Shaken G-8 issues Africa, climate pledges

Further climate talks
The leaders failed to overcome stiff resistance from Bush to launching a more aggressive attack on global warming.

"If it is impossible to bring America into the consensus on climate change we will never ensure the huge emerging economies like China and India ... are part of the dialogue," Blair said Friday. Blair added that Russia has agreed to make climate change a major priority when it takes over the G-8 presidency next year.

Describing the agreement on climate change, Blair said merely that the plan of action “will initiate a new dialogue” between the summit countries and leaders from developing nations who also met with them.

The G-8 leaders agreed to start a new dialogue to “slow down and then in time to reverse the rise in harmful greenhouse gas emissions,” Blair said, adding that those talks would happen in Britain on Nov. 1.

The United States, the only G-8 country that has not ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, was successful in rejecting Blair’s call for setting specific targets and a timetable for reducing greenhouse emissions.

The communique acknowledged the split between the United States and the other countries in a section that said “those of us who have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, welcome its entry into force and will work to make it a success.” That was the document’s only mention of the treaty put into effect last February.

Bush contends the Kyoto accord’s curbs on greenhouse emissions would wreck the U.S. economy.

The document did also state that “while uncertainty remains in our understanding of climate science, we know enough to act now.” French President Jacques Chirac called that compromise language a “visible, real evolution” in the American position.

Blair blasts 'politics of terror'
The terrorism document followed the attacks in London on Thursday.

Within hours of the bombings, Bush and the other leaders issued a special joint statement that condemned “these barbaric acts.”

“We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism that is not an attack on one nation, but on all nations and on civilized people everywhere,” the leaders said.

In his closing statement Friday, Blair said: “There is no hope in terrorism, nor any future in it worth living. And it is hope that is the alternative to this hatred, so we offer today this contrast with the politics of terror.”

Despite the leaders’ expressions of anti-terror solidarity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hinted Western countries were being hypocritical because they do not call Chechen rebels international terrorists.

Russian has objected vehemently to Britain’s granting asylum to a top Chechen rebel representative, Akhmed Zakayev, and the United States giving refuge to another, Ilyas Akahmatov.

“It is highly dangerous and misleading to think that those who support and encourage terrorism can be called political figures,” Lavrov said.

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