No one in Hokkaido was hailing the deal struck by the G8 on climate change as a breakthrough. Not the G8 — and certainly not the group of five developing countries invited to the summit.
Indeed, it took some close textual analysis to spot why the declaration issued by the eight leading industrial nations moved things forward from last year’s get-together in Germany.
Last year the summit agreed to ”seriously consider” cutting carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. This year the G8 said that they, with the leading developing nations such as China and India, would ”consider and adopt” the 50% goal.
According to British sources in Hokkaido that little word ”adopt” represented a concession from George Bush, who has moved substantially from the hard-line position he was adopting three years ago.
The response of the big developing countries showed, however, that the verbal gymnastics were not entirely convincing. A statement by China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil said the G8 was responsible for global warming and should shoulder most of the burden for tackling the problem. Forget a piffling 50%, the G5 said, we are looking for cuts of 80% to 90%.
The summit declaration from the powerhouse economies of the developed world gave no baseline date from when the cuts in greenhouse gases would be calculated, nor did it commit to an interim reduction en route to the 2050 goal.
Both matter, because the choice of start date affects the size of the cut in carbon emissions that will be needed, while agreement to a 25% to 40% reduction by 2020 would force countries to start taking action straight away.
Supporters of the deal say those points were never going to be agreed in Hokkaido and will be on the agenda in the run-up to next year’s climate change summit in Copenhagen. Some tough bargaining is now in prospect, with the G8 likely to face the accusation that it is still not taking the threat of climate change seriously enough.
There is now a process in place that locks all the leading polluters into one set of negotiations. Green groups slammed the deal, although they privately acknowledged that Bush has shifted his position substantially from a time when he denied the science of climate change.
Friends of the Earth’s international climate campaigner, Tom Picken, accused G8 leaders of an ”elaborate smokescreen” to try to fool the world that they were showing international leadership on global warming.
”Setting a vague target for 42 years’ time is utterly ineffectual in the fact of the global catastrophe we all face. Urgent action is needed to tackle climate change and spiralling energy prices caused by our addiction to increasingly expensive and insecure fossil fuels.”
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said the G8 deal had positive elements, but warned: ”What I find lacking is any kind of language on where industrialised nations, G8 nations, want their emissions to be in 2020 and I think that is critical to making progress in the negotiations.”
Oxfam labeled the deal as a ”tepid” response : ”At this rate, by 2050 the world will be cooked and the G8 leaders will be long forgotten. The G8’s endorsement of a half-hearted ’50 by 50′ climate goal leaves us with a 50/50 chance of a climate meltdown. Rather than a breakthrough, the G8’s announcement on 2050 is another stalling tactic that does nothing to lower the risk faced by millions of poor people right now.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South African minister of environmental affairs and tourism, said ”As it is expressed in the G8 statement, the long term goal is an empty slogan. To be meaningful and credible, a long term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions.” Copyright: Guardian News & Media 2008