Talks in Deadlock Ahead of Leaders' Arrival

President Obama Makes Phone Calls to Lobby Other Countries as Pressure Rises to Reach a Face-Saving Agreement

By JEFFREY BALL, STEPHEN POWER and GUY CHAZAN
Associated Press
U.N. climate chief Yvo De Boer speaks with protesters staging a sit-in at the Copenhagen Climate Summit on Wednesday.
COPENHAGEN -- Negotiators at the United Nations climate summit scrambled Wednesday to bridge multibillion-dollar disagreements as President Barack Obama and other world leaders prepared to descend on the Danish capital Friday.
As night fell in Copenhagen Wednesday, it appeared that the leaders could arrive for the summit's final sessions with significant work to do to achieve Mr. Obama's goal of a "meaningful" climate agreement.

Protesters and Danish police clashed at the gate of the U.N. Climate conference in Copenhagen, as heads of states are arriving to break the deadlock of COP15 negotiations, Roman Kessler reports.
Mr. Obama has gotten personally involved in a last-ditch lobbying effort, calling large and small nations seen as pivotal to breaking an impasse. Failure to ink even a nonbinding political deal in Copenhagen would be an embarrassment to Mr. Obama, who has made attacking climate change a centerpiece of his agenda.

Mr. Obama has telephoned leaders in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Brazil, Grenada, France, Germany and the U.K. as U.S., European Union and Australian negotiators lobby others in the so-called G-77 group of poorer nations "who know it's in their strategic interest...not to go along with the others," said one official involved in the talks. In some cases, negotiators for G-77 nations approached their bigger Western interlocutors, offering input as they tried to hash out a deal.
The White House said Wednesday that the talks were deadlocked.
Danish negotiators talked Wednesday with officials from a number of delegations to try to hash out elements of a potential agreement. Ideas under discussion include calling on nations to make emission cuts by 2020 that they have already promised, outline cumulative emission limits the developed world should meet by 2030, and include a target for a cumulative emission limit by 2050 for the entire world. None of these would be binding.
Also under discussion is the creation of a fund of about $30 billion that developed countries would offer to pay for emission-reduction efforts in developing countries through 2012.
One element of a potential Copenhagen result emerged Wednesday as the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, Japan and Norway pledged $3.5 billion Wednesday toward slowing the cutting of forests in developing countries. But that offer depends on a broader agreement.
In addition, negotiators are looking at a way to resolve a dispute over how nations would verify that other countries are making promised emission cuts. Under discussion is a proposal that would set minimum standards of information sharing.
Sen. John Kerry said in Copenhagen Wednesday that he told top negotiators from China and India in meetings that it would be "exceedingly difficult" for the U.S. Senate to approve legislation curbing emissions unless the countries agree to some form of international review of their actions to control emissions.
Chinese officials have stuck to their position that they don't intend to agree to let other countries monitor their progress in meeting their voluntary environmental pledges. Su Wei, the deputy head of the Chinese delegation in Copenhagen, said Wednesday that U.S. concerns on the issue weren't necessary. "China is very sincere in its energy-conservation and environment-protection drive," he said.
President Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, on Wednesday said, "If you set a goal but you can't look transparently into figuring out whether somebody is meeting that goal, then you have an unenforceable, nonverifiable agreement."
U.S. negotiators and their EU and Australian counterparts have struggled in Copenhagen as China has organized a bloc of nations including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, and Venezuela against U.S. proposals, officials involved in the talks say.
Negotiators for the G-77 have expressed frustration throughout the summit with what they view as stingy offers of aid from richer countries. At one point members of the group briefly walked out of bargaining sessions. China has aligned itself with the G-77 on many key points, even as U.S. negotiators have argued that China can't be considered a poor country.
The stalemate prompted gloom Wednesday at the sprawling conference center where delegates from more than 190 nations huddled between meetings. Outside the hall, Danish police used pepper spray and batons to subdue protesters, many of whom expressed anger at the slow pace of progress inside.
"I still believe it's possible to reach real success, but I must say that in that context the next 24 hours are absolutely crucial," the top U.N. climate negotiator, Yvo de Boer, said late Wednesday.
Connie Hedegaard, president of the conference, resigned Wednesday to hand the job to Denmark's Prime Minister Lars L[oslash]kke Rasmussen, as more than 100 other world leaders head to Copenhagen for the final stretch of the talks. Mr. de Boer said that Mr. Rasmussen was holding consultations with regional representatives to see how best to move forward in the talks.

Negotiators at big international summits usually have agreements wrapped and ready to go so that when senior political leaders arrive all they need to do is sign off, and pose for photographs. Officials in Copenhagen fretted that time is short for an orderly ending of this summit.
"We have no more time to lose," said European Commission President Jos[eacute] Manuel Barroso.
An all-night negotiating session that went on until about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday failed to produce agreement between developed and developing countries on how to divide up responsibility for slashing emissions over the next several decades.
When it was over, much of the document was in brackets, which in U.N. procedure means it is the subject of dispute.
Developing countries want industrialized ones to make deeper cuts and to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in environmental aid. Industrialized countries want the right to monitor developing countries to ensure that a range of environmental actions they have promised actually materialize.

Instead of making progress on these issues, negotiators have spent more than a week in the chilly Danish capital bogged down in disagreements about bureaucratic structure. Chief among them is whether an existing climate-change treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, should be extended, or whether it should replaced by a new agreement. That seemingly arcane issue comes down to questions of money, power and trust.
Developing countries don't want to give up the Kyoto treaty, which puts more of the burden for emission cuts on developed countries and prods them to help bankroll clean-energy efforts in the developing world.
In the treaty, industrialized nations that ratified it promised to cut their collective greenhouse-gas emissions 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. never ratified the treaty, and China, as a developing country, isn't obligated to produce any emission cuts.—Elizabeth Williamson and Jing Yang contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com, Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com and Guy Chazan at guy.chazan@wsj.com