06 July 2006

Climate Change: Energy Bumps Issue from the G8 Agenda

ROME - At the last G8 summit, political leaders vowed to "act with resolve and urgency" on climate change. A year on, global warming has been sidelined by concerns on how the world can satisfy its growing appetite for energy, according to Reuters/Planet Ark.

While analysts were not entirely convinced by Prime Minister Tony Blair's bid to highlight climate change -- a fashionable issue in Britain -- during his G8 presidency, they believe Russia has all but dropped the issue.
"I don't think this year there's going to be any particular emphasis on climate, I would be very positively surprised if there were," said Benito Mueller, Senior Research Fellow at Britain's Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Russia, chairing the Group of Eight for the first time and hosting a summit starting July 15, has been ambivalent about global warming which leaders at last year's G8 summit called "a serious and long-term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the planet".

Moscow's decision in 2004 to ratify the Kyoto Protocol saved the greenhouse gas-limiting treaty from collapse, which looked likely when the United States pulled out three years earlier.

Read the full story: G8

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1 comment:

The Green Skeptic said...

Gregg Easterbrook echoes that sentiment in his essay "Case Closed: The Debate About Global Warming is Over," when he writes:
"A vast area of the former Soviet Union might open to agricultural production, while large permafrost regions in Russia and Canada might open to petroleum exploration or even residential development."

"But though there could be benefits to a warming world," Easterbrook concludes, "the bad is likely to outweigh the good."

Download the Easterbrook paper here: http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/easterbrook/20060517.htm

or read my post about it here: http://greenskeptic.blogspot.com/2006/05/climate-change-easterbrooks-case.html