Climate Change and the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit

Transcript

CARLOS PASCUAL:  In working on this issue, it is probably one of the most difficult challenges of international policy that we face today, where we have scientific realities that are linked to technological challenges, those technological challenges affect our economies, the economic implications have direct impacts on labor groups, those have implications for different geographic areas and our politics, those feed into our national policy debates, and where we stand on the national policy debates affects our ability to negotiate international agreements, and the cumulative total of those international agreements brings us back to the overall scientific impact all over again, which means that we have a loop here which is inescapable and phenomenally complicated at each step of the way. Some of the individuals who we will be listening today have been at the center of working through that terribly difficult conundrum.

This is an issue which needs all governments to have participated and all countries to have participated, or at least the major emitters, because we do not simply have a luxury of allowing some to drop out. That additional ounce of carbon that is emitted makes no difference whether it comes from Detroit or Newcastle or Beijing or Hokkaido, so it is absolutely critical that we bring countries into this equation.

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