Two days back, the G8 summit ended in L'Aquila of Italy with the international consensus over not allowing average global temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius with baseline temperature point being temperature in 1990 or later. Although lack of absolute definition of baseline castes doubt on effectiveness of this goal. EU members accept the baseline set at 1990. Whereas many others, such as Japan, want 2005 as the starting point.The developed countries could not convince China and India, top emitters of CO2 on commitment that aims at bringing down developing nations' CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050. Both China and India are among the top CO2 emitters, but they rank much lower in terms of per capita CO2 emissions.
"It is inevitable for developing countries to increase emission in the process of economic development, but they will still make efforts to lower the growth of emission in a certain period," Su Wei, director-general of the Department of Climate Change in China's National Development and Reform Commission said.
Moreover, Russia expressed signs that the 80 per cent carbon reduction for rich countries that it signed up was not in fact viable.
That has exposed the weak point of economic development activities. Simply it has become impossible to see effective measures for climate change mitigation going hand in hand with the goals of economic development.
Sustainable carbonless economy looks far unreachable utopia for near future.
