Climate Pact Is "No Post-Kyoto Answer"
    By Rob Taylor
    Reuters

    Tuesday 27 February 2007

    Canberra - A six-nation alliance of big polluters drawing in China, Japan, the U.S. and India was not the answer to the search for a wider post-Kyoto pact to combat global warming, Britain's top climate diplomat said on Tuesday.

    The American-led Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, which also includes Australia and South Korea, was formed in July 2005 and aims to use technology, rather than binding Kyoto-style caps, to limit greenhouse emissions.

    Australia, one of the world's biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters, has called the partnership a model for a past-Kyoto deal drawing together both developing and advanced economies.

    But John Ashton, Britain's Special Representative on Climate Change, said the six nations had little in common, making the chances of meaningful cooperation slight.

    "I think I have to raise a slight eyebrow at whether it really is a sort of natural regional grouping," Ashton told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Australia.

    "If you're looking at regional economies ranging from Australia to India to Japan, there is perhaps more diversity than there is in common across those economies."

    Ashton, who aims to persuade governments to accelerate action to combat carbon emissions, said the partnership had not led to large investment in new technologies other than by Australia, which has pledged A$100 million for green energy. The U.S. has promised a similar amount in 2007.

    "Money Talks"

    "In the end money talks. This is about infrastructure and you need public investment to trigger the shift in private investment, so I'd look at how much money is going into it and what's coming out of it," he said.

    Ashton said a global carbon trading system was unlikely to take shape anytime soon, meaning the world would have to place more effort into the search for other climate change answers.

    "One has to be very careful to avoid falling into a trap, that I think some people do fall into, which is to say that emissions trading is the answer," he said.

    "Realistically it is going to be some time before you have a price signal for the global market which is sufficiently robust to shift investment on the scale that investment needs to be shifted."

    Ashton, a career diplomat with a science background, said energy-hungry China - a major polluter which had built 80 new coal-fired power stations - could also hold the answer for development of new clean-climate technologies.

    "China is deploying capital faster than any human society has ever done, building infrastructure faster," he said.

    "If you want to bring a new technology into maturity, where is the cheapest and quickest place to do that? It is in a country which is deploying capital rapidly, because that is where you can bring down the technology risk."

    China ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002, but is excluded from the current round of emission cuts as a developing nation.

    Ashton said there was no more urgent task facing the world on climate change than to accelerate the deployment in China of carbon capture and storage technologies.