Merkel presses China on climate

[demoleft]

Source: BBC

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged China to address the issue of climate change, as she starts a three-day visit to the country.

But China said that it was still catching up economically, making it harder to reduce emissions.

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While China declared its first national plan to tackle climate change in June this year, it also said it would not want the problem addressed at the expense of economic development.

China is not obliged to meet targets that apply to developed nations under the UN-backed Kyoto protocol, which runs until 2012 and is the main international framework for reducing greenhouse emissions.



Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6964892.stm

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A look at home, Mrs Merkel.
"The European Union thinks it can be a model for the world on climate change. Can it?", The Economist March 2007:

"Unfortunately, the EU often seems more committed to grand statements of intent than to practical steps to achieve their aims. Consider the emissions-trading scheme (ETS), Europe's flagship programme for reducing greenhouse gases. Under the ETS, companies get a fixed number of permits to pollute. As they grow, they must either reduce emissions or buy spare permits from other firms that have done more to clean up their act. Such “cap-and-trade” schemes have proved a cheap and effective way to reduce emissions of other pollutants in America. But the EU handed out too many permits for the ETS, resulting in little if any reduction in emissions. Worse, governments handed out the permits free, in effect rewarding the dirtiest firms with a valuable asset." (My bold)

The Economist, http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8850522

What's worse, in Italy (for example) there's no discussion, no news - nothing about this commitment.
When it comes to pollution the only name that comes to the average people's mouth is "China". (Which is not the lamb, anyway).
Mrs Merkel had better make things work over here.
Please make corrections in case the ETS system has changed in the meantime. The Economist article is from last March.

[David__77]

1. Then Germany should provide economic assistance to China.

Developed countries should help the developing countries to address these environmental concerns in a way that does not hinder their development. Certainly the developed countries had an environmentally dirty process of industrialization. We should all be interested in developing a world with less economic polarization between nations and classes.