Tony Blair has joined Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a call for countries around the world to join the fight against global warming. In his last press conference, Mr Blair borrowed a line from one of the movie star’s Terminator films to say farewell, joking: “My press officer said to me, whatever else you do this morning, don’t say: ‘I’ll be back’.” Both Mr Blair and Mr Schwarzenegger stressed the importance of getting international agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases once the targets set in the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.
And they both said it was vital that a new agreement has the backing not only of America – which refused to ratify Kyoto – but also China and India, which are set to become the world’s biggest carbon emitters. Mr Blair made clear he would have liked to see the US come on board with Kyoto in 1997, but indicated he believes it is now possible President George Bush will sign up for a successor deal.
“It would have been better if we had acted sooner, that’s the truth,” he said, when asked about America’s tardy response to the problem of global warming. “The important thing now is that we have agreement.” Mr Bush’s readiness to agree with other leaders of rich industrialised countries at G8 summit in Germany to look for ways to stabilise global temperatures was a vital breakthrough, Mr Blair suggested. He said: “For the first time at the G8 a few weeks ago, we have an agreement on the basic principles for a new global deal on climate change, we can agree a goal for stabilising the climate, we can agree that it has to be a framework that involves everybody – in particular America and China – and we can agree the type of mechanisms that are going to get us there.”
The “urgency” achieved at the EU Heiligendamm summit would give momentum to global warming conferences called by the US in the autumn and the UN in December, making agreement on a successor to Kyoto more likely, said Mr Blair. The Prime Minister said he did not believe America would sign up to any agreement that did not include China, while China would not sign up to anything which prevented its people improving their standards of living. But he made clear he did not regard Mr Bush as a block to agreement, provided the right deal could be devised.
“I think people understand that if the President can get agreement on a global deal, he will actually deliver that agreement too,” he said. Mr Schwarzenegger, who has made the battle against climate change a personal crusade, said that it had been down to state governors like himself, rather than the US Federal Government, to show leadership on global warming. “The US is states and counties and cities,” he said. “Washington is just a little dot. Why should we wait for Washington?”
Mr Schwarzenegger said the US needed to show leadership, and it was not good enough for America to demand action on climate change from developing countries, when it produced 25 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions with just five per cent of its population. “The idea of continuing to say that ‘China should come in otherwise I’m not going to’, that doesn’t work. We have to show leadership.”
Mr Schwarzenegger described the UK as a “model” for California, which had inspired him to believe it was possible to combine economic growth with environmental protection. Both Mr Blair and Mr Schwarzenegger made clear they regard technological innovation as a key to solving the problem of global warming, through more efficient energy production, cleaner cars and planes and emerging techniques like carbon sequestration to prevent the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Business opportunities could make clean technology the “new gold rush”, said the California governor. And he added: “Technology in the end is going to save the day. Technology is going to save the environment. The faster we can improve technology with cleaner cars, cleaner jet engines and so on, the better it is.”
Mr Blair neither confirmed nor denied reports that he is to be appointed an international envoy for peace in the Middle East. But he hinted strongly that he was ready to take up a job seeking agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, saying: “I have said on many occasions I would do whatever I could to help such a resolution come about.”
Mr Schwarzenegger said he would back Mr Blair’s appointment as envoy for the quartet of the US, EU, UN and Russia which is leading the international drive for Middle East peace. But the governor added: “Out of selfish reasons I hope that he becomes the envoy for the environment and brings all the countries of the world together to join some kind of treaty – a Kyoto kind of treaty – that everyone can join and we can all together reduce greenhouse gases.
“I think the Prime Minister is the only person who can do that.”
