Transcript
LORD WHITTY: You should be in no doubt here in America that the E.U. both regards
climate change as one of the major priorities facing us and is very united on that issue. I would also, since we've got an election on in the U.K.—which doesn't bother members of the House of Lords, but nevertheless it is an issue—I'll underline what the
commissioner said, that all three political parties in the U.K. also put a very strong priority on climate change and measures to tackle it. And you will know that Tony Blair in particular is attempting to use his presidency of the G8 and the U.K. presidency of the E.U., which follows the Luxembourg presidency, to emphasize the way in which we are
tackling climate change.
In the U.K. itself, we have set out a policy not only for meeting our Kyoto target, which we will definitely do, but also a more stretching target for the U.K., which we are well on the course for meeting, and also why two years ago we set in our energy
policy a long-term goal of an absolute cut in carbon emissions by 2050, of 60 percent. Now, that is the kind and order and scale that we are talking about if we are to attain the targets referred to by Minister Lux in terms of restricting growth in temperature increase to 2 percent.
The U.K. and the E.U. will of course continue to put in place policies and measures to address our contribution to climate change, but this is of course a global problem. And we need, and Prime Minister Blair is particularly insistent that we need, the re-engagement of the United States in this process—a process with the U.S. alongside underdeveloped countries takes the lead in the way which we were envisaging when we signed up to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and which we have lost with the U.S. withdrawal from Kyoto. Now, nobody is arguing that the United States is likely to sign up to the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol. We understand
that. Those who have ratified Kyoto will go on and deliver what Kyoto commitments require and also set up, I hope, ground-breaking mechanisms such as the trading, which we've already successfully launched in Europe.
But the issue now is not Kyoto as normally understood—that's happening anyway, notwithstanding the U.S. nonparticipation. The issue on which we now require
the U.S.'s constructive and creative engagement is the huge challenge beyond Kyoto, beyond 2012. That we want to begin to address now and to address in meetings such as the bilateral between the E.U. and the U.S. in June and, in particular, the G8 summit in Scotland in July, under our presidency.
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