World climate change talks begin
Energy and environment ministers from around the world are meeting in London today to discuss how to tackle climate change.
The two-day meeting, involving representatives of more than 20 countries, will focus mainly on how new technologies can be used to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
Until now, the Kyoto protocol has been the main international effort to tackle climate change, establishing a set of targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
However, this does not include the US or the emerging economies of China and India – they argue that such cuts are not economically viable at the current time.
As a result, leaders of the world’s richest countries meeting at the G8 summit in Gleneagles in July agreed to put more of an emphasis on sharing new technology and developing sustainable energy supplies as a way of tackling climate change.
Writing in The Observer on Sunday, Tony Blair outlined the importance of international action in tackling the problem – and the need to look at ways to cut emissions that would be agreeable to different governments.
“We know climate change is a major threat. And worries over security of energy supply and rising oil prices are pushing energy policy to the top of the agenda,” he said.
“But we must understand that neither issue can realistically be dealt with unless the US, the EU, Russia, Japan, China and India work together.”
The fact that the US, China and India were unlikely to make any real efforts to cut emissions meant that other tactics had to be tried out, the prime minister said.
“We need to see how the existing energy technologies we have such as wind, solar and – yes – nuclear, together with new technologies such as fuel cells and carbon capture and storage, can generate the low carbon power the world needs,” he wrote.
Brazil and the US were already using biofuels, Mr Blair said, while the EU’s agreement to work with China to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions was a “modest but significant start”.
