Blair sees wider climate deal after Kyoto.


Germany's presidency of the G8 (Group of Eight) countries could lay the foundation for a radical climate deal embracing emerging powers and the United States, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said overnight.
The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which runs to 2012, aims to slash greenhouse gases but does not include countries like India, China and the United States, responsible for a quarter of the world's industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Blair used his closing speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) to highlight a changing mood in the United States, where President George W Bush this week recognised climate change as a challenge and told Americans to cut gasoline use.
"The mood in the US is in the process of a quantum shift," Mr Blair told the packed audience of business leaders in what he said would be his last speech at the forum as Prime Minister.
Mr Blair was unequivocal in his view that global warming needs to be addressed by the major global powers.
"It would be madness not to act to prevent its realisation - just as a precaution. Its challenge is the supreme expression of interdependence. America and China, even if they had no other reason for a relationship ... would need one simply for this alone," he said.
Mr Blair said Germany's presidency of the G8 group of industrialised nations would provide the opportunity for world partners to agree "at least the principles of a new, binding international agreement" to replace Kyoto.
"But one which is more radical than Kyoto and more comprehensive, one which this time includes all the major countries of the world," he said.
Mr Blair said any agreement without binding commitments from the United States, China and India would not be able to deliver.
"If Britain shut down our emissions entirely ... the growth in China's emissions would make up the difference within just two years," he said.
"Without the biggest economies being part of a framework to reduce carbon dependence, we have no earthly hope of success."
Senior officials from advanced and developing countries joined an "informal" conference in Tokyo this week to start work on a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.
Among participants were the United States, China and India.
The Kyoto Protocol obliges 35 developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
But the nations signed up to the protocol account for only about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
- Reuters