UK diplomat compares climate change to Cold War

LONDON: The United States and Europe should treat the challenge of fighting climate change even more seriously than they responded to the threat from the Cold War, a British diplomat said Wednesday.

John Ashton, the British foreign secretary's special representative for climate change, said industrialized countries should essentially put their economies on a war footing to tackle the problem of man-made global warming.

"What's needed is a greater and more urgent mobilization of financial, technological, intellectual and political resources than it took to win the Cold War — a degree of mobilization across the economy of which we have no experience in peacetime," Ashton told a conference on climate change and security at the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank in London.

"It's becoming better understood that this deep and rapid restructuring of the economy is essential if we are to sustain the levels of affluence that our public now takes for granted," he said.

Britain, which signed up to the Kyoto treaty target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 12.5 percent from 1990 levels, has set the goal of reducing emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050.

Some environmentalists have pushed the country to set more ambitious targets.

The U.S. has yet to back mandatory emissions cuts, saying it favors market incentives to get polluters to reduce their output. It has also balked at signing up to any international pact on long-term reductions that leaves out developing powers such as China.

Earlier, a defense official told the conference that climate change was forcing the British military to adapt its strategy and equipment to cope with more extreme weather.

Undersecretary of State for Defense Derek Twigg said the British military was working on heat-resistant medical supplies and lighter medical kits to be used in hotter battlefields.

"We've moved beyond merely theorizing whether climate change has ramifications for defense. We know it will," Twigg said. "Our equipment will have to be adapted to operate in more extreme and much more difficult conditions across the globe."