The United States has undergone an important mood-shift on climate change and is on the path toward "strong climate action," a key UN official said here Tuesday.
"The mood is completely different now… There's a sense that the country's on the move toward strong climate action," Michael Zammit Cutajar, who chairs the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) working group on long-term cooperative action, told reporters.
The US House of Representatives last month approved a bill that sets long-term limits on greenhouse gas emissions, a prime contributing factor to global warming, and aims to shift the US economy to one that runs on cleaner energy.
The proposed law, called Waxman-Markey after the lawmakers who introduced it, calls on the United States to reduce emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from the level they were at four years ago when the Kyoto Protocol on climate change came into effect.
But in a move that Zammit Cutajar said breaks with the previous US stance on climate change, the bill also takes a longer view and calls for greenhouse gas emissions to be slashed to just 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.
"Previous US negotiators have always made it clear that they are not bound to any action following the target year," he said.
"I find positively striking the idea in Waxman-Markey that this country could commit itself over a 40-year period," he said.
"This time you have a view that gets the country onto the path that keeps going in the desired direction."
Under the Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated in 1997, developed countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to an average of around five percent below 1990 levels.
The United States negotiated an emissions cut of seven percent below 1990 levels for itself, but then famously rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.
The cuts set by the American Clean Energy and Security Act for 2020 are the equivalent of a four-percent cut from 1990 levels.
The US Senate has yet to vote on the bill.
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