APEC forge deal on climate change

++ World Leaders contributing efforts to curb the global warming that will effect the future CLIMATE CHANGE... ++

8th September 2007

SYDNEY, Australia - Pacific Rim leaders agreed Saturday to curb global warming by improving energy use and expanding forests, laying out a plan they hope will influence future climate change talks but that critics dismissed as too timid.

President Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin, China's Hu Jintao and leaders of other Asia-Pacific economies adopted the program at an annual summit after officials struck a deal between richer and developing nations over targets.
The program's centerpieces are two modest goals — one on energy efficiency, the other on forests. Unlike the contentious, U.N.-backed Kyoto Protocol, it does not set targets on the greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming, and its' goals are voluntary.
Yet in bringing together the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit's disparate group of countries on a contentious issue, the program may carry weight in upcoming talks in Washington, New York and Indonesia for a new post-Kyoto blueprint.
And unlike the Kyoto agreement, which largely exempted developing countries from targets, China has signed on to APEC's goals.
"APEC leaders have charted a new international consensus for the region and the world," summit host Australian Prime Minister John Howard said, standing outside the graceful, shell-shaped Sydney Opera House where the leaders met.
A massive demonstration that activist groups called for — and that authorities warned could be violent — mostly fizzled in the presence of a show of force by police and threats of arrest.
About 3,000 demonstrators held a festive, mostly peaceful rally, protesting against Bush, the Iraq war and APEC's pro-business policies. Police arrested 17 protesters while two officers were injured. But protesters stayed on the approved route and away from a 10-foot metal fence police erected throughout downtown Sydney to cordon off summit sites.
Aside from their group meeting, APEC leaders also took advantage of the gathering to confer with each other. Bush held a first-ever three-way meeting with Australia's Howard and Japan's Shinzo Abe to discuss India, China and other security issues.
It was on climate change that APEC leaders hoped to break new ground. The grouping accounts for more than half the world's economy and contains most of its biggest polluters.
Under the platform, APEC members will reduce "energy intensity" — the amount of energy needed to produce a dollar of gross domestic product — by 25 percent by 2030. They also pledged to increase forest cover in the region by at least 50 million acres by 2020.
"If you have APEC, especially the largest emitters — the U.S., China, Russia, Japan — sign up to an agreement like that, it would be hard to ignore at the global level," said Malcolm Cook of Sydney-based think-tank the Lowy Institute.
But other climate change experts and environmental activists were dismissive, saying the goals were nonbinding and so modest in scope as to render the program ineffective.
"In practical terms, that will mean almost nothing," Frank Jotzo, an Australian National University expert in climate change economics, said of the plan. "It is very unambitious."
The "energy intensity" goal was particularly weak, Jotzo said, as it sets a rate that most economies are naturally meeting as they get richer and shift out of power-intensive manufacturing.
And while an APEC statement said the added trees were enough to absorb about 11 percent of the greenhouse gases the world emitted in 2004, critics noted the increase does not make up for ever-rising emissions levels.
"If the APEC statement is the platform for future action on climate change, then the world is in trouble," said Greenpeace energy campaigner Catherine Fitzpatrick.
While the pact applies to all of the group's mix of developing and industrial countries, the United States and Australia have agreed that richer countries should bear more of the costs in solving global warming.
"That can potentially break this impasse between developed and developing countries," Jotzo said.