IBS

Reuters

UNLIKE all other rich countries bar Australia, the United States never ratified the Kyoto protocol, and formally withdrew from it in 2001. The United Nations’ treaty on climate change restricts emissions from rich countries while allowing those of poor countries to grow unfettered. That would put American firms at an unfair disadvantage to Chinese and Indian ones, the Bush administration says, and would prompt the most polluting industries to move to poor countries.

But America is not happy with the notion that it shirks its responsibilities to the planet, but nor does it want to sign up to tough emissions targets. So on Thursday May 31st George Bush announced a new initiative designed to reconcile those concerns. The American plan involves negotiations between the world’s big emitters, including developing countries such as China and India, which were not required to cut their emissions under the Kyoto protocol. The aim of the talks would be to set targets by the end of 2008—which, given America’s previous hostility to targets of any sort, looks like a concession to the Europeans ahead of next week’s summit of the Group of Eight, which will address climate change among other topics.

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, wants the G8 countries to agree that the increase in the world’s average temperature due to global warming should not be allowed to exceed 2°C. To that end, she wants them to pledge to cut their 1990 levels of greenhouse-gas emissions by half by 2050. These steps, she hopes, will pave the way for negotiations on a new global pact on climate change; talks could get under way as soon as December. Mrs Merkel has told the German parliament that she is not sure a deal can be reached. She is planning to have lunch with Mr Bush on June 6th, the opening day of the summit, in the hopes of breaking the deadlock. But the chances of success are slim: the rowdy debate about climate change at the summit might even drown out the howls of anti-globalisation protestors outside the venue.

The new American initiative seems an admission that its previous strategy has failed. At a conference in Laos in 2005 it recruited Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea to an outfit called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Canada’s conservative government toyed with joining the partnership and announced that it would not be able to reduce emissions by as much as it promised at Kyoto. But it recently pledged instead to reduce emissions by a more modest amount by 2020, and says it has no objections to Mrs Merkel’s 50% target by 2050.

Australia’s government, too, seems to be wavering in its opposition to mandatory emissions caps. Indeed, world leaders seem to be competing with one another to churn out ever more ambitious targets on global warming. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has decided to make climate change one of the centrepieces of his tenure. He too has produced a plan for a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050. Tony Blair, Britain’s outgoing prime minister, has an even more ambitious reduction in mind, of 60%. The European Union as a whole has agreed to reduce its emissions by 20% by 2020, and offered to increase the figure to 30% if non-European countries make commitments of their own. Norway, meanwhile, hopes to become the world’s first “carbon neutral” country, by reducing its emissions to zero by 2050, or paying for equivalent reductions elsewhere.

All these proposals are much more ambitious than America’s, and it will take a lengthy debate—and perhaps another president—to reconcile them. In the meantime, global emissions continue to grow. Indeed, the growth appears to be accelerating. A study recently published by America’s National Academy of Sciences found that worldwide emissions, which had been growing by 1.1% a year in the 1990s, grew by more than 3% a year between 2000 and 2004. That is faster than the most pessimistic projections of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body set up to make authoritative pronouncements on the science of global warming. It is also faster than economic growth, implying that the world is not just consuming more energy, but also making it ever more dirtily.