Prime Minister Rudd has put his new Climate Change Minister Penny Wong under the pump. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to unite developed and developing nations when it comes to future emissions controls.

“I fully recognise the difficulty of this because the distance between those two positions at present is enormous, but this is a gap which Australia in the past could not even hope to begin to bridge because we were not at the negotiating table at all in a substantive way,” Mr Rudd said. “We now are, and Senator Wong’s brief, apart from arguing the Australian position, will be to do whatever is within her power and Australia’s power to seek to bridge the gap between the positions of the developed and developing world on future emissions controls.”

This is no mean feat. In fact, it’s a herculean task. Factor in the competing interests of developed nations like the US who have thus far resisted binding targets, and developing nations like China and India who point out the unfairness of hampering the economic growth that promises to lift millions of people out of poverty. Trying to end the Mexican stand-off between the two has thus far alluded any UN talks and no one’s holding their breath at Bali.

In a speech last week, Professor Ross Garnaut, author of the upcoming Garnaut Climate Change Review, laid it out on the table:

…it is impossible to avoid the imperative that effective action will first be taken by developed countries. This is widely recognised as being fair, and given realities of historical responsibility and existing capacity to support the necessary investment, was the only basis on which early steps towards mitigation could be taken…It is an equally important reality that there will be no adequate global mitigation unless the major developing countries soon become part of the global mitigation effort. Their inclusion, after early action by developed countries, is an urgent matter.

Australia is lapping up lots of good will at the convention at the moment, after receiving sustained applause on the first day of the conference when it was announced that Australia was ratifying the Kyoto protocol.

And while we’re a small player on the international stage, we could hope to play a role as head of The Umbrella Group — the group is chaired by Australia and includes the USA, Japan, Canada and New Zealand. Of these countries, the US and Canada will be the most problematic for Rudd and Wong if they truly seek to get serious about targets. And there’s now a new question mark over Japan’s willingness to commit.

Here’s a quick guide to Developed v Developing countries for an indication of just how big Rudd’s ambition, and Wong’s task, is:

First of all, what’s an Annex 1 country?

As it stands, Kyoto sets down legally-binding commitments for industrialised economies that have ratified it (Annex 1 countries) to limit or reduce emissions of six categories of greenhouse gases by a 2008-2012 timeframe compared to a benchmark of 1990, according to The Australian. Poorer countries don’t have to commit to binding emissions targets. They make a general pledge to avoid pollution. So far, 172 countries plus the European Community (EC) have ratified Kyoto. Thirty-six of them, plus the European Union as a party in its own right, come under Annex 1. Together, they account for 61.6 percent of emissions by industrialised countries, but 30 percent of the global total, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The developing countries’ position:

China: China is refusing to sign an agreement in which the US and developed countries don’t take the lead and accept binding targets to slash their emissions first. “Finding a way to end this stand-off is the most important task in Bali,” says The SMH.  But “while China, India, and other developing countries haven’t contributed nearly as much to the existing climate problem as the U.S. and other rich nations, now — with their rapidly growing economies and populations — they’re poised to help make the problem much, much worse,” says Grist.  China will soon bump the U.S. out of its slot as No. 1 greenhouse-gas emitter.

But according to Reuters, “China launched its own ambitious national strategy on climate change this year” with a big renewable energy target, a pilot emissions trading scheme and plans to cut it emissions from its coal-fired power stations. Mexico, India, Brazil and South Africa are looking at similar strategies.

India: The executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, cited India as an example of why developed nations need to accept that they must take the lead on reducing emissions. “In India alone there are 400 million people who don’t even have access to electricity,” he said. “For them to ask a country like India not to increase its emissions would be basically to condemn those 400 million people to continue living without electricity.”  According to The Economist, if the big developing countries like India agree to look into cutting emissions from particular sectors—an idea that the Bush administration has pushed—rather than from their economies as a whole, America will be likelier to commit itself to emissions controls. “After all, it was the developing world’s refusal to countenance cuts that led America to turn its back on Kyoto in the first place.”

Brazil: For Brazil, home of the world’s largest expanse of tropical forest, the main issue at Bali is not targets, but deforestation. Brazil says the West should pay to help curb climate change by protecting tropical forests, says Reuters. A major ethanol producer, Brazil criticises the United States for its import duties on biofuels. The Kyoto protocol established the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), under which developing countries that reduce their industrial emissions can sell those reductions to rich countries. But developing countries have no incentive to stop chopping down their forests, and tropical deforestation accounts for around 20% of total annual greenhouse-gas emissions, says The Economist. A group of heavily-forested countries have been lobbying to get paid for not cutting down their green canopies, but this initiative has met plenty of opposition, and Brazil has been wary of the idea. Brazil was instrumental in designing the CDM, which it is doing nicely out of, and it fears that flooding the market for carbon credits with new supply from tropical forests would depress the price and destroy the mechanism. It’s also uncomfortable about the implication in an “avoided deforestation” programme that its forests are the whole world’s property.

