Bush, EU leaders deadlocked on climate change
Pastor Dale Morgan
Tuesday May 1, 4:01 AM
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Bush, EU leaders deadlocked on climate change*
US President George W. Bush and visiting European leaders agreed Monday
to define global warming as a serious problem requiring "urgent" action,
but deadlocked on what concrete remedies to apply.
"I think this is where we should be clear about the glass being half
full instead of half empty," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a
joint public appearance on the sidelines of the annual US-EU summit at
the White House.
Merkel, who holds the rotating presidencies of the EU and the Group of
Eight (G8) industrialized nations, spoke after talks with Bush and
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
The three leaders formed a united front on Iran's nuclear program, which
Washington says is cover for an atomic weapons quest. The United States
has backed talks led by Britain, France and Germany.
"We talked about Iran and the need for our nations to continue to work
closely together to send a unified message to the Iranians that their
development of a nuclear weapon is unacceptable to peace," said Bush.
"Nuclear proliferation is indeed a threat, not only to regional
stability but to the global peace and global stability," said Barroso.
"And the Iranians should understand that this message they are receiving."
In a joint statement on energy security and climate change, the three
leaders called for "urgent, sustained, global action" to battle global
warming.
Asked what concrete steps they had agreed to take, the leaders said they
had set up a US-EU conference on alternative-fuel standards to meet in
here next year, and plans to take up climate change at the June G8
summit in Germany.
Merkel also said they had agreed on the need for "a proper agenda" for
UN talks on the environment in December on the Indonesian island of
Bali, calling that "an enormous step forward."
Bush, who declared "the good news is that we recognize there's a
problem," said no solution is possible unless it includes major
developing nations like China and India but seemed to say that
Washington would find its own way.
"I think that each country needs to recognize that we must reduce our
greenhouse gases and deal, obviously, with their own internal politics
to come up with an effective strategy that hopefully, when added
together, that it leads to a real reduction," he said.
Bush called earlier this year for a 20-percent cut in gasoline use over
10 years, citing advances in the use of alternative fuels, and for the
US Congress to broaden his powers to overhaul emissions standards.
The 27 EU members agreed in March to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by
at least 20 percent by 2020, based on 1990 levels. Germany's proposal
was a more aggressive 40 percent cut.
"There are different approaches, obviously, as to how to solve that. But
we have been able, actually, to find a lot of common ground," Barroso
said at the White House.
Merkel said any solution had to cover developing countries but warned
"what is also true is that, if the developed countries, who have the
best technology, don't do anything, it will be even harder to convince
the others.
"But without convincing the others, CO2 emissions worldwide will not go
down," she said.
The leaders also said they had discussed efforts to revive the Doha
Round of global trade talks; reconstruction and development efforts in
Iraq and Afghanistan; Cuba's future; and the Middle East peace process.
"We have been talking at greater length also about the situation in
Darfur, which we consider to be totally unacceptable, and that we need
to do everything we can in order to help the people there," said Merkel.
"We ought to use all of our possibilities in order to achieve progress
also in the United Nations," she said.