Heated discussions about the meeting in Åre

Photo: Gunnar Seijbold/ Swedish Government Offices.

This past weekend environment ministers from the EU countries have met in Åre to discuss the European strategy before the global climate negotiations in Copenhagen in the end of this year. Closing the meeting on Saturday, the Swedish environment minister Andreas Carlgren declared a big unity behind the promise to reduce the CO2 emissions of EU with 30 percent if the rest of the world agrees on “what is needed”.

Russian roulette

But the last week discussions in Swedish newspaper and on blogs have also been intense. For example Johan Rockström, executive director of Stockholm Environment Institute wrote in a polemical article together with the general secretary of the European Environment Agency, Jacqueline McGlade, that the goals of cutting emissions 50 percent by 2050 won’t be enough to fulfill the goals of the G8 or the EU to limit global warming to 2 degrees.
“Already the IPCC showed clearly that with a climate goal almost double as ambitious as what the G8 has settled and the meeting in Åre might confirm, we are in fact playing Russian roulette! – - – Our research shows that the goal for 2050 must be to reduce global emissions to as close as zero as possible”, they write.

No thermostat button

Other strong words come from the founder of Tällberg Foundation, Bo Ekman, who writes in another article that “the declarations from G8 and EU give the impression that policy makers have a solution at their disposal: that there is a thermostat button that can be turned off to stop global warming at exactly 2 degrees. An out-of-date mechanistic world view is being applied to a complex, interactive system in perpetual change. It is like asking a Newton physicist of the old kind to repair a decomposing nuclear power plant.”

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 27, 2009

• climate change
• EU
• politics