Economic climate negotiations 50 years' Bretton Woods process as clean energy slips

It took decades for negotiators to write treaties to reduce nuclear warheads and resolve trade disputes between nations, and by that measure, efforts to limit global warming may be just the beginning.

Conversations on the United Nations climate from Mexico next week resembling "sit in Bretton Woods in 1944," said Harvard University Environmental Economics director Robert Stavins, referring to meetings he devised a new world financial system provides an agency that govern international trade.

"Negotiations on the weather will be a continuous process, as trade negotiations, is not a simple task with a clear end point," Stavins said in a telephone interview. "It took 50 years to build the institutions that led to the World Trade Organization. It was something that was done in a moment."

Impulse, however slight, is needed to support world markets carbon dioxide as well as the 5.7 trillion U.S. dollars should be invested in clean energy projects by 2035, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.

Trade in carbon dioxide permits, which aims to curb the burning of fossil fuels that emit gases responsible for global warming, will shrink by 4 percent this year to $ 122 billion.

After the talks failed to produce a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009 - despite the presence of world leaders including U.S. Barack Obama President and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao - investors reduced their bets on wind and solar energy and carbon reduction technologies. The WilderHill New Energy Index of 87 companies that develop or use of low carbon technologies has fallen 18 percent this year, erasing $ 500 billion in market value.

'Signal' for investors

Investors could not get a "sign" of Copenhagen, that global standards would encourage investment, Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist, told a conference of 11 November. That "casts a shadow over the prospects for clean energy technology," he said.

"Expectations are very low compared to any significant result" of this year, said Robert Clover, global head of clean energy research at HSBC Holdings Plc in London. "People are looking for in the talks to see how to promote national policies and regulations."

The outlook is bleak for completing an arms control agreement in 1979 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. U.S. responded by refusing to ratify the second Treaty Strategic Arms Limitation. President Ronald Reagan withdrew from the agreement in 1986, ending discussions dating back to 1964.

Bretton Woods

The talks resumed with the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Two U.S. treaties since then allowed and Russian arms inspectors access to other nuclear arsenal to verify reductions in stockpiles of warheads. Obama is trying to push in Congress a new arms treaty with Russia after the program expired in December.

The summit in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 created the International Monetary Fund and led to the creation of the World Bank. It is the vision of a trade body but did not complete the letter. It took five years of negotiations for the WTO, which has awarded the trade disputes between the nations since its inception in 1995.

global warming talks accelerated in 1992 when the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which coordinates the annual conferences, including last year's summit in Copenhagen and turns of this year in Cancun. Now with 194 members, the agency agreed in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 to limit CO2 emissions from developed countries. U.S. signed the treaty but never ratified it.

"Smaller Pieces"

"We've been at it for 18 years on climate change, but that is not unique," Duncan Hollis, an associate professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia and editor of the "Oxford Guide to treaties" that published next year. "The failure of this in small pieces and trying to hit a piece at a time is certainly worth trying."

The UN talks are aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Envoys have suggested as much as $ 100 billion a year to help poor countries to produce clean energy technologies and promote low carbon energy like wind, solar and electric cars.

When negotiators in Copenhagen did not reach a treaty to succeed Kyoto when its targets expire in 2012, Obama and Wen were among some 30 leaders formed the non-binding agreement in Copenhagen. The agreement, which had joined 140 countries, including pledges to limit emissions of all major emitters in the world.

"Hole in One

"The realization is that you can not have a hole in one, we can not accept the big problem than once," Danish Climate and Energy Lykke Friis, the minister said in an interview. "That's not the same as saying the process is broken. Let's focus on what we can not agree and we can not agree."

Christiana Figueres, the UN's top diplomat talks in Cancun, said that the goal of advancing a package of measures that include forest protection, climate aid and distribution of technology. A full-fledged treaty is not on the agenda.

"It is unrealistic to expect governments to move in a major step towards a legally binding treaty," Figueres said in a press conference in Bonn on 15 November. She told the UN General Assembly in New York on 01 November that "a silver bullet solution to climate change is not an option" and "progress has to be done one step at a time."

climate negotiations may be more complex than that of Bretton Woods, as they include developing countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil - not only in the U.S. and its allies. And the divisions that prevented a deal in Copenhagen remain.

U. S. View

U.S. says he will not sign a treaty unless all major emitters such as developing countries are obliged to respect it. China, which has the most greenhouse gases, says he is not willing to devote their national objectives in international law.

"You can not build a system based on the idea that China should be treated the same as Chad, where China is now the largest emitter in the world," said U.S. Special Envoy Climate Change, Todd Stern, 8 October in a speech at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor.

The November 2 election that cut the representation of Obama's Democratic Party in Congress that the U.S. action climate change even less likely for now. The Paris-based IEA estimates the inaction on climate change from Copenhagen raised the cost of reducing carbon emissions at $ 1 billion to $ 18 billion by 2035.

Stavins said that a treaty is unlikely to be in writing, either in Cancun or the next year's conference of the UN climate in southern Africa. That is a view shared by Trevor Houser, a negotiator for the U.S. State Department Copenhagen summit, which is now a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

'Beat Time'

"A treaty may not even be the right approach in the short term," Houser said in an interview. "Instead of wasting valuable time waiting for the stars to align behind a new treaty, the international community has the opportunity to get down to the implementation of financing, transparency, adaptation and technology cooperation provisions of the Copenhagen agreement. "

The agreement promises Copenhagen can take from 3 to 3.9 degrees Celsius warming by 2100, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said. That could lead to rising sea levels more than 2 meters (7 feet), which would submerge most of countries like the Maldives and Tuvalu, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Change assessment of global warming. Up to 30 percent of species at risk of extinction and hundreds of millions of people face water scarcity, he said.

"We're running out of time," said Alden Meyer, policy director at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. "The atmosphere does not negotiate with politicians."