Countries Pare Ambitions for Talks on Climate Change

By JEFFREY BALL
With the push to cap greenhouse-gas emissions all but dead in the U.S., world diplomats will meet in Mexico starting Monday to try to eke out a less-ambitious attack on global warming.

Few observers are confident of a breakthrough.

At a two-week United Nations climate conference in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, negotiators will focus not on the stick of mandatory emissions limits but on the carrot of tens of billions of dollars in subsidies from industrialized countries to help developing nations grow on a greener path.

Almost all growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions in coming years is expected to come from developing countries. The subsidies likely would, among other moves, help China build more-efficient coal-fired power plants, Brazil preserve forests, and an array of developing countries build wind farms and solar projects.

Diplomats pledged the incentives at a U.N.-sponsored climate summit in December in Copenhagen. They promised $30 billion in climate funding for poor countries by 2012, and another $100 billion annually, expected to come largely from private investment, starting in 2020.

But negotiators left for another day the task of hashing out the details of how to deliver on those funding pledges. The day has come, but the details have prompted yet another standoff.

Many developing countries say the U.S. and other rich nations are in some cases cutting as much money in other parts of their foreign-aid budgets as they're adding in what they call climate aid—basically shuffling rather than enlarging their foreign-aid budgets. They say the billions of dollars in new climate aid should be in addition to that already-existing assistance.

The U.S. rejects the argument that only climate funding that adds to past years' total amounts of foreign assistance should qualify toward such pledges, Todd Stern, the Obama administration's top climate negotiator, said in an interview. "There are very sharply differing views on what is new," he said.

No one suggests the incentives would bankroll emission cuts large enough to put a major dent in global greenhouse-gas output.

But the fight over these subsidies is a "concern, because, quite frankly, everyone has to start doing things now" to make deeper emission cuts down the road more possible, Robert Orr, the U.N.'s assistant secretary-general for policy planning, said in an interview.

Yet expectations of any major emission cuts over the next decade or two are dimming. In recent months, Congressional leaders in the U.S. have made clear they don't intend to take up the issue of a nationwide emissions cap anytime soon. China has said repeatedly it doesn't intend to accept a mandatory cap.

The U.S., China, and many other countries pledged voluntarily in Copenhagen to curb the growth in their emissions by specific amounts. The fitful economic recovery makes it easier to notch progress on those pledges, because a slower economy requires less growth in fossil-fuel consumption. Fossil fuels contribute to climate change, many national scientific academies say. And many countries, including China and India, are implementing policies that nurture domestic makers of renewable-energy and energy-efficiency equipment, hoping to promote new export industries.

But the International Energy Agency said in a report this month that even if countries met the emission-reduction pledges they made in Copenhagen, greenhouse-gas output probably would rise enough to push average global temperatures more than two degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com