Copenhagen Pits United States Against Developing Nations

COPENHAGEN—For anyone who's trying to understand why it's so hard for 193 countries to agree on a new climate change treaty, Yvo de Boer, the top United Nations climate official, was kind enough to offer an explanation this afternoon.

Basically, de Boer said, it's because countries have split into different groups, and those groups are insisting on different things. And so far, no one's been willing to budge on the priorities.

African countries, he says, "feel...they are getting almost nothing" in terms of money to protect their people from the impacts of climate change. So they want more financial support.

Island nations, like Maldives, say their top priority is keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in the coming decades. Allowing temperatures to creep higher is the equivalent of a "suicide pact" in their minds, de Boer says, since rising sea levels would wipe many of them out. That means they want global emissions to come down as quickly as possible.

Big developing countries, like China, are insisting that the industrialized world make steeper cuts in its emissions than what's been put on the proverbial table.

And the developed world, led by the United States, is demanding that China and other major developing countries not only get a grip on their emissions but also agree to let the world track whether their emissions are improving. As Sen. John Kerry pointed out today, by 2020, China is predicted to emit 40 percent more greenhouse gases than the United States.

Though the United States and China are getting most of the attention, de Boer says, "a lot more people than those two countries have success and failure in their hands."

Negotiators are expected to continue working late into the evening in preparation for the arrival of many heads of state tomorrow.

Today's talks failed to produce any breakthroughs, but de Boer said he remains optimistic a deal can be reached by Friday. He acknowledged that time is running out.

"I still believe it's possible to reach a real success," he said. "The next 24 hours are absolutely crucial."

• See photos from the Copenhagen climate summit.
• See the Top 5 Issues at Copenhagen.
• See 10 Animals Threatened by Global Warming.