China and India hold out on emission targets

By David Pilling in Toyako
Published: July 9 2008 09:25

China and India failed on Wednesday to give their support to halving carbon emissions by 2050, dimming briefly raised hopes of a breakthrough on climate change at the Group of Eight summit.
The inability to win over the developing countries is a blow to the G8, which had expected their support. This is the first time they have defied the developed world openly on this issue.

The G8 summit this week has grappled with what Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, called the “triple shock” of a food, oil and financial crisis. But G8 leaders struggled to take decisive action, merely expressing “serious concern” at high oil prices and seeking to sketch out longer-term solutions to food shortages.
Leaders of the big emerging economies showed little willingness to compromise, insisting it was largely for rich nations to clear up their own mess.
Japan said Australia, South Korea and Indonesia had expressed support for the 50 per cent cuts agreed by the G8. But China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa issued a statement saying that rich countries needed to slash carbon emission levels by 80-95 per cent from 1990 levels.
The UK appeared to agree with the statement. David Miliband, the UK’s foreign minister, signed a communique with South Africa this week calling on rich countries to embrace the deeper cuts.
Yasuo Fukuda, Japan’s prime minister, tried to put a positive spin on the talks, saying: “We saw eye to eye.”
US officials who have blocked previous attempts to reach agreement declared themselves happy. James Connaughton, chairman of President George W. Bush’s council on environmental quality, said: “The G8 has taken a significant step forward in its level of ambition.”
In a conference dominated by what one Japanese official called a “nexus of interrelated issues” – climate change, rising oil and food prices, African poverty and financial strains in the west – the G8 was sometimes revealed as lacking in clout.
Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, floated the idea of enlarging the G8 to a G13, but his proposal was cold-shouldered by the US, Japan and other countries happy with present arrangements.
Mr Fukuda said the summit was the most important in years, coming as it did amid a welter of urgent global problems. But he also hinted at the G8’s impotence, saying, for example, that high oil prices were largely a “structural problem” of supply and demand.
Mr Fukuda expressed hope, but little conviction, that rising fuel and food prices – which are threatening global inflation – might calm down following the summit.
Without major Middle Eastern oil producers present, experts said, there was little G8 leaders could do on petroleum prices except call for more investment and market transparency. They did express a desire for more regular dialogue between producers and consumers. They also stressed the importance of energy efficiency as a long-term solution to fossil-fuel dependence.
Oxfam’s Jeremy Hobbs said: “The G8 failed to rise to the challenge of a world crisis” describing the consensus reached on climate as “at best shallow”. WWF called the Major Economies Meeting of G8 plus major emitters, which campaigners see as a willful distraction from the UN process, as a “Major Embarrassment Meeting”.
G8 leaders also discussed aid to Africa amid accusations from charities that they were reneging on their own pledges made at Gleneagles in 2005. Mr Fukuda denied that, saying: “Some might suggest we are not delivering on our commitments. But don’t we meet those commitments? Well, probably we do.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008