Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress.
The world’s leading economic powers remain inactive in preventing an increase in the serious impacts of climate change.
While current impacts of climate change may not have reached alarming proportions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that will happen soon enough if we do not take early action. What is causing increasing concern, as the December U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen draws ever nearer, is the continuing deadlock in political action to deal with this challenge.
There is clear consensus among those arriving in Pittsburgh this week for the G20 that climate change is our most pressing global problem. The leaders of 16 of these countries signed a declaration last July after the G-8 meeting in Italy acknowledging that temperatures should not be allowed to exceed 2 degrees Celsius and that, as a consequence, global emissions must be reduced 50 percent by 2050. But the IPCC had clearly concluded that to ensure this limit, global emissions would have to peak no later than 2015, a finding that both the G-8 and the G-20 failed to highlight. Nor do the negotiations leading u... Read more
