By Alex Morales and Kim Chipman

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=ahGP9j31GiEw

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- When Barack Obama was elected president, he was heralded as a possible savior for climate- treaty talks that had dragged on for years while George W. Bush rejected limits on U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

"America is back" at the United Nations negotiating table, Democratic Senator John Kerry declared after the November election. Danish climate minister Connie Hedegaard said U.S. emissions policy moved forward 35 years overnight.

Instead, Obama may send empty-handed envoys in December to the table in Copenhagen where 192 countries will try to assign emissions reductions because Congress has given him no mandate. With the European Union, Japan and Australia ready to pledge cuts of more than 20 percent only if other nations follow suit, the stage is set for promises to collapse.

"How can we expect other major players to move their position until they know that in the end the U.S. is also going to deliver?" Hedegaard, chairwoman of the UN talks running from Dec. 7-18, said in an interview.

The possible domino effect, along with a continuing split between the U.S. and China, erode chances for a strong treaty, negotiators and political scientists say.

"It is unlikely that an agreement which would be meaningful is going to be finalized" in the Danish capital, Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in an interview.

When Obama picks up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December, he'll be an hour's flight from where more than 10,000 envoys, UN officials and lobbyists will be meeting to conclude an agreement on slowing climate change, a challenge the president has said the U.S. will "lead the world" in tackling.

Obama Undecided

Obama hasn't decided whether to make an appearance, administration officials said. Environmentalists say he's a likely no-show because stalled climate bills in Congress mean the U.S. may have little to offer, threatening to unravel prospects for a global deal.

"If this were a play getting ready to come to Broadway, we would say: 'Well, we aren't sure of the financial backing or the orchestra and, guess what, the lead star says he might not sing,'" said Peter Goldmark, director of the climate and air program at New York-based Environmental Defense.

There are other stumbling blocks beyond the U.S.

Industrialized nations are still split with developing countries such as China, the largest greenhouse-gas producer, over transferring clean-energy technologies to poorer nations and over climate-adaptation aid.

Bali Road Map

Yet the heart of a climate deal is to get nations to slash heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide that scientists blame for global warming. That was the UN's principle conclusion in a 2007 declaration made in Bali, Indonesia, that proposed a "road map" for forging a new treaty in Copenhagen two years later.

Obama has said he'll push to cut U.S. emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Moving on his lead, the U.S. House passed legislation in June to create a cap-and-trade system that would limit gas emissions and create a market in pollution permits.

Today, Senate committee hearings are set to begin in Washington on a comparable measure. Congressional leaders, embroiled for months in the debate over health-care legislation, made no promises that the full Senate will take up the climate bill before 2010.

The moderate Democrats and Republicans "we are counting on" to back climate-change legislation are preoccupied with overhauling the U.S. health-care system, said Bob Simon, chief of staff of the Senate Energy Committee.

Having no Congressional mandate will make it "extraordinarily difficult" to commit to a target in treaty talks, U.S. lead negotiator Jonathan Pershing said Oct. 9 at the last negotiating round in Bangkok.

Too Many 'Ifs'

If the U.S., the second-largest emitter, could deliver, other countries might firm up their commitments, Brice Lalonde, France's lead negotiator, said in a telephone interview. He pointed to carbon-reduction pledges by many developed nations that are conditional on a deal being reached in Denmark.

"Look at all the commitments which are conditioned by 'if,'" Lalonde said. "Take out all these ifs and we've got an agreement."

Only if other nations take similar steps will Japan and Australia cut their emissions 25 percent by 2020, they said. Commitments by New Zealand and Switzerland are also contingent on a wider deal. And the 27-nation European Union has pledged a 20 percent greenhouse-gas cut by 2020 from 1990 levels and will ramp that up to 30 percent if comparable action is taken by other developed nations.

China Factor

Developing nations, whose emissions are growing faster than in richer countries, might be motivated to talk about when they can 'peak' their greenhouse gases before starting to cut them, if they got a clear stance from the U.S., Lalonde said.

India, Brazil and Mexico also may be looking to the world's biggest economy for action before fully committing, said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group.

The U.S. climate position avoids giving too much economic leeway to China, a growing industrial competitor that rejects binding emissions targets. China says that as a developing nation the priority is to pull its people out of poverty. The two nations release 40 percent of global emissions.

Even so, Chinese President Hu Jintao has said that his country will cut emissions in proportion to economic growth by a "notable" margin by 2020.

Avoiding Another Kyoto

"It's fair to say that the Chinese are holding back on putting forth a number in terms of their greenhouse gas intensity target until they have greater clarity on what the U.S. is going to do," said Schmidt. "If the U.S. put forward a number and gave a clear signal of what it would do, I think China would follow minutes after that."

