G8 Climate Talks "Less Than Nothing" - Sunday Herald

[hatrack]

“Nowadays it rains differently,” said Andrés Tamayo, a Catholic priest from Honduras. Droughts had become more frequent and less predictable, and farmers’ harvests were suffering. “These changes affect the poorest communities the worst,” he said at a meeting in Edinburgh last week. “Climate change oppresses us.” Tamayo was speaking alongside seven other community leaders from Colombia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, India and the Philippines. They all made the same point, often with anger and passion. Droughts and floods caused by pollution from the developed world are killing them.

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The meeting, Global Warming 8, was one of many organised in Edinburgh in the run-up to the G8 summit at Gleneagles. Its outcome was summarised by the former UN high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson. “It isn’t possible to make poverty history without combating climate change,” she said. “The G8, including the US, must take responsibility for the problem, and must take action.” But what has been achieved? According to Sarah La Trobe, of the Christian relief agency Tearfund, less than nothing. The G8’s failure to make any meaningful commitment to protect people suffering from climate change “puts millions of lives at risk,” she said. Any progress on Africa would be “fundamentally und ermined” by lack of action on climate change.

The G8 finalised two documents on climate change, a communiqué and a “plan of action”. Earlier versions of both had been leaked, enabling progress on disagreements to be tracked. The worst fear of environmentalists had been that George Bush would fail to accept that the world is heating up due to pollution. He disputed a sentence in an early draft that said simply: “Our world is warming.” In the event, the communiqué did accept that climate change was happening and that pollution was causing it, though the words it used were tortuous. Human activities, it said, “contribute in large part to increases in greenhouse gases associated with the warming of our earth’s surface”.

The convoluted phrasing of the next sentence betrayed its compromises. “While uncertainties remain in our understanding of climate science,” it said, “we know enough to act now to put ourselves on a path to slow and, as the science justifies, stop and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.” This caused Lord May, president of the Royal Society, to dismiss the communiqué as a failure. “The science already justifies reversing – not merely slowing – the growth of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. G8 countries also promised to act “with resolve and urgency” to find ways of achieving “substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”. But there were no specific targets, and no timetables for achieving them. “The G8 was not a sell-out but it was certainly a cop-out,” said Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland. “The US, the world’s biggest greenhouse polluter, has taken a minuscule step forward .” He added that the G8 agreement would actually allow countries to increase emissions for years. “The world must now get on with ignoring the Bush administration.”

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http://www.sundayherald.com/50715

[NNadir]

1. What a surprise. Waltzing to catastrophe. n/t.