UNITED NATIONS – In the highest-level conference yet on climate change, 100 world leaders come to the United Nations on Tuesday to decide how to start an energy revolution.
While attention turns to U.S. President Barack Obama’s first U.N. speech, the most substantial changes may come from what the presidents of China, India and other major economies spell out for billions of people and their households, businesses and farms in the decades ahead.
Those leaders are expected to make more ambitious commitments than the U.S. leader, whose hands are still tied by Congress.
“We are asking developing countries to do as we say, not as we did,” said Ed Miliband, Britain’s climate secretary, whose nation has pledged to cut carbon emissions by more than a third from 1990 levels by 2020, and said 40 percent of the UK’s electricity by then would come from renewable sources.
Tuesday’s U.N. summit and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh at the end of this week are intended to add pressure on the United States and other rich nations to commit to cuts and provide the billions of dollars needed to help developing nations stop cutting down their forests or burning coal.
China and the U.S. each account for about 20 percent of all the world’s greenhouse gas pollution created when coal, natural gas or oil are burned. The European Union is next, generating 14 percent, followed by Russia and India, which each account for 5 percent.
Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected to lay out new plans for extending China’s energy-saving programs and targets for reducing the “intensity” of its carbon pollution — carbon dioxide emission increases as related to economic growth.
China has been cutting energy intensity for the past four years and could the new carbon intensity goal in a five-year plan for development until 2015. China already has said it is seeking to use 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
India, too, may draw away some of the spotlight for laying out plans for the fifth-biggest contributor of global warming gases to bump up fuel efficiency, burn coal more cleanly, preserve forests and grow more organic crops.
The United States, under former President George W. Bush’s administration, long cited inaction by China and India as the reason for rejecting mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases.
Tuesday’s meeting is intended to rally momentum for crafting a new global climate pact at Copenhagen, Denmark, in December. Bush rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for cutting global emissions of warming gases, which expires at the end of 2012, based on its impact on the U.S. economy and exclusion of major developing nations like China and India, both major polluters.
But neither China nor India say they will agree to binding greenhouse-gas cuts like those envisioned in a new climate pact to start in 2013. They question why they should, when not even the U.S. will agree to join rich nations in scaling back their pollution.
“The crisis today on climate change is the inability of the United States to put on the table credible emissions reduction targets for 2020,” said Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister.
The EU is urging other rich countries to match its pledge to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and has said it would cut up to 30 percent if other rich countries follow suit.
Japan’s incoming prime minister, whose nation generates more than 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, has announced a new goal of a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.
Obama has announced a target of returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse emissions by 2020. Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate envoy, said the Obama administration is moving “full speed ahead” toward helping craft a global climate deal.
But with Congress moving slowly on a measure to curb emissions, the United States could soon find itself with little influence when 120 countries convene in Copenhagen.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate bill this summer that would set the first mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. But action in the Senate has been delayed as lawmakers wrestle with overhauling the health care system.
China’s ambition to grow quickly but cleanly soon may vault it to “front-runner” status — far ahead of the United States — in taking on global warming, the U.N. climate chief said Monday.
“China and India have announced very ambitious national climate change plans. In the case of China, so ambitious that it could well become the front-runner in the fight to address climate change,” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press. “The big question mark is the U.S.”
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The daring return of deposed President Manuel Zelaya has thrust Honduras back onto the world stage and posed a sharp challenge to interim leaders determined to hold new elections without him after a June coup.
Thousands of Zelaya supporters defied a curfew and spent the night surrounding Brazil’s embassy, where the leader remained holed up Tuesday, a day after slipping back into the country. In exile since June 28, Zelaya said he had traveled for 15 hours overland in a series of vehicles to pull off the stealth homecoming.
The government of interim President Roberto Micheletti ordered a 26-hour shutdown of the capital Tegucigalpa beginning Monday afternoon, closed the airport and set up roadblocks on highways leading into town. The measures were taken to keep out more Zelaya supporters from other regions in an attempt to head off the big protests that disrupted the city after his ouster.
But Zelaya loyalists ignored the decree and surrounded the embassy dancing and cheering and using their cell phones to light up the streets after electricity was cut off on the block housing the embassy.
“We’re here to support him and protect him, and we’re going to stay here as long as it’s physically possible,” said Carlos Salgado, a 43-year-old jewerly maker from Zelaya’s home state of Olancho.
