Tomorrow US State Department climate change negotiator Todd Stern will head to Bonn to join the UN-sponsored climate change talks.  The Bonn meeting is seen as a key step towards the goal of coming to an international agreement at Copenhagen in December.

On Wednesday Stern gave an address at the Center for American Politics that focused on China and the US-China relationship on the issue of climate change.  During the Bush administration, the US essentially maintained that no global climate change agreement would be possible without China agreeing to significant emissions cuts.  This position has basically been a non-starter with China given the fact that industrialized countries are responsible for the highest percentage of cumulative emissions and their current per capita levels of emissions outweigh those of developing countries such as China.

How the Obama administration is going to address the China issue, therefore, has been a matter of interest.

From Stern's talk it is clear that the US is not going to demand absolute cuts from China.  However, he pretty forcefully said that China can't hide behind its old arguments, arguing that it is not in China's interest to pursue a high-carbon form of development.

He was asked by reporter to clarify specific actions the US might be looking for from China and responded that whatever it is, it must be substantive and verifiable.  To me this suggests that maybe there is some commitment on the table whereby China would reduce energy intensity or hit an emissions target below business-as-usual projections.

We probably won't get too much clarification in the short term, but it is likely that there will be significant behind the scenes discussions in Bonn between Stern and his Chinese counterparts about ways to move forward.

UN-sponsored climate change talks began on Monday in Bonn. The negotiations will last two weeks and represent a step on the path towards a successor to the Kyoto agreement scheduled to be completed by December.

While the negotiations are underway many NGOs are highlighting the domestic positions of various countries. Yesterday, the Climate Action Network held a press conference to discuss the impending decision on levels of greenhouse gas emission reductions in Japan.

Prime Minister Taro Aso indicated that he would announce Japan's midterm (2020) reduction target sometime in the next couple of weeks. The graphic above illustrates the various targets being debated in Japan--everything ranging from a 4% increase from 1990 levels to a 25% decrease.

Japan's decision will undoubtedly influence where other big emitters set their own targets--particularly the United States.

Today a major Japanese business group suggested that domestic industry could meet a 15% reduction. Last month, Aso said that a 25% reduction would be hard to sell politically in the country given the recession. During the CAN press conference, Masako Konishi of WWF-Japan, however, cited a recent public opinion poll that suggested there was strong public support for significant reduction targets.

Beginning on Monday in Bonn, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is holding a new round of negotiations. The goal is to get more clarity on an international agreement prior to the year-end talks in Copenhagen.

A couple weeks ago I posted on the document that is being discussed relating to possible changes in obligations from developed countries. The topic of this post is the document being discussed by the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action.

This document is laying the groundwork for what the long-term limits should be for greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere as well as how mitigation and adaptation should be financed and verified in various contexts.

There are several propositions in the document for long term limit goals. The options under discussion range from stabilizing GHG concentration in the atmosphere at 450 ppm all the way to 350 ppm. Each number would be a significant goal. The current concentration is around 388 ppm and scientific models suggest that the number could more than double in the absence of a significant global mitigation effort.

On the issue of mitigation the document has a wide range of time lines and emissions reduction numbers. One provision asks developed countries to decrease GHG emissions between 20-45 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and by anywhere from 75-90 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.

As a point of comparison: Obama has pledged to reduce US emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020 and then hit the 80% target by 2050.  The Waxman-Markey bill is even weaker, calling for an 83% reduction from 2005 levels by 2050.

Also included in the document were targets for developing countries, including a reduction from "business as usual" between 15-30% by 2020 and an eventual 20% reduction from 2000 levels by 2050.  Large developing countries like China have shown signs in recent days a willingness to deviate from business as usual; but any net emissions reduction obligations will likely be a non-starter.

It will be interesting to see how the various disparities get hashed out over the next two weeks in Bonn.  This is really the first time we are starting to see actual numbers in the negotiation documents.  Optimism is relatively high given the change in US administrations and the opening of a China-US dialog on the subject in recent months.  How delegates from various countries react to the actual numbers in Bonn could give a sense of whether this optimism is nothing more than a chimera.