Late Reversal by U.S. Yields Climate Plan

In a tumultuous final session at international climate talks in which the United States delegates were booed and hissed, the world’s nations committed Saturday to negotiating a new accord by 2009 that, in theory, would set the world on a course toward halving emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2050.

The dramatic finish to the negotiations came after a last-minute standoff during a day of see-saw emotions, with the co-organizer of the conference, Yvo de Boer, fleeing the podium at one point as he held back tears and the representative from Papua New Guinea telling the American delegation to lead, follow or “please get out of the way.”

The standoff started when developing countries demanded the United States agree that the eventual pact not only measure poorer countries’ steps, but also the effectiveness of financial aid and technological assistance from wealthier ones.

The United States did capitulate in that open session, which many observers and delegates said included more public acrimony and emotion than any of the treaty conferences since 1992, when countries drafted the ailing original climate pact, the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In a broader sense, the closing session of the two-week negotiation here was the culmination of a profound shift over the course of months by the Bush administration from insisting that the 1992 treaty, signed by President Bush’s father, was sufficient on its own to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate.

In 2005 talks in Montreal, for example, the American negotiating team walked out of one session, rejecting any talk of formal negotiations over new steps to improve on that pact.

But since then, the science, and politics, of climate have shifted dramatically.

This year, a set of four reports emerged from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, each cementing more clearly than ever that humans were warming the world, and that unabated emissions would lead to centuries of disrupted climate patterns, rising seas and ecological and social harm.

Along with the science came the Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth;” Hurricane Katrina, which while not linked to global warming in itself, was a vivid and effective icon; and spiking oil prices, adding urgency to calls for moving away from fossil fuels. Finally, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s contention that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant under the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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