You just can’t keep a good man down. You might think he’d want a rest after a decade as Prime Minister. You might suppose he’d have his hands full sorting out the Middle East. You might reckon he’d be busy planning his impending role as the next President of Europe. But – pah!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K9rVRuehGU]
Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would 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.
Mark Lynas has more in a Comment is Free piece published today. (Incidentally, if we’re still focused on two degrees C – as we should be, and as Mark certainly is in his CiF piece – then it’s worth noting right at the beginning that the IPCC says in its Fourth Assessment Report that to limit warming to between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees, then the global emissions cut by 2050 needs to be between 50 and 85 per cent. Hard to avoid the suspicion that we’ll need to be at the deep end of that emissions reduction range in order to come in at the low end of the temperature increase range.)
