On Monday, the states of California, New Jersey and New York joined eight European Union countries — Portugal, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands — and New Zealand, Norway, and the Canadian region of British Columbia to create an International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP).

This new forum was created to enable countries to work together against climate change and exchange their experiences on the matter.

Carbon markets exist around the world, as industry pays for the right to pollute and the European Union presidency, currently Portugal, stated that “this cooperation agreement will also assure that the programmes in different countries are compatible with setting up a global carbon market.”

The various USA states involved said that they were disappointed their and that they will try to bring the rest of the country on board.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said he expected the United States to change its position on climate change and called on Washington to set targets for cuts in US greenhouse gas emissions. He said it was “a question of time.” He went on to say that “We need the United States to adopt a position similar to Europe’s. We cannot convince the emerging powers like China and India to reduce their emissions without the United States setting itself targets.”

The United States is the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter.

I do not know where Australia was?!?

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001, Kyoto, International Carbon Action Partnership, ICAP, Jose Manuel Barroso,  European Commission president, United States

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.