AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- The president-elect won't be there, but an Obama buzz will crackle through the conference hall when negotiators gather Monday for a final push toward a sweeping new global-warming treaty.
"America is back," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., underscoring that Barack Obama's election signals a U.S. intent to regain a leadership role on climate change.
"After eight years of obstruction and delay and denial, the United States is going to rejoin the world community in tackling this global challenge," said Kerry, who is in line to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Delegates from nearly 190 countries will gather for two weeks in Poznan, Poland, meeting for the fourth time in the past year. Previous talks have included bickering, clashes and compromise in what the top U.N. climate official calls the most difficult and complex international negotiation in history.
They have a deadline of December 2009 to complete an accord on reducing worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases, to which global warming is partly attributed.
Delegates say that Obama's election promises to energize a process that until now has been burdened by a U.S. reluctance to endorse any international climate plan.
"In Poznan there will be a buzz -- we can call it the American buzz," said Jake Schmidt, of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The U.S. is back in the conversation, and back with a leader that gets it."
At the same time, a world financial crisis has struck just when governments must commit to spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight climate change.
A report by the U.N. climate change secretariat estimates that at least $200 billion will be needed annually to cut carbon emissions 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2030. Hundreds of billions more may be needed for poor countries to deal with such effects of global warming as rising seas, water scarcity and shifts in farming, it said.
About 9,000 delegates, activists and researchers will attend the Poznan meeting, which will end with a two-day summit of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, 150 environmental ministers, and Kerry and other U.S. congressmen who are instructed to report back to Obama.
The Poznan conference is the halfway mark in a two-year negotiation to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obliged 37 industrial countries to cut carbon emissions below 1990 levels by an average 5 percent by 2012.
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