| EFL. Here because of the effect on the oil producers of an international move to clean coal as a major energy source. |
 The first ministerial meeting of a controversial alliance promising economic growth with low carbon emissions has opened in Sydney. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate aims to develop and promote technologies such as "clean coal", nuclear and renewables. Green groups say the body aims to emasculate the Kyoto Protocol.
| hard to do when it never matured, sexually or otherwise .... |
The meeting involves politicians and industrialists from Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the US. The Asia-Pacific partnership was announced in July, but this is the first time that ministers from the six countries have come together.
US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was due to be the highest-profile attendee, but withdrew a few days ago citing concerns over the Middle East in the wake of Ariel Sharon's illness. | Significant that it would have been Condi and not the Commerce Secty. Underscores the real stakes here. |
Australia's Environment Minister Ian Campbell does not believe her absence will affect the gathering. "It certainly would have been fantastic if the US secretary of state could have been here," he said.
"But the meeting will be the culmination of an enormous amount of work by the six governments; and we're still very hopeful of constructive outcomes to deliver the two policy aims of robust, strong economic development, but within a framework of much lower greenhouse gas emissions."
The ideology | nice rhetorical thrust, that |
behind the partnership is that emissions can be brought down effectively by developing and spreading new technologies.
It is a voluntary body without international commitments such as those contained in the Kyoto Protocol. Environmental groups believe the approach will achieve little. | Environmental groups believe many things, often before breakfast and simultaneously. A few are actually true. |
"Voluntary agreements have been tried before and have failed to affect significant change," commented an NGO climate coalition in a joint statement co-ordinated by Climate Action Network Australia (Cana). "Without targets, timetables nor market-based incentives to encourage the deployment of already developed clean energy technologies, the Asia-Pacific partnership is an empty and meaningless shell that will not help us avoid dangerous climate change."
Australia and the US have both withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol | not quite - we never joined, formally |
, claiming that meeting the commitments on greenhouse gas reductions that they agreed to at the Kyoto summit in 1997 would damage their economies.
They have found common ground with China, India and South Korea, all developing nations that resist the idea of binding targets on reducing emissions; while Japan, which remains committed to its Kyoto Protocol target, now has a foot in both camps. |