US President Barack Obama is hoping to restore momentum to the search for a global deal on climate change this year when he chairs a meeting of the major economies during the G8 summit in Italy this week.
Obama is hoping that the 17-nation meeting — which will include G8 members and a range of other major economies that produce roughly 80 percent of world carbon emissions — will sign up to a pledge to prevent world temperatures increasing by more than 2ºC, the maximum thought permissible before climate change becomes irreversible.
It is the first time that Obama has backed the pledge. He will also travel to Moscow ahead of the G8 to try to bind Russia to a global climate change deal.
The meeting of the leading nations is being held in a former army barracks in the Italian town of L’Aquila. The venue was switched to the town, which was shattered by an earthquake earlier this year, by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the luxuries of normal world-leader summits will be notably absent.
In what could prove a pivotal meeting on Wednesday at the summit, Obama will use his prestige to pull together the developed and developing countries ahead of a make-or-break UN session in Copenhagen designed to set the future framework on climate change, post 2012.
Obama is said to be willing to take the initiative by dropping long-standing US opposition to the 2ºC target, according to a draft communique.
“The fact that Obama is chairing this meeting and really wants to make progress shows how far the US has traveled over the past year,” a British official said. “We are not expecting the developing countries to sign up to targets at this summit, but we need to start making progress.”
In Italy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is also hoping to sell his ambitious plan, unveiled last week, of a US$100 billion-per-annum climate change aid program. Brown is the first world leader to put a figure on the amount of green technological aid the West might need to fund to help developing countries grow sustainably.
He is trying to break a diplomatic logjam by proposing the financing package by 2020, much of the figure coming from the private sector. He hopes the proposals will be a lure for developing countries such as India to commit themselves this year to carbon reduction targets.
In a severe blow to those hoping to secure a global deal on climate change, India last week again ruled out committing itself to carbon reduction targets. India is the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and its emissions are projected to treble by 2050.
The UN is supposed to agree a post-2012 climate change framework in Copenhagen in December.
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
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
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS