Raphael John-Lall

French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy is call­ing for a World En­vi­ron­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tion to deal with cli­mate change and en­vi­ron­men­tal top­ics. "We must de­vel­op a world en­vi­ron­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion...There must be a new world gov­er­nance in Copen­hagen," he said. Sarkozy, who is the first French Pres­i­dent to at­tend a British Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing (CHOGM), made the call at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain.

Com­ment­ing on the Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence to take place in Copen­hagen in De­cem­ber, he said it will be a his­toric event for coun­tries to make im­por­tant de­ci­sions. He said: "Ei­ther we suc­ceed or we fail in Copen­hagen. If we fail we lose out. It's a his­toric chal­lenge. In the lead-up to Copen­hagen, things have not moved fast enough... im­por­tant de­ci­sions will be made there." "If de­ci­sions are not made in Copen­hagen then it will be a his­toric fail­ure...Ei­ther we take all the de­ci­sions or we take none," he added. Re­spond­ing to ques­tions about small states like T&T and the de­ci­sions they had to make re­gard­ing in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion and the en­vi­ron­ment, he said it was pos­si­ble to do both.

He said: "T&T has im­por­tant re­sources and a high stan­dard of liv­ing. But we want sus­tain­able growth with­out car­bons. The whole point of the meet­ing is that we are not ask­ing coun­tries to choose be­tween growth and the en­vi­ron­ment. That is look­ing at things the way they did in the 20th cen­tu­ry." Re­spond­ing to ques­tions about cri­te­ria for de­ter­min­ing car­bon emis­sions per capi­ta and its re­la­tions to coun­tries like T&T, he said he did not think that a small coun­try like this could se­vere­ly af­fect world car­bon emis­sions. "I don't think that T&T risks up­set­ting world bal­ance in terms of emis­sions. I don't know enough about T&T. Al­though I saw T&T's oil wells from my bed­room win­dow," he said.