Kyodo News. The G8 nations are drafting an action plan that, among other things, promotes the transfer of energy-saving technology to developing nations, with China and India especially in mind.

The Gleneagles Action Plan on Climate Change and Clean Energy is set to be adopted at the upcoming G8 summit in July in Gleneagles, Scotland.

Energy researchers from the G8 plus five developing nations met in the UK in May to discuss ways to improve collaboration on clean energy, and combating climate change. These included enhancing research links in transport, bioenergy, solar energy, carbon capture and storage and the built environment.

The proposed plan is partly the outcome of those discussions.

The plan is reportedly also being drawn up as a way for the G8 nations to demonstrate their common stance on global warming ahead of full-fledged discussions on international global warming measures in the post-Kyoto Protocol regime for 2013 and beyond. This also maps to comments that President Bush has made about steps the US should take to help China become more energy-efficient.

The draft outline calls for the use of hydrogen energy, speeding up the development of technology to absorb excess carbon dioxide, and stipulates the respective roles and measures to be taken by the G8 nations for various issues such as energy use and funding for global warming measures.

The plan will call for the promotion of the development of low-emission vehicles such as hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles and research into creating a system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in air transport.

The draft apparently also calls on the  International Energy Agency to help review international standards on energy efficiency for home electronics, appliances and buildings.

As an aside, the focus on appliance efficiency can be extremely effective. Climatologist Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford observed the following during an interview on Living on Earth:

Back in the 70s, in the energy crisis, California passed a rule, fought, screamed about by the electric appliance industry requiring a more than a factor of two improvement in the efficiency of refrigerators. They said it would be too expensive, and everybody’s refrigerator would be too small. None of that happened. In fact, the Feds adopted those rules a few years later, and the amount of electricity that is saved is so amazing that despite the Vice President telling us that energy efficiency is a moral virtue and doesn’t do anything, really, and you need supply like ANWR, we have already saved just in refrigerators alone from the initial California rules that went national two ANWRs in energy.

The plan apparently does not, however, include targets on how much G8 nations should cut on greenhouse gas emissions, thereby avoiding a conflict with the policy of the US, which has opted out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

The G-8 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.