Financial Times - Possibility Of Any International Climate Agreement As Remote As It's Ever Been

[hatrack]

The prospect of an international agreement on climate change appears as remote as ever after a week of frantic negotiations in which a US concession met a rebuff from developing countries. Negotiators were on Friday trying to regroup for the next stages of the United Nations negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, the main provisions of which expire in 2012.

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Stephen Hale, chief executive of the think-tank Green Alliance, said: “We are worse off than a week ago.”

Barbara Helfferich, a European Commission official, said the G8 had produced “a half step forward”, not the “full step forward that we would have liked”.

Yvo de Boer, the official in charge of the UN talks, said he was most concerned with the failure of the G8 to set any mid-term emissions targets for 2020. But Mr Hale said the real shift in negotiations would come later this year, with a new president in the White House.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cd86249e-4f5b-11dd-b050-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1