ANALYSIS: Obama flat, China mixed, Japan wins at UN climate summit

Sep 23, 2009, 13:11 GMT

New York - A United Nations summit that brought together more than 100 world leaders to address global warming has become a tale of three leaders who came before the UN for the first time.

Based on reactions: US President Barack Obama's speech fell short of expectations; Chinese President Hu Jintao promised fresh commitments with few specifics; and Japan's new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama won plaudits for a major new target to curb pollution.

The three leaders were in the spotlight at a one-day conference Tuesday in New York that was designed to inject much-needed political momentum into negotiations toward a new global climate treaty by a December summit in Copenhagen.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said leaders had shown 'a sense of optimism, urgency and hope that governments are determined to seal the deal in Copenhagen.'

While it was a day of speeches rather than negotiations, most climate groups sounded cautiously optimistic that the summit had renewed efforts by world governments to reach that elusive global deal.

'Political leaders have said that they take the issue seriously, and we will hold them to their promises because there is a tremendous amount of work to be done before December,' said James Leape, director general of WWF International.

But it was Obama and Hu, heads of the world's two biggest emitters of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming, who were most anticipated ahead of the summit. Their agreement is considered pivotal to the prospects for any global treaty.

Obama has made tackling climate change a top priority since taking office in January, in some cases sharply reversing course from his predecessor George W Bush, who chose not to address a similar UN conference two years ago.

Obama announced new vehicle emissions standards and pushed for investments in renewable energy, in part to pull the US out of recession. The Environmental Protection Agency declared that it has the authority to force companies to curb their pollution, though it is reluctant to use that power without the approval of legislators.

Yet Congress is tying Obama's hands: legislation that would cut greenhouse-gas emissions has stalled in the US Senate. A failure of lawmakers to pass a bill in time for the Copenhagen talks in December could prevent Obama from having the bargaining power to close the deal.

At the UN, Obama declared a 'new day' for US climate action and said the US supported a 'significant' climate change agreement in Copenhagen.

With Senate action unclear, Obama was vague in terms of what the US could promise. He has previously pledged to cut US emissions 20 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050 but made no mention of those commitments in his speech on Tuesday.

Obama's refusal to go out on a limb has led to skepticism about the US commitment, especially in the European Union, which wants stiff new curbs in global emissions to be agreed at Copenhagen.

'There's great disappointment about President Obama, who hasn't brought anything new to the table here in New York,' Martin Kaiser, coordinator of climate politics for Greenpeace, told the German Press Agency dpa.

Hu, the first Chinese leader to address the UN in 30 years, came to the summit with similarly high expectations and speculation that China planned a major announcement on its emissions.

Hu said China was committed to making the Copenhagen talks a success and for the first time said China could adopt targets for slowing the growth of its own pollution levels by 2020 - a key demand from wealthier nations.

But Hu offered few precise figures. He promised only to limit China's emissions by a 'notable margin' by 2020, though he also pledged to raise China's use of renewable energy to 15 per cent of the total by the same year.

Kaiser said it was important that China declared its readiness to sign onto a global climate treaty, but 'we had expected a much stronger signal from Hu Jintao.'

And so, in a summit that brought few new commitments, it was Japan's new prime minister who made the greatest splash. Following through on an election campaign pledge, he promised to cut the country's emissions 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That would push Japan past the European Union, which has promised a 20-per-cent cut, and signalled that the Asian powerhouse was now set to become one of the new leaders in efforts to curb global warming.

The UN's Ban praised Hatoyama's pledge as a 'quantum jump' from the previous Japanese administration, which had pledged only an 8- per-cent cut. Hatoyama was swept to power in an August election that ushered in the first change in Japanese party rule in five decades.