Germany: global warming back on G8 agenda
Pastor Dale Morgan
Germany: global warming back on G8 agenda*
26 Sep 2006 16:52:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Germany will make fighting climate change a
top priority when it takes control of the G8 next year and will try to
persuade the United States of its importance, Chancellor Angela Merkel
said on Tuesday.
Merkel, a former environment minister, said she wants to put cutting
emissions of the "greenhouse gases" blamed for global warming back on
the agenda of leading industrial nations after Russia played down the
issue during its G8 presidency in 2006.
But she said any efforts to stop global warming without the cooperation
of "our American partners", the world's largest producer of greenhouse
gases, were doomed to failure.
"That means we've certainly got our work cut out for us -- let me say
that clearly," Merkel said to applause, referring to the United States,
which in 2001 withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty
designed to limit greenhouse gases.
"To prevent global warming, the nations with the largest emissions of
gases that are causing climate change have to take part," Merkel, who
holds a doctorate in physics, told a meeting of conservationists in Berlin.
"That's why we will make this an important issue once again on the
agenda during our G8 presidency," said Merkel, who has picked a village
on the Baltic coast as the venue for the 2007 G8 summit.
Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), produced by burning fossil
fuels, trap heat in the atmosphere. Scientists say that if emissions are
not curbed, sea levels will rise and drought and floods become more
frequent, with dire results.
The United States, responsible for one quarter of all man-made
greenhouse gas emissions, is the only G8 member not to have ratified the
Kyoto Protocol.
Russia, chairing the Group of Eight for the first time, has been
ambivalent about global warming. Germany will take the chair next year,
and will also hold the European Union's rotating six-month presidency in
the first half of 2007.
Merkel said she was encouraged that developing nations with booming
economies had acknowledged the danger of climate change.
"China, India and other countries are now much more aware of the risks,"
she said. "As a result, the ground is now more fertile than it once was."
"We urgently need agreements for the period after 2012 when the Kyoto
Protocol expires. Germany will do all it can within its realm as
president of both the G8 and the EU ... We have a great chance next year
to have an international impact."