Date published: 2007/08/22
The BBC says:
Rich nations should be absolved from the need to cut emissions if they pay developing countries to do it on their behalf, a senior UN official has said.
The controversial suggestion from Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has angered environmental groups.
They say climate change will not be solved unless rich and poor nations both cut emissions together.
But Mr de Boer said the challenge was so great that action was needed now.
The UN's binding global climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, currently requires industrialised nations to reduce the majority of emissions themselves.
But Mr de Boer said this was illogical, adding that the scale of the problem facing the world meant that countries should be allowed to invest in emission cuts wherever in the world it was cheapest.
"We have been reducing emissions and making energy use more efficient in industrialised countries for a long time," he told BBC News.
"So it is quite expensive in these nations to reduce emissions any more.
"But in developing nations, less has been done to reduce emissions and less has been done to address energy efficiency," Mr de Boer observed.
"So it actually becomes economically quite attractive for a company, for example in the UK, that has a target to achieve this goal by reducing emissions in China."
It's amazing how the so-called environmentalists get hysterical about such things. Well, their goal is to hammer the western economies by having them go cold turkey off of fossil fuels, so anything that avoids that happening is evidently considered to be bad news by them. But de Boer is just talking common sense. The goal is to reduce global emissions. Period. Either the so-called environmentalists support this goal or they do not.
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