Obama science adviser insists talks with China will not bypass UN process

Summit in December is the only place to reach formal agreement, says John Holdren

Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 July 2009 18.11 BST

Bilateral talks between the US and China will not replace the need for a global climate deal at Copenhagen, according Barack Obama's most senior science adviser. John Holdren also said that, though there was much legislative work still to do in Congress, he was confident the US would be in a position to sign up to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol by the end of the year and would do it within the United Nations framework.
"There are a lot of conversations going on with China and those are bilateral and multilateral," said the former physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who now heads the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. "I suspect there's not going to be a formal bilateral deal – both the US and China recognise that the UN process, in its current embodiment in the run-up to Copenhagen, is the place where the formal deals that matter ought to be reached."
Environmentalists have been broadly positive about the Obama administration's approach to dealing with climate change but some have expressed concerns that the US will not have the time to prepare itself to sign a global deal to fight global warming in Copenhagen in December. Others have been concerned that a bilateral deal between the US and China - the world's biggest polluters - would circumvent the UN process in Copenhagen, with the two nations agreeing a mutually acceptable but unambitious deal.
But Holdren played down such suggestions : "My best guess is that we will get a deal in Copenhagen, the Chinese will be a part of it and the bilateral conversations preceding that will have been helpful leading up to Copenhagen. But ultimately it will have to be a multilateral deal."
Holdren, who is in the UK this week to accept his election as a foreign fellow of the Royal Society, insisted the Obama administration had not been distracted from climate change or the importance of a deal at Copenhagen, even in the face of crippling economic problems and proposed health care reforms. He pointed to the passing of the Waxman-Markey bill, which would establish a carbon cap-and-trade system in the US, through the House of Representatives and said that international talks ahead of Copenhagen would further speed up the legislative preparation at home.
Holdren also acknowledged that the Waxman-Markey bill was not perfect. The bill contains only modest CO2 emissions reductions targets – a 17% reduction in emissions on 2005 levels by 2020 – but he argued that it was more important to get something into law fast rather than haggle over the details for several more years.
"The single most important thing is that we are able to pass legislation that embodies a mandatory economy-wide approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the US," he said. "The goal of President Obama is to get the US on a trajectory that is compatible with a global emissions trajectory that does avoid unmanageable changes in global climate. What that amounts to as a global goal is trying to avoid exceeding global average surface temperature increase of 2C."
The bill is expected to get a rough ride by sceptical senators but Holdren is believes certain elements may actually be improved, such as extra money allocated to research, development and demonstration of clean energy technologies. He pointed out that many of those who voted against the bill in the House did so because they thought it was not bold enough. "If you really want aggressive targets to be met, you really want a large contribution from innovation in energy technologies to reduce emissions [they said]. Those folks said there's not enough in this bill for the research, development and demonstration of clean energy technologies to go with the forward-leaning targets."
If it passes through the Senate, Holdren said the Waxman-Markey legislation would send long term signals to businesses to invest in new technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS). "Without CCS it's going to be extremely difficult to meet any reasonably forward-leaning climate change goal. ."
Holdren said CCS was one of a handful of technologies that were essential to meet climate goals — other priorities included better batteries for plug-in hybrids, cheaper solar thermal power systems and improvements in solar photovoltaics.
On the bill's modest reductions targets, he said there would be time to re-visit these in future. This might get easier in future as members of the public began to see the damage from climate change escalate around the world. "And once you have a cap and trade system in place that puts a real price on greenhouse gas emissions, you're going to see a pace of innovation response that's going to make it clear to people that it's easier and less expensive to reduce emissions than they had feared."