copenhagen, to try and craft a Copenhagen agreement and that's where the actions of the United states and China are also particularly relevant.
MOTTRAM: Leaders around the world have welcomed news that Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen, taking with him long awaited targets for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent of 2005 levels, by 2020, and 80 per cent by mid-century. The US Ambassador to Australia, the newly credentialed close friend of President Obama, Jeffrey Bleisch, says the US commitment to addressing climate change is unquestioned, but he had a caution about Copenhagen, where the chances of a legally-binding global replacement for the Kyoto Protocol all-but evaporated long ago.
BLEISCH: I think one thing that we should be conscious of is that although I believe the president and others are committed to meaningful achievement in Copenhagen, that this is a long war and we shouldn't judge its success by any individual battle. So I think we're committed to true success in Copenhagen but I we also understand that this is only one step in a much longer story.
MOTTRAM: Among the most difficult issues is China's position that developed countries should be held to binding targets but that developing nations should not. On the flip side, there's some pressure from Europe to impose a carbon tax on imports from countries that don't agree to binding commitments, meaning principally China and India. Australia's Trade minister Simon Crean has warned against it.
CREAN: We would be concerned if measures such as carbon taxes didn't become de facto new trade barriers. Its been hard enough getting the current ones broken down to be erecting a new set in the name of environment protection.
MOTTRAM: The unresolved complexities of getting international agreement on climate change are still very much on show. There is some movement at the domestic level. New Zealand has now passed an emissions trading scheme, though critics say it'll do nothing to reduce carbon pollution. China has won praise for measures from pollution reduction to investment in alternatives but its development demands are huge. Meanwhile in Australia, the government's proposed emissions trading scheme, for which it needs conservative opposition support, has precipitated a major leadership crisis in that opposition .. also threatening the chances of passing the scheme into law. Australian green groups say it should be abandoned as useless anyway.
Kumi Naidoo, the Executive Director of environmental group Greenpeace International says countries like Australia are not showing sufficient leadership .
NAIDOO: While Australia has had relatively good press internationally, in terms of how it has handled its role in the negotiations, the things that worry us about Australia is that it is one of the world's most polluting countries, its the largest coal exporter, its planning to double export capacity and per capita sadly Australia is the world's largest polluter. So in that context the five per cent emissions reductions target, when what we're calling for by 2020 is in the region of 40 per cent, then I think this is just too big a gap.
MOTTRAM: Kumi Naidoo says he's not giving up on Copenhagen, but in the activist mode that is the Greenpeace hallmark, he says its time for ordinary people across the world to make their voices heard in the public debate.
