Developing countries dig in heels on climate change
Thu Jan 25, 2007 6:07am ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-25T110751Z_01_L24860589_RTRUKOC_0_US-DAVOS-CLIMATE-DEVELOPING.xml&WTmodLoc=IntNewsHome_C2_worldNews-4
GENEVA (Reuters) - Developing countries stand to suffer the worst
effects of global warming, and should not have to pay for a problem
created mainly by the rich, executives and experts said on Thursday.
At a gathering of 2,400 of the world's most powerful people at Davos,
a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, leaders from emerging nations said
they wanted the United States, European Union and others in the West
to be more accountable for the heat-trapping emissions their cars and
factories produce.
They also asserted their right to stoke their own economies, even if
greenhouse gas levels rise as a result.
"The U.S., the Europeans, the OECD countries have for the last 30 to
40 years contributed to greenhouse gases much more than us," Rahul
Bajaj, chairman of India's second-largest motorcycle maker, Bajaj Auto
Ltd., said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
His compatriot Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the telecommunications
group Bharti Enterprises, said developing countries needed incentives
to react on climate change.
"We, as a billion people, are going to be consuming a lot of services
and goods that will create emissions. We will need technology, we will
need money," he said.
On the World Economic Forum's opening day on Wednesday, with falling
snow and chill winds ending a balmy start to the Swiss winter,
participants voted climate change as most likely to have an impact on
the world in years ahead, as well as the issue global leaders are
least ready for.
Politicians from rich countries have acknowledged the need for action
to address the consequences of global warming for developing
countries, but have made no major commitments to help.
POOR SQUEEZED
Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam Britain, said poor countries were
particularly squeezed by growing calls to limit the use of fossil
fuels, which trap solar rays in the atmosphere, contributing to severe
storms and ecological damage.
They are also most vulnerable to global warming's effects, including
irregular rainfall, floods and droughts that have decimated fertile
lands and made subsistence farming difficult in much of Africa, as
well as Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere.
"We have already seen that the effects of climate change are hitting
poor people hardest and earliest," she said in an interview in Davos
on Thursday.
In addition to "big sums of money" that would be required to help
countries cope with these impacts, Stocking said emerging countries
must be allowed some slack to expand their industries and create
wealth.
"We must not stop developing countries in their economic development
by imposing strict restrictions on carbon emissions that we do not
have ourselves," Stocking said.
Nicholas Stern, advisor to the British government on climate change,
agreed that international aid would be required to help the developing
world cope.
"This is not about stopping growth. It is about doing things in
different ways," he told Reuters Television on the sidelines of the
World Economic Forum.
Ensuring that emissions-saving technologies reach emerging giants such
as China and India, as well as poorer countries, is critical, he said,
adding: "I think that rich countries should shoulder the bulk of that
cost."
Others said that more stringent monitoring of emissions from the
Western powers -- by far the biggest source of accumulating greenhouse
gases -- would help assuage emerging nations on the need to act.
"Maybe we could have an international task force to have some sort of
enforcement for the countries that are committed in the Kyoto
Protocol, and also for the countries like the United States that are
not committed but must reduce their emissions," Brazil's trade and
industry minister Luiz Fernando Furlan said.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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