IN BALI, a crush of thousands of green worthies and sweat-stained diplomats and politicians is showing how to save the environment while destroying it.
The United Nations’ climate change summit is being carried by fleets of jets and large cars and cooled by banks of power-chewing airconditioners. Blocks of expensive hotel rooms will be ablaze with lights every night of the 11-day conference which ends tomorrow.
Watching it all will be a flock of environmentalists and reporters, many of whom will be consuming energy along with the best of then.
If you want to know what is causing global warming, just go to Bali and watch the people who think they can prevent a climate catastrophe.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia yesterday said the conference had to consider people who were ”not worried about cars, airconditioners and cell phones” but about food.
None of the V8-and-Blackberry crew in the audience felt a need to offer a blush.
This is a conference addressing deforestation but which uses huge stacks of paper every day.
It is a conference demanding action on air pollution at which security guards have to wear face masks at check-points because of the accumulation of vehicle exhausts.
It is a conference installed in First World comfort supposed to decide a process to rescue the developing world from the excesses of others.
Rubbish emissions are up by 50 per cent from the conference venue and few pay heed to the garbage bins meant to separate paper and plastic.
When the rubbish men come around all is lumped in together, supposedly to be sorted at the dump.
Few pay heed to the signs imploring the thirsty crowds to recycle their plastic water cups and bottles, despite the water coolers around the venue. Side events and launches give out lavish souvenirs to attendees – glossy photo books about the forests, T-shirts to save orangutans. The money would be better spent saving the forests and orangutans.
There are more laptops at the conference than delegates.
Each day has been punctuated by a silly stunt from one or other of the hundreds of activists and interest groups – men wearing polar bear suits, pretend thermometers and fake forests being chopped down.
A Norwegian activist yesterday strode into the media centre wearing a cowboy outfit and carrying a stockwhip and branding iron. Earlier, he had stood at the traffic lights on the main road into the conference centre, saying he wanted to whip U.S. President George W. Bush into shape and brand his backside.
All a bit juvenile in the grand scheme of what is being discussed but it is a short-term boon for Bali where it is business as usual.
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
Rudd points finger at the US;
BALI DECEMBER 3 – 14 OUR CLIMATE FUTURE – PM takes the stage in Bali as climate change battle rages
BYLINE: Michelle Grattan, Mark Forbes and Marian Wilkinson, Nusa Dua, Bali
KEVIN Rudd has sent a pointed message to the United States that it must pull its weight in the international effort to combat climate change.
Speaking to the UN climate change conference in Bali – his first international address as Prime Minister – Mr Rudd also pledged that Australia would set ”robust” targets for cutting emissions by 2020.
But he still declined to give explicit endorsement to the plan for a Bali conference declaration in which rich nations would collectively nominate a target of 25% to 40% cuts by 2020.
In a clear reference to the US – now the only developed nation not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol – Mr Rudd said all rich nations should embrace a set of binding emission targets.
”We need this meeting at Bali to map out the process and timeline for this to happen,” Mr Rudd said. ”We need all developed nations – those within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol, and those outside that framework – to embrace comparable efforts in order to bring about the global outcomes the world now expects of us.”
Mr Rudd’s position has been that Australia accepts the science underlying the proposed 2020 cuts but does not want to adopt specific numbers until after the completion of Professor Ross Garnaut’s study into what is feasible for Australia.
Despite Mr Rudd’s failure to embrace specific targets, he received long and loud applause for ratifying the Kyoto Protocol when he took up his seat on the podium yesterday with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer and other government heads.
With just two days left for the conference to agree on a framework for tackling global warming past 2012, the UN chief issued a blunt warning about the importance of making a deal.
”If we leave Bali without such a breakthrough, we will not only have failed our leaders but also those who look to us to find solutions, namely the peoples of this world,” Mr Ban said.
”This is the moral challenge of our generation. Not only are the eyes of the world upon us. More important, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob them of their future.”
