In the recently held G-8 summit, US President George Bush praised the move by G-8 leaders to rally behind and completely support a strategy for a global climate-change accord. The G-8 nations are the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia.
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Climate change is any long-term significant change in the “average weather” that a given region experiences. Average weather may include average temperature, precipitation and wind patterns. It involves changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over durations ranging from decades to millions of years. These changes can be caused by dynamic process on Earth, external forces including variations in sunlight intensity, and more recently by human activities.
However, according to many environmentalists argue that the summit’s unclear vows to work towards lowering greenhouse gas emissions by a drastic 50 percent by 2050 does not appear to be legally binding and can be interpreted in various ways.
At the summit, President Bush whole-heartedly supported the broad emissions-reduction goal. In a statement, President Bush reiterated his stance that further progress is going to depend on the further development of clean energy technologies. Developing nations, he said, will need assistance so they can become “good stewards of the environment.”
This was President Bush’s last summit with the G-8 leaders and he was all praises for the group’s attempts at combating global climate change. His main demand on a climate change accord was that developing countries who have a high rate of energy consumption, need to be included in some requirements along with the major industrialized democracies that make up the Group of Eight. However, developing nations such as China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa have rejected the option of being part of the 50-percent reduction goal. It was the first time at a G-8 summit that the G-8 heads of state sat down together with these developing countries to discuss the problem of global warming. According to the heads of G-8, developing countries are today responsible for releasing nearly 80 percent of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
In a move quite opposed to what President Bush first supported in his first term, at this summit he heartily backed the broad emissions-reduction goal stated by his summit partners. In his first term, President Bush firmly disputed scientists’ assertions about global warming.
In a statement, the President stated, “We made clear, and the other nations agreed, that they must also participate in an ambitious goal. 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.”
Overall, US President Bush was instrumental in expanding on the global warming discussions beyond the G-8 membership. However, he won’t be in office long enough to witness the next chapter of the controversial climate change debate play out.
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.
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