From The "Oh, That's Nice" File - "Sense Of Urgency Greater Over Climate Deal" - Reuters

[hatrack]

BERLIN - The world is at last waking up to the perils of climate change but time is running out to translate that realisation into serious action, Britain's environment minister Hilary Benn said on Tuesday. Diplomats hope that a meeting in Indonesia in December of UN environment ministers will agree to start talks to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the only global deal on cutting climate warming carbon emissions but which expires in 2012.

"Time is not on our side and frankly we've just got to get on with it," Benn told Reuters on the margins of a two-day meeting in Berlin of environment and energy ministers from the group of 20 (G20) nations. "I think there is a recognition that we absolutely have to launch the process at Bali. It's been encouraging in that sense," he said of the meeting's progress.

But success is far from guaranteed. Kyoto took five years to negotiate and another eight to come into force -- a timeframe that, if repeated, scientists say would push the world deep into unknown climate territory. Scientists say global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius this century unless urgent action is taken to curb emissions of so-called greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

But the world's top polluter the United States rejected Kyoto as economic suicide and has made repeated efforts to undermine it. At the same time booming carbon emitters such as China and India are not bound by the treaty and are resisting calls for them to agree to binding cut targets under any successor deal.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44275/story.htm

[gateley]

1. I hope this receives a lot of attention.

I think that since the candidates all have a "plan" for the environment (even though some of them suck and none really go far enough), the country just takes a breath and says -- well, THAT'S being addressed.

There is SO MUCH in our world that needs help, that we've become bogged down and have difficulty focusing on more than one or two issues at a time.

And so many of the problems are serious and requiring immediate attention. Granted, if we have no earth/atmosphere/eco system, nothing else matters, but there are people here who can't find a job, who can't get treatment for medical problems, who can't afford the gas to drive to work, who can't buy enough groceries for their families with today's dollar -- how do we put any of that on hold? The destruction we've wrought in Iraq, our service men and women who are being treated as second class citizens. I'm bumming myself out -- and we can all add to the list...

I think we need to address these issues concurrently and forcefully, but then, where's the money?


Grim.