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Post by Jaga on Sept 24, 2007 11:44:56 GMT -7
and also many other foreign leaders are here but we do not know too much about it.... Polish President Lech Kaczyñski has left for a four-day visit to the USA. He is to take part in the 62nd Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, as well as a world leaders meeting concerning climate change. President Kaczyñski will also to meet the Polish diaspora in New York and Chicago. On Monday some 80 world leaders will meet in the UN seat in New York to discuss climate changes issues. “These top-level talks are aimed at discussing all issues connected with climate changes. Above all, we will talk about what can be done better and what are the challenges ahead of us,” said Mariusz Handzlik, head of the Foreign Affairs Bureau in the President’s Chancellery. In the USA there will also be a number of bilateral talks. The President will meet for example with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Chile's President Michelle Bachelet, as well as Presidents of Latvia Valdis Zatlers and Turkmenistan, Gurbangulmy Berdimuhammedow. On Sunday evening President Kaczyñski accompanied by his wife, Maria, will meet with Polish expatriates living in NY in the Polish National Home situated the traditionally Polish district of the city – Greenpoint. On Tuesday Lech Kaczyñski will also meet with the Poles living in Chicago. (photo: Jakub Szymczuk) www.thenews.pl/archives/1282-Polands-President-visits-USA.html
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Post by Jaga on Sept 24, 2007 15:47:43 GMT -7
This is what they talk about:
World Leaders Meet for UN Climate Talks
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With tales of rising seas and talk of human solidarity, world leaders at the first United Nations climate summit sought Monday to put new urgency into global talks to reduce global-warming emissions.
What's needed is "action, action, action," California's environmentalist governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, told the assembled presidents and premiers.
The Bush administration showed no sign, however, that it would reverse its stand against mandatory emission cuts endorsed by 175 other nations. Some expressed fears the White House, with its own forum later this week, would launch talks rivaling the U.N. climate treaty negotiations.
President Bush didn't take part in the day's sessions, which drew more than 80 national leaders, but planned to attend a small dinner Monday evening, a gathering of key climate players hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Ban set the day's theme in his opening speech, declaring that "the time for doubt has passed" on the issue of global warming and calling the U.N. climate talks "the appropriate forum for negotiating global action."
He organized the one-day summit to build momentum for December's annual climate treaty conference in Bali, Indonesia, when Europe, Japan and others hope to initiate talks for an emissions-reduction agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
The 175-nation Kyoto pact, which the U.S. rejects, requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. It set an average target of a 5 percent cut below 1990 levels by 2012 for emissions from power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources.
Advocates for emissions reductions say a breakthrough is needed at Bali to ensure an uninterrupted transition from the 1997 Kyoto pact to a new, deeper-cutting regime, something that almost certainly would require a change in the U.S. position.
The chief U.N. climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, told the summit of the mounting evidence of global warming's impact, including the accelerating rise in sea levels as oceans expand from heat and the runoff of melting land ice.
"The time is up for inaction," he said.
A Pacific islander, President Emanuel Mori of the Federated States of Micronesia, told the summit that encroaching seas are already destroying crops, contaminating wells and eating away at his islands' beaches.
"How does one explain to the inhabitants that their plight is caused by human activities done in faraway lands?" he asked.
The United States has long been the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Bush objects that Kyoto-style mandates would damage the U.S. economy and says they should be imposed on fast-growing poorer countries like China and India in addition to developed nations. He instead is urging industry to cut emissions voluntarily and is emphasizing research on clean-energy technology as one answer.
On Thursday and Friday, Bush will host his own Washington climate meeting, limited to 16 "major emitter" countries, including China and India, the first in a series of U.S.-led gatherings expected to focus on those themes.
"The Washington meeting is a distraction," Hans Verolme, climate campaigner for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, told reporters. U.S. leaders "need to show they are serious and implement domestic legislation to reduce emissions," he said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the summit, put the Washington meetings in a different light, describing them as designed "to support and help advance the ongoing U.N. discussion."
Japan's envoy, former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, said Tokyo believes the separate U.S. talks will "contribute to achieving consensus" in the U.N. process, in which all agree that China, India and others must eventually accept emission limits.
But Japan and others, to one degree or another, stressed that all nations — including the United States — must accept emission targets.
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