Blair Campaigns for Climate Action

There's no clear game plan for the afterlives of former national leaders. Some build houses and make peace (Jimmy Carter), some try to stay in the political game (Bill Clinton) and some just disappear on the golf course (Gerald Ford). But former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is taking a different tack. Since he left 10 Downing Street a year ago, Blair has spent much of his time in Jerusalem, working to broker a new peace deal in the Middle East. As if trying to untangle the world's most intractable diplomatic knot didn't keep him busy enough, Blair has also set his sights on solving another insolvable problem during his retirement: climate change.

On Friday in Japan, where the G8 summit of global leaders will convene next week, Blair released a global warming report titled "Breaking the Climate Deadlock" that he'd helped guide with the Climate Group, a London-based environmental NGO. The study plots a road map for international climate negotiations between now and the end of 2009, when the world's nations will meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. More than 10 years after the Protocol was signed, the world still has yet to achieve a fairer and more effective climate deal — even as the scientific consensus on global warming has darkened considerably. Politics haven't caught up with climatology.

Blair's choice of venues wasn't an accident — global warming is likely to be high on the agenda at the G8, where leaders from the world's biggest economies, along with representatives from major developing nations like China and India, will try to set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking in Tokyo, Blair urged world leaders to commit to cutting global carbon emissions 50% by 2050 — including developing nations, which have no obligations under Kyoto — and paving the way toward a firm interim target for cuts by developed nations by 2020. Without near-term goals, a promise to cut emissions four decades in the future is virtually meaningless. But for years many developed nations — most significantly but not solely the U.S. — have been reluctant to fix themselves to carbon caps while major developing nations remain unbound to any commitments. China and India, however, refuse to consider carbon-cutting action that could slow their exploding economic growth. Hence the climate deadlock — an appropriate word — the former Prime Minister has set himself to break. "Now is the moment to get serious about a solution," Blair said in a speech Friday. "Such a solution has to be global."

Speaking to TIME after his speech, Blair — who put climate change high on the G8's agenda when he hosted the 2005 summit in Gleneagles — was characteristically optimistic. "When I began this process in 2005, the issue was one of political will," he said. "But the world has woken up. The question is not, what is the problem, but what is the solution?" In a way, Blair is right. From San Antonio to Shanghai, ordinary people, business leaders and politicians are worried about climate change. They're afraid, and they want something done about it. Even the long recalcitrant U.S. has come around, with both presidential candidates supporting significant climate action (though Democratic Senator Barack Obama promises to go much further), and states like California stepping ahead of the curve. What remains to be done is simply punching through an equitable climate deal for the world, then letting the magic of energy efficiency, renewable power and avoided deforestation take us to a low-carbon world. It's a framework that Blair and the Climate Group lay out well in their report. "Once you agree to a global target and a shared vision, you can identify the key building blocks for a new economy and move towards a new world," he said.

The world can agree on a problem — it can even agree on what a solution might look like — but that doesn't mean it's ready to act together, as Blair hopes. We're likely to see just how far apart we remain from global consensus at next week's G8 summit in Hokkaido. Developing nations know that climate change is their problem too, but they'll still bargain hard to ensure that rich nations bear most of the burden. The developed world is far from united — though E.U. nations have already committed to at least a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels), the U.S. and oil-rich Canada remain reluctant to tie themselves down. (President George W. Bush recently pledged to cap the growth in U.S. emissions by 2025 — a goal that's not even in the same galaxy as that of his European counterparts.) Host nation Japan, the most energy-efficient big country in the world, is struggling to meet its Kyoto caps and is backing away from hard targets. Countries can't even agree on which year to employ as a baseline for emission reductions: 1990, which was used for the Kyoto Protocol, or a more recent year. No one is speaking the same language. "You have a clear split between the European and the non-European G8 nations," says Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "That makes it unlikely we'll get any specific agreement for 2020, which makes it unlikely developing nations will agree to specific targets for 2050."

Meanwhile, the world melts — scientists recently warned there was a chance that the North Pole could be briefly ice-free this summer, an astonishing possibility. The longer you spend reporting on climate change, the less likely it seems that our political systems are capable of crafting a commensurate response. Maybe we lack the ability to plan so far in ahead. In the U.S., the talk today is of gas prices, not global warming, and the first serious attempt at a federal carbon cap recently went fell in an embarrassing defeat in the Senate. Present fears overwhelm us, something Blair should know well — his Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 was meant to focus on development and climate change, but it was instead dominated by the London bombings, which had occurred a few days earlier.

Blair seems resolute to meet the climate challenge, and he has the right ideas. "If you've got children, you want them to grow up in a world that doesn't have catastrophic climate change," he said. But after a few more months of hitting his head against the climate wall, he might want to spend his retirement years working on something a bit easier. Like Mideast peace.