Isramart : U.S. Defends Its Climate Plan as Talks Open

Isramart news:
At a news conference, he fended off questions from European reporters about the adequacy of President Obama’s plan for emissions cuts, which is roughly parallel to what is laid out in legislation in the House and Senate. The proposal calls for a 30 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels by 2025, 42 percent by 2030 and more than 80 percent by 2050.

He said the targets were in line with a long-term trajectory for emissions that scientists had defined as avoiding the worst risks, but only if all countries – including emerging economic powers among developing countries — did their part, as well. “It’s a vision that moves the United States down the curve of greenhouse gas emissions at a level that no other country has even begun to seriously contemplate,” Mr. Pershing said.

He stressed the importance of all countries, particularly emerging economic powers, coming in with measurable emissions plans. While the United States produces a fifth of worldwide emissions of the gases, that means four fifths are coming from elsewhere, added. “Unless the world can combine its efforts we won’t solve the problem,” he said. (Click for a super Times graphic laying out the different emissions profiles and demands of important countries.)

But he stressed that the United States was still dead-set on getting measurable, verifiable commitments out of the world’s emerging economic powers, with China the unstated target.

A British reporter brought up the batch of e-mail messages and files that a British climate research center says were stolen from one of its servers and that have since been seized upon by skeptics and foes of cuts in greenhouse gases as evidence of corruption in climate science. Would they undermine the talks?

Mr. Pershing predicted they would end up being “a small blip on the history of this process,” adding:

I think they’ll have virtually no effect. My sense about the climate emails that have been stolen and the information they have provided is that they have released a barrage of additional information which makes clear the robustness of the science, the multitude, the enormous multitude of different strands of evidence that support the urgency and the severity of the problem, that have been managed in multiple places around the world. What I think is unfortunate, and in fact shameful, is the way some scientists who’ve devoted their lives are being pilloried in the press without due regard to process.