Supported by the U.S. and other governments since his ouster, Zelaya called for negotiations with the leaders who forced him from the country at gunpoint. But Micheletti urged Brazil to turn Zelaya over to Honduran authorities for trial.
Zelaya told The Associated Press that he was trying to establish contact with the interim government to start negotiations on a solution to the standoff that started when soldiers flew him to Costa Rica.
“As of now, we are beginning to seek dialogue,” he said by telephone, though he gave few details.
Talks moderated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias stalled over the interim government’s refusal to accept Zelaya’s reinstatement to the presidency under a power-sharing agreement that would limit his powers and prohibit him from attemting to revise the constitution.
In June, the country’s Congress and courts, alarmed by Zelaya’s political shift into a close alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba, backed the president’s removal.
He was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason and abuse of power for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum on reforming the constitution. His opponents feared he wanted to end a constitutional ban on re-election — a charge Zelaya denied.
Arias called his proposed compromise the last option to end the Honduran crisis. “I think this is the best opportunity, the best time now that Zelaya’s back in his country,” he said in New York.
Zelaya returned on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, where U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the opposing factions in Honduras to look for a peaceful solution.
“It is imperative that dialogue begin, that there be a channel of communication between President Zelaya and the de facto regime in Honduras,” Clinton said at a joint news conference with Arias.
Micheletti showed no inclination to give any ground, saying late Monday that Zelaya had violated Arias’ mediation effort by returning.
“Arias’ mediation in Honduras’ political problem has ended … and he has absolutely nothing else to do in this conflict,” Micheletti said in a televised interview.
The interim government was clearly caught off guard by Zelaya’s dramatic move. Only minutes before he appeared publicly at the Brazilian Embassy, Honduran officials said reports of his return were a lie. They soon ordered a 15-hour curfew, then later extended the shutdown by another 11 hours, until 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Speaking from the embassy, Zelaya summoned his countrymen to come to the capital for peaceful protests and urged the army to avoid attacking his supporters.
“It is the moment of reconciliation,” he said.
Teachers union leader Eulogio Chavez announced that the country’s 60,000 educators would go on strike indefinitely Tuesday to back Zelaya’s demand to be reinstated.
International leaders were almost unanimously against the armed removal of the president, worrying it could return Latin America to a bygone era of coups and instability. The United States, European Union and international agencies have cut aid to Honduras to press for his return.
The U.S. State Department announced Sept. 4 that it would not recognize results of the Nov. 29 presidential vote under current conditions — a ballot that was scheduled before Zelaya’s ouster. The coup has shaken up Washington’s relations with Honduras, traditionally one of its strongest allies in Central America.
The secretary general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, called for calm and warned Honduran officials to avoid any violation of the Brazilian diplomatic mission. “They should be responsible for the safety of president Zelaya and the Embassy of Brazil,” he said.
Zelaya said he had “evaded a thousand obstacles” in getting back to Tegucigalpa but declined to give specifics on who helped him cross the border, saying that he didn’t want to jeopardize their safety.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin said neither his country nor the OAS had any role in Zelaya’s journey before taking him in.
“We hope this opens a new stage in negotiations,” Amorin said.
But Honduras’ Foreign Relations Department accused Brazil of violating international law by “allowing Zelaya, a fugitive of Honduran justice, to make public calls to insurrection and political mobilization from its headquarters.”
In the days following the coup, at least two of the thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets were killed during clashes with security forces. Thousands of other Hondurans demonstrated in favor of the coup.
DENVER – Counterterrorism officials are warning mass transit systems around the nation to step up patrols because of fears an Afghanistan-born immigrant under arrest in Colorado may have been plotting with others to detonate backpack bombs aboard New York City trains.
Investigators say Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old shuttle van driver at the Denver airport, played a direct role in a terror plot that unraveled during a trip to New York City around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. He made his first court appearance Monday and remained behind bars.
Zazi and two other defendants have not been charged with any terrorism counts, only the relatively minor offense of lying to the government. But the case could grow to include more serious charges as the investigation proceeds.
Zazi has publicly denied being involved in a terror plot, and defense lawyer Arthur Folsom dismissed as “rumor” any notion that his client played a crucial role.
Publicly, law enforcement officials have repeatedly said they are unaware of a specific time or target for any attacks. Privately, officials speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case said investigators have worried most about the possible use of backpack bombs on New York City trains, similar to attacks carried out in London and Madrid.
