[greenyes] Bush Administration Policy on Climate Disruption

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

NEW YORK TIMES



March 16, 2005
Climate Change Is Called Economic Threat at Talks
By HEATHER TIMMONS

lONDON, March 15 - The British government gathered together environment and 
energy officials from 20 countries on Tuesday to discuss climate change, 
which Britain has declared a top issue as it takes the leadership of the 
Group of 8 industrialized nations.
Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, told the delegates here at the 
opening of the meetings that the changing climate could no longer be 
considered just an environmental issue, but a real threat to economic 
activity.
"We have sufficient evidence that human-made climate change is the most 
far-reaching and almost certainly the most threatening of all the 
environmental challenges facing us," Mr. Brown said. Problems from soil 
erosion to the depletion of marine stocks "threaten future economic activity 
and growth" around the world, he said.
Mr. Brown called on wealthy nations to solve these problems, both because 
they had caused them, he said, and because less developed nations will feel 
their effects more keenly. "Climate change is an issue of justice as much of 
economic development," he said.
The British government and the Bush administration differ over the 
importance of greenhouse gases, mostly notably in the Kyoto agreement on 
limiting emissions that went into effect last month without the backing of 
the United States.
The same day that Mr. Brown talked about cutting emissions, an American 
delegate, James L. Connaughton, chairman of the United States Council on 
Environmental Quality, told the BBC in an interview that the science was 
still contested. "We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent 
to which humans are a factor" in global warming, he said. He added, though, 
that they might well be a factor.
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_________________________
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