CLIMATE CHANGE: Ministers Meet Generates Only Hot Air

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

POTSDAM, Germany, Mar 18 2007 (IPS) - Renewed U.S. opposition to an international deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions meant that an environment ministers meeting on the weekend produced nothing more than hot air.

Environment ministers of the G8 countries (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan) and their counterparts from the major developing countries Brazil, Mexico, India, South Africa and China met in Potsdam near Berlin Mar. 16 and 17 to discuss new limits for greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide and methane generated from the burning of fossil fuels are believed to cause global warming and consequently climate change.

German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel publicly denounced the U.S. opposition to an international consensus.

“On two issues, the United States were the only ones who spoke against consensus,” Gabriel told journalists at the closing press conference.

The U.S. opposes a global carbon emissions trading scheme of the kind in place in the European Union. It also rejects the notion that industrialised nations should help achieve a “balance of interests” between developing countries’ need for economic growth and environmental protection, Gabriel said.

“We find this regrettable,” he said, but added that he was not surprised. “I did not expect something different.” Gabriel had said ahead of the meeting that the G8 was looking to create an economic and ecological “balance of interest” with developing countries.

The ministers met to prepare for the G8 summit to take place Jun. 6-8 at the German Baltic seaside resort Heiligendamm, 200km north of Berlin.

This is the first time an environment ministers conference was called ahead of a G8 summit. The G8 and the five emerging economic powerhouses between them produce up to 75 percent of all emissions.

The German government, which presides over G8 this year, had been seeking agreement on a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires 2012.

“We still have a lot of homework to do” to reach such an agreement, Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told media representatives.

Steiner said the weekend talks had given rise to some optimism but that these discussions “still have not reached the point at which we could say the summit of Heiligendamm will bring about the grand strategy” the world needs after 2012.

Stephen Johnson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, dismissed talk of mandatory greenhouse gas reductions as “rhetoric”, and said the U.S. government focus was “certainly not on (internationally binding) emissions caps.”

The summit at Potsdam, 30km south of Berlin, was also expected to prepare the ground for a UN conference on greenhouse gases emissions to take place next December in Bali, Indonesia.

The failure of the Potsdam summit followed warnings by scientists, environmental activists and some of the leaders at the summit that there has been enough talking on climate change, and that decisive action is now needed.

“Stop talking – act now” read a Greenpeace banner on a ship on the Havel river near the palace of Cecilienhof where the ministers met.

Most environmentalists agreed that the U.S. rejection led to the failure of the summit.

“The U.S. government hasn’t moved,” Regine Guenther, head of climate and energy at the German branch of the environmental organisation World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) said in Potsdam.

The U.S. generates 25 percent of the world’s total emissions. The second largest is China with 17 percent and then the European Union. By some estimates Chinese emissions will surpass those of the U.S. by 2009.

Developing countries such as China and India, which are not bound by the Kyoto Protocol to cut emissions, continue to argue for differentiated responsibility on the ground that they need industrial growth at competitive costs for the sake of economic growth, and are short of resources for expensive new technology to cut emissions.

Environmental activists are now urging the German government to set up an ambitious objective for the June summit.

Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace said German Chancellor Angela Merkel should make the Heiligendamm summit a “climate crisis summit” where G8 countries commit themselves to cutting emissions by 30 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels.

The European Union offered earlier this month to cut emissions by 20 percent by 2020. The EU agreement said it would increase those reductions to 30 percent if other big countries such as the United States and China joined in.

Muenchmeyer said the world should not wait for the United States but agree substantial mandatory targets anyway. “We can’t afford to wait for the slowest country,” he said.