Beckett still hopeful on climate change
Environment secretary Margaret Beckett is still hopeful that an “ambitious action plan” on climate change can be achieved at the G8 summit this week.
Her comments came after US president George Bush indicated that he would not be signing up to an international agreement on climate change at the meeting at Gleneagles.
Speaking on ITV’s Tonight with Trevor McDonald, which will be screened this evening, Mr Bush said he could not support anything resembling Kyoto’s legally binding reduction on carbon emissions.
“The Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt,” he said in the interview, which was recorded last week.
Mr Bush did concede that the problem of global warming was something that required action and admitted that human activity was “to some extent to blame”.
But he said investing in new green technologies such as hydrogen-powered cars and carbon sequestration was a better solution than cutting carbon emissions.
Speaking on Today, Ms Beckett said the G8 summit was not the place to sign up to an international treaty on climate change, but it was important to begin to “engage constructively in a dialogue about what people can do”.
“It would be wholly wrong and totally counter-productive, and it’s not something we have ever imagined or intended, that we should be asking people at Gleneagles to sign up to some kind of detailed methodology or specific targets or whatever,” she said.
The important thing, the environment secretary said, was “to try to end up going in the same direction; that wherever people come from, there is a recognition about the urgency of the problem and that there is agreement”.
Referring to the Bush administration’s refusal to cut carbon emissions, Ms Beckett said that action had been taken and would be taken, “whether or not the United States is involved”.
“But in the long-term we cannot successfully tackle it unless the whole global community are engaged, including the United States,” she added.
“Accepts that it’s a problem, accepts that there is a human ingredient to that problem and accepts the need to do something about that and some of the steps that we could take. That is the kind of thing that I think people who actually want these talks to succeed will be looking for out of Gleneagles.”
Meanwhile, an EU directive on energy efficiency to be signed this week intends to cut millions of tones of carbon dioxide by introducing standards for everyday items such as washing machines, boilers and PCs.
Environment minister Elliot Morley backed the new directive, saying: “We know that products can be designed to be much more efficient and do less harm to the environment. Wasted energy is a hidden cost for consumers and in this day and age that is unacceptable.”
