At the time of the Rio summit in 1992, the percentage being given was just under half this, at 0.34 per cent.But although all the wealthy nations, except the US, pledged at Rio to move towards the target, they have moved further away since then. The US has not yet offered any figure, while Australia says it cannot begin to contemplate any cuts in its fast-rising emissions.”We in Europe have put our cards on the table. It is time for the special pleading to stop and for others to follow suit. If we fail in Kyoto, we fail our children because the consequences will be felt in their lifetime,” said Mr Blair, who also warned of rising sea levels and damaging climate and temperature shifts. It was a message repeated by several other EU prime ministers and presidents in New York.In his speech to the General Assembly, Mr Blair said Britain would reverse the decline in UK foreign aid.

The biggest responsibilities falls on those countries with the biggest emissions.”The US, which Mr Blair did not mention by name, has the biggest emissions of all. Developed countries have promised to cut their emissions after 2000 – by how much will be settled at a climate treaty conference in Kyoto, Japan, in December.The EU is advocating a 15 to 20 per cent cut in annual emissions between 2000 and 2010, which would mean serious curbs in fossil fuel use and lifestyle changes. But Britain, Germany and Russia are the only large economies keeping that promise – mainly because of disastrous economic decline in the case of Russia. The European Union as a whole is also on target to meet its stabilisation commitment, thanks to Britain and Germany cutting emissions.”Some other countries cannot say the same, including some of the great industrialised nations,” Mr Blair told prime ministers and presidents from several dozen nations attending the earth summit, a week-long special session of the UN General Assembly.”To them I say this: our targets will not be taken seriously by the poorer countries until the richer countries are meeting them. Tony Blair yesterday condemned the United States and other industrialised nations for foot-dragging in the international campaign to tackle man- made climate change. After the back-slapping and warmth with President Bill Clinton at the Denver G7 Summit over the weekend, he repeated his pointed criticism of the US at a meeting with Vice-President Al Gore in New York yesterday.
Britain is also trying, at the United Nations Earth Summit, to forge a new environment and development consensus between rich and poor countries, by urging the wealthy nations to reverse the decline in their foreign aid.Mr Blair, accompanied to UN headquarters by no less than three of his Cabinet, condemned the US, plus Japan, Canada and Australia, for failing to deliver on commitments to stabilise rising emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide which comes from the burning of coal, oil and gas.This pledge, which covers the period 1990 to 2000, was made at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when all the developed nations signed a treaty to stabilise their annual CO2 emissions. That necessitated 14 hours’ flying by the world’s ultimate gas guzzler, clocking up nearly 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Three other ministers, John Prescott, Clare Short and Michael Meacher, are flying to New York and back sub-sonically by jumbo jet, with 40 members of the UK’s official delegation, including the former environment secretary John Gummer. Altogether this delegation will be responsible for more than 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.. Tony Blair thinks future Earth summits might best be done through televisual conferencing and electronic link-ups. Staying at home would save on climate- changing emissions from aircraft, he was due to say in his speech, although that bit was cut out to shorten it

He had a point.

The UK’s ministerial presence at the Earth Summit Plus Five event spewed out over 100 times more global-warming carbon dioxide gas in a few days than the average Briton is responsible for in an entire year.
The great bulk of this climate changing cloud came from Concorde, chartered cheap rate from British Airways to take Mr Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to the G7 summit in Denver then on to the New York event yesterday. “Some questions come to us with a kind of jinx attached,” a DoD spokesman told The Independent last week “Yours seems to have a jinx.”Essay, page 20. The youngest victim was two days old.Despite four weeks of enquiries to the State Department and the Department of Defense seeking clarification about the terms of sale of the American missiles – including 30 telephone calls giving the code numbers of the Hellfire missile which killed the ambulance victims on 13 April, – neither department had felt able to respond to The Independent’s questions last night.The Defense Department claimed that the State Department must answer; the State Department insisted that the Department of Defense must reply. Israel says that its battles in Lebanon constitute self-defence operations – “Grapes of Wrath” was commenced after Hizbollah guerrillas fired rockets into Israel in revenge for the booby-trap killing of a Lebanese teenager – but according to defence sources, the US government has not made a single complaint about the use of Israeli weaponry in Lebanon last year.American-made 155 mm guns fired the shells that slaughtered 109 Lebanese refugees – 55 of them children – at the UN camp at Qana on 18 April last year, while a US Marine Corps missile was believed to be responsible for the death of nine civilians from one family when the rocket was fired by the Israelis at a block of flats in Nabatiyeh on the same day. to friendly countries solely for internal security [or] for legitimate self-defense … ” but the bulk of prohibitions apply only to the further transfer of US weapons technology. It sails right by.”The terms of the US Arms Export Control Act state that “defense articles .. shall be sold or leased by the United States Government …

Senatorial and congressional committees will routinely approve the transfer next month, the costs defrayed from Washington’s $1.8bn (pounds 1.1bn) military assistance programme to Israel.US officers have complained to The Independent that Israel now has carte blanche to plunder the US inventory, knowing that its sympathisers on Capitol Hill will raise no questions about the use that will be made of America’s military technology against Arab countries.The officers, who said that almost all the bombs and missiles fired during “Grapes of Wrath” were transfers from US forces, spoke of thousands of tanks and artillery pieces stripped from US Nato armouries in Europe over the past 20 years for shipment to Israel despite angry protests from the Defense Department.”The State Department gives the orders and the acceptance of every Israeli request and desire – whatever it wants – is acceded to,” a senior retired US officer intimately involved in the sale and transfer of weapons to Israel, said “Questions aren’t asked any more. Just over a week ago, for example, the United States received an Israeli request for 98,000 shells for 155 mm guns – more than three times the 26,000 rounds fired into Lebanon during the entire three-week “Grapes of Wrath” operation – at a cost of $30m.No explanation was given by Israel as to why such an enormous quantity of ammunition should be needed six years after the US government launched its Middle East “peace process” in Madrid. Enquiries by The Independent have revealed that the Hellfire missile fired by an Israeli helicopter pilot at an ambulance in southern Lebanon on 13 April, 1996 – which killed four children and two women – was originally sold to the US Marine Corps by Martin Marietta of Florida, and only later transferred to Israel.But so routine has the system of weapons transfers from US inventories become, that massive shipments of ordnance to Israel are now undertaken with no publicity or debate. An investigation by The Independent has revealed that most of the American bombs and air-to-ground missiles fired by Israel in Lebanon last year were sold to the United States armed forces – not to Israel. Israel’s “Operation Grapes of Wrath” – the bombardment of southern Lebanon that killed almost 200 civilians and 14 guerrillas from the pro-Iranian Hizbollah – used at least 1,700 bombs and missiles that were “transferred” from US military stocks with no prohibition on their use against civilians.
In private, senior American officers have expressed grave concern about Israeli misuse of US weapons, including Marine Corps air-to-ground missiles that have killed dozens of Lebanese civilians over the past two years. Already, some new MPs have been sent out to explain Tony Blair’s “Labour into Power” modernisation project.Labour-held constituencies can also find their MPs planning to spend more time with them. Over the next six weeks, the party’s backbenchers will each spend a week in their own areas.