US President Barack Obama, buoyed by a domestic victory on climate policy, faces his first foreign test on the issue next week at a forum that could boost the chances of reaching a UN global warming pact this year.
Obama, who has pledged US leadership in the fight against climate change, chairs a meeting of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters at the G8 summit in Italy on Thursday.
Known as the Major Economies Forum, the grouping includes 17 nations that account for roughly 75 percent of the world’s emissions, making any agreement from its leaders a potential blueprint for UN talks in Copenhagen in December.
Meetings of the forum, which Obama relaunched earlier this year, have so far failed to achieve major breakthroughs.
Developing countries want their industrial counterparts to reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, while rich nations want developing states to commit to boosting their economies in an environmentally friendly way.
Those debates and others will be featured at the Italy meeting, the first at a heads of state and government level, and all eyes will be on Obama, whose climate initiatives European leaders have lauded while privately pressing him for more.
Europeans “want to seize this moment to push as hard as they can on the Americans to get significant ... targeted commitments on carbon emissions reductions,” said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies.
“They know that this is going to be a very careful walk along the road to Copenhagen in December and they’re going to publicly praise and privately push hard,” she said.
Obama has reversed the environmental policies of Republican predecessor George W. Bush by pressing for US greenhouse gas emission cuts and a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon dioxide output from major industries.
The House of Representatives helped turn that vision into a potential law last week by passing a bill that would require large companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels.
But those figures are still below what many scientists say is necessary and — potentially more dangerous for the Copenhagen process — the measures face obstacles to their passage through the US Senate.
Washington has resisted calls to endorse the aim of limiting global warming to no more than 2˚C at the G8 summit, though a European official said on Wednesday the US was now on board for that goal.
“The politics of climate change are stuck, despite Obama coming in,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
He said the US was still on the defensive in comparison to the more progressive EU.
Despite those challenges, White House officials said the president would carry momentum to the G8.
“Bolstered by the great progress in the House last week, the president will ... press for continued progress on energy and climate,” Denis McDonough, the White House deputy national security adviser, told reporters.
Activists hope Obama’s presence will pay dividends.
“This is really a chance for President Obama to bring what he’s most known for here in the US — hope and change — into the climate dialogue internationally,” said Keya Chatterjee, director of international climate negotiations at environmental group WWF in Washington.
She said other industrialized nations had used the Bush administration’s reluctance to sign up to major emissions curbs as an excuse to avoid making their own strong commitments.
“In the past year it’s been very easy for Canada and Russia and Japan to hide behind the Bush administration, but they don’t have that to hide behind anymore,” she said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS