Goosing the Ganders

From Reuters

LONDON — Lawmakers and business leaders from around the world launched a campaign on Friday to push recalcitrant governments to take action on climate change.

Accusing rich and poor alike of talking a good fight against but doing little, the parliamentarians from the Group of Eight rich nations and five major developing countries said their three-year goal was to force the pace.

"Climate change is both a national and a global problem and an issue that transcends political affiliations," Joan Ruddock, British parliamentarian and co-chair of the new Climate Change Dialogue initiative, told a news conference.

Canadian lawmaker Bryon Wilfert, saying his country now had the toughest global warming policies of any G8 nation, said governments had been lazy in tackling the crisis that threatened millions of lives across the world through droughts and floods.

"There is an urgency that not all players grasp or share," he said in a thinly veiled reference to the United States' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on cutting emissions of greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels.

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