Brainstorming
On Climate Change
By Jeremy Lovell
16 March, 2005
Planet
Ark
Britain
told the world's biggest polluters including the United States on Tuesday
that only by placing the environment at the heart of economic policy
could they prevent a crisis caused by global warming.
Britain hosted a two-day brainstorming on climate change by ministers
and senior officials from 20 countries in the run-up to a July meeting
of the eight most industrialised nations - the G8 group - currently
led by London.
The need for action
to avert a looming climate catastrophe was rammed home by graphic images
of melting glaciers and makeshift sea defences displayed at the venue
of the meeting.
"We must make
climate stability, energy investment and energy security central to
economic policies," British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon
Brown told the meeting. "International cooperation is again the
only way forward."
Brown said he would
study the costs and feasibility of so-called carbon sequestration --
the capture and burial deep underground of millions of tonnes of the
carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning power stations.
The Kyoto Protocol
on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases came into force in February
but is still shunned by the world's biggest emitter, the United States,
and puts scant limits on China as it rises fast up the pollution ranks.
Senior officials
from both countries attended the London meeting, aiming to discuss ways
to achieve the environmental Holy Grail of sustainably growing low carbon
economies.
The U.S delegate
made it clear energy efficiency, not a radical shift to a low carbon
economy, should be the key.
"We are now
trying to find a portfolio in which three words are important, technology,
technology, technology," US President George W. Bush's chief environment
adviser James L. Connaughton said before the meeting.
"RICH NATION HYPOCRISY"
As about 30 people
banged pots and pans in the street outside to protest at what they said
was rich nation hypocrisy, speakers stressed the need to cut greenhouse
gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and switch to renewable resources.
And that did not
just mean wind and wave power. Nuclear power -- anathema to the green
lobby -- had to remain an option.
"We will keep
the nuclear option open," British Trade and Industry Secretary
Patricia Hewitt said, noting that while it was a low carbon technology
there were major questions over its true costs and the problem of nuclear
waste storage.
Liu Jiang, leading
the Chinese delegation, went even further stressing that nuclear power
was clean and saying that China was embarking on a major investment
programme in nuclear reactors to reduce its massive dependence on burning
coal.
He also urged the
rich, developed world which owns most of the cutting edge green technology
to make it more readily and cheaply available to developing countries
as they try to climb the steep slope out of poverty.
Jacques Dubois,
chairman of the giant SwissRe reinsurance company that underwrites insurers'
risks, said his experts considered the risks to people and property
from climate change to be a major problem for the future.
The London meeting
is part of Britain's agenda for the G8, which Prime Minister Tony Blair
has vowed will make progress on climate change and African development.
The two sensitive
issues will come together at the G8 summit near the Scottish town of
Gleneagles in July.