Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Leaders of Major Industrial Nations Clash over Climate Change, 06/08/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/g8_6-06.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is climate change?

2. Why are international leaders talking about it?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is the G8 Summit and how is it influencing the issue of climate change?

Amid a growing call to address global climate change, the leaders of the major industrial nations are set to debate some of the most ambitious climate change proposals at an international meeting since the mid-1990s.

The conversations will come this week in Heiligendamm, Germany, during the annual Group of Eight (G8) Summit, a gathering of the world's largest economic powers.

2. Who is hosting the G8 Summit this year and what is their plan to address global climate change?

The host country, Germany, has proposed that the participating countries adopt a plan to "stabilize" global temperatures, keeping them from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Most scientists predict that if global temperatures rise more than this amount, changes to the climate could be catastrophic.

3. What is the Kyoto Protocol? Why is it a focus of this international meeting?

The topic is also taking on additional importance as the last major international treaty aimed at reducing emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, is set to expire.

Countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to levels at least 5 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. The agreement was signed in 1997 but did not go into effect until 2005.

4. What is the U.S. opinion of the Kyoto Protocol?

One hundred sixty-nine nations ultimately ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, did not.

In 2001, President Bush said that he would not sign the agreement because it exempted some of the world's largest nations and biggest polluters, China and India, from reducing their emissions.

Under the agreement, China and India were exempted because they were developing economically and facing challenges cutting emissions while trying to expand their industries. The Bush administration argued that the two countries would have an unfair economic advantage if they weren't required to reduce their emissions.

5. What is President Bush's plan for addressing global warming?

After six years of refusing to agree on a global framework for addressing global warming, President Bush issued his own plan for high-level talks on climate change among the world's 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

President Bush's recent proposal would bring both India and China to the negotiating table, starting this fall. Each of the 15 countries included in the talks -- which produce 85 percent of world greenhouse gases -- would be responsible for coming up with its own plan to reduce emissions between 2012 and 2030.

6. How has China responded to the issue of global climate change?

China, in the meantime, has said that it is against mandatory caps on emissions and rejects Germany's goal of stabilizing world temperatures, saying they both run counter to its development goals.

Yet Ma Kai, chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planning body, said that the nation is "ready to work with the rest of the world community to reduce the effects of global warming," Bloomberg News reported.

China's recently released plan addressing climate change would focus on increasing energy efficiency and work to cut its greenhouse gas output, by adopting hydropower, nuclear energy and biomass fuels.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Though China is not a member of the G8 why is it important that the Asian nation play an active role in coming up with a plan to address global climate change?

2. What is more important to a country, a robust economy or a clean environment? Is it possible to have both? Why or why not?

3. How would you try and address the issue of climate change at the international level? Should more be done? If so, why has it not happened up until now?

4. The G8 Summit is dealing with the issue of global climate change on the international level. What is being done about climate change on the national or even local level? What can you do, as one person, to lessen your impact on global climate change?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.