Developing countries will not surrender trump card for a handshake – they want hard cash and firm commitmentsWith barely five months until make-or-break climate talks in Copenhagen, where the world will attempt to agree a new treaty on climate change, how significant are the G8 announcements?Headline writers have drooled over the "historic" agreement to limit the global temperature rise to 2C, to cut world emissions 50% by 2050, and for the G8 to reduce its own pollution 80% by that date.The numbers may sound reassuringly low, large and colossal, respectively, but there is significant political sleight of hand at play here. Does the 50% cut by 2050 sound familiar? The same countries agreed at the 2007 G8 summit to "seriously consider" such a target. By 2008, they had moved to "consider and adopt" it. Come 2009, well, we can consider it well and truly adopted.Implicit in such a 50% reduction for the world, is a demand that developed countries cut their share by 80%. That is not ambition, that is mathematics. The baseline usually used is 1990, when the carbon pollution from rich countries dwarfed that from their poorer colleagues. To reach the average 50% decline, the bigger polluters need to make bigger cuts. Period. Announcing both as separate targets is like advertising a right sock free with every left sock bought.Which brings us to the 2C ambition. Europe adopted such a target in 1996, so the
UK,
France,
Germany and Italy are saying nothing new. Of the rest,
Japan and Canada are hopelessly over their targets set under the
Kyoto protocol, while the collapse of the Soviet Union means that Russia's emissions have dipped so low since 1990 that it can afford to increase them by a third between now and 2020 and still boast of a 10% cut overall.For the US to agree to the 2C target looks a sizeable step when compared with the recent reign of George
Bush, but not if you go back further to 1992, when the US joined other countries in signing the UN Framework Conve ...
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