Sachs: Better global warming treaty likely

Though President Bush has kept the United States from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a successful international climate change treaty will soon be crafted, author and U.N. official Jeffrey Sachs predicted during his standing-room-only talk in Bowen Hall Auditorium yesterday.

In a lecture focused on the prospects for a stronger international response to global warming over the next few years, Sachs said negotiations for a new agreement will likely begin this winter at a U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"I'm an optimist that we're, this time, really going to get somewhere," he said.

Sachs, who argued in his book "The End of Poverty" that extreme worldwide destitution could be eradicated by 2025, heads the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Sachs said current international law has been ineffective in preventing climate change. "The Kyoto Protocol ... has not really made much of a dent," he said. "We're going to have to do something better than that."

But "no chance" exists of reaching a new global agreement while President Bush remains in office, Sachs said. "This administration will not sign a post-Kyoto agreement."

He argued for "a mid-century target" for new emissions goals, noting that the Kyoto Protocol's aggressive short-term targets had limited success. "Rather than targeting emissions, we have to target concentration levels of greenhouse gases" in the long term, he said.

Sachs also said that China, a country for which "coal is far and away the drug of choice," must participate in the new agreement for it to be successful. "There is no solution unless they decisively reduce emissions," he said.

He called it "almost unimaginable" that the international community could hold atmospheric carbon dioxide to safe levels solely by using more renewable energy. Instead, Sachs advocated "fossil fuels used safely," arguing that they should be supplemented with carbon capture or other emissions-reducing technology.

Many U.S. energy companies, Sachs noted, have begun researching this technology — along with other alternative energy forms — as they become more convinced that transitioning to green energy would not be costly. He cited a "growing belief among many, many professionals" that greenhouse gas emissions could be stabilized at a cost of one percent or less of world income.

"The business community is way ahead of the politicians right now, and they're pulling the politicians to an agreement," Sachs said, adding that campaigns by companies like General Electric could encourage the United States to participate in a new climate change agreement.

As recent scientific research has formed the technical foundation for a new protocol, Sachs said, public awareness of climate change has also increased since Hurricane Katrina.

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To help mitigate climate change, students should help "get U.S. politics back on track" through activism and their voting decisions, Sachs said in an interview after the lecture.

Rob Weiss '09, who is the vice president of Princeton College Democrats, said Sachs' lecture helped listeners "get a handle on the way the [climate change] problem was progressing."

"I thought he had a number of well-informed ideas," said Weiss, who is also a USG senator, adding that he wants to "push for the USG to take some action on climate change."

Entitled "Negotiating the Post-Kyoto Climate Change Framework" and sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute, the talk was this year's Taplin Environmental Lecture.