LONDON (AFP) — Former British premier Tony Blair is leading a team of international environment experts backed by the United States and the United Nations and charged with securing a global climate change deal, he told The Guardian on Friday.
"There is a deadlock. Everyone is agreed where we want to get to, but unless you agree on the framework for getting there, you are left with a process and not a result," Blair told the newspaper.
Blair, who stepped down as prime minister last year after 10 years in power, said he thought he could prepare a framework for a 50 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, but added that it was important to agree on a deal that included the United States and China soon.
"The fact of the matter is that if we do not take substantial action over the next two years, then by 2020 we will (be) thinking seriously about adaptation rather than prevention," he said, adding that he had the backing of the White House, the United Nations, and Europe.
The former prime minister's team includes several international experts on climate change and will present an interim report in June, and will then list the differences remaining between major countries in the summer of 2009.
His group will follow that up by presenting a list of economic models to help overcome fears over the potential sacrifices necessary to combat climate change.
"The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that we are not going to get the action necessary by telling people not to consume," Blair said.
"The Chinese and Indian governments are determined to grow their economies. They have hundreds of millions of very poor people -- they are going to industrialise, they are going to raise their living standards, and quite right too."
Blair, who is also an international peace envoy to the Middle East, said he would formally launch his initiative at a meeting of the G20 group of the world's 20 biggest polluters in Japan this weekend, and would then travel to China and India to discuss the plans.
"Essentially what everyone has agreed is that climate change is a serious problem, it is man-made, we require a global deal, that there should be a substantial cut in emissions at the heart of it, and this global deal should involve everyone, in particular America on the one hand and China on the other, so it is the developed and developing world," he said.
"The question is what is the framework that gets everyone in the deal?"
Blair launched the G20 dialogue while prime minister in 2005 when he hosted the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. This weekend will mark the fourth meeting of the initiative.
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