too little too late?

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U.N. Official Wants World Summit on Global Warming

 

January 09, 2007 — By Francois Murphy, Reuters

PARIS -- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should call a meeting of heads of

government to decide the next steps against global warming, the U.N. official

responsible for tackling climate change said on Monday.

 

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat (UNFCCC), told reporters there

was not much time left to prepare a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which

expires in 2012. " The window of opportunity is closing, " he said. De Boer said

he hopes to meet Ban during a trip to New York next week.

 

The last annual U.N. meeting of about 100 environment ministers, in Nairobi in

November, made scant progress on finding ways to widen the U.N.'s Kyoto

Protocol.

 

Several ideas have been floated for discussion recently, such as French

President Jacques Chirac's plan, unveiled last week, for a conference to promote

a tax on imports from states that refuse to join Kyoto's successor.

 

" I'm wondering how all these initiatives are going to contribute to a global

negotiating process, " de Boer said.

 

" I'm really hoping that the new Secretary General will feel he's in a position

to show the kind of leadership the world seems to be calling for, " he added.

 

Kyoto obliges 35 developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 5

percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. But Kyoto nations account for only about

one third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Environment ministers involved in talks on Kyoto are often junior cabinet

members and lack clout, and de Boer said the problems raised in talks on the

environment were often economic in nature.

 

The United States, the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases, pulled out of

Kyoto in 2001, saying it would cost U.S. jobs and wrongly excluded big

developing nations such as China, India, South Africa and Brazil.

 

Those states will become major greenhouse gas emitters in the future but fear

that curbing carbon emissions will hinder their drive to reduce poverty and

promote growth, de Boer said. They should therefore be offered incentives, he

added.

 

" I think it has to be at the level of the Secretary General that you bring heads

of government together to try and flesh out these key principles and then to say

to the technicians, to the professionals: 'okay, these are the lines of the

playing field' " , he said.

 

" I think that time is running out and that this year would be good because it

would allow us sufficient time to negotiate something in a thorough way, " he

said.

 

The meeting could be a group of key nations rather than a large summit but it

should include important developing states, de Boer added. (Additional reporting

by Alister Doyle in Oslo)

 

Source: Reuters

 

 

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure

that just ain't so.

- Mark Twain