Environment

G8 on greenhouse gases

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Leaders at the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy have issued a joint statement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Anchor Lisa Mullins gets details from Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who’s been following the talks.
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LISA MULLINS: Some G8 leaders rode electric cars to their meetings today. Fitting, since a main topic being discussed at the summit is climate change. In fact today, G8 leaders issued a joint statement on reducing greenhouse gases. Alden Meyer is the Director of Strategy and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been pushing for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. He is at the summit in L’Aquila, Italy. How aggressive, Mr. Meyer, is the approach that the leaders are taking?

ALDEN MEYER: Well, this was the meeting of industrialized countries, the eight major industrialized powers. It’s sort of a good news/bad news story. On the good news side, for the first time, all eight of them acknowledged the need to stay below a certain temperature threshold increase, and to limit the worst impacts of global warming. And this had been a split for a number of years between the four European Union members of the G8, and the other four countries Japan, Russia, Canada and the United States.

LISA MULLINS: What is the temperature change?

ALDEN MEYER: The temperature limit, the trying to stay below is two degrees Celsius, and that is a roughly three point six degrees Fahrenheit for people in America. So we’re about two degrees below our current levels, of global service temperatures.

LISA MULLINS: Is that aggressive enough in your view?

ALDEN MEYER: We would like to see it even lower, but the reality is that right now, based on past emissions over the last hundred, hundred fifty years, we’ve committed the planet to almost one and a half degrees warming, even if we eliminated all emissions overnight.

LISA MULLINS: I understand that tomorrow there is going to be another statement issued by the G17, this is the G8 plus nine. What’s the significance of this statement, and who’s gonna be signing it?

ALDEN MEYER: Well, this is a process that was launched by President Obama, back in April, to try to bring countries representing about 80 percent of global emissions of heat trapping gases together around a table and see if they could build some understanding and make some progress on some of the tough issues. There will be a reference to the need to hold temperature increases below the two degrees Celsius threshold that I talked about earlier, but there won’t be agreement on a global reduction goal for 2050 of 50 percent or more below today’s levels. And that’s the missed opportunity.

LISA MULLINS: China is such an important player in this, but as we heard earlier in the program, the President of China, Hu Jintao, has returned to the country in order to take care of the Uighur problem that’s in the western part of China. What’s the significance of his exit?

ALDEN MEYER: The impact of that, and that’s not just on the climate energy issues we’ve been talking about, it’s on all the issues across the board, North Korea, Iran, food security, health, Africa. If Hu Jintao, President Hu Jintao had still been here in L’Aquila, over the next two days, there could’ve been a possibility that he and President Obama and the other leaders might’ve tried to salvage more out of the conversation tomorrow on climate, but it’s very difficult to imagine a negotiating dynamic changing much now that China is not represented by Head of State in the conversation. It sort of freezes the discussion where they were when President Hu Jintao left to return to Beijing.

LISA MULLINS: Alden, before I let you go, question about whether or not any of these statements, particularly the one released today, is going to hold any water given that legislative bodies, such as the US congress, are the ones to implement these potential green house gas reductions?

ALDEN MEYER: Well, clearly you have to have implementation, you have to have follow through on any political declaration leaders make. Of course, the good news in the US is that we do have a commitment coming out of the house to try to get reductions of 80 percent in the US emissions by 2050. The Europeans are moving forward on implementing their unilateral decision to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2020. It’s a little bit more of a mixed bag when you talk about the other three G8 members, Japan, Canada and Russia. None of them are really putting targets and ambition levels on the table that we need.

LISA MULLINS: Alden Meyer, director of Strategy and Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He’s been speaking with us from the G8 summit in L’Aquilla, Italy. Thank you very much.

ALDEN MEYER: Glad to be with you.

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