FRANCE: Greenpeace calls for drastic cut in CO2 emissions.

The environmental group Greenpeace has called for a 50% reduction in carbon emissions to prevent temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees centigrade (3.6 farenheit). Greenpeace on Tuesday (January 30) released its latest report on climate change entitled "Energy (r)evolution," calling for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gases. Written in collaboration with specialists from the German Institute of Technical Thermodynamics and some thirty other experts from around the world, Greenpeace says the report presents the first global energy strategy for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by almost 50% of what they were in 1990, by the year 2050. "We can do something, and we have shown that there are no technical or economic barriers but we have lots of political barriers and that's basically what we need to overcome," said Sven Teske, renewable energy director at Greenpeace. Greenpeace warned that a 2 degree rise in world temperatures could bring environmental disaster. "My country where I live in, Holland, will effectively disappear, the World Trade Center memorial will be under water and the coast lines of the continents as we know them will have completely changed beyond all recognition and we'll be looking at hundreds of hundreds of millions of people with no place to live," said Steve Sawyer, climate and energy policy advisor for Greenpeace. The United Nations is due to release a report on Friday (February 2) urging governments to act on global warming studies. A draft of the report projects a big rise in temperatures this century and warns of more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels linked to greenhouse gases, released mainly by the use of fossil fuels. The report draws on research by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries and has taken six years to compile. Thirty-five industrial nations have signed up to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol, capping emissions of carbon dioxide. The United States pulled out in 2001, arguing that Kyoto would cost jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations from goals for 2012. Still, U.S. President George W. Bush said last week that climate change was a "serious challenge". The U.N. report, the fourth of its kind, is expected to foresee global average temperatures rising to 2.0 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a "best estimate" of a 3.0 C (5.4 F) rise. Around 40 Greenpeace activists climbed Paris's Eiffel Tower on Monday to put up two banners pressing for urgent action on climate change. One read: "It's not too late".

ITN Source | January 31, 2007

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