Global warming will be top issue at G8 Summit in Italy

Steven Thomma - McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — One question could dominate this week's gathering of the world's top economic powers in Italy: Will the United States and Europe act by themselves to cut emissions of the heat-trapping gases that are causing long-term global warming and will they be able to persuade fast-developing nations such as China and India to go along?

President Barack Obama will lead a gathering of nations called the Major Economies Forum, looking to forge a consensus for a global pact to stop global warming ahead of a climate meeting in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He'll arrive Wednesday in Italy reportedly prepared to embrace the broad goal of limiting global warming to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — in the global average temperature since the dawn of the industrial age. Many scientists see 2 degrees C as a dangerous threshold that shouldn't be crossed.

Obama also will arrive at the Wednesday-Friday meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, armed with the tentative promise of U.S. action to cut its own emissions, a dramatic shift after years of opposition by the Bush administration. The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would put the first mandatory limits on U.S. emissions and reduce them if it becomes law.

However, the president faces a challenge winning Senate approval even for a proposal that environmentalists call watered down and Europeans consider short of what's needed. Even if the core group that's meeting in Italy — the world's eight top economic powers, called the G-8 — agrees to the goal of curbing global warming, it'll still find major countries such as China reluctant to sign on to specific emission cuts.

"It is premature to expect any major breakthroughs on contentious issues like targets for emissions reduction," said Sarah Ladislaw, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right research center in Washington.

Still, White House aides said that Obama hoped that the Major Economies Forum, a gathering of economic powers that produce roughly 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, would build momentum toward an international pact in which all nations took action to fight global warming, though not all in the same way or on the same timetable.

"Obviously bolstered by the great progress in the House last week, the president will chair that meeting and press for continued progress on energy and climate," said Denis McDonough, the president's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

The first test could be reaching broad agreement on the goal of capping global warming at 2 degrees Celsius. Global temperatures already have risen about 1 degree C. Keeping them from rising more than 1 to 3 degrees C this century would require aggressively reducing greenhouse gases.

Although the magnitude of change is difficult to predict, scientists forecast that if the world takes the least aggressive approach to reducing emissions, the global average temperature will increase by another 2.5 to 6.5 degrees C (4.5 to 11.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week that she expected the G-8 to endorse the 2-degree C goal and suggested that the United States will go along for the first time.

"We cannot do this without the United States," she said in Berlin of the fight against global warming. "That's why it will be important to have a clear acknowledgement of the 2-degree goal in the documents from the L'Aquila summit."

The European Union, which already has endorsed the 2-degree C cap as well as plans to cut its own emissions, wants the United States to go farther than the cuts that the U.S. House has approved. That bill would cut U.S. emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. The Europeans want a 20 percent reduction from the much lower levels of 1990.