Enlarge imageBy Sumeet Desai
LONDON (Reuters) - The government wants tighter limits on greenhouse gases by Europe and other rich countries as a first step towards establishing a global carbon trading system to avoid the economic upheaval of climate change.
A report to be published on Monday, according to a 27-page summary obtained by Reuters, says that the benefits of determined worldwide steps to tackle global warming will massively outweigh the costs.
But the report’s author, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, concludes that ignoring climate change could lead to economic upheaval on the scale of the 1930s depression.
"The risks are very big and unless we act soon to reduce those risks they will become very difficult to deal with," Stern told BBC radio on Monday. "And unless this is international, we will not make the reductions on the scale that is required."
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Britain is pushing for a post-Kyoto framework that would include the United States -- the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases that cause climate change -- as well as major developing countries such as China and India.
U.S. President George W. Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol -- which obliges 35 rich nations to cut carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars -- in part because he said it hit jobs.
The report estimates that stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cost about one percent of annual global output by 2050. Inaction, however, could cut global consumption per person by between 5 and 20 percent.
It precedes U.N. climate talks, starting in Nairobi on November 6, focussing on finding a successor to Kyoto which ends in 2012.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, described the Stern findings as "a wake up call to every country in the world".
"The report is clear: We are heading towards catastrophic tipping points in our climate unless we act," Blair wrote in an article for the Sun. "Creating cleaner energy whilst using less has to be the key."
CARBON MARKETS
Chancellor Gordon Brown will argue at the launch of the report that harnessing the power of markets is the best way to find new ways to curb the output of polluting gases, Treasury officials said.
Sharing a platform with Blair and Stern, Brown will propose a new EU-wide target for emissions reductions of 30 percent by 2020 and 60 percent by 2050 and expansion of the carbon trading scheme to cover more than 50 percent of emissions.
Brown will also signal the government’s commitment to give statutory backing to reduction targets through a new bill.
Brown wants the EU scheme -- which sets overall limits for carbon emissions but then allows businesses to trade their quotas -- to be linked with Australia, California, Japan, Norway and Switzerland with a view to setting a global price for carbon that fixes a clear cost for pollution.
He will also announce that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who created a stir this year with his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is to become one of his advisers on environmental issues, Treasury officials said.
Stern said that, on current trends, average global temperatures will rise by 2-3 degrees centigrade within the next 50 years or so, compared with temperatures in 1750-1850.
If emissions continue to grow, the earth could warm by several more degrees, with severe consequences. Poor countries would be worst hit as melting glaciers initially increased flood risk and then hurt water supplies -- eventually threatening one-sixth of the world’s population.
"Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," the report says.
