Greenpeace urges climate talks to reject nuclear
© 2000 Reuters Limited
September 6, 2000
PARIS - Environmental group Greenpeace yesterday urged experts at international talks on climate change to reject nuclear power as a solution to global warming.
"France and Britain are leading the lobby for nuclear to be included in the list of 'acceptable technologies' that can be used for 'clean development' projects. We want it to ruled out," Greenpeace France director Bruno Rebelle told Reuters.Representatives of 180 countries are meeting in the central French city of Lyon this week and next to thrash out how an international agreement to curb the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming will be made to work in practice.
The negotiations, between experts from the countries which signed the Kyoto Protocol (treaty) in 1997, are a crucial preparation for ministerial-level world talks on climate change in the Dutch city of the Hague in November.
The Kyoto Protocol commits industrialised countries to cutting emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to around 5.2 percent below the 1990 level by 2008-2012.
After three years of negotiations, the Kyoto signatories have still not agreed if there should be sanctions for countries which fail to meet their reductions targets.
Nor have they agreed how systems for buying the right to pollute - either by purchasing emissions credits from states which more than meet their reductions targets or by funding projects for curbing emissions in other countries - will work.
Environmental groups want recourse to these so-called flexible mechanisms kept to a minimum, so that governments take genuine action at home to cut greenhouse gas emissions from oil, gas and coal consumption, transport and heavy industry.
They also want the Kyoto rules explicitly to prevent countries earning emissions credits by building nuclear power stations abroad. "Otherwise they could use the Protocol as an excuse to revive the ailing nuclear industry," Greenpeace France energy specialist Helene Gassin said.
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin - whose country obtains 80 percent of its electricity from atomic energy - is due to attend the talks on September 11.