US: Hurricane Katrina's wake-up call has gone unheard say Friends of the Earth, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
European Union member states have been warned by Friends of the Earth that a failure of leadership by the EU at the UN climate change conference, which opened in Montreal yesterday, "will leave the summit dead in the water".
The Montreal summit is expected to attract between 8,000 and 10,000 participants, among them government delegates, business and civic leaders and environmental activists. As such, it will be the largest such meeting since the Kyoto summit in 1997.
Key issues on the agenda involve the adoption of rules to make the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change fully functional, as well as starting negotiations on deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the current regime comes to an end.
The talks in Montreal are the first since Kyoto came into force last February, after it was ratified by Russia.
Conspicuously, the 156 countries which are parties to it do not include the US, which is responsible for 24 per cent of global emissions.
With climate change "proceeding apace" and freak weather events intensifying, Jan Kowalzig from Friends of the Earth Europe said participants "must not forget that they're negotiating the future of our planet, with millions of lives and livelihoods at stake".
Referring to the American position, Mr Kowalzig said the Bush administration had made it clear the US "will continue to look for a free ride on the planet.
"Hurricane Katrina's wake-up call has gone unheard. Yet . . . the rest of the world cannot afford to wait."
Though the EU has been to the fore in backing Kyoto, Friends of the Earth fears that some member states may be hoping for non-binding targets on emissions cuts in the future. It said this would be "cynical and short-sighted" given the scale of the threat.
Last September, at a debate in New York hosted by former US president Bill Clinton, British prime minister Tony Blair said: "The truth is that no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem."
British environment secretary Margaret Beckett recalled yesterday that at the 2004 talks in Buenos Aires, "it was only just possible at the very, very last minute to squeak through an agreement to do, or say, or consider anything that even had the word 'future' in it".
Pat Finnegan, of Grian (Greenhouse Ireland Action Network), complained that Ireland is among the wealthy countries which are "still not reducing their emissions even by reference to what was designed to be a relatively easy pathway in the first period to 2012".
Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups are campaigning to ensure that the Montreal summit agrees on a "robust negotiation process" to be completed by 2008 at the latest, leading to emission cuts of 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. Last week, the Department of the Environment's most senior climate change policy official said Ireland will have to cut its dependence on oil, gas and coal "sooner rather than later."
He said future targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be even more challenging.
Addressing a seminar in Dublin as a prelude to the Montreal summit, principal officer Owen Ryan said making cuts "has to be the priority, rather than buying credits abroad".
The most recent estimates available put Ireland's emissions 24 per cent higher than they were in 1990.