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ENVIRONMENT: Legislators Debate Climate Road Map

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Feb 14 2007 (IPS) - Legislators from the world’s most industrialised nations and from major developing countries are meeting here in Washington to chart out a plan to battle global warming and address growing worries over climate change.

Delegates to the forum will issue a statement that the current president of the Group of Eight most industrialised nations, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, will share with other leaders at their July summit in the resort of Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea.

The statement will help craft a new international agreement to follow the end of the first Kyoto Protocol commitment period in 2012, which regulates emissions from greenhouse gases.

The two-day meeting was organised by the Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE) and the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development. It has attracted senior members of the U.S. Congress, including two presidential hopefuls, Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Senator John McCain.

The lawmakers come from the so-called G8 – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Britain and the United States – which together represent about 65 percent of the global economy, as well as from rising economic powers Brazil, China, Mexico and South Africa.

Merkel, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Yuriko Koike, Japan’s national security advisor, and David Miliband, Britain’s secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were among the keynote speakers of the event being held at the U.S. Senate in Washington.

U.S. lawmakers, whose country boycotted the Kyoto treaty after refusing compulsory limits on the industrial emissions widely blamed for global warming for fear that they would derail the U.S. economy, say there’s a new mood in the country and in Congress.

But despite the fact that the U.S. is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the White House is reluctant to embrace legislation that would force U.S. companies to cut their emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Rather than emissions caps, President George W. Bush has stressed investment in new and cleaner technologies that he says will also help lessen the country’s dependence on foreign sources of energy, a main goal of his presidency.

Robert Watson, the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and now chief scientist of the World Bank, said the new perceived interest in the U.S. in taking strong measures to combat climate change may have been motivated in part by national security concerns.

David Miliband of Britain urged Washington to get on board, saying the issue now is political rather than just environmental. He said that that climate change has emerged from “a box marked ‘environment'” and is being reframed as a political issue.

“When climate change could cause a greater financial meltdown than the two world wars and the Great Depression put together, how can it not be an issue for treasury and finance ministers?” he said.

Miliband, whose country is a close ally of the United States, said Washington, given its position in the global economy, should work to develop the green technologies of the future – in electricity, heat, transport and agriculture.

“The battle against global warming will only be won with America on our side. America has a huge amount to gain as well as to contribute from being at the heart of a global drive to reduce emissions,” he told the conference Wednesday.

The issue of climate change and how to deal with it has created tensions between industrialised nations and international institutions like the World Bank and some developing countries like China on the other.

Rich countries want to see China and India trim their emissions, but poor countries say decades of intensive activities and industrialisation by the G8 is the main reason for climate change.

Chinese officials, for example, point to the high rate of emissions per capita in rich nations compared to those in poorer nations. India, which has one of the world’s highest poverty rates, also sees calls by rich nations to reduce energy consumption as primarily self-serving.

But despite the differences, most economists and environmentalists in attendance agreed that there is a global understanding that lower emissions and cleaner energy sources are key if global warming is to be stemmed.

“People in all nations of the world have moved strongly in the last few months to recognise that this is a problem of great seriousness,” said former World Bank Chief Economist Sir Nicholas Stern. “There’s an increased preparedness to act, both in the reducing of emissions… and in adapting to a changing climate.”

New scientific evidence paints a sobering picture of the link between human activities – like burning fossil fuels while cutting down the forests that absorb carbon dioxide – and global warming. As a result, C02 levels are now 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution.