June 03, 2007	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 17, 1428

PARIS: Climate experts have greeted George W. Bush’s call for a “new framework” to combat global warming, proffered days ahead of a G8 summit at which climate change will top the agenda, with some relief but even more scepticism.

“It is positive that President Bush recognises the urgency of dealing with climate change and the principle of reducing greenhouse gases,” said a top European diplomat who will attend the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.

What is worrying is that he “has totally ignored the existing framework for negotiation,” he said, referring to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The US is a member of the UNFCCC, but failed to ratify the one instrument it produced – the Kyoto Protocol – that mandates a reduction of the gases, primarily carbon dioxide, that are driving global temperatures higher.

Under intense international pressure to take action, Bush proposed on Thursday that “by the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases”. He gave no indication, however, as to the size of the emissions cuts Washington might commit to or when they would take effect.

Other experts underlined the absence of enforceable measures in the Bush proposal.

“There is no mention of sanctions, of legally-binding targets. This is not the quantum leap in climate policy from the US that we need to solve the problem,” commented Thomas Downing, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford, an independent think-tank focusing on development and environmental issues.

Downing, who is also a lead author of the UN's recent three-volume, scientific report on global warming, said that Bush’s initiative could even prove counter productive.

“It conflicts directly with the existing climate policy process ... and could result in further conflict and chaos in international negotiations,” he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is hosting the summit of G8 leaders, welcomed Bush’s statement, but suggested there was still a large gap between the European and American positions on how to keep the world from overheating.

“As far as the concrete formulations for Heiligendamm are concerned, we will have to make significantly more progress,” she said.

The US rejected a draft summit statement on global warming prepared by Germany that called for limiting worldwide temperature rise this century to 2 C (3.6 F), and cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

“Bush talks about a long-term global objective, but then says it’s up to each state to decide what it wants to do given its particular constraints,” noted Morgane Creach of Action Climate Network, a federation of 13 environmental groups in France.

His proposal is “nothing more than an enlargement” of an earlier US initiative, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, “which is targeting a technological solution to climate change,” she said.

According to experts, technological solutions – renewable energy sources, bio-fuels, carbon sinks – will only yield significant results in 15 to 20 years. In the meantime, they argue, only strong incentives in the form of market mechanisms or regulations can push industry to large-scale investments.

“It is true that climate change is, in many important ways, a technology problem, and the US has made progress on this front,” said Downing.—AFP