Rift develops at end of UN climate change talks

Source: Agencies  |   2008-12-14  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

A UN climate conference closed yesterday in contention over a proposal to raise what could amount to billions of dollars for poor countries by levying a tax on carbon trading among the world's wealthy nations.

The final post-midnight session, which ended nine hours after the conference was due to close, exposed a deep rift between developing countries most vulnerable to global warming and the industrial nations that were being asked to channel money and technology for the defense against climate catastrophes.

The reality of global warming "is families that lose their home, communities that lose drinking water, farmers that lose their livelihood and children that remain orphans after a hurricane," Costa Rican delegate Christiana Figueres said in the closing hours of the meeting in Poznan, Poland.

The confrontation climaxed a meeting that began on December 1 with limited expectations and ended with few achievements.

The conference was the midway point in a two-year negotiation intended to produce a new climate treaty to control emissions of greenhouse gases after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol expires.

The UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, acknowledged that the talks "caused some bitterness." At the same time, he said, they signaled the start of hardcore negotiations on the final shape of the accord, due to be completed in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"There's a lot of anger and frustration among the developing countries," said Kim Carstensen, the climate change director for WWF International.

The conference, he said, "was a waste of time."

Developing countries proposed a 2 percent tax on all transactions of the carbon market, which could become one of the world's richest commodity markets if the United States created a national cap-and-trade system as promised by President-elect Barack Obama.