Brian Fallow: Nations still split on climate change

From the jaws of defeat negotiators at the Montreal climate change summit have snatched not victory but at least a ceasefire.

Had the meeting ended, as seemed likely until the 11th hour, in acrimonious failure it would have been a chilling signal that the issue of global warming is just too hard for multilateral agreement.

Inasmuch as it averted that, the meeting was a success.

But the agreements reached, like the meeting itself, display the chasm of Grand Canyon proportions which divides nations on this issue.

The countries that have undertaken obligations under the Kyoto Protocol - which is every developed country except the United States and Australia - agreed to begin a process of considering further commitments beyond the end of 2012, when Kyoto's first commitment period ends.

So the risk that Kyoto will fizzle out without a successor agreement has receded somewhat.

There is no commitment to a deadline for completing that process, however, only that the resulting agreement should be reached as soon as possible and in time to ensure there is no gap between the first and second commitment periods.

So New Zealand businesses and policymakers will have to wait some indeterminate time before knowing what the rules of the international game will be in 2013 and beyond.

And the Kyoto countries only represent about a third of global emissions of greenhouse gases.

The largest emitter, the United States, remains adamantly opposed to accepting any binding target for emissions reductions.

Yet that is the key to putting a financial value on the right to emit greenhouse gases, which in turn - Kyoto countries believe - is the key to creating an environment in which cleaner technologies make commercial sense. Those technologies inevitably involve some cost and it is hard to compete with free.

Kyoto does not impose any obligations on developing countries either, including China, which is already the second largest emitter.

What has been agreed by the wider world at Montreal is to engage in a dialogue, "an open and non-binding exchange of views on co-operative action to address climate change".

The Bush Administration has attempt to define the disagreement as between Kyoto's approach, which emphasises emission reduction targets, and theirs, which emphasises technology.

It is a bogus distinction. Neither is any use without the other.