Industries Can Lead in Carbon Reduction
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28/07/2008
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Business Week (New York)
Rather than merely adhering to national climate-change rules, industries, such as cement, can lead the way with their own global agreements
by Elaine Coles
The agreement by member countries at the recent G8 summit in Japan to "consider and adopt a goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050" was widely hailed as a success. But in truth, the position of the world's richest nations has barely budged from last year, when they agreed to "consider seriously" halving global emissions. Furthermore, there are no details yet on how these cuts should be shared between rich and poor nations, nor on what the baseline for such cuts should be.
The world cannot afford to make progress on climate change one word at a time. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the room for maneuver in keeping global temperature increases to 2