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Bush under fire at Paris climate meeting

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Leading players in talks to forge a pact for tackling climate change took the lash on Thursday to U.S. President George W Bush's new blueprint for global warming, with Germany mocking it as "Neanderthal."

At a ministerial-level meeting of major carbon emitters, South Africa blasted the Bush proposal as a disastrous retreat by the planet's number-one polluter and a slap to poor countries.

The European Union -- which had challenged the United States to follow its lead on slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 -- also voiced disappointment.

His proposals "will not contribute to the fight against climate change," EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said, adding he hoped the U.S. would "reconsider its options and policies."

"Time is running out and we have the duty to reach an agreement in Copenhagen in 2009," said Dimas.

Germany accused Bush of turning back the clock to before last December's U.N. climate talks in Bali and even to before last July's G-8 summit.

In a statement entitled "Bush's Neanderthal speech," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said: "His speech showed not leadership but losership. We are glad that there are also other voices in the United States."

Bush's speech on Wednesday came at a key time in efforts to craft a new U.N. treaty for slashing the heat-trapping fossil-fuel gases that scientists fear will ravage Earth's climate system.

The Bali talks yielded a two-year "road map" designed to culminate in a planetary deal that will tackle carbon emissions beyond 2013, after the present pledges in the Kyoto Protocol run out.

These negotiations have the delicate task of bridging the U.S. on one side and the European Union and developing countries on the other -- and Bush's critics said his speech had provocatively staked out old positions already blamed for prolonged stalemate.

Instead of setting a date for cutting U.S. emissions, Bush had merely outlined a year -- 2025 -- by which the emissions would peak, they said.

In addition, he renewed his attack on Kyoto-style mandatory emissions caps and pressed big emerging countries to make concessions, saying they should not get "a free ride" in the next climate treaty.

"There is no way whatsoever that we can agree to what the U.S. is proposing," South African Environment and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said, describing the Bush administration as "isolated."

"In effect, the U.S. wants developing countries that already face huge poverty and development challenges to pay for what the U.S. and other highly industrialized countries have caused over the past 150 years," he said.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto shrugged off what he called "hot-blooded reaction" to the Bush speech and compared what he said was the administration's record of setting goals and achieving them with those who sought "short-term political benefit" from rhetoric.

Launched by Bush last September, the so-called Major Economies Meeting (MEM) aims at being a forum for plain and informal talk, thus helping to speed the overall UN negotiation process.

It is also looking at how to enlist smart technology and energy-intensive industries in action to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

MEM leaders are expected to meet at the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Japan in July when they will issue a statement on future action.

Delegates in Paris, though, said debate remained lively as to whether this statement should include a specific goal for long-term reductions or instead be confined to vaguer ambitions.

The MEM gathers Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and European Union are also represented.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, gathering top climate scientists, last year urged rich countries to slash their emissions by 25-40% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

The European Union has pledged a 20% cut by 2020, and offered to deepen this to 30% if other developed countries follow suit.

At present, U.S. emissions are already more than 16% above the 1990 benchmark.

The United States by itself accounts for roughly a quarter of global carbon emissions, but it is closely followed -- and by some estimates already surpassed -- by China.

© AFP

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

21 Comments
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“Neanderthal.”

Oh, I'm just rolling with this one.

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Europe is the world leader on pledging to reduce greenhouse gases. For the actual implementation, eh, not so good. But they have the pledging part down pat.

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the planet’s number-one polluter

Actually China is now the world's #1 polluter. Looks like tha AFP is a bit slow to update. Surprising. :)

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"White House spokesman Tony Fratto shrugged off what he called “hot-blooded reaction” to the Bush speech and compared what he said was the administration’s record of setting goals and achieving them with those who sought “short-term political benefit” from rhetoric."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahahahaha!!! Tony has had me laughing umpteen dozen times, but this one takes the cake! Name one goal the administration has met, and I will name you 2 dozen failures.

Calling bush a loser and not a leader is nothing new nor 'hot-blooded'; everyone knows for a fact bush has been nothing but the former, and never once the latter. Never once.

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Not to worry though, in a year there will be a democrat in office, and like the Clinton before h/she will actually DO something for the environment (like ratifying the Kyoto protocol). It'll make bush's oil buddies cry out in anger, but hey.

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“Neanderthal?” I resent that remark! Bush is a cro-magnon. Neanderthals were intelligent! And all the while "Delegates in Paris ...said debate remained lively as to whether this statement should include a specific goal for long-term reductions or instead be confined to vaguer ambitions," the global heating continues unabated. The time to talk was 1960. 'Nuff of the talking, DO something!

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What are the failed, post-modern pseudo-states of Europe going to do if we don't dance to their silly tune on "global warming"? Are they going to refuse to sell us their cheese? Are they going to launch gratuitous lawsuits against multinationals like Microsoft?

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"What are the failed, post-modern pseudo-states of Europe going to do if we don't dance to their silly tune on "global warming"? Are they going to refuse to sell us their cheese? Are they going to launch gratuitous lawsuits against multinationals like Microsoft?"

This would be a funny comment in a context where there wouldn't be much to worry about.

Only, this leaves the main element out of the equation: climate.

