UN Climate Leader Urges Nations To Pledge Carbon Cuts At Bush Climate Wank-A-Thon In September - AFP

[hatrack]

The UN's top official on climate change on Friday called on wealthy countries to emulate the European Union (EU) and Japan by offering to slash their carbon emissions at a conference to be hosted by the US next month.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the talks for long-term emissions reductions in Washington on September 27-28, announced by the White House earlier, offered an exceptional chance to break the deadlock for tackling greenhouse gases.

"I view it with a lot of hope and expectation. This is the next step in the process and I am very keen to see where it takes us," de Boer said in an interview from Bonn with AFP. "I would like to see a serious commitment from industrialised countries that they will go much further (in offering to cut greenhouse-gas pollution) than what they have already proposed."

De Boer singled out as a model the EU, which has committed itself to cutting its own emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and promised to deepen this to 30 percent if other big polluters follow suit, and Japan which wants the world to halve emissions by 2050.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2007/070803223226.fkbdzztw.html

[phantom power]

1. Really, it's a shame that so many people will have to waste their time attending this.