Washington - The Obama administration will try its hand starting Monday at finding a consensus among 17 leading economies on climate change as the US State Department sponsors the "Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate" in Washington. The week-long talks, which include India and China, are part of the process leading up to a major world meeting in Copenhagen at year's end that is to forge a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which expires in 2012.
But US President Barack Obama's government goes into the meeting with a hand weakened by his own majority centre-left Democratic Party in Congress, where legislators are already debating whether to scale back a far-reaching proposal introduced last month that would boost incentives for renewable energy and for the first time force companies to pay for pollution that is blamed for global warming.
The draft bill echoes Obama's pledge to aggressively tackle greenhouse-gas emissions, lowering them by about 15 per cent by 2020 compared to the 2005 level and 80 per cent by 2050. It would introduce a cap-and-trade programme, which essentially allocates pollution credits to companies that can then be traded on the open market between cleaner and dirtier firms.
Since March, however, utilities have made inroads in Congress in their push to be given 40 per cent of the emission permits for free. A Democratic counter-proposal would only reduce emissions by 6 per cent by 2020, the Washington Post reported.
Republicans have derided the measure as a tax on business and a job killer in times of recession.
The European Union is aiming for tougher cutbacks, with emissions scaled back by 20 per cent by 2020 compared to 1990, a much sharper cut than the US proposal of using 2005 as the starting point for calculations.
Ten days ago, Obama's administration opened a door that could enable it to go around Congress in regulating carbon emissions, ruling through its Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases threaten US air quality and public health.
The decision must be submitted for public comment for 60 days before being finalized, and would allow the government to regulate industry emissions of six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, under existing clean air laws without additional congressional approval.
But the White House has said it would prefer to wait for lawmakers to agree on a way forward.
Todd Stern, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's special envoy for climate change, told reporters last week that the US must find consensus within its borders before serious negotiations abroad.
"We don't want a repeat of a situation where we sign a lovely agreement in some foreign capital and not have it approved back here," he said.
The US signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, but Congress refused to ratify it. Obama's predecessor George W Bush opposed any international cooperation on the climate change front for most of his eight years in office, insisting that the rapidly developing economies of India and China must be held to the same standards as developed countries.
The US and China are the world's two largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.
India and China will be sending top level ministers to the meetings in Washington, as will Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the European Union, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Britain and of course the US. The United Nations and Denmark have been invited as the hosts of the all-important December meeting in Copenhagen.
