Developed world must tackle 'defining' climate issue (Roundup)

By Chris Cermak Sep 25, 2007, 0:33 GMT

New York - Industrialized countries must be at the heart of all attempts to tackle climate change and cut greenhouse-gas emissions, world leaders said during a one-day conference Monday at the United Nations.

More than 80 world leaders were among some 150 speakers addressing the conference. Many focussed on clean technologies and massive economic changes needed to cut global emissions from industries.

'It is not a question of choice between growth and protecting our world. We need clean growth,' said French President Nicolas Sarkozy. 'A new economy must be invented.'

Sarkozy called on the world's major polluters to cut their carbon- dioxide emissions - the chief cause of global warming - by at least half by 2050. He pushed nuclear energy, France's main power source, as a possible solution.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that a global carbon-trading scheme, which places a price on industries' carbon-dioxide emissions, should play a 'central role' in any future attempts to fight global warming.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called climate change the defining issue of this era and charged industrialized countries with leading the effort to combat it.

'I am convinced that climate change and what we do about it will define us, our era, and ultimately the global legacy we leave for future generations,' Ban said in opening the special session.

The conference is designed to build political momentum ahead of a critical meeting in December in Bali, Indonesia, where negotiators will begin talks to replace the Kyoto Protocol - a treaty setting targets for industrial nations to reduce carbon emissions - before its expiration in 2012.

'Our goal must be nothing short of a real breakthrough in Bali,' said Ban, voicing 'dismay' at the slow pace of talks so far.

The United States never ratified Kyoto, though Washington is taking part in talks for a post-2012 deal. One leader notably absent from Monday's conference was US President George W Bush, who was to arrive late in the day and plans to attend a dinner organized by Ban.

In Bush's place, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the gathering that new technologies were at the heart of US efforts to combat global warming, but she did not suggest a global carbon trading scheme to help spur innovations.

'The world needs a technological revolution,' said Rice adding that the world must find ways to 'transcend' fossil fuels in the search for clean, renewable alternatives.

Many countries called for a global carbon market, which places a price on carbon dioxide emissions for industries, to be part of any future solution.

'Our ultimate success will depend on developing the carbon market,' said European Comission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

The European Union in 2005 introduced the world's largest carbon trading scheme, but the system has been hampered by countries issuing too many permits, reducing the scheme's effectiveness.

The EU has resolved on its own to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, but both Merkel and Barroso said that figure could be raised to 30 per cent if there was a binding international deal including other regions.

Three UN-backed reports earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), compiled by hundreds of scientists around the world, found that global warming was 'unequivocal' and the result of human actions.

The IPCC warned that climate change was already affecting parts of the world, yet the 'terrible irony' is that it is hitting developing nations hardest, though they did not cause the problem, Ban said.

That feeling was echoed by environmental groups, who said they will be looking to the developed world for tougher targets on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions - the chief cause of global warming.

The more industrialized countries cut emissions, 'the more wiggle room developing countries will have' to take their own measures, Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International told reporters.

Ban urged countries to be 'creative' in finding ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, insisting that tackling global warming was affordable and that technologies already exist to reduce pollution.

'We know enough to act,' Ban said. 'What we do not have is time.'