Soaring living costs cloud UN climate talks
Pastor Dale Morgan
Soaring living costs cloud UN climate talks*
Reuters
BONN - U.N.-led climate talks kick off on Monday in Germany with experts
trying to forge a global warming pact facing a new challenge from
critics who say climate change measures are partly to blame for higher
food and energy prices.
The meeting is the second of eight which aim to secure a global climate
deal by the end of next year, to come into force after the first round
of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
The Bonn talks focus on the "toolkit" of steps which can curb rising
emissions of greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide, which scientists say
risk catastrophic climate change.
Senior officials from more than 160 countries face the difficulty,
however, that many such measures -- including carbon taxes and emissions
trading -- deliberately raise energy costs by penalising carbon
emissions from burning fossil fuels.
They are controversial options as record oil prices hit motorists and
electricity consumers worldwide.
Meanwhile carbon-cutting biofuels have helped drive up food prices by
using food crops to make an ethanol alternative to gasoline.
The United Nations' climate change chief Yvo de Boer cautioned on Sunday
against blaming biofuels too much.
"While growing crops for biofuels has some influence on food prices,
clearly other factors like increasing wheat consumption and hoarding of
rice also play a significant role," he told Reuters.
The Bonn meeting, which ends on June 13, follows one in Bangkok in
March-April which produced little of substance to contribute to a new deal.
"The challenge is now to move ahead and start identifying what could be
written into the 2009 agreement," added de Boer, who is head of the U.N.
climate change body .
Another U.N. agency, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, hosts a
summit this week in Rome to discuss record food prices.
Kyoto caps the greenhouse gases of some 37 industrialised countries, but
neither of the world's top two emitters -- the United States and China.