Half of What? Climate change is dominating this week´s Group of Eight meeting in Japan, as it should.

 

Today´s announcement that the G8 nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) have pledged to cut their greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050 brought confusion because it wasn´t immediately clear if the baseline for that reduction would be current emission levels or 1990 emission levels.

 

It would be helpful if the world´s wealthiest and most powerful nations could get that straightened out, because the difference is, ahem, significant.

 

Tomorrow the G8 will deliberate some more about climate change, and this time the talks will include the Outreach Five nations -- Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. This also is significant since those nations, China and India in particular, are undergoing explosive economic growth and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with no end in sight.

 

Paper Chase. Speaking of China and India, the insatiable demand for recycled paper in those fast-growing Asian nations is driving a new trend here: large-scale, organized poaching of curbside recyclables.

 

In San Francisco this is becoming an epidemic, and, as this Associated Press story reports, municipalities and recycling companies are going to great lengths to curb the curbside larcenists.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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