U.S., Australia Say Businesses Will Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions Voluntarily

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The world's biggest polluters opened a two-day climate conference Wednesday with representatives insisting industry leaders will voluntarily slash emission standards.

SYDNEY, Australia — The world's biggest polluters opened a two-day climate conference Wednesday with representatives insisting industry leaders will voluntarily slash emission standards and environmentalist complaining many of the proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unfairly favor the oil and coal industry.


The Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate brought together senior ministers from the United States, Australia, Japan, China, South Korea and India, along with dozens of executives from energy and resource firms.


The countries -- with 45 percent of the world's population -- account for nearly half of the world's gross domestic product, energy consumption and global greenhouse gas emissions, the Australian government said.


Environmentalists have branded the meeting a stunt to divert attention from the U.S. and Australian governments' refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which legally binds countries to targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.


They also complained the meeting was focused exclusively on untried technologies that would prop up the fossil fuel sector rather than putting financial resources into proven renewable energy areas like solar, wind and geothermal.


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Among emission-cutting technologies discussed at the meeting are geosequestration -- which captures carbon dioxide before its released into the atmosphere and then stored underground -- and clean coal, which includes a basket of technologies that treat coal so that it gives off fewer emissions when burned.


"The conference will fail if it doesn't put in place (regulations) and strong financial incentives for industry to spend billions and billions of dollars on clean energy today," said Erwin Jackson, climate change program manager with the Australian Conservation Foundation. "If it just throws research dollars to the coal industry to clean up their act in 15 to 20 years, we've missed an opportunity."


The coal industry counters that the attention given to the sector is only a recognition of its growing importance, especially in China and India.


"The reason for continued interest in coal is the simple recognition that with global energy demand growing at a rapid rate, that demand can't be met without coal," said Mark O'Neill, executive director of Australian Coal Association, which estimates that coal generates a quarter of the world's energy. "You can't simply eliminate a quarter of world's energy supply."


The six countries are expected to announce a series of measures aimed at the developing cleaner, more efficient technologies to reduce greenhouse gases. But there will be no Kyoto-like targets for cutting emissions, which the United States and Australia argue will harm their economies by driving up the price of commodities like coal and oil.


Canberra and Washington, instead, say industry will regulate itself without specific targets or taxes on the amount of carbon they pump into the atmosphere.


"I believe that the people who run the private sector, who run these companies, they do have children, they do have grandchildren, they do live and breathe in the world," U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.


Boston University Prof. Anthony Patt, at BU's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, said voluntary compliance will fail.


"It is clear that voluntary agreements to reduce emissions, even when coupled with government subsidies to develop new technologies, accomplish very little," Patt said in a statement.


Global warming has been blamed for rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather, like the hurricanes that lashed the United States last year.


Japan, China and India have signed on to Kyoto, but the latter two countries were considered developing nations when they joined and do not have any binding emissions targets under the pact.


At a U.N. global warming conference in Canada last month, the United States declined to join an agreement signed by more than 150 nations to open talks on mandatory post-2012 reductions in greenhouse gases.


Source: Associated Press


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