All roads in the "Bali Roadmap" for new climate negotiations lead to one address and one date: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and Jan. 20, 2009.
That's when a new occupant of the White House will be sworn into office, and when a fresh US team, with what many expect to be a new attitude, will take up the negotiating mandate issued here on Saturday at the end of the two-week UN climate conference.
For seven years, these annual sessions have witnessed a long-running diplomatic feud between the administration of US President George W. Bush, dead set against international obligations for industrial nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and most of the rest of the world, which favors them.
The faceoff played out again here in Bali this past week, when the US delegation blocked an effort to insert into the "roadmap" an ambitious suggested negotiating goal for the next two years -- emissions cuts of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The "emissions cutters" were spurned again, in a repeat of what has happened consistently since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which mandated relatively small reductions but was rejected by the US.
Time now may be on the emission cutters' side.
From California to New England, US state governments are enacting their own caps on carbon dioxide and other industrial and transportation gases blamed for global warming. Many US cities have adopted Kyoto-style targets, trimming emissions via "green" building codes, conversion of municipal fleets to hybrid vehicles, energy-saving lighting and other measures.
Judging from recent opinion polls, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the southeastern US drought and the California wildfires apparently are awakening more and Americans to the potential perils of climate change.
"The majority of the United States is with you," California's environment secretary, Linda Adams, told the hundreds of Bali conference delegates last week. "We know that climate change affects all of us."
'A NEW DIRECTION'
In Washington, too, there's movement after years of inaction. A US Senate committee has approved the first legislation mandating caps on greenhouse gases and sent it to the full Senate.
"What you see is a new direction coming," said David Doniger, a veteran climate policy analyst with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "And this new direction is a very clear indication of where our policy is going in the future."
That policy will be set primarily by the new president, and the Democratic presidential candidates and at least two of the Republicans -- Senator John McCain and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee -- have endorsed mandatory emissions caps.
To many at Bali, the US election calendar dominates the climate calendar. Even the diplomatically cautious and precise Yvo de Boer, UN climate chief, managed to hint that delegates should bide their time in the coming negotiations next year and in 2009.
"I really hope that that is a discussion" -- about emissions reduction levels -- ``taken up toward the end of that two-year debate," he told reporters.
NOT A SURE THING
But decisive US action, even after Bush, is far from assured.
"The real problem is Congress," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, climate activist, told a Bali gathering this past week. "They're unwilling to face any issue that has costs or antagonizes any group of voters."
In fact, the emissions-caps bill may face trouble in the full Senate.
Even swift action may come too late for some.
Rising seas, expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melted land ice, are encroaching on low-lying island states, especially in the western Pacific. In these islanders' minds, the roadmaps and new directions were needed a decade or more ago.
"We are very concerned that there is so little progress," Kete Ioane, environment minister of the Cook Islands, told the Bali assembly days ago.
"We are merely asking for our survival, nothing more, nothing less," he said.
In the past month, two important developments are poised to equip Taiwan with expanded capabilities to play foreign policy offense in an age where Taiwan’s diplomatic space is seriously constricted by a hegemonic Beijing. Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) led a delegation of Taiwan and US companies to the Philippines to promote trilateral economic cooperation between the three countries. Additionally, in the past two weeks, Taiwan has placed chip export controls on South Africa in an escalating standoff over the placing of its diplomatic mission in Pretoria, causing the South Africans to pause and ask for consultations to resolve
An altercation involving a 73-year-old woman and a younger person broke out on a Taipei MRT train last week, with videos of the incident going viral online, sparking wide discussions about the controversial priority seats and social norms. In the video, the elderly woman, surnamed Tseng (曾), approached a passenger in a priority seat and demanded that she get up, and after she refused, she swung her bag, hitting her on the knees and calves several times. In return, the commuter asked a nearby passenger to hold her bag, stood up and kicked Tseng, causing her to fall backward and
In December 1937, Japanese troops captured Nanjing and unleashed one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Over six weeks, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and women were raped on a scale that still defies comprehension. Across Asia, the Japanese occupation left deep scars. Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines and much of China endured terror, forced labor and massacres. My own grandfather was tortured by the Japanese in Singapore. His wife, traumatized beyond recovery, lived the rest of her life in silence and breakdown. These stories are real, not abstract history. Here is the irony: Mao Zedong (毛澤東) himself once told visiting
When I reminded my 83-year-old mother on Wednesday that it was the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she replied: “Yes, it was the day when my family was broken.” That answer captures the paradox of modern China. To most Chinese in mainland China, Oct. 1 is a day of pride — a celebration of national strength, prosperity and global stature. However, on a deeper level, it is also a reminder to many of the families shattered, the freedoms extinguished and the lives sacrificed on the road here. Seventy-six years ago, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東)
RSS