Climate change needs money
2008-04-20 12:23
Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday the fight against climate change needs massive new flows of private investment and globally regulated "green" markets to succeed.
Some 90% of the funds for fighting global warming will come from the private sector over the long term, Sarkozy said at climate talks in Paris with the world's biggest polluters.
Mobilizing a few hundred million euros, or dollars, is not enough, he said, adding that the international community must "massively redirect financial flows toward this new low-carbon economy."
The US-sponsored talks in Paris this week are aimed at ironing out disagreements among leading economies such as the United States, the European Union, China and India over how to reduce global warming.
Reduce emissions
They are meant to feed broader UN efforts to work out a follow-up plan to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires signatories to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming.
Sarkozy said the current climate negotiations should pay greater attention to the financial side of a post-Kyoto plan. The protocol expires in 2012.
US officials agreed. "I commend the president for making this point," Alexander Karsner, an assistant US energy secretary, told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the talks.
Such private financing is a "cornerstone" of what the United States has been doing to fight global warming, he said. The US government has pushed private investment in "green" technology and voluntary emission cuts by the private sector instead of government-mandated mandatory ones.
Sarkozy also said the carbon credit market and other environmental financial tools currently used in Europe should be "globalised and regulated."
Karsner, however, said he saw little need for a globalised carbon market.
Boyden Gray, special US envoy for European affairs, said he did not foresee such a global system "any time soon."
A carbon trading market - or "cap-and-trade" system - works much like any commodities market, except that traders earn their fees selling a ton of carbon dioxide instead of corn or copper.
Countries that agree to reduction targets are given permits for allowable carbon dioxide emissions, and the permits are passed on to businesses. Companies can choose to cut their emissions by retrofitting a factory and selling their permits for a profit - or continuing to pollute and buying additional units of carbon dioxide on the open market.
Sarkozy, in his speech on Friday, did not directly address US President George W Bush's landmark announcement on Wednesday that the United States must stop the growth in its emissions of so-called greenhouse gases by 2025.
It marked the first time that Bush - who rejected the Kyoto Protocol and has long said mandatory emissions cuts would hurt the US economy - had set a specific target date for reductions in US pollution.
His speech overshadowed the first day of the Paris climate talks Thursday. Many delegates said it was too little, too late from the world's No 1 polluter.
A UN climate panel of scientists released reports last year warning of fast-rising seas, extensive droughts and flooding, severe heat waves and other dire effects from global warming.
- AP