The investigation into Zazi’s role and how many others may be involved was ongoing. Two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation told The Associated Press late Monday that more than a half-dozen individuals were being scrutinized in the alleged plot.
The FBI said in a statement that “several individuals in the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere” were being investigated.
Backpacks and cell phones were seized last week from apartments in Queens where Zazi visited.
In a bulletin issued Friday, the FBI and Homeland Security Department warned that improvised explosive devices are the most common tactic to blow up railroads and other mass transit systems overseas. And they noted incidents in which bombs were made with peroxide.
ATLANTA – Surging floodwaters ripped apart a west Georgia trailer home, drowning a 2-year-old boy swept from his father’s arms. In Atlanta, stranded motorists scrambled to the tops of their car as waters rose on one of the city’s busiest highways. To the north, crews worked furiously to shore up a levee holding a surging river back from an isolated town.
Storms that pounded the Southeast on Monday turned sleepy creeks into rivers, and rivers into raging floodwaters. Six people were killed across the region, including five in the Atlanta area. Aerial shots showed schools, football fields, even entire neighborhoods submerged by the deluge, sending some unlucky residents scurrying for higher ground.
“It’s a mess all over,” said Lisa Janak of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.
At least two people were missing, including a Tennessee man who went swimming in an overflowing ditch on a $5 dare and a 15-year-old Georgia teen who never returned from a swim in the surging Chattooga River.
The storm came after days of rain pounded most of the region and saturated the soil. Some parts of Georgia have had more than 20 inches since Friday.
“Any rain that fell has no place to go,” said Georgia climatologist David Stooksbury. “This rainfall on top of already saturated soils really made the situation worse.”
Many parts of north Georgia have experienced “historic” amounts of rain well in excess of so-called 100-year predictions, which describe a storm with the likelihood of happening once every century, said Stooksbury. The downpours come just months after much of the region emerged from an epic drought that plagued the region since 2007.
As the storm front rumbled through west Georgia, it turned a normally docile creek into a surging headwater that tore apart 2-year-old Preston Slade Crawford’s mobile home around 2 a.m. The boy’s body wasn’t found until hours later, but his parents had been rescued as another son, age 1, clung to his mother’s arms in the county west of Atlanta.
“By the time we got into our vehicle, they were screaming at the back of our house,” said Pat Crawford, the boy’s grandmother, who watched as the family’s mobile home was whisked away. “We could see them, but the current was so bad, we couldn’t get to them.”
Crawford said she was on higher ground, unable to help her family members. Craig Crawford clung to his 2-year-old son, but the boy was pulled away in a strong undercurrent.
To the northwest, crews in the tiny Georgia town of Trion worked to shore up a levee breached by the Chattooga River and in danger of failing. The town evacuated more than 1,500 residents, and Red Cross workers quickly set up an emergency shelter able to help hundreds nearby.
“It’s a grave situation for us,” said Lamar Canada, Chattooga County’s emergency management director.
Most of the dead were motorists trying to navigate the treacherous roadways. Seydi Burciaga, a 39-year-old woman from Georgia’s Gwinnett County, was found dead in her vehicle after it was swept off a road by flooding, said Gwinnett County Fire Capt. Thomas Rutledge.
But the surging waters weren’t just dangerous for drivers. A 22-year-old Alabama man, James Dale Leigh, drowned when a pond’s rain-soaked bank collapsed beneath him, said Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin.
Among the hardest-hit areas was Georgia’s Douglas County, where as much as a foot of rain fell Monday. Flooding there was blamed for the deaths of a man and two women in three separate situations, said county spokesman Wes Tallon.
Emergency officials were often forced to improvise to rescue dozens of people stranded in their homes and cars.
“We’re using everything we can get our hands on,” Tallon said. “Everything from boats to Jet Skis to ropes to ladders.”
Other southeastern states were hit less severely.
In Kentucky, rescue crews went on more than a dozen runs to help stranded people after 4 inches of rain fell on parts of Louisville Sunday, said Louisville fire department spokesman Sgt. Salvador Melendez.
Water rose as high as window-level on some houses in North Carolina’s Polk County, forcing emergency officials to evacuate homes along a seven-mile stretch of road. Flooding in more than 20 counties in western North Carolina closed roads, delayed school and forced evacuations.
The forecast held little good news for Georgia: Another round of storms was expected to move in Tuesday from the west.
“Don’t remind me,” Carroll County Emergency Management Director Tim Padgett said of the forecast. “That’s the worst news we could hear.”