Barack Obama to save Copenhagen climate summit

President Obama must intervene personally to rescue a proposed global deal on climate change that is hanging in the balance, the British Energy and Climate Change Secretary has told The Times.

Ed Miliband said that there was a much greater chance of a successful deal being agreed in December if Mr Obama travelled to Copenhagen to lead the US delegation to the UN conference.

Gordon Brown has said that he will attend the conference but Mr Obama and most other world leaders have yet to commit themselves to going. White House officials offered no new assurances yesterday, saying only that the Administration would be represented at the “appropriate level”.

The British challenge will add to the pressure on Mr Obama to attend, but the case for staying in Washington to shepherd his healthcare reforms into law may prove irresistible.

Asked by The Times if Mr Obama’s presence in Copenhagen would increase the chances of a successful outcome, Mr Miliband said: “Yes. This only works if leaders engage. It’s a very interesting lesson that in July the leaders met in L’Aquila in Italy and agreed that they should commit to avoiding dangerous climate change above two degrees [centigrade]. If they had left it to negotiators it wouldn’t have happened. And Obama was there.”

He called on the US to make a binding and ambitious commitment to cutting its carbon dioxide emissions.

“We do need significant cuts in emissions from the US. We want as much action from America as we can get,” Mr Miliband said. “America and China are the two biggest emitters. They are very key to this. I think a deal without America would be a very bad deal.”

As a presidential candidate, Mr Obama promised to end US isolation on climate change. A cap-and-trade Bill that would allocate carbon emissions permits to major polluters was narrowly passed by the House of Representatives in June but has since been mired in Senate committees.

Senior advisers to the White House have said that alternative carboncutting strategies are being considered in case support for the cap-and-trade Bill, drafted by the Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, slips on its way to a final vote. They include limiting mandatory carbon cuts to power plants.

Another proposal involves handing responsibility for America’s carbon footprint to the US Environmental Protection Agency instead of Congress. Both scenarios would all but rule out full US participation in a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting emissions, which is the goal of the Copenhagen summit.

The US never signed the protocol and its failure to do so continued to hamper negotiations, Mr Miliband said: “The biggest difficulty we face is that Kyoto was a partial deal because it didn’t have America in it.” Leaders of other countries are waiting to see what Mr Obama will do before making their own announcements.

Mr Miliband said the proposal in the Waxman Markey Bill to cut US emissions by 17 per cent between 2005 and 2020 “would be a very good start”. He said: “If you compare what America is planning to do from now until 2020 under Waxman Markey, it’s about the same as what we are doing, possibly more depending on how you calculate it. If you look back to 1990 it’s less but they are starting 20 years later.”

Britain has agreed to cut its emissions by 34 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 per cent by 2050.

Mr Miliband said that Mr Obama’s election was part of an “alignment of the stars” that made Copenhagen a unique opportunity to secure a deal.

Carbon target

— 190 nations will meet on December 7-18 to try to agree a global deal on cutting CO2 emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012

— The objective is to keep global warming within 2C (3.6F) of the pre-industrial average. The world currently emits 50 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent a year

— Lord Stern of Brentford, former World Bank chief economist, says that emissions must fall to 44 gigatonnes by 2020 and 20 gigatonnes by 2050 to meet the 2C target

— Voluntary commitments by countries so far amount to a cut of two gigatonnes by 2020 — four gigatonnes short of the target

— Gordon Brown has proposed a global fund of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries to adapt to climate change and develop low-carbon economies

— The EU wants the Copenhagen deal to include a commitment to end the destruction of rainforests by 2030

Source: Times database