Green groups blast Clinton’s strategy in climate talks

The leaders of the country’s top environmental groups slammed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week over the Obama administration’s negotiating strategy going into international climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

“America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress,” the top executives at the country’s 16 major environmental groups said in a letter to Clinton Tuesday. “U.S. positions on two major issues — the mandate for future negotiations and climate finance — threaten to impede in Durban the global cooperation so desperately needed to address the threat of climate change.”

The letter comes as delegates from around the world are meeting in Durban for United Nations negotiations aimed at tackling a litany of problems blamed on global climate change. While the talks will not yield a binding agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions, negotiators are working to find common ground on a series of issues that represent incremental steps toward a broader climate accord.

Environmental groups have developed an increasingly tense relationship with Clinton in recent months. They have criticized the State Department's review of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil sands crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas, alleging that the review is biased in favor of the project's operator, TransCanada Corp.

In their Tuesday letter, the environmental groups say the United States is standing in the way of progress by taking hard-line stances on the conditions necessary to agree to a mandate requiring future negotiations and financing to assist developing countries address problems associated with climate change.

“On the mandate issue, the U.S. has laid down a set of stringent pre-conditions that would have to be met for the U.S. to support a mandate for negotiations on a comprehensive long-term climate regime,” the letter said.

“The U.S. shouldn’t require countries to agree to the specific parameters of the final agreement before negotiations even begin.”

On the issue of financing, the groups say the United States is being too rigid.

“We recognize that detailed agreements on how to generate finance from specific sources may take some time,” the letter said. “Yet as with the legal mandate, the current refusal of your negotiators to even allow a discussion to take place about the relative strengths and weaknesses of various proposals, and the technical issues related to implementing them, risks fostering the perception of bad faith.”

Negotiators at the current round of talks must attempt to sort out a range of long-standing disagreements between developing and developed countries over how to divide the responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A slew of countries signed on to a climate treaty, known as the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997. But the United States never ratified the protocol.

The letter was signed by the top executives at the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oxfam America and others.