Summit in December is the only place to reach formal agreement, says John HoldrenBilateral talks between the US and
China will not replace the need for a global climate deal at Copenhagen, according Barack Obama's most senior science adviser. John Holdren also said that, though there was much legislative work still to do in Congress, he was confident the US would be in a position to sign up to a successor to the
Kyoto Protocol by the end of the year and would do it within the United Nations framework."There are a lot of conversations going on with China and those are bilateral and multilateral," said the former physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who now heads the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. "I suspect there's not going to be a formal bilateral deal – both the US and China recognise that the UN process, in its current embodiment in the run-up to Copenhagen, is the place where the formal deals that matter ought to be reached."Environmentalists have been broadly positive about the Obama administration's approach to dealing with climate change but some have expressed concerns that the US will not have the time to prepare itself to sign a global deal to fight global warming in Copenhagen in December. Others have been concerned that a bilateral deal between the US and China - the world's biggest polluters - would circumvent the UN process in Copenhagen, with the two nations agreeing a mutually acceptable but unambitious deal.But Holdren played down such suggestions : "My best guess is that we will get a deal in Copenhagen, the Chinese will be a part of it and the bilateral conversations preceding that will have been helpful leading up to Copenhagen. But ultimately it will have to be a multilateral deal."Holdren, who is in the
UK this week to accept his election as a foreign fellow of the Royal Society, insisted the Obama administration had not been distracted from climate change or the importance of a deal at Copenhagen, even ...
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