Tony Blair to present new plan to break deadlocked climate talks
22 Sep 2009
Former British prime minister Tony Blair hopes to break the deadlocked global climate talks with plans for creating 10 million jobs by 2020 if developing nations agreed big cuts in greenhouse gases.
Blair who heads a climate initiative released a report that shows a global climate agreement could boost the world's GDP by 0.8 per cent by 2020, as compared with the projected gross domestic product with no action on climate change.
Blair was in New York ahead of a UN climate summit that will be attended by 100 world leaders. The summit will be followed by a number of supporting events in New York City over the week.
The events will serve to build support for negotiating a new climate deal in Copenhagen, Denmark in December to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, that provides for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012.
The report is one of a series he is promoting and is based on computer modeling techniques developed by Cambridge University economists. According to Blair the upcoming Copenhagen talks will mark the moment concerned nations moved from a campaign to a policy programme, that will clearly spell out the methodology for the main economies of the world to clear the hurdles in the way of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other industrial warming gases.
At the same time Blair acknowledged the costs of investment in new forms of clean energy such as wind, solar, nuclear power, electric vehicles seem daunting over the short term particularly in the backdrop of the global financial crisis.
