It looks likes there is more trouble for the Copenhagen summit.

President Obama is scheduled to be in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10. Mr. Obama, however, will most likely not stop off in Copenhagen for the climate summit being held December 6 - 18, unnamed White House sources told The Times.

Without congressional approval of a cap and trade bill, administration insiders see no advantage to the president attending the Copenhagen meeting.

India and China dealt a further blow to the Copenhagen summit announcing that they agreed to a five-year pact to coordinate climate change policies. Both China and India reiterated their demand that advanced technologies necessary to meet climate change goals be made available to developing countries “essentially for free.” WSJ

Without a US commitment to reduce CO2 and without participation from India and China, what will the Europeans do? The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his position clear last week when he warned of a climate catastrophe if agreement was not reached on a new climate treaty. According to Brown, there is no “plan B.”

The EU, however, has expanded since Kyoto Protocol was reached. The newer EU members in central and eastern Europe are not as wealthy as western Europe. Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski expressed his country’s viewpoint in the Irish Times, explaining that the wealthier EU member states “cannot expect the poorer countries of the EU to be the ones who are disproportionately helping the poorest countries in the Third World”.

The other issue for Poland and eastern European members are the trade-able credits they hold as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. These credits called “assigned amount units” (AAUs) are enormously valuable. EU environmental ministers are concerned that the AAUs could undermine the international carbon market. Therefore, they are reviewing whether countries can continue to bank these AAUs unrestrictedly and whether they can be used at full value to offset carbon emissions beyond 2012. Irish Times

The challenges to Copenhagen continue.

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Copyright 2009 - K.J.Collins