Emissions Strategy

The U.S., Australia, Japan, China, India, and South Korea have announced the creation of eight working groups to study and promote technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Representatives of the six industrialized countries, collectively called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development & Climate, agreed to the initiative at a meeting held Jan. 11–12 in Sydney, Australia.

The working groups will focus on cutting emissions from fossil energy use; increasing renewable energy and distributed generation; cleaning up power generation and transmission; reducing emissions from the steel, aluminum, cement, and coal-mining industries; and setting standards for buildings and appliances.

To fund the program, Australia pledged $100 million to the partnership to be spent over five years to support a range of environmentally friendly projects. In his 2007 proposed budget, President George W. Bush will be requesting $52 million to support partnership efforts.

In its communiqué, the partnership notes that fossil fuels “underpin our economies” and “will be an enduring reality for our lifetimes and beyond.” It vowed not to sacrifice economic growth in the effort to combat climate change.

Environmental groups call the efforts of the Asia-Pacific partnership minuscule in comparison with the billions of dollars of investment for deploying clean technologies that have been generated by the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “The few million dollars on the table are paltry, nowhere near enough to develop new technologies and certainly not enough to get them into widespread use,” says Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.