Christian Aid: U.S. Must Be 'Named and Shamed' at Climate Conference
LONDON – The time is coming for the governments of the United Kingdom and European Union to "name and shame" the United States, a U.K.-based Christian agency claimed, for what it calls "blatant attempts to derail any meaningful international agreement on climate change."
Currently, environment ministers from around the world are attending a U.N. conference in Bali in an attempt to find a "roadmap" to prevent a possible climate catastrophe.
According to Christian Aid, the representatives from the United States made comments which reveal "that their only aim is to obstruct any plan that will require significant action by the rich nations that are overwhelmingly responsible for global warming."
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"If European ministers are serious about tackling climate change, then the days when they can stand discreetly by while the United States shamelessly wrecks the negotiations by rejecting any mention of clear and binding targets for reductions in rich countries' greenhouse gas emissions are numbered," said Andrew Pendleton, senior climate change policy analyst for Christian Aid.
Pendleton said the U.K. Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, should be ready to expose the United States for acting in an irresponsible and short-sighted way. Benn, Pendleton continued, should speak up for the world's poor who are in desperate need of Britain's moral leadership.
He described Bali as an opportunity for governments to act together to stop a climate catastrophe by seeing each country taking responsibility for its own contribution to climate change.
"After a year of calamitous disaster, in which the lives of many of the least responsible people have been claimed by ever more ferocious weather, in which scientists have spelled things out clearly enough for a three-year-old to comprehend and in which business is saying that it needs a clear, ambitious agreement, Christian Aid fears that the politicians are poised to fail horribly," Pendleton stated.
"This [failure] appears to be what the United States is actually working for. If the U.K. and the rest of the EU want a different outcome at Bali, then they must work to isolate the U.S. and to support their Indonesian conference hosts."
Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, told the conference attendees that without the participation of the United States, any climate change agreement would not be effective.
