Climate talks seek international pact

BALI, Indonesia – Delegates and scientists from around the world opened the biggest-ever climate conference today, aiming to build a new international pact by 2009 to combat global warming – or risk economic and environmental disaster.

Some 10,000 conferees, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries gathered on the resort island of Bali for two weeks of U.N.-led talks that follow a series of scientific reports this year concluding that the world has the technology to slow global warming but must act immediately.

The Bali meeting will be the first major climate change conference since former Vice President Al Gore – due in Bali next week – and a U.N. scientific council won the Nobel Peace Prize in October for their environmental work, feeding the growing sense of urgency as ice caps melt, oceans rise and extreme weather increases.

“The negotiations have to move faster and more decisively here in Bali,” said Kenyan Environment Minister Kivutha Kibwana, the outgoing president of the conference, which met last year in Nairobi.

The immediate aim of the Bali conference will be to launch negotiations toward a pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming when it expires at the end of 2012, and set an agenda for the talks and a deadline. The U.N. says such an agreement should be concluded by 2009.

A main thrust of the conference will be to draw the United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, into the process. Washington did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that mandatory cuts in emissions would harm the economy and calling into question the veracity of global warming science.

Confronted with the scientific reports of the past year, however, the Bush administration has signaled a willingness to play a larger role in the negotiations, and U.N. officials agree that they must craft a post-Kyoto framework that Washington will go along with.

Among the most contentious issues ahead will be whether emission cuts should be mandatory or voluntary, as the U.S. favors. Also on the agenda will be to what extent rapidly rising economies such as China and India will have to rein in their emissions, and how to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to a worsening climate.