Indeed, there is not much Europe can do, just like when the US decided to begin war in Irak. But this time, we'll all pay the price...

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ha ha ha! redacted is so far behind the times he thinks global warming is a myth LOL!!!

Anyone else on JT think redacted has a case?

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Oh, I get it now - all those NASA satellite images showing the polar ice caps shrinking at the fastest rate ever must all have been Photoshopped.

That's about the only way people like redacted could have a case.

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"ha ha ha! redacted is so far behind the times he thinks global warming is a myth LOL!!"

Post here what you regard as proof and I'll reconsider.

Explain also why your hero Al Gore still won't debate the matter publicly .

Seen Big Al's little side businesses that are set to cash on the hysteria that people like you whip up?

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"Oh, I get it now - all those NASA satellite images showing the polar ice caps shrinking at the fastest rate ever must all have been Photoshopped."

C'mon sushi, surely you can do better than NASA. It's an American organization...

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"Post here what you regard as proof "

Heh, poor sod. I didn't realize there were global warming conspiracy theorists too...

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"Not to worry though, in a year there will be a democrat in office, and like the Clinton before h/she will actually DO something for the environment (like ratifying the Kyoto protocol). "

Smithinjapan - You really ought to do a little research before you post. You raise suspicions about how informed the other watermelons (green on the outside...) here are.

Clinton never signed on to Kyoto.

It was shot down in the Senate.

By a vote of 97 - 1.

Currently the supposedly transgressor nations have penalties totaling something like 33 billion US dollars.

Who's going to enforce payment?

The UN?

The EU?

"Hahahahaha, too funny!"

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Redacted - "Post here what you regard as proof and I'll reconsider."

LOL!! Too funny! :-)

Redacted - "Seen Big Al's little side businesses that are set to cash on the hysteria that people like you whip up?"

I'm yet to see one single person who makes this claim actually back it up.

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Can't help noticing it's the same bunch of reality holdouts who back the Iraq war that also deny global warming is a threat.

I just can't work out what the common factor is besides sand in their ears :-)

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"Can't help noticing it's the same bunch of reality holdouts who back the Iraq war that also deny global warming is a threat."

China and India, backing the US in Iraq?

Give us more, sushisake.

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Global warming is real. Listening to someone say that they have solution for it is the myth. So far there's been no evidence that any of the measures, including Kyoto, will yield any positive results, or any results at all for that matter.

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redacted - "China and India, backing the US in Iraq?"

Was that posted on the right thread??

Even SiuperLib agrees global warming is a threat. So do most of us.

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Superlib agrees global warming is a threat?

I think you are putting words in his mouth.

There are climate anomalies, i.e. the weather changes. I don't dispute that. It's something I learned in elementary school.

Simple example - Where did the woolly mammoth go?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth

"Extinction

Most woolly mammoths died out at the end of the Pleistocene, as a result of climate change and a shift in man's hunting patterns. A recent study conducted by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain determined that warming temperatures had reduced mammoth habitat to only a fraction of what it once was, putting the Woolly Mammoth population in sharp decline before the introduction of humans into the territory.[3] Glacial retreat shrunk mammoth habitat from 7.7 million km2 42,000 years ago to 0.8 million km2 6,000 years ago. Although a similarly drastic loss of habitat occurred at the end of the Saale glaciation 125,000 years ago, human pressure during the later warming period was sufficient to push the mammoth over the brink.[4] The study employed the use of climate models and fossil remains to make these determinations.[5] A small population of Wolly Mammoths survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 6000 BC [3], while another remained on Wrangel Island, located in the Arctic Ocean, up until 1700 BC. "

I agree with superlib's conclusion - there's been no evidence that any of the measures help.

As I pointed out above the supposedly transgressor nations are 33 billion dollars behind in paying their penalties...

Meanwhile, we have punished the world's poor by pushing ethanol as a genuine solution to an extremely complex problem:

"Dr Richard Pike, chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry, has said that biofuels are a "dead end" and "extremely inefficient", and that the government was wrong to impose a requirement for 5 per cent biofuel content in motor fuel by 2010. Dr Pike points out that "the 80 tonnes of kerosene used for a one-way commercial flight to New York is equivalent to the annual biofuel yield from an area of approximately 30 football pitches." At this rate it would take the whole of Britain's farmland just to run Heathrow.

"It really is time to stop this nonsense. To produce these crops people are farming intensively, using more fertilizers and pesticides. In poorer countries people are cutting down virgin rainforest to plant biofuel crops. Poor people are finding corn and wheat priced out of their market, and the tanks of 4x4s are taking the food from the plates of poor families."

http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/environment/time-to-kill-crop%11derived-biofuels-200803291126/

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Even SiuperLib agrees global warming is a threat.

I do agree that global warming is a threat. But I also happen to think you're Bush-obsessed and that prevents you from making rational decisions. That leads to some outlandish statements which undercut your own credibility. If you were able to tone things down a bit a and free yourself from your insecurities you'd probably find that we have a lot of common ground. But as far as I can tell you're unable to stop yourself from being an political hothead so that kind of kills any chance you have to be respected. Just my opinion...

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