Britain’s Blair tours Japan, India, China to rally support on climate change.
AP, London, March 14, 2008.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair began a tour of China, India and Japan on Friday hoping to rally support for a new global pact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s leader in June, said his talks with lawmakers and business leaders are aimed at breaking a deadlock on setting new targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.
Speaking before the visit, he warned that the global response to climate change is still not living up to the scale of the problem.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Wednesday that developed countries are chiefly responsible for global warming, insisting that developing nations should be allowed to set lower emission reduction targets. China and some other developing countries, including India, argue their economies should not be penalized by binding cuts when their per capita emissions are below those in developed countries.

But Blair, who was arriving in Tokyo on Friday, said the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol - which set binding targets on industrial countries to cut emissions by 2012 - must involve a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
«We believe that there is a huge economic opportunity - for countries, for business, for people in taking action on climate change,» Blair said in a video message posted on his Web site.
«But it won’t be maximized unless there is that true global deal, one with everybody in it, one that has in its heart a substantial cut in emissions and that most crucially has the means of doing it,» he said.

Blair was carrying out the unpaid seven-day tour in his role as a consultant to The Climate Group, a nonprofit organization which is funded by corporations and governments from around the world.

In December, delegations from nearly 190 countries agreed at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bali, Indonesia, to adopt a blueprint for controlling global warming gases before the end of next year.

Blair said The Climate Group had convened a panel of experts to examine possible frameworks for the deal and will deliver a report to a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations in July.

«Unless there is a concerted global deal where there is a framework that everyone agrees to … then it isn’t going to work,» Blair said.

«What we know at the moment is that whatever deals are being done on a unilateral basis in individual countries, the amount of emissions are still rising,» he said.

China now generates a large share of the world’s greenhouse gases, with some experts saying it has already overtaken the U.S. as the world’s No. 1 emitter.

On The Net www.tonyblairoffice.org

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Tony Blair is to lead a new international team  which could have the backing of China and America.

The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.

He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer.

“This is extremely urgent. A 50% cut by 2050 has to be a central component of this. We have to try this year to get that agreed, because the moment you do agree that, then you have something for everyone to focus upon. We need a true and proper global deal, and that needs to include America and China,” Blair said.

He is due to reveal the initiative this weekend at a meeting of the G20 in Japan, before travelling to discuss the plans with the Chinese and Indian governments. “There is a deadlock. Everyone is agreed where we want to get to, but unless you agree on the framework for getting there, you are left with a process and not a result,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is that if we do not take substantial action over the next two years, then by 2020 we will thinking seriously about adaptation rather than prevention.”

Blair played a key role in putting climate change on to the international agenda, and in trying to persuade the Bush administration that it could play a part in a global deal to cut carbon emissions.

He will formally launch the initiative, this weekend, at a meeting in Tokyo following talks with Yasuo Fukuda, the prime minister of Japan, the current president of the G8. “People often say to me there are a lot of climate change plans out there, and I say ‘how many of them are politically doable? So the experts are providing technical knowledge, and specialist insight, but what I am trying to do is guide it politically,” Blair said.

The Climate Group, a not-for-profit organisation supported by business, backs him. His team of international experts, includies Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of the groundbreaking report on the costs of climate change, and specialists from China, Japan, the US and Europe.