Bush faces isolation on climate at G8 talks

Bush faces isolation on climate at G8 talks
By Fiona Harvey in London and David Pilling in Tokyo
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 3 2007 21:06 | Last updated: June 3 2007 21:06



George W. Bush Sunday night appeared likely to split the world’s eight richest nations on the eve of their summit, despite a last-ditch intervention by Tony Blair, the British prime minister, over global warming.

Climate change will dominate what looks like being a tense three-day summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial economies beginning on Wednesday as Germany, present chairman of the club, and the US squabble over how to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Blair, speaking in Berlin on Sunday before meeting Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said the summit should set goals for reducing carbon emissions, pledge to establish a global carbon market and commit to the United Nations-led Kyoto process on climate.

“At the G8 we need to agree the elements of a future framework,” Mr Blair told an international conference of legislators. “This would allow the UN talks to accelerate and reach earlier agreement, so that we have a framework for after Kyoto in place by 2009.”

Mr Blair’s comments, which reiterated three core demands by Ms Merkel that the US has opposed, will strengthen the chancellor’s hand in her tug of war with Mr Bush ahead of the summit at Heiligendamm, an 18th century resort on Germany’s Baltic coast.

Although Mr Blair’s apparent attempt to build a bridge between the chancellor and Mr Bush could help reduce some of the tension expected at the summit, a deal on climate seemed unlikely on Sunday.

Ms Merkel wants G8 members to agree that global warming should be kept to a maximum of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; to reduce emissions by 50 per cent of their 1990 level by 2050, and to start work on a global emissions trading scheme.

But Mr Bush’s suggestion last week of talks on climate change outside the UN, without commitments to emissions trading or firm cuts in greenhouse gas output, found support among non-European members of the G8. Japan and Canada quickly welcomed Mr Bush’s remarks, while Russia’s position remained unclear.

Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, said: “I believe the United States too is finally getting serious in dealing with global warming.” Tokyo’s view is that binding targets have failed because they leave the world’s biggest emitters – especially the US, China and India – on the sidelines. It is championing a more inclusive, but vaguer approach, in which the world’s biggest emitters pledge to use technology to tackle global warming.

His chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said: “We believe prime minister Abe and president Bush share the same perspective and look forward to achieving significant progress at the G-8 level at Heiligendamm].”

The US has rejected all three German proposals on the climate. Mr Bush’s suggestion last week that the world’s main polluters should meet and set their own emissions targets by the end of the year was interpreted in Berlin as a bid to start a parallel, and possibly competing, initiative to the UN-led Kyoto process and split the G8.

On Sunday, British officials said the president had been misinterpreted and stressed the significance of his acknowledgement – the first – that the US should be part of a new multilateral climate agreement when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.

In a weekend interview, Ms Merkel said she would accept neither a watering-down of the two-degree target nor endorse any climate initiative that would compete with the UN process. ”One thing is clear,” she told Der Spiegel. ”We must agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012, as part of a process led by the United Nations.

“There will certainly be other meetings and initiatives before then . . . They can even be helpful. What matters is that they all eventually merge into the UN process. This is non-negotiable.”

The chancellor will meet Mr Bush on Wednesday before the start of the summit, in one last effort to sway him, German officials said.