Washington - Most of the world's eyes will be on Barack Obama when he travels to Copenhagen in December, yet the US president and his army of negotiators have been extremely cautious in their statements ahead of the meeting of global governments to thrash out a new climate treaty. That's because the Obama administration faces a difficult balancing act: How to strike a deal that can lower global pollution and satisfy major powers like China and the European Union, without alienating sceptical lawmakers back home.
The US is a major part of the climate puzzle. It emits about 20 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming. China, the other key piece, also adds 20 per cent.
Obama has been a vocal supporter of tackling climate change. But he has been forced to draw tough lessons from former president Bill Clinton, who signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first global climate treaty. With lawmakers almost unanimously opposed, Clinton never even submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.
This means it is the Senate, not Obama, that will dictate policy at the UN-sponsored Copenhagen meeting from December 7-18. While the Senate is considering a far-reaching bill that would limit domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it has little chance of passage until next year.
The lack of a clear congressional mandate means Obama, who will attend the conference on December 9, will have very little wiggle room this time around, according to Timothy Wirth, who was the Clinton administration's lead negotiator at Kyoto.
"There isn't final congressional direction, and they are not going to do something that goes beyond what they think the Congress is going to do," Wirth, who now heads the UN Foundation, an advocacy group, said in an interview with the German Press Agency dpa.
The Senate's slow deliberations have helped delay the entire Copenhagen process. There is now talk of a two-step deal: The thorniest policy issues will be ironed out in Copenhagen, but the actual legal framework of a global treaty will be agreed some time in 2010, by when the US Congress should have a final bill approved.
Climate change remains a hugely controversial topic in the United States. A recent opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre found that 57 per cent of Americans believe there is "solid evidence" of global warming, down from 71 per cent in April 2008. Just 36 per cent believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon.
Global warming is therefore not seen as a top concern, and it remains uncertain whether any climate bill will make it through Congress. Instead, health care reform, Obama's top domestic priority, has soaked up much of the political oxygen this year.
"The success of (Obama's) first term is going to be determined in significant part by what happens on health care, and doesn't have anything to do with what happens in Copenhagen," Wirth said.
Moreover, many Americans are worried about the economic costs of what environmental advocates say is needed - a dramatic shift from fossil fuels like oil and coal to clean energy sources like wind and solar power.
The climate bill would introduce a system that, for the first time, forces companies to pay for their carbon emissions. Most opposition Republicans have derided this as a job killer, just as the US emerges from a deep recession. Critics also want assurances that China will tackle its own pollution before the US takes action.
Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, the country's oldest environmental organization, says the regional impacts of lowering US pollution levels are wider than in most countries. Even left-leaning lawmakers from rural states have resisted tougher pollution controls.
"The United States has the problem that, within one nation, we have 'countries' whose energy economy is like France's and 'countries' whose energy economy is like Poland's," Pope told dpa. "The real concern is not what it does to the economy of the United States, but what it does to the economy of West Virginia."
All this has forced Obama to tread cautiously ahead of the Copenhagen summit, where other countries will be pressing hard for the US to make a firm commitment to curb its climate-damaging gases.
Obama last week proposed a 17-per-cent reduction below 2005 levels by 2020, in line with legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives in the spring. The Senate is debating a 20-per-cent cut, but that will likely be reduced in the bill's final version.
The United States also has yet to say how much money it will offer developing countries to clean up their own industries. Emerging countries like China and India insist on help from wealthy nations, which they say bear historical responsibility for global warming.
The financing issue is perhaps the biggest stumbling block to a deal in Copenhagen, and here, too, Pope said: "The US in particular has not stepped up to the plate."
