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 Editorials | Environmental | November 2005 
Canada Urges Wider Global Warming Fight
 Reuters
| | Chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson takes questions during a news conference at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal November 29, 2005. The U.S. ruled out making extra pledges to fight global warming beyond 2012 on Tuesday, angering environmentalists who accused Washington of blocking a 189-nation conference in Canada. (Reuters/Christinne Muschi) |
Montreal - Host Canada urged a wider fight against global warming at the start of 189-country talks on Monday that will try to enlist the United States and poor nations in UN-led schemes to fight climate change beyond 2012.
"Let us set our sights on a more effective, more inclusive long-term approach to climate change," Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion told the opening of the UN conference in Montreal, which lasts until Dec. 9.
"More action is required now," Dion told delegates at the talks, likely to involve up to 10,000 representatives of governments, environmental groups and businesses, charged with working out how to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels.
The talks will start mapping out what to do after the UN's Kyoto Protocol, a first step by about 40 industrial nations to curb emissions, runs out in 2012. Negotiations on a successor could take several years.
The Montreal session included actors and video images showing the risks of a changing climate - including more frequent hurricanes, ice storms, desertification, locust swarms, forest fires, floods and melting ice caps.
Dion said climate change was the single most important environmental issue facing the world today.
He did not mention Washington by name but the United States, the world's biggest polluter, and Australia have pulled out of Kyoto, denouncing its caps on emissions as an economic straitjacket.
Caps Won't Work
"A targets and timetables approach will not work for us," chief US climate negotiator Harlan Watson told Reuters, reiterating the Bush administration's opposition to Kyoto-style caps.
Washington favors an approach with big investments in new technologies like hydrogen or research into burying carbon dioxide, the main industrial gas blamed for warming the planet.
"We are working hard on some of the advanced technologies ... but the development and deployment of technology does not fit with rigid targets and timetables," said Watson.
Apart from the United States and Australia, Kyoto excludes poor nations, such as China and India, from the first set of targets. Their emissions are growing but far lower per capita than those of industrial nations.
"We have an enormous task in front of us," said Argentine Environment Minister Gines Gonzalez Garcia.
He said big nations should take the lead and "significantly reduce" their emissions. Kyoto backers are supposed to cut their emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
Some delegates noted that US President George W. Bush signed a declaration at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July promising action at the UN talks in Canada.
Referring to Montreal, the G8 leaders said: "We are committed to move forward in that forum the global discussion on long-term cooperative action to address climate change."
Since records began in the 1860s, the 10 hottest years have been since 1990 and most scientists blame rising temperatures on a build-up of greenhouse gases from carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.
Dion is due to stay on as president of the talks although Canada's Liberal government is likely to be toppled in a confidence vote on Monday, which would trigger an election.
The meeting is a parallel session of the 156 nations which have ratified Kyoto and a total of 189 countries, including the United States, which back the wider UN climate convention.
International Air Traffic, the Kyoto Protocol's Great Forgotten
Caroline de Malet - Le Figaro
Greenhouse gas emissions generated by international aviation are not, at present, counted. Europe intends to put an end to this exception.
Do you know that when you make a round trip between Paris and New York on the plane, you burn 128 gallons of kerosene and emit 1.2 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere? That's twice as much as you would use driving a Twingo in the Ile-de-France for six months (5,000 km) and as much as if you had used four tons of cement (a modern house of 1100 square feet demands ten) or heated your home for about six months ... Or, about a month and a half worth of your total emissions (heating, food, transportation ...), according to the French Institute for the Environment (Ifen). Which corresponds to over twice the emissions not to be exceeded per year per inhabitant in order to stabilize CO2 emissions on a planetary level, deems the expert Jean-Claude Jancovivi in his Manicore letter.
Commercial aviation represents 5% of global warming attributable to human activities. For airplanes modify the concentrations of greenhouse gases by throwing out carbon dioxide (CO2), forming ozone (O3) and destroying methane (CH4). They are the source of the trails of cloud vapor - contrails - that we see in the sky behind airplanes.
It is surprising, therefore, that these emissions are not counted in the national inventories of emissions, which keep up-to-date accounts of the reduction efforts of each of the countries signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. Only polluting emissions from domestic transportation (40% of the total) figure there. For defining the nationality of the emissions of an international flight creates a real conundrum: should they be imputed to the country the airplane belongs to, to the country where the fuel is sold, to the country of the airplane's destination, or to the country from which the passengers depart?
Yet at issue is one of the most rapidly growing sources of polluting emissions. Air traffic is growing by 4% a year on average and it is estimated that these emissions will quadruple between now and 2050.
"Taking these emissions into account is an announced objective of the European Union, which is increasing its activities to this end within the UN organization in charge of climate change (UNFCC) and the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization)," explains André Gastaud, Transportation Advisor to the Interministerial Mission on the Greenhouse Effect (Mies). A work group in Brussels is presently reflecting on the way this sector could be included in the European systems of CO2 emission rights that was established at the beginning of 2005. European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas evaluates the impact on tickets at "0-9 Euros per round-trip ticket." At the international level, however, the subject - which will be evoked in Montréal - risks running up against Saudi Arabian opposition. |
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