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Taipei Times : Ban urges US lead in battling global warming
TVNZ, New Zealand : Climate talks stagnate
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Taipei Times : Ban urges US lead in battling global warming



AP, UNITED NATIONS

Saturday, Mar 03, 2007, Page 6


UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed hope that the "active debate" in the US administration and Congress on global warming will spur the US to take a leadership role in combating climate change.

The UN chief was addressing a student conference on global warming that brought hundreds of high-schoolers from around the world to the UN General Assembly hall on Thursday.


One student asked what Ban thought about the rejection by US President George W. Bush's administration of the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 pact that requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming gases by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.


"I have a sense of active discussion within the US government and Congress regarding the Kyoto protocol," Ban said. "And this kind of active debate has helped raise its profile and public interest in climate change."


Ban also said that climate change poses as great of a danger to the world as war.


"The majority of the UN's work still focuses on preventing and ending conflict," Ban said. "But the danger posed by war to all of humanity -- and to our planet -- is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming."


The Bush administration argues that the Kyoto protocol would hurt the US economy. Instead, the White House says it is spending almost US$3 billion a year on energy technology research and development combat climate change.


Ban welcomed that effort, but said it was critical that the international community come up with a new strategy to deal with global warming after Kyoto expires in 2012.


He added that climate change will be a top priority during his five-year term.


"I hope that the United States -- while they have taken a role in innovative technologies as well as promoting cleaner energies -- will also take lead in this very important and urgent issue," he said.


After years of arguing that not enough was known about the problem, Bush referred to global warming as an established fact in his January State of the Union speech and acknowledged that climate change needed to be addressed.


At a climate change forum in Washington last month, foreign lawmakers said that after hearing from US lawmakers, they sensed a shift in Washington toward greater cooperation with other countries on global warming.


"I am encouraged to know that, in industrialized countries from which leadership is most needed, awareness is growing," Ban told the conference organized by the United Nations International School.


"In coming decades, changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals -- from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land -- are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict," he said.


Bush's State of the Union address was the impetus, in part, for a proposal by the UN Environment Program to hold a summit on global warming later this year. Ban has not said if he will move forward with a summit.


But he said he would discuss how best to confront the problem with world leaders at a G8 meeting in June.

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TVNZ, New Zealand : Climate talks stagnate




Mar 3, 2007


Governments are making scant progress towards extending a UN pact to fight global warming despite mounting public concern about climate change and UN warnings it poses a threat as great as war, experts say.


"We're not seeing governments saying 'yes, we'll make new commitments'," one UN official said of negotiations sponsored by the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn.


The world's top climate scientists raised pressure for action with a report last month which said it was more than 90% certain that human activities led by burning fossil fuels are causing global warming.


Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN climate panel, said it was still hard to predict the political impact of the report, which also warned of more droughts, floods and rising seas in coming centuries.


"I'm reminded of what Chairman Mao said when he was asked what he thought of the influence of the French Revolution on the world: 'It's too early to tell'," he told Reuters.


The world's environment ministers have been widely predicted to agree a mandate to start negotiations to extend the UN's Kyoto Protocol, the UN plan to fight global warming, beyond 2012 at a December meeting in Bali, Indonesia.


But even that may be in doubt. Many companies want clarity about what the rules will be after 2012 to let them make long-term investments, for example in new factories.


"A mandate is an optimistic goal," said Harald Dovland, Norway's chief climate negotiator.


"No one wants to talk about commitments or mandates," a UN official said. "Agreement on a mandate at Bali now looks like the best case outcome."


Still, public pressure is rising. And Germany, the current president of both the European Union and the Group of Eight industrialised nations, is making global warming a top issue.


UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that dangers posed to humanity by war were "at least matched" by the threats of warming. But he has rejected a call by UN environment agencies to hold a summit to address the threats.


The big problem for the UN climate negotiations is that the top emitters of greenhouse gases from human activities - the United States, China, Russia and India - are not among big enthusiasts for Kyoto led by European nations and Japan.


"I think that the (US) agenda is shifting - not into loving Kyoto but into acknowledging that things have to be done and maybe also that binding targets are an acceptable tool," said Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard.


Many US legislators, including some Republicans, are pushing US President George Bush to drop opposition to caps on emissions - the basis of Kyoto which binds 35 rich nations to cut emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-12.


Bush has shown no sign of wavering in his belief that Kyoto would harm the US economy and wrongly omits 2012 targets for developing nations. Poor countries in turn feel no pressure to act when the world's richest economy is outside Kyoto.


A first test of whether there is new impetus in fighting climate change will come at an EU summit next week. Leaders will discuss a plan, opposed by France, to set a mandatory goal of getting 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020.


"There is a level of public attention to the climate issue that we have never seen before," said Jennifer Morgan of the British-based environmental think-tank E3G. "The first test will be the EU heads of state."

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