G8 : DOA

Sadly enough, the playpen is again flaunting international discussion and rejecting in advance G8 agreements on substantial efforts to keep our planet hospitable to life as we know it. Perhaps they should avoid some climate damaging emissions and just all stay home, talk on the telephone, and exchange thoughts by e-mail. A joint tele-conference would be enough to announce their failure to achieve anything worthwhile for mankind and his environment. (And aid to Africa will probably succumb to their summit party as well.)

U.S. Rejects G-8 Climate Proposal - washingtonpost.com

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 26, 2007; Page A09

U.S. officials have raised a second round of unusually bluntly worded objections to a proposed global-warming declaration that Germany prepared for next month's Group of Eight summit, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Representatives from the world's leading industrial nations met the past two days in Heiligendamm, Germany, to negotiate over German Chancellor Angela Merkel's proposed statement, which calls for limiting the worldwide temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Bush administration officials, who raised similar objections in April, rejected the idea of setting mandatory emissions targets as well as language calling for G-8 nations to raise overall energy efficiencies by 20 percent by 2020. With less than two weeks remaining, said sources familiar with the talks, the climate document is the only unresolved issue in the statements the world leaders are expected to sign at the June 6-8 summit.
"The U.S. still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement," a paper dated May 14 states. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to. . . . We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position."