Originally published on the CGS blog on June 6, 2007.
The G8 summit started off with a bang – the sound of President Bush slamming the door on Germany’s global warming proposal. The President’s chief environmental adviser, Jim Connaughton, dashed whatever faint hopes remained that the administration would accept the goal proposed by its European counterparts – cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 in order to prevent temperatures rising by more than 2’C (which scientists have identified as earth’s climate tipping point) – when he announced this morning that the U.S. would reject the proposal.
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will not leave entirely empty-handed, however. Her consolation prize is a commitment from President Bush that the U.S. will work within the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to seek a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. This is a much-needed reassurance, after the President’s announcement last week, which seemed to indicate the U.S. would sidestep the UN process to launch its own set of bilateral and multilateral discussions on climate change.
I suppose a little bit of something is better than nothing… But I still think we should expect better from the U.S.
