L'AQUILA: US President Barack Obama said on Thursday there was still time to close the gap with developing powers on climate change, after the UN chief criticised the G8 for not going hard enough.
On the first day of a meeting of the Group of Eight major industrialised nations in L’Aquila in Italy, the G8 failed to get China and India to accept the goal of halving emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.
Obama, hoping to make his mark on his first G8 summit by chairing a meeting of rich and emerging powers on the environment, said progress could still be made before talks on a new UN climate change treaty in Copenhagen in December.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama told Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that ‘there was still time in which they could close the gap on that disagreement in time for that important (meeting).’
Obama was due to chair the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF), which was likely to agree to try to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) versus pre-industrial levels but not to agree on the scale of emission cuts.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said progress on climate change at the G8 was ‘not enough’ so far.
‘This is politically and morally (an) imperative and historic responsibility ... for the future of humanity, even for the future of the planet Earth,’ the UN chief said.
Progress was hampered by the absence of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who left L’Aquila to attend to ethnic clashes in China’s northwest that have killed 156 people.
Sharing the burden
Temperatures have risen by about 0.7 Celsius since the Industrial Revolution ushered in widespread use of fossil fuels.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he hoped the temperature target would be agreed by ‘all the countries around the table today’ — the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia, plus emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Mexico.
But one G8 source said it was ‘not realistic’ to expect a deal on emissions. India said developing countries first wanted to see rich nation plans to provide financing to help them cope with ever more floods, heatwaves, storms and rising sea levels.
They also want to see rich nations make deeper cuts by 2020.
G8 countries agreed among themselves on a goal of cutting global emissions by 50 per cent by 2050, with the United States accepting this for the first time. They also set a reduction goal of 80 per cent in aggregate for developed countries.
But G8 member Russia immediately said it could not hit this target by 2050 and Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice said 80 per cent was an ‘aspirational goal.’