Clinton Offers Surprise Deal at Climate Conference

(Dec. 17) -- With the clock winding down and the hosts of the Copenhagen climate conference reportedly abandoning hope of a deal, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a possibly game-changing U.S. push to facilitate a $100 billion per year fund to help developing countries pay for measures to mitigate and adapt to global warning. Her remarks threw the spotlight on China and set exhausted negotiators back to work on salvaging a conference still teetering on the edge of failure.

"The U.S. is prepared to work with other countries to jointly mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020," Clinton told a packed news conference at Copenhagen's Bella Center. But her offer came with a major caveat: that the recipients of such funds agree to strict and open accounting of how they are spent. China in particular, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has strongly resisted provisions for international review of its progress, and it has considerable support for that position among other developing countries.

"If there isn't a commitment for transparency of some sort, that would be a deal-breaker," Clinton said, underlining that the U.S. funding would flow only as part of a complete package that has so far eluded the Copenhagen conference. "In the absence of an operational agreement that meets the requirement that I outlined, there will not be the final commitment that I outlined, at least from the United States," she said.

The proposal gave a fillip of hope to negotiators who have been unable to bridge yawning gaps between poor countries and the richest ones over how to pay the trillions of dollars in estimated costs to reach the conference's stated goal of keeping average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. The next 24 hours will reveal whether it is enough to reshuffle the cards and allow government leaders to sign a substantive agreement Friday.

Even if her conditions are fulfilled, Clinton remained intentionally vague on how much U.S. taxpayers would be contributing to any such fund. "We expect this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance," she said.

Nevertheless, the prospect of any U.S. public funds going into such a fund is sure to further stiffen the spines of Republicans in Congress who don't even believe there's any global warming to mitigate. Sen James Inhofe, R-Okla. -- already in Copenhagen at the vanguard of what Fox News reports will be 40 members of Congress arriving today and Friday -- poured cold water on any chance of an agreement. "Nothing binding will come out of here in my opinion, and if it does, it will be rejected by the American people," he said.

In a bid to head off the first of those predictions, President Barack Obama will arrive in Copenhagen Friday morning for what he hopes will be a signing ceremony with about 110 other government leaders. But while the 11th-hour U.S. offer may have helped prepare the ground for a substantive deal, there still may be too much digging to do before the conference is set to close Friday. The $100 billion a year offer is 10 times more than developed countries agreed to offer for a '"fast-start" fund to be in place next year. It reflects the fact that the richer countries have been brought up short by an unusual unity among the poorest countries, which most scientists agree will suffer the most from warmer temperatures. Their representatives have demanded up to $500 billion per year from the richer countries. As Politico reported, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the conference Wednesday, "If the climate were a bank, [the United States] would have saved it."

But according to the Guardian, it was Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi -- the head of the group of African nations that earlier this week walked out of the conference to dramatize their need for massive aid -- who put the $100 billion figure on the table before Clinton arrived. "My proposal dramatically scales back our expectation of the level of funding in return for more reliable funding and a seat at the table in the management of such fund," he said. Many other poor countries are still disposed to reject that figure, but their negotiating strength is limited.

That is not the case for China, however, which is determined to reject any accord that would restrain its largely coal-fueled economic growth. Premier Wen Jiabao, who arrived in Copenhagen Wednesday night, has reiterated promises to reduce the country's "carbon intensity," or the carbon footprint of its per capita economic output. But he stressed that "our carbon intensity reduction plans are voluntary and should not be linked with the rich countries' binding targets." China fears that international monitoring of its carbon output -- a key U.S. demand -- would create just such a linkage. If Copenhagen is to yield anything more than a promise to keep working, it could well fall to Wen and Obama to hash that out on Friday, in the final minute of the 11th hour.