G8 push for tanker safety, skirt Kyoto clash at Paris meeting

Terra Daily ^ | Apr 27, 2003 | AFP Wire

[PeaceBeWithYou]

The Group of Eight gave a verbal push here Sunday for tougher measures against decrepit oil tankers and reaffirmed their vows to help poorer countries but skirted tougher environmental issues that have divided the United States and Europe.

A statement issued by the G8's environment ministers after a three-day meeting said that the catastrophic sinking of an oil tanker off Europe's Atlantic coast last November, in the second such disaster in just three years, "demonstrated that the existing rules on tanker safety and pollution prevention need to be further improved."

They backed calls for the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to require the tanker industry to set up additional funds to compensate victims of oil spillages and settle claims for environmental damage.

And they urged IMO member states "to work towards... accelerating the phasing out of single hulled tankers."

Single-hulled tankers are notoriously older vessels that are the biggest culprits for oil disasters. If their hull is breached, their contents are disgorged into the sea. Double-hulled tankers are safer, but they are recently-built and more expensive ships.

The European Union (EU) this year followed the United States in passing laws barring single-hulled tankers from EU waters. Germany at the G8 meeting lobbied for tougher wording for scrapping these vessels, but this was refused by Japan, whose shipping operators still use a lot of the older vessels, according to diplomatic sources.

Elsewhere, the powerful nations' club reforged their commitment to developing countries, saying the goals set in the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, ranging from access to safe drinking water, energy safe sanitation to conserving biodiversity, were "priority fields for action."

But no new money was put on the table.

The G8 meeting was held in the aftermath of the Iraqi war, and in that context every effort was made to avoid further storms in the international political arena.

The final communique made only a passing reference to climate change, which many scientists describe as the biggest long-term peril facing human life.

And for the first time since President George W. Bush came to power, the annual meeting failed to make any mention at all of the Kyoto Protocol, the UN's global warming pact, which has become one of the biggest sources of discord between Washington and Brussels.

Instead, the G8 made an unspecified pledge to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions" to help achieve "the ultimate objective" of Kyoto's parent treaty, the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The United States, the world's biggest source of heat-trapping pollution, has walked away from Kyoto mainly on the grounds of the cost to its oil-dependent economy, and Russia is dragging its feet about ratifying the accord.

The US representative at the Paris meeting, Environmental Protectional Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Whitman, failed to show up at a scheduled press conference along with the other ministers, sparking questions from journalists as to this was a US snub of France, the current G8 chairman.

French Ecology Minister Roselyne Bachelot insisted that Whitman had had to "rush off to catch a plane" to take her to New York, and affirmed that she and Whitman had met informally several times during the weekend and had "extremely strong and cordial working contacts."

The G8 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Russia and the United States, as well as the European Commission.

The meeting had originally been scheduled to take place in the northwestern French provincial town of Angers.

But the government decided, at the peak of the Iraqi war, to shift the venue to Paris on security grounds.

Anti-globalisation and green protestors, numbering about 3,000, rallied in Angers on Saturday, but the event passed off peacefully.

[PeaceBeWithYou]

The US representative at the Paris meeting, Environmental Protectional Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Whitman, failed to show up at a scheduled press conference along with the other ministers.

Nice. "Let them eat cake" move.

[MEG33]

Scheduling problems may be ongoing.