Word: howard
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...were to draft one international politician to be your front man on climate change, Australian Prime Minister John Howard would not be high on your list. The conservative politician - and "mate of steel" to George W. Bush, according to the U.S. President - refused to enact the Kyoto Protocol and has long expressed doubt about global warming. Australia is second only to the U.S. in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions among major countries, and it's the world's biggest exporter of coal, the cheap, dirty fuel responsible for a quarter of the world's total carbon emissions...
...Howard, who has ruled Australia for more than 11 years, seems to be having a change of heart - at least rhetorically. Australia is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum this week, and Howard, with Bush's approval, has pushed climate change to the top of the agenda. He wants APEC - made up of 21 nations bordering the Pacific, including big carbon emitters like the U.S., China, Russia and Japan - to consider long-term "aspirational goals" on reducing carbon emissions, rather than the binding cuts called for in Kyoto. Such flexibility, he argues, would help bring major developing economies...
...Howard has been cautious in the days leading up to the summit. "There's broad goodwill and there's a broad belief that this conference should provide a way forward on this issue," he told reporters on Sept. 4. Environmental groups like Greenpeace have dismissed the agenda as a vague distraction from the need for stronger action, but Howard's tamer goals might still prove difficult to implement. For one thing, even by the standards of most international groupings, where hot air outweighs actual action, APEC usually accomplishes little of substance, other than the traditional goofy closing photo of national...
...plan a successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012. For all its path-breaking importance, Kyoto was flawed because it proved unacceptable to Washington and put no clear demands on major developing countries like China, which has just passed the U.S. as the world's top emitter. If Howard's aspirational goals - which emphasize clean technology and energy efficiency over hard emissions caps - get Beijing and Washington talking at the same table, this APEC summit would accomplish more than most. "Howard argues that his approach is the only way to bring major emitters - code for China and the U.S. - into...
...That pretty much sums up APEC, which, as Australian Prime Minister John Howard likes to say, does its best work "under the radar." As a club based on informal cooperation, APEC doesn't set rules or impose targets. Instead, it promotes free-market values and offers practical help in implementing them. "It builds a climate in which trade liberalization is seen as the right direction," says Heseltine. "To resile from that, to move backward, actually becomes very hard." For a quick measure of APEC's effectiveness, says Oxley, contrast Vietnam and Venezuela. Vietnam, embracing APEC's open-market model...