Washington shies away from commitments

Delegates from the United States made no concrete commitments at the Doha climate conference on Wednesday, despite great pressure both domestically and internationally.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday called on the US to take a leading role in climate-change issues and provide more technology and financial support to developing countries.

In US President Barack Obama's re-election victory speech in November, he mentioned "the destructive power of a warming planet".

However, US negotiators failed to make further financial or technological support for developing countries other than repeatedly saying these issue will not "fall to the ground" in later climate-change talks.

"When I issued my statement to welcome his re-election, one of the key messages was to work together with the United States on climate change," Ban said.

"The climate-change issue should be led by the developed world. They should provide technology and financial support so that developing countries can mitigate and adapt," he said.

"The impact of climate change affects everyone equally without regard to where they are coming from, rich or poor. So it is only reasonable that richer countries should assume leadership, and the US should play and can play an important role," Ban said.

"No one is immune to climate change ― rich or poor. It is an existential challenge for the whole human race," he said.

Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, noted that within days after superstorm Sandy hit the northeastern US, the newly re-elected Obama promised that in his second term he will take action to protect people from climate change, but in Doha, "we see the same negotiators using the same blocking tactics".

Samantha Smith, World Wildlife Fund global-climate and energy-initiative leader, agreed. "We have got another critical chance to get a global agreement in 2015, also under President Obama. What will his legacy be ― climate failure? The US must stop blocking and proactively push discussions on how to raise ambition between now and 2020," she said.

The US was again given the "Fossil of the Day" on Tuesday, an award that NGOs give out on a daily basis to countries they deem to have blocked progress in climate-change negotiations.

It was the US' fourth Fossil award in Doha, for downgrading developed-country Measurement, Reporting and Verification, an effective system to "measure, report and verify" countries' emissions, commitments and actions, designed during the climate conference in Durban, Mexico, in 2011.

"This is all the more strange because in Copenhagen in 2009, the US pushed China hard to be more robust in its accounting and reporting of emissions. Now the tables have turned," said Montana Brockley, Program Coordinator of Climate Action Network-International, a global network of more than 700 NGOs working to fight climate change.

"The US has some of the most robust transparency and accounting procedures in the whole world, but simply has an allergy to replicating these at an international level," she said.

A recent public opinion survey conducted by the Yale University showed that the public in the US has increasingly accepted the reality of climate change and think the government should take action to counter it.

The survey showed about 77 percent of US citizens said global warming should be a priority for the US president and Congress. It also found that 70 percent of US citizens now accept that climate change is real, and more than half acknowledge it is caused mostly by human activities.

Although the US public thinks the government should make climate-change issues a priority, on the government's agenda it still ranks after issues such as economic development and unemployment reduction, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, at an event jointly hosted by the Center for China Climate Change Communication and Yale University during the climate change talks in Doha.

Contact the writers at wuwencong@chinadaily.com.cn and lanlan@chinadaily.com.cn