Environmentalists sceptical of 2050 cut

SOBER policy makers were treated to a cheery advertisement on Tuesday's edition of the Financial Times newspaper featuring the leaders of Japan, the United States and Canada as cute Hello Kitty characters. But the message from a climate change pressure group could not be graver.

Urging Japan's Yasuo Fukuda, the US's George W Bush and Canada's Stephen Harper to act as "grown-ups" and set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 was AVAAZ.org.

Environmental groups accused the three of standing in the way of a deal they hoped could be reached at a Group of Eight (G8) summit in Japan.

"Fukuda, Harper and Bush are blocking climate emissions targets for 2020 that scientists say must be enacted to prevent a climate catastrophe," read the ad, which carried a petition from 200,000 AVAAZ supporters.

"The world can't wait for urgent action on climate change, and it is your responsibility to take the lead," the petitioners said.

In the end, G8 leaders did agree on a deal.

And it was a pretty ambitious one: to "at least" halve the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. But only by 2050.

But by then, critics argue, its patrons will probably be dead.

"In the year 2050, Harper will be 91, Bush will be 104 and Fukuda will be 114. So we don't necessarily believe their commitments," AVAAZ's Ben Wikler said.

And in any case, the world by then may well be "cooked, "added Oxfam international.

"The G8's endorsement of a tepid '50 by 50' climate goal leaves us with a 50/50 chance of a climate meltdown," the charity said.

Such alarmist notes are not only coming from environmentalists. On Monday, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that global warming was already having a devastating effect in Africa.

"We tend to think of climate change as something of the future. It is not. We see it now most of all in Africa, where drought and changing weather patterns are compounding the challenges we face in obtaining the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals)," Ban said. His concerns were shared by the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick. Most see Bush as the main obstacle to a mid-term deal, which may yet be reached when leaders meet for UN-sponsored talks in Copenhagen next year.

The US president has always refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the first ever global deal on cutting emissions, and says he will only sign up to a new agreement if it also imposes strict limits on rapidly developing countries such as India and China.

In the meantime, his proposed solution is to boost nuclear energy instead. "There is no question ... that nuclear energy, responsibly developed by countries capable of managing it, is an essential component of cutting greenhouse gas emissions," Jim Connaughton, Bush's environment advisor, told reporters at the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan. Greenpeace, a pressure group founded in 1971 to oppose United States nuclear tests in Alaska, says this is hogwash. A study it was circulating at the G8 summit found that the existing 439 commercial nuclear reactors currently provide just 6.5 per cent of the world's energy consumption. "Even if today's current installed nuclear capacity was doubled, it would lead to reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of less than 5 per cent and would require one new large reactor to come online every two weeks until 2030," the study argued. Greenpeace further noted that even in established nuclear countries, it typically takes more than a decade to build a new reactor.

Tuesday's deal at least provided a much-needed popularity boost for Fukuda, who went into the summit with support ratings of just 30 per cent. The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper said Fukuda's ability to broker a deal between the European Union, the strongest supporter of the need to cut emissions now, and the United States, would allow him to call the G8 a success. But as Tuesday's advert suggested, environmentalists will more likely continue to call him a Hello Kitty character.

DPA