End blame game on climate change, Arnie tells the UN

Published on Tuesday 25 September 2007 00:05

RICH and poor countries must get over their disagreements about how to fight climate change and forge a new pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol, California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, said yesterday.

Speaking at a United Nations conference on global warming, Mr Schwarzenegger urged countries to stop blaming each other for rising temperatures and to work together to solve the problem.

"The current stalemate between the developed and the developing worlds must be broken," Mr Schwarzenegger said. "It is time we came together in a new international agreement that can be embraced by rich and poor nations alike."

Mr Schwarzenegger, a film star and one-time body builder, has made reducing emissions a key policy goal of his governorship of California, the world's seventh largest economy.

The governor said it was time to stop the blame game.

"The time has come to stop looking back at the Kyoto Protocol," he said. "The consequences of global climate change are so pressing ... it doesn't matter who was responsible for the past. What matters is who is answerable for the future. And that means all of us."

UN climate change negotiations will take place in December in Bali to try to forge a way to cut emissions after the Kyoto agreement expires.

Mr Schwarzenegger, who backed a landmark 2006 California law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, urged leaders to stop talking and start acting.

"California is moving the United States beyond debate and doubt to action," he said. "I urge this body to push its members to action also."

Mr Schwarzenegger has criticised the Bush administration for not doing enough on the issue, while praising European countries for showing leadership and developing an emissions-trading system.

George Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto treaty, which requires 36 industrial nations to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 5 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. The US president says Kyoto unfairly burdens rich countries while exempting developing ones such as China and India.

Developing nations say rich states built up their economies without emissions restraints and argue that less-developed countries should have the same opportunity to establish their economies now.

But as emissions from places such as China and India grow, environmentalists say action by the developed world alone will not be enough to stop the warming trend.

The one-day meeting, of more than 150 countries, was also scheduled to hear from such international figures as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and from the climate campaigner and former US vice-president, Al Gore.