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Climate Change and Energy Policy
1997 will be a year of great challenges and also great opportunity for the Climate. Five years ago, in Rio, Britain signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It will soon also be 25 years since the Stockholm Environment Conference, which led to the United Nations Environment Programme. Since 1995, scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have deemed climate change to be "discernible". Britain's changing weather patterns and current drought focuses minds on what the future may hold. At the "climate summit" in Kyoto this December, the immediate priority will be to achieve legally binding reduction targets for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The Objective of the Climate Convention is to constrain climate change to rates and limits allowing ecosystems to "adapt naturally". Scientists advising the United Nations have proposed criteria for a lower, safer limit, which includes a maximum one degree Celsius rise above pre industrial levels and a higher, less safe limit of two degrees. Governments should now use these limits to plan the future permissible global use of fossil fuels. Such a task is long overdue because the existing reserves of fossil fuels - such as oil, coal and gas -will, when burnt, produce at least twice as much carbon dioxide as even the upper limit can tolerate. (This is also the temperature limit adopted by the EU as its policy target.) Ipso facto, a negotiated "carbon budget" is required, and reliance on fossil fuels must be phased out in an orderly way. Industrial nations cannot credibly continue to expand production and use of fossil fuels - the principal source of climate changing pollution - and on the other hand, to advocate reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Energy prices should also reflect the environmental cost of energy production and use, through instruments such as carbon and energy taxes. Efficiency and renewables must receive the incentives they require to succeed. Priority should be given to developing renewables over fossil fuels. We believe the time-scale to complete such action will be a number of decades but that a start must be made now, taking advantage of the political opportunities of 1997.
Current Signatories
ALARM UK Please return signed copies to:
Liz Pratt, Greenpeace UK, Canonbury Villas, London N1 2PN |