Less than a week after he announced that his Administration was ready to embrace long-term international action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, President George W. Bush assumed his usual role on climate change at this week's G8 summit: roadblock-in-chief. Chancellor Angela Merkel of host nation Germany had hoped to win approval for specifically targeted reductions on greenhouse gases—50% cuts by 2050 compared to 1990 levels, with the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising more than two degrees centigrade—but that effort seemed doomed before climate change came up on the G8's agenda this afternoon.
Though Merkel said on Thursday afternoon that the G8 had agreed to "substantial cuts" in emissions, Bush told reporters earlier: "What you won't get—and there was never a question of this—was the 50%." In other words: not gonna happen.
Instead, the U.S. has pushed to open up further negotiations that will embrace major carbon emitters—including big developing countries like India and China—and promote flexible goals for cutting emissions that would vary from nation to nation, instead of binding targets such as those laid out by the Kyoto Protocol. (The Kyoto Protocol, which doesn't include the U.S., India or China, expires in 2012.) Environmentalists were quick to blame Bush for stifling meaningful international efforts to address climate change. "This is a clear failure of responsibility," says Daniel Mittler, climate policy analyst for Greenpeace. "Bush is not putting anything on the table but hot air." But while the President seems to remain frustratingly unaware of the growing global consensus for immediate action on climate change, he may be on the right track—providing he's willing to back his recent green rhetoric with firm action.
Though the G8 represents most of the world's economic and political power, the group is responsible for less than half of current global greenhouse gas emissions — about 40%—and that percentage will decrease rapidly as energy use in developing nations skyrockets. According to projections by the International Energy Agency, China may pass the U.S. as the world's leading carbon emitter as early as this year, and if Beijing does nothing to slow its emissions, the country could produce more greenhouse gases during the next 25 years than the world's richest 26 countries—including the entire G8—combined. It will be wonderful if the G8 nations actually make substantial emissions cuts, but as Bush told reporters on June 6: "If China is not part of the process, we all can make major strides and yet there won't be a reduction, until China and India are participants."
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