Climate Summit Concludes Where It Began

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JOE LAURIA
UNITED NATIONS -- The world's two largest greenhouse-gas emitters called for new action to curb emissions linked to climate change, but they didn't make any concrete new commitments themselves.

President Barack Obama said the U.S. is "determined to act" to combat climate change, and Chinese President Hu Jintao said his country would cut carbon emissions per unit of economic output by "a notable margin" over the next 11 years. But neither leader specified how his country would actually cut emissions.
That reticence reflects the political realities both men confront at home: domestic industrial bases that, particularly amid a recession, don't want to sacrifice their global economic competitiveness in the name of the environment. And the impasse underscores how difficult it will be for diplomats to reach any significant global agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions when they meet in December at a big U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen.
Messrs. Obama and Hu called climate change a serious issue and said they needed to work harder together to combat it.
China and the U.S. together account for 40% of greenhouse-gas emissions, meaning the world won't significantly curb the heat-trapping pollutants without their participation. The two countries have been at odds for years over what steps each should have to take to limit emissions.
Mr. Hu told world leaders that China will combat climate change in the next decade by meaningfully cutting carbon emitted per unit of gross domestic product by 2020. Mr. Hu said China would expand its forest coverage -- trees absorb carbon dioxide -- reduce coal consumption and by 2020 increase to 15% the share of energy it derives from renewable sources.
But Mr. Hu didn't commit to a hard cap on emissions. Even if China emits less carbon per dollar of economic product, its overall emissions could grow.
Mr. Obama said, as he has before, that the U.S. will act to combat climate change, and warned of "irreversible catastrophe" for future generations if the world doesn't limit greenhouse-gas emissions. But Mr. Obama's message was overshadowed by signs that Congress may delay action on a proposal to curb U.S. emissions, and by a skirmish in the Senate over proposals to scale back the Obama administration's authority to regulate emissions from various industries.
Can the nations of the world address the threat of global climate change without inflicting unjustifiable damage to their economies? The Journal's Beckey Bright hears both sides of the argument from Robert Stavins, Professor of Environmental Economics at Harvard University and Steven Hayward, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Obama acknowledged the "doubts and difficulties" clouding climate legislation in Congress, but said the U.S. is determined to push for a treaty at a December summit in Copenhagen to limit countries' greenhouse-gas emissions.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the climate summit amid concerns that international talks on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions are stalling. On Tuesday, he said talks ahead of the summit were moving slowly.
"Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable, economically short-sighted and politically unwise," Mr. Ban said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at the U.N. that with 87 days left until the Dec. 12 summit, "the time has passed for diplomatic bargaining." But agreements on key issues, such as how much rich nations are willing to pay poor nations to cut their emissions remain elusive.
The African Union, for instance, is considering walking out of the Copenhagen meeting if rich nations don't pay its members $67 billion a year to develop non-carbon energy sources.
President Barack Obama and China's President Hu Jintao came together at the U.N. to talk climate change. But as the WSJ's Steve Power reports, the meetings were noticeable as much for what wasn't said as what was.
In his speech, Mr. Obama focused on steps his administration has already taken to fight climate change, such as proposing rules to limit automobile emissions. In a further step Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized new rules that will require refineries, cement kilns, glass manufacturers and other large facilities to monitor and report their emissions to the government.
Mr. Obama said he would use a meeting of Group of 20 nations in Pittsburgh this week to push countries to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. The U.S. offers certain tax breaks to oil companies, some of which the Obama administration has proposed to eliminate.
Oil producers have said that raising taxes on them will discourage domestic energy production and frustrate the administration's stated goal of curbing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. Mr. Obama has resisted proposals to raise fuel taxes that consumers pay directly, such as federal gasoline taxes.—Stephen Power in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com and Joe Lauria at newseditor@wsj.com