G8 leaders meet to talk climate targets - July 06, 2009
Normally when world leaders meet at their summits these days they like to wrangle about climate change before setting a target that doesn’t go as far as many scientists think is needed. Equally normal is a storm of media coverage with various unnamed sources speculating about what is going to happen.
According to the BBC at the G8 summit in Italy, which starts Wednesday, leaders may break from their bickering routine. The Beeb reports that a target to cut greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050 is to be set, with leaders also to “call for any human-induced temperature rise to be held below 2 degrees Celsius”.
The Guardian says US President Barack Obama is also ready to back the ‘no more than 2 degrees’ target at the meeting in L’Aquila, according to “a draft communiqué”.
This is a bit of a change from 23 June when Reuters was reporting that the US was having less-than-none of European attempts to push the <2 target, “according to a draft summit text”. Reuters also said then that the target would be for a 50% reduction by 2050, rather than 80%.
The Australian is playing safe, telling its readers that unnamed negotiators told it that “progress had been slow and even the framework for a possible deal last night remained unclear”. It does note that Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, is behind the <2 target.
To drive home how important all this is, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives gave an exclusive interview to The Times (who repaid the favour by misspelling his name, but that’s by-the-by).
“We feel that climate change is not an environmental issue, it’s a security issue, it’s a human rights issue,” he said at a meeting in Oxford. “If you thought that defending Poland was important [from Nazi Germany], defending the Maldives is important. If you can’t save the Maldives today you can’t save yourself tomorrow.”
