Criticism
Environmental and climate organisations such as Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Climate Action Network criticised the agreement for not setting binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries, and that the statement was little more than a political stunt.
Greenpeace pointed out that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told an APEC lecture in Melbourne in April 2007 that aspirational targets are a "political stunt" and "not a real target at all". One Greenpeace spokesperson said the declaration should be named the "Sydney Distraction" on climate change.
The Australian Conservation Foundation called the declaration "very weak" and said the "declaration does not advance global discussions on climate change."
Read more about this topic: Sydney Declaration
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)