Indonesia: A super-polluter, ranked third among the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters, behind only the US and China. The Australian points out the hypocrisy of Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar enthusiastic tone on Monday – when he “proposed with barely mock humility” that ‘I think I speak for everyone here’ in welcoming Australia’s Kyoto ratification. The Oz says “pollution of all types is a defining feature of Indonesian life; the mess and roil of cities such as the capital, Jakarta, perhaps its most obvious incarnation.”  But as far as this UN convention is concerned, deforestation is the country’s biggest pollution bugbear. Custodian of an estimated 91million hectares of untouched tropical rainforest, Indonesia is losing this valuable natural resource at a rate of at least two million hectares a year, and probably much more. Up to 80 per cent of that loss is thought to be through illegal logging and other unauthorised deforestation. And “for ordinary residents here in Indonesia,” reports The NY Times, “a political solution cannot come soon enough.” The WWF says Indonesia is highly vulnerable to climate change. Drought, floods, landslides and rising sea levels are part of daily life here.

Poorer nations: Meanwhile, Grist reports that the anti-poverty charity Oxfam joined Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Papua New Guinea in their calls for more aid from richer countries to help them both fight and adapt to climate change, which is expected to hit poorer nations the hardest.

Island Nations:  The Maldives and other small island states say emissions from big polluters are causing seas to rise and threaten their very existence, says Reuters. They want the United Nations to assess whether a link exists between failure to tackle climate change and human rights.

The developed nations’ position:

Japan: Japan, a key member of the group, has signalled it may be edging towards the position held by the US, which advocates imposing voluntary emissions targets in any post-Kyoto accord on climate change, reports The Australian.  The Japanese delegation notably failed to mention the need for binding targets in its opening statement to the crucial Bali conference, says The SMH.

The EU: The leader of the pack. The European Union has committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels and is adamant that any new deal must contain binding commitments for all signatories to the proposed agreement, reports The Australian. EU ambassador to Australia Bruno Julien said the EU considered mandatory targets on developed countries and firm commitments from developing ones crucial to delivering the cuts in greenhouse gases needed to avoid dangerous climate change. “We share the same views even if we have had no time to go into in-depth discussion with the Australian Government,” he said. In fact, the EU has dangled the prospect of even steeper emissions cuts across Europe to fight global warming – but only if the rest of the world follows suit. The bloc urged rich nations to rally together to slash greenhouse gas output by 30 per cent by 2020, says Reuters. The EU hopes to persuade the United States and other big economies to move toward binding targets to halt and cut emissions. 

Canada: Canada has become increasingly hostile to the idea of binding targets unless all countries are included. “We don’t need an international agreement that says Canada should accept binding targets,” he said. “We are already imposing binding targets on ourselves. We need an international agreement to make sure the world will accept targets,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said. Canada has ratified Kyoto, but the federal government looks set to simply ignore its commitments, says Grist. This will “surely create a crisis of confidence in the international regime if there are no repercussions.”

USA: The real bully on the block. With its insistence on only voluntary emissions cuts at a conference specifically aimed at churning out a binding agreement on mandatory cuts, “the U.S., if not a roadblock, seems to have left the road completely,” says Grist. Despite President Bush’s new warm rhetoric on the UN, substantive areas of disagreement remain. The US still opposes binding emission-reduction targets set at the international level, although it has suggested it could adopt national targets. The U.S. strategy could thus be to support a U.N. agreement on long-term global reductions, but with each country establishing a target for itself — an outcome unacceptable to most other parties. Under this model, more cooperation would be found in international technology partnerships like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the Methane-to-Markets Partnership, or the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, which Grist labels as “essentially toothless forums for information exchange.”

The leaders of the US delegation will be Paula Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, who represented the U.S. at COP12 in Nairobi last year and defended the Bush administration’s calls for voluntary measures and refusal to ratify Kyoto. Also in attendance will be Harlan Watson, long-time negotiator for the U.S., friend of the oil industry, and an expert in delay tactics, according to Grist. The Bush Administration opposition rests on two principles, says The SMH. It won’t sign an agreement that it believes gives China and India a competitive advantage by tying only developed countries to binding cuts in their emissions. Bush also does not want a legally binding national target to cut US emissions at home. In June, Bush agreed with his industrial allies in the Group of Eight on a need for “substantial cuts” in emissions and to push for a new U.N. climate deal in 2009.

New Zealand: According to the Climate Institute’s Bali blog, the Kiwis believe Bali should kick start negotiations on a range of emission reduction commitments for industrialised countries of 25-40% reductions by 2020. This is also the position of the EU and other “progressive countries” and “if Australia supported this it would send a very strong signal to Canada and Japan that they need to lift their game.”