President Bush met with G-8 nations (U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia), as well as developing nations China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, on a variety of matters, including “climate change”.
President Bush on Wednesday hailed the move by G-8 leaders to coalesce behind a broad climate-change strategy, saying in a valedictory to summitry that “significant progress” has been made on global warming.
“In order to address climate change, all major economies must be at the table, and that’s what took place today,” Bush said. Environmentalists said the summit’s broad pledge to work toward slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050 did not go far enough.
Well, of course not. The eco-hysterics won’t be happy until we’re all living on raw vegetables and riding bicycles made with 19th century technology (what few of us remain, after the necessary die-off of the parasitical human population).
Still, Bush’s position represented quite a progression for a president who in his first term disputed scientists’ assertions about global warming. This time, he heartily backed the broad goal stated by his summit partners.
Ah, yes, he has “grown” in office. But maybe he has just grown subtler. See below.
“We made clear, and the other nations agreed, that they must also participate in an ambitious goal,” Bush said, “with an interim goal, with interim plans to enable the world to successfully address climate change. And we made significant progress toward a comprehensive approach.”
The leaders couldn’t agree on additional specific numerical targets, though. And not everybody signed onto the 2050 goal.
In a statement that Bush read to reporters here, he reiterated his position that substantial progress will likely hinge on further development of clean energy technologies. Developing nations, he said, will need assistance so they can become “good stewards of the environment.”
The President seems to have learned that denying the ridiculous to ridiculous people is a ridiculous strategy, especially when ridiculous people make ridiculous reports about it. It is truly a theater of the absurd. But he didn’t actually promise to DO anything except talk about how they might talk about it some more later. Good for him.
….
It was Bush’s last G-8 summit, and the meeting here, along with his talks on the sidelines of the summit, presented a mixed scorecard for him to take home. Bush saw fellow G-8 leaders essentially embrace his argument that a comprehensive global warming strategy must include participation by developing nations as well as the leading industrialized democracies.
YES! Which means it’ll never happen, because the developing nations are not led by people who want their nations to commit slow economic suicide. And they are soon going to be putting more CO2 in the air than the G-8.
But he ran into opposition to talk of trade sanctions against President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe for an election that Bush has labeled a “sham” balloting.
Most likely, if the UN Oil For Food scandal is any guide, France, Germany, China and Russia are all dealing economically with Zimbabwe. And even if not, people generally don’t like to see “pressure to do right” applied on other people that might set a precedent for pressure on them at some later time.
And he made no headway in resolving differences with Russia over U.S. plans to put a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a separate talk with reporters that that American defense system “deeply distresses” Moscow and he accused Washington of engaging in “halfhearted negotiations that have come to nothing.”
Russia doesn’t want the US to be able to intercept 5-10% of the missiles that Russia could launch if it chose, using a system designed to offer protection from rogue states with only a few missiles to launch. I wonder why not. Does it just hurt their feelings that we can do it at all?
Bush held one-on-one talks with several other world leaders, including China’s President Hu Jintao, whom he assured he was excited about going to the Beijing Olympics later this summer. Hu told Bush he was grateful that he hadn’t politicized the event because of China’s crackdown in Tibet.
Neighborhood bully to beat cop passing through: “Thanks, officer, for not noticing me beating on that sissy over there. Would you like to come to my party? We’ll have Chinese food.”
In an early morning meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Bush defended a languishing deal his administration negotiated to sell India nuclear fuel and technology. The deal, which would reverse three decades of U.S. policy by allowing the sale of atomic fuel and technology to India, faces significant opposition on both sides.
Both sides of what? The ocean? The bed? The pancakes? Surely not the summit… there were way more than two sides. Maybe the reporter meant both sides of Congress… be nice to say so. But he’s the professional journalist and I’m not… so it’s probably something really sophisticated.
Bush took no questions from reporters at the closing of the meeting. Nor did he address criticisms that emerged about the G-8’s positions, such as the contention by some environmentalists that the G-8 stance on global warming amounted to political window-dressing.
Beatific smile here.
But he did say he and his summit partners had “served both our interests as Americans, and we’ve served the interests of the world.”
See title of this post.
Bush was instrumental in broadening the global warming discussions beyond the G-8 membership. But he won’t be in office long enough to see the next chapter of the contentious climate change debate play out.
In fact, five of the developing nations at the expanded meeting, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, issued their own statement rejecting the notion that all share in the 50-percent reduction goal. “It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” said the statement.
You mean the developing nations don’t want to strangle their nascent economies?
“We’re not in complete convergence yet,” acknowledged Jim Connaughton, one of Bush’s top environmental advisers.
It was, nevertheless, the first time that heads of state from the U.S. and the seven other major economic powerhouses sat down to talk about global warming at the same table with China, India and six other emerging economies. Altogether the 16 countries are responsible for spewing 80 percent of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Environmentalists deplored the statement the leaders released after the meeting, saying it was meaningless without any targets.
Exactly right, and exactly as it should be.
“To be meaningful and credible, a long-term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions,” said Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, who called the G-8 statement an “empty slogan.”
What does “environmental affairs” have to do with “tourism”? Do they have a minister of “applesauce affairs” and “rubber”?
The discussion on global warming is a run-up to U.N.-led efforts to craft a new climate change accord at a meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009. That new accord would succeed the Kyoto Protocol that starts to expire in 2012.
That would be the useless Kyoto Protocol which, even if all had agreed to it, and even if those who DID agree to it had followed it, would have made about 1/10 of one degree of difference by the year 2100, in even very optimistic projections by people who think CO2 is the big problem.
