Climate debate heats up G-8

President Bush's new global warming plan greeted with skepticism at this week's world summit in Germany.

from the June 4, 2007 edition

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Fewer friends in US's corner

Either way, some analysts say, the Bush plan is merely trying to defuse the barrage of criticism aimed its way.

"This is a transparent effort to divert attention from the president's refusal to accept any emissions-reductions proposals at [the] G-8 summit," says Philip Clapp, head of the National Environmental Trust in Washington. "The White House is just trying to hide the fact that the president is completely isolated among the G-8 leaders by calling vaguely for some agreement next year, right before he leaves office."

As if to underscore that isolation, long-time Bush ally on climate, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, announced over the weekend that his country would set an emissions target next year and set up a carbon-trading system by 2012 to help achieve it. Both approaches have been anathema to the White House.

Others suggest the White House is attempting an end-run around any United Nations-based process for dealing with climate. Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister, said Friday that the G-8 should not allow the Bush plan to become "a Trojan horse to get past Heiligendamm and basically torpedo the international climate-protection process."

Some, though, say Washington's approach in the end may help prod a ponderous UN process. While setting an "aspirational" goal might seem out of touch with calls for binding commitments, environmental treaties often set a broad goal, which is turned into action through each country's process of ratification and enacting enabling legislation, said James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, at a May 31 press briefing. Citing fisheries agreements as an example, he noted that, "You agree on goals in the international process [and] you implement them through national strategies that include binding measures."

Such an approach could be attractive to rapidly growing countries such as India and China, which say binding commitments could unfairly place a drag on their economic growth. Both the Kyoto Protocol and its parent document, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, acknowledge that developed countries have a responsibility to move first on global warming. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the cumulative emissions these countries have pumped into the air are responsible for rising global average temperatures, scientists say.

But all parties agree that for emissions controls to be truly effective, countries such as China, India, and Brazil must be brought into the process. Beijing is slated to release on Monday its own climate-change strategy in advance of attending the G-8 meeting as an observer.

"The acid test of Heiligendamm will be getting the unconstrained powers to commit" beyond 2012, says John Kirton, director of the G-8 Research Group at the University of Toronto. "They don't have to define the nature of the post-Kyoto regime, but it is fundamentally important that they agree to do something."

The flexibility of the US proposal, he suggests, "is more to bring the unconstrained on board."

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