Posted on 02/20/2008 4:56:07 PM PST by NormsRevenge
BRASILIA, Brazil - Encouraged that all major U.S. presidential candidates vow to protect the environment, lawmakers from industrialized nations and big emerging economies met Wednesday to craft solutions to global warming and rising deforestation.
Scores of legislators and officials from China to Cameroon were considering approval of a document demanding "ambitious absolute emission reductions for developed countries" to fight climate change.
Proposals in the draft document included a global carbon market in which nations would be able to trade and sell credits, sharp increases in funding for developing countries to reduce emissions and even a worldwide ban on incandescent light bulbs.
The document did not explicitly name the United States — the only major industrial nation to reject the relatively modest cuts of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But most nations hope Washington will agree to deep and mandatory reductions in greenhouse emissions by a 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The delegates applauded when U.S. Rep. Edward Markey said the leading Republican and Democratic candidates — Sens. John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama — are arguing among themselves about who will do most to help the environment.
No matter who wins, "the United States will have a president committed to a mandatory carbon cap-and-trade program and to reaching an international agreement in Copenhagen in December of 2009," said Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
The 100 legislators at the two-day forum, organized by Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment, hope to build consensus on how to attack global warming, then take the ideas home to try to gather broader support.
They include legislators from the Group of Eight industrial nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia and the United States — as well as fast-growing countries like China, Brazil, India, South Africa and Mexico.
The draft document said an agreement on global warming "should support and encourage equitable contributions from developing economies" to reduce greenhouse gases, but it stopped short of the prickly issue of making those cuts mandatory for poorer nations.
Nations like China and Brazil are rapidly approaching the ranks of developed countries, but have argued they shouldn't be forced to make cuts as deep as nations that have contributed to global warming for many years.
"The challenge for us ... is to push the boundaries of the possible," said Elliot Morley, a British member of parliament and the president of the Globe organization.
The draft, which will be approved, rejected or modified on Thursday, also called for global timber licensing to stop illegal logging in tropical forests.
Morley said that negotiators must find a way "to create a value for standing forest that discourages illegal deforestation." In places like Brazil, he said, deforestation could cause wild climate swings that would hurt its important agricultural industry and spark waves of migration to large metropolitan areas.
But Cameroon's minister of forestry, Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, said many remote forested areas are home to people who have cut down trees as a way of life for generations and have little hope of finding other ways to make a living.
For those communities, "deforestation is a way of life," he said. "How do you deal with these problems when that's the reality, the way of life?"
The point was also driven home in Brazil, where about 2,000 people burned tires, blocked roads and attacked federal agents who were raiding sawmills to crack down on illegal Amazon logging on Tuesday.
Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency said it would continue its enforcement despite the setback in the Amazonian town of Tailandia.
Scores of legislators and officials from China to Cameroon were considering approval of a document demanding “ambitious absolute emission reductions for developed countries” to fight climate change.
Proposals in the draft document included a global carbon market in which nations would be able to trade and sell credits, sharp increases in funding for developing countries to reduce emissions and even a worldwide ban on incandescent light bulbs.
The document did not explicitly name the United States — the only major industrial nation to reject the relatively modest cuts of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But most nations hope Washington will agree to deep and mandatory reductions in greenhouse emissions by a 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Whoever the President is in 2009, it doesn’t look good.
Get used to it fools, the Earth is going to get colder in the next few years.
and what pray tell is GLOBE?
http://www.globeinternational.org/
“GLOBE is a unique environmental forum in which parliamentarians from industrialised countries and the emerging economies get together with business leaders and scientists to develop proposals on how the world can cooperate beyond 2012.”
German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, Addressing the 2007 GLOBE Legislators Forum
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a EUrodriven affair, perhaps?
Supporters
http://www.globeinternational.org/content.php?id=1:4:0:0:0
GLOBE International receives support from Governments, Inter-governmental bodies such as the World Bank and also from corporate membership of GLOBE’s policy themed Dialogues.
G8 + 5 Climate Change Dialogue
http://www.globeinternational.org/content.php?id=2:7:0:214:0
The GLOBE G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue was launched on the 24th February 2006 at the House of Commons in the UK. It enjoys the support of:
UK Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Tony Blair MP
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel MdB
US Senators Biden, Bingaman, Boxer, Craig, Kerry, Lieberman and McCain
European Commission President Manuel Barroso
The Chinese National Peoples Congress
The Indian Lok Sabha
The Japanese Prime Minister’s National Secuirty Advisor, Ms Yuriko Koike
Legislative bodies from across the G8 and +5 countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa).