American negotiators say they don't want to bring a deal back home to the Senate, the only U.S. body that can ratify a treaty, and get it rejected. Former President Bill Clinton's UN envoy Peter Burleigh signed the Kyoto Protocol accord in 1998. Neither Bush nor Clinton sent the treaty to the Senate. The 100- member chamber said at the time it would reject an accord that didn't make requirements of developing nations such as China.

"We don't want to repeat the Kyoto experience of having a number where there's nothing behind it," Obama's climate envoy, Todd Stern, said Oct. 18 in London.

By avoiding Kyoto, the world's biggest energy consumer was allowed to increase emissions by about 16 percent from 1990 through 2007, UN data show. Kyoto demanded a 7 percent reduction from the same base year to the 2008-2012 measurement period.

Hostage to Congress

"Are we going to be forever hostage to the U.S. Congress?" asked Bernarditas Muller, a negotiator for the Philippines who helps co-ordinate the G77 group, an alliance of 130 developing nations.

Just as in the 1990s, Congress is concerned over losing jobs to low-cost economies with no emission rules, and members are considering setting duties to be paid on their imports.

"The negotiations need to move forward on what we do with leveling the playing field on manufacturing so that a country that acts responsibly on CO2 emissions doesn't lose jobs to those countries that don't," said Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio.

Uncertainty over the U.S. position "is causing countries to hold back what they might do as well," said the NRDC's Schmidt, who's tracked international climate negotiations since 2000. "It's having a big ripple-on effect for the rest of the negotiations."

Obama and many world leaders probably will send underlings to the Danish capital instead of traveling themselves as the chance of countries breaking a deadlocks are slim, said Eileen Claussen, head of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia.

"There is a lot of pressure on the president to go," Claussen said. "But it's hard to imagine heads of state going to Copenhagen and ending up with a political declaration that says: 'It's really hard and we are going to take another six months to do it.'"

Russia Still Dragging Its Feet on Climate Change

Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring into Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar ice caps melt any further, Russia would be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil-fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.

To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997, during negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol (the international treaty on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions). Because Russia is the world's third largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emissions allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments. (Read about getting air traffic under control.)

As a U.N. official who participated in the talks put it, "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations - and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) - to get the country to ratify the deal.

How the world will persuade Russia to take an active part in the upcoming climate-change summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 2 remains to be seen. Scientists say this is the last real chance that global leaders have to deal with global warming before its effects become irreversible, and this time around there are few obvious carrots with which to bait the Kremlin. (Russia has since abandoned plans to join the WTO.) And Russia has already indicated that it is not putting a high priority on the talks. In June, President Dmitri Medvedev announced the country's emissions targets, which would effectively see Russia spew 30% more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020 than it does today. "We will not cut our development potential," Medvedev said at the time.

Then, at a preliminary round of climate talks in Copenhagen in late October, Russia sent an even more disappointing message. The head of the country's delegation, Mikhail Zelikhanov, a parliamentary deputy for Prime Minister Valdimir Putin's United Russia Party, questioned the basic premise of the fight against climate change. "Scientific circles in Russia and elsewhere still do not have a united opinion on the causes of global warming," Zelikhanov told the group of lawmakers from 16 countries in the hall of the Danish parliament. He suggested that an international panel be created to study whether or not global warming was the result of human actions and whether it could be stopped by cutting pollution.

Zelikhanov is part of a growing chorus of global-warming skeptics in Russia. At a climate conference in St. Petersburg in 2007, Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of parliament, told experts that a process of "global cooling" was in fact taking place. As evidence, he cited the paintings of the 16th century Dutch masters, whose warmly colored landscapes, he said, showed that temperatures were indeed higher back then. And last month, the state-run Channel One television station aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which claimed that a media conspiracy had invented the idea that pollution is to blame for climate change.

None of this bodes especially well for the success of the December summit. "It will not be possible to finalize an agreement without the participation of Russia," says Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen, who is spearheading the negotiations. "We will need to engage Russia in this dialogue." This might be possible through concessions, though. Last month, Denmark put itself on Moscow's good side when it became the first country to approve the construction of Russia's Nord Stream gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea. On Nov. 2, Rasmussen received a sign of support from Putin on climate change, albeit a slightly vague one. "Are we ready to support Danish efforts to promote the ideas of the post-Kyoto period? Yes, we are," Putin said at a joint press conference with Rasmussen.

A European official involved in the negotiations says Russia's fear of isolation may also compel it to cooperate. With the U.S. and China taking the lead in the climate-change summit and Brazil and India playing an active role, Russia would be the largest polluter and the only major power not helping to solve the crisis. "They won't want to be the bad guy," says the official, who spoke last month in Copenhagen on condition of anonymity.

But another member of the Russian delegation at the October talks left little room for optimism. Elena Chistyakova, chief adviser to the parliament's foreign affairs committee, says Russia may sign the treaty - and that's it. "[Russia] will drag out the ratification as long as they can. And if they ratify it, then they'll drag out the implementation," she says. "There's just no political will."

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