Earlier in the week British Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a conference which took place under the climate change agreement reached at the recent meeting of the G8* in Gleneagles, Scotland. This weeks meeting included energy and environment ministers from the G8 and also Australia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa and senior official from United Nations organizations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Tony Blair, once a champion of the Kyoto Protocol, seems to be increasingly acknowledging that the future lies less with the target-based approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and more with promoting economic growth and encouraging the private sector to develop low carbon technologies.
Amongst other things, the conference delegates discussed:
1. The need to promote wider access to cleaner energy technologies and accelerate deployment,
2. That there is no shortage of appropriate technologies… the challenge is to create the incentives for private sector investment, and
3. The need for appropriate frameworks to provide incentives in R&D for the next generation of clean energy technologies, and to overcome the “valley of death” in which promising new technologies fail to achieve their commercial potential.
The Guardian has suggested this “undermines more than 15 years of climate change negotiations” and the same newspaper quotes Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth commenting that “His [Tony Blair] role is pivotal. He’s the only leader who’s pushing climate change as an issue that has to be dealt with. So what he says is going to carry particular weight and he’s basically just rewritten the history of climate change politics.”
Australia and the US have refused to ratify Kyoto on the basis it will be very damaging economically while achieving very little in terms of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – China and India have ratified but are exempt.
Blair and the conference delegates appear to have really just built on the policy change articulated at the Gleneagles meeting held in Scotland early in July.
Interestingly this approach mirrors that proposed by the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate which was announced in Laos in late July at the Association of South East Asian Nations regional summit.
This group, comprising Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States – which together account for nearly half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – propose to:
1. Develop, deploy and transfer existing and emerging clean technology,
2. Explore technologies such as clean coal, nuclear power and carbon capture,
3. Involve the private sector.
The Clean Development Partnership group was to meet in Adelaide this month but the meeting has been postponed.
While the US and Australia have been ostracized for not signing Kyoto, it seems we may have been right all along to not go down that blind alley which is perhaps Kyoto.
…………
*The G8 has its roots in the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent global recession. In 1975, the French invited the heads of state of six major industralized democracies to a summit. The participants agreed to an annual meeting organized under a rotating presidency, forming what was dubbed the Group of Six (G6) consisting of France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At the subsequent annual summit in Puerto Rico, it became the Group of Seven (G7) when Canada joined. In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, the USSR (now Russia) began meeting with the G7 after the main summit – making 8. (adapted from Wikipedia)
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.