By Simon Leufstedt on December 20th, 2009
Our world leaders haven’t yet apologized for their climate failure in Copenhagen so Greenpeace and the global tcktcktck campaign have done it for them in these advertisements at the Copenhagen airport:
“I’m sorry,” the text of the ad reads. “We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… We didn’t.”
Some of the so called world “leaders” depicted are Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev and others.
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By Simon Leufstedt on December 12th, 2008
Leaders from the European Union (EU) have just agreed on a new watered-down climate deal to tackle global warming. The actual emissions cuts could amount to as little as 4% by 2020.
Yesterday UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in Poznan that “the world is watching us. The next generation is counting on us. We must not fail.” He also called for the EU to show the way and leadership on the climate crisis for other countries. Unfortunately it seems the short-sighted “leaders” of Europe ignored him. Instead of 30% emission cuts by 2020 the EU leaders only agreed on cuts by 20% by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.
But the actual emission cuts could end up being as little as 4% by 2020, environmental groups warned. That is because of special exemptions for dirty industries in Europe as well as allowing cheap emission cuts overseas to be counted to the EU total. The latter has been heavily pushed by the new Swedish right-wing government who has called for as much as 88% of the EU emission cuts to be allowed to do overseas in development countries.
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