The UN climate chief predicted on Wednesday that the world will reach the goal of cutting global-warming gases 50 percent by 2050 and said the US economic meltdown should spur governments to take bolder action in confronting climate change.
But Yvo de Boer added that governments must move away from taking "small incremental steps" that won't achieve the goal and change direction -- as Norway did this month with the announcement that it will become "carbon neutral" by 2030.
Others warned that the technology to cut emissions still needs to be developed.
De Boer, who presided over last month's UN climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia, said nations can't be driven away from their agreement to adopt a blueprint for fighting global warming by next year because of the US financial turmoil.
"This is the time to be bold and really push through," he said, adding that some people "are going to suffer pain and other people are going to gain."
De Boer spoke to two reporters after moderating a panel at the World Economic Forum on climate change that included several energy company executives and Rajendra Pachauri, the chief UN climate scientist who chairs the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change which shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
"We have the International Energy Agency telling us that if we continue with business as usual then greenhouse gas emissions will go up by 50 percent whereas Pachauri is telling us emissions need to go down by 50 percent," de Boer said.
He then asked the panel members whether they believed a 50 percent reduction would be achieved, or whether governments would "focus on short-term and lock us into technologies that will not get us to 50 percent."
James Rogers, chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy Corp, said he was "cautiously optimistic that we're able to achieve the objective of 50 percent reduction by 2050, but the key to that optimism is really investment in technology, because that's what's going to drive it."
In the short term to 2025, however, he said carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise "because the technology is not going to be available," particularly for coal "which is such a key driver of emissions of CO2" in India, China and the US.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing