by Tan Copsey
After a week of apparently intense negotiation the G8 has reached a deal on climate change. The G8 boldly delared that they were:
'committed to taking strong and early action to tackle climate change in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system'.
by Tan Copsey
After a week of apparently intense negotiation the G8 has reached a deal on climate change. The G8 boldly delared that they were:
'committed to taking strong and early action to tackle climate change in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system'.
The National Resources Defence Council described the deal as demonstrating 'a fundamental and important shift in the international global warming policy conversation'.
But others were less effusive, David Roberts on Grist puts it rather bluntly - 'the U.S.
basically gave the rest of the world the finger yet again'.
When all is said and done, it would seem that very little has actually been achieved this week. It says something rather damning about the state of international negotiations when we are forced to cheer the US agreeing in principle to the possibility of maybe engaging with the UN process, and abiding by the rules they themselves helped establish a decade ago. What struck me about Bush's concessions was how much time we have lost.
Though momentum towards real negotiations at Bali later this year is building, it would be foolish to assume that these small concessions mean the US will really re-engage within the United Nations Framework. We should remember who we're dealing with here – a President left behind by an emergent politics fundamentally incompatible with his own.
In the midst of the larger cultural and economic change that is occurring in the West, it is easy to forget how crucial international agreements of this sort can be. The G8 had an opportunity to make a much bolder statement of intent. But instead what they produced was weaker in word and substance than those formulated a decade ago. The G8 are apparently 'committed' to 'early action'. Too little, too late, I say.