The President of the World Bank, Prof Paul Wolfowitz
Key businesses including Anglo American, American Electric Power, BP, Ernst & Young, Holcim, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, Sustainable Forestry Management, Vattenfall and Bayer-AG.
Respected International Institutions such as The World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and others.
The strength of the dialogue is that it brings together legislators from the G8 and +5 countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa) with respected international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and business leaders from a cross-section of sectors and geographic regions. This expertise helps to ensure that the conclusions reached are both politically and practically robust.
The Dialogue is run by GLOBE in partnership with the Com+ Alliance of Communication Networks (www.complusalliance.org) and will directly shadow the G8 Heads of Government process, including the ministerial meetings of the Gleneagles Dialogue, through to the Japanese G8 Summit in 2008.
Dialogue Aim
The Dialogue will draw together senior legislators from the G8, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa with international business leaders, civil society representatives and opinion leaders to discuss, and agree on, the measures needed to tackle climate change post-2012.
Specifically, the Dialogue aims to present a package of proposals to the G8 Heads of Government in Japan which enjoys the support of legislators from across the G8 and +5 together with business leaders and leading civil society opinion leaders.
Dialogue Objectives
1. To provide a forum outside the formal international negotiating structures at the UN for legislators, senior business leaders and other key decision makers to discuss a post-2012 international climate change agreement - importantly allowing the representatives from the major non G8 countries of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa to be represented.
2. To create a greater understanding between participating legislators, business leaders and key civil society organisations about different country priorities and identify common ground on which a future political accommodation can be built.
3. To allow business leaders to inform and advise legislators on the development and application of new and existing technologies that need to be delivered at scale to markets in G8 and +5 countries.
4. To share knowledge, expertise and best practice to identify specific measures to address climate change that legislators can support in their respective parliaments.
5. To provide an informal mechanism to engage with a broader constituency of key legislators - with a particular focus on fostering greater contact & understanding with the G8 and +5 countries.
Well I thought Obammmah said CHANGE IS GOOD!
Brazil hosts climate change forum
I know one thing, I am 57 years old and the weather here is the same as it was 35 years ago when I moved here. No colder, no drier, no wetter, no cooler. SAME OLD SAME OLD.
Of course they would be happy to demand DEVELOPED countries cap their CO2. That way the UNDEVELOPED countries like China and Brazil get a huge advantage over us in the global economy. Brazil recently discovered 8-40 billion BBLS of oil off their coast. GW or no GW they will tap and sell/use that oil for as long as it lasts.
People need to wake up to the fact that GW is being used by our enemies to further undermine our economy. With the useful idiots (Democrats, McCain, and envirowackos) going along for the ride, our enemies are strangling our economy in three ways.
First, by using the enviros to declare our own resources off limits (oil in ANWR, coal in Clinton’s Nat’l monument in Utah), they are forcing us to spend a billion $ a day on imported energy. This is shipping our wealth overseas each and every day.
Second, by making the Developed countries adhere to strict CO2 limits, they will cripple what is left of our heavy industry. We will not even be able to generate enough electricity to meet existing demand, let alone future demand if this is passed.
Third, they will build their own economies on oil and coal based power, which we in essence are subsidizing their growth and constraining ours.
This plan is insidious and clever. Does anyone ask Obama/Clinton/McCain if the Saudis will pump less oil if we reduce our CO2? Will Hugo? Will the Mullahs in Iran? Will China stop opening one dirty (compared to our clean coal) coal plant every 10 days? Will Brazil stop exploring for oil if we sign Bali/Kyoto? Will the Russians go retrieve the flag they left claiming the undersea floor by the north pole if we just bow to the feet of Saint Al and the Branch Algorians? Of course not. They are playing us for fools and our political class fiddles while oil is over $100 and our country is going broke.
And Brazil and China do not care about the enviroment at all.
I was in Salvador Brazil in 2000. A friend was living there and I visited her. Her husband worked for Dow Chemical Co. Dow had bought a plant there. The safety features were MISSING compared to USA safety. They had to retro fit EVERYTHING to bring it up to US standards.
Plus there was a place we were warned NOT to go into in the ocean. Another chemical plant dumped its waste there. There were no laws governing the enviroment. Could have changed but there is so much corruption there.
W.T.O.B.A *
*What , This Old Bollocks Again ?
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