Hopes fade for Mexico climate talks

A woman looks at a poster of the Great Climate Wall of China by Green Peace, which is composed of photographs submitted by thousands of people from China and around the world, confirming they are taking action to cope with climate change, during the UN Climate Change Conference in Tianjin October 4, 2010.

OSLO (Reuters) - Hopes for U.N. climate talks in Mexico next month have faded, overshadowed by splits between the United States and China and by fears the 194-nation process is too unwieldy ever to work out a pact to slow global warming.

Experts told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit the November 29-December 10 annual meeting of environment ministers in Cancun, Mexico, could agree steps to set up climate funds to help poor nations or ways to share green technology.

Most nations gave up hopes of a quick all-encompassing treaty to curb greenhouse gases after world leaders at a 2009 summit in Copenhagen failed to work out a binding deal to avert projected heat waves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

Even a patchwork of smaller deals, for example to curb deforestation, is now not certain.

Countries are "bolting down their positions because they don't see any movement on the other side," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, who said many were blaming the economic slowdown for a lack of action.

"We are in a very, very troubling situation," he said. But he predicted that more extreme weather, such as the floods in Pakistan or the drought in Russia that pushed up grain prices, would eventually bring global cooperation.

GROUP OF 20

Some experts say the talks could shift from the United Nations to other groups, such as the G20 which includes all big emitters -- China, the United States, the European Union, Russia and India.

"This is one of the things that could happen as there has been frustration for some time now over the bureaucratic nature of the U.N. process," said Mark Lewis, head of carbon analysis at Deutsche Bank.

Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," said the world should abandon U.N. talks and instead work out a simpler deal to invest $100 billion a year in new clean technologies such as wind or solar power.

"The talks are going nowhere," he said.

But Steiner said it was wrong to predict the demise of the U.N. track.

An objection to groups such as the G20 was that they excluded 3 or 4 billion people in poor nations, from Bangladesh to small island states in the Pacific, who have done little to cause global warming but are most at risk.

The world cannot afford to ignore their views, he said.

Last week in China, a final round of preparatory talks for Cancun was hit by disputes between Beijing and Washington, the top greenhouse gas emitters, about how to share out responsibility for combating climate change.

The United States, where President Barack Obama has failed to persuade the Senate to agree emissions cuts by 2020, says China must do far more. Beijing retorts that Washington must take the lead as the world's richest economy.

Investors have modest hopes for Mexico.

"It would be nice to get a sense that direction is moving forwards rather than backwards," said Rob Lake, head of sustainability and governance at Dutch pension fund APG, which manages 250 billion euros ($346.5 billion) in assets.

He said investors did "not necessarily" need industrialized nations to agree new binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions when a first period of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.

New U.N.-backed Kyoto targets would "provide an extra level of certainty but we need policy framework certainty within the countries we are investing in," he said.

A U.N. advisory group agreed in Ethiopia on Tuesday that it was feasible for rich nations to keep a promise made in Copenhagen of raising $100 billion a year in aid for developing nations from 2020 despite austerity in many donors.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who co-chaired the talks, said penalties on carbon emissions would be a major source of the funds. "I hope that this report will be ... a useful input to the (U.N.) negotiations," he said.

(Additional reporting by Gerard Wynn and Nina Chestney in London; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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