GLENEAGLES, July 6: The Group of Eight summit is likely to yield only lacklustre promises on climate change, thanks to hardline tactics by US President George Bush, green activists said here on Wednesday.
Negotiators from the G8 countries were poring over a draft communique and ‘action plan’ that summit leaders were expected to endorse as early as Thursday, mid-way through their three-day meeting.
But an alliance of green groups said leaked documents and other information they had gleaned from the closed-doors meeting suggested Mr Bush was winning his way in the battle of the text.
“All the signals from the White House since Mr Bush ‘s re-election in November is that the US position has been hardening, not weakening, on this point. It’s almost certain that there is not going to be a significant shift from the US delegation this week,” said Stephen Tindale, director of the British branch of Greenpeace.
WWF’s Jennifer Morgan said British Prime Minister Tony Blair had named climate change, along with help for Africa, as the cornerstone of his G8 leadership.
“I don’t think that he has caved yet and I hope he won’t,” she told a press conference.
“The opportunity still exists for there to be different statements” in which seven of the leaders would set more ambitious plans, leaving the United States isolated.
“We won’t allow ourselves to be negotiated down to the lowest common denominator,” Morgan said.
On the draft communique, the United States was still blocking agreement that global warming was such a big problem that there was an ‘urgent need to act’, said Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland.
The document, he said, also had a “vacuous” commitment on the Kyoto Protocol, the UN pact on cutting greenhouse gases that was ditched by Mr Bush in March 2001 in one of his very first acts since taking over the Oval Office.
Promises to provide funds for renewable energy and energy efficiency have been chopped out of the draft text, leaving the accent on belief that a technological breakthrough, in cleaner coal, nuclear power and hydrogen, will stave off the crisis, Dixon said.—AFP