He also put direct pressure on the US, calling on it to ”exercise flexibility” in the negotiations.
But as Mr Ban and Mr Rudd were highlighting the importance of Washington’s role, its representatives in Bali were hardening their opposition to endorsement of specific cuts.
Chief US negotiator Hartan Watson said any declaration had to be ”neutral” and not include figures for potential emission cuts.
”Once numbers appear in text it pre-determines outcomes and it can really drive negotiations in one direction,” he said, adding that America wanted to leave ”all options on the table” for the negotiations over the next two years.
The hardline stance was echoed by the head of the American delegation, Paula Dobriansky, who said numbers amounted to a ”prejudgment”.
Mr Rudd handed over documentation for ratifying Kyoto to Mr Ban shortly before addressing the conference.
He said the costs of action on climate change were ”far less than the costs of inaction”. He also conceded that tackling climate change would ”require tough choices. And some of these at a political price”. But he said that ”unless we act, the long-term costs will threaten the security and stability of us all”.
Mr Rudd said that when Australia sets short-term and medium-term targets for emission cuts, ”they will be real targets. They will be robust targets.
”They will be cognisant of the science and they will set the Australian economy firmly on the path to achieving our commitment to a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050,” he said.
Mr Rudd also said developing countries had to play their part ”with specific commitments”.
”We must all respect the aspirations of developing nations to secure their economic development and deliver rising living standards for their people. But failure to act on climate change will make the development goal even harder to achieve.”
Mr Rudd said Australia recognised the responsibility of the developed countries to assist developing countries with technology transfer, financial incentives, and other support.
”The world expects us to deliver binding targets. It expects us to deliver specific commitments. It expects us all to pull together and for all of us to do our fair share,” he said.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong delivered a report to the conference on behalf of the Umbrella group of nations, which Australia chairs and includes Canada, Japan, Russia and the US among others.
Senator Wong said the group was committed to working towards ”outcomes that are ambitious, comprehensive, equitable, have respect for national circumstances, and provide flexibility in combating climate change”.
The group does not have a united stance on detail and no mention was made of the 2020 reference in the draft declaration.
Opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt criticised the lack of a concrete plan in Mr Rudd’s speech for Australia to take the lead in tackling world deforestation. But the Opposition has backed the Government’s refusal to specify a 2020 target for cutting Australian emissions until it receives a full analysis.
The chief executive of the Climate Institute, John Connor, expressed disappointment that the Australian Government was still not endorsing the 2020 negotiating range for cuts.
More Bali PAGE 10
OPINION
· Letters, Tandberg PAGE 14
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
Climate change action at what political price?;
Environment – ANALYSIS
BYLINE: Marian Wilkinson
”ACTION to tackle climate change will not be easy. It will require tough choices. And some of these will come at a political price,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the UN conference, perhaps prophetically.
Right now Mr Rudd has a choice in Bali, but so far he has hesitated to make it.
The choice is clear: either he embraces critical wording in the draft Bali deal recognising the scientific imperative for developed countries to lead the way in making deep cuts in their emissions by 2020, or he does not.
The European Union and much of the developing world have embraced the draft wording. Why? Because it sends a strong signal that the advanced, innovative economies of the world will drive forward the technological revolution that will ultimately be crucial in combating devastating climate change.
But as a prime minister in office for just 10 days, supporting these words is a very tough choice for Mr Rudd. He is well aware the US strongly opposes the draft. So does Canada, and probably Japan as well.
Mr Rudd has already split with the US on climate change by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. And yesterday he embraced robust 2020 targets for Australia that will be guided by scientific evidence.
But to go a step further and embrace the draft Bali text would put Australia at a much greater distance from its old allies and antagonise sections of the business community at home.
Mr Rudd’s rationalisation is that he wants to be a bridge between old allies and new, between China and the US. He knows the words in the draft text do not bind any country or impose any obligation. They are only the preamble to one part of the ”Bali road map”. And that road map itself is only the mandate to launch negotiations to reach a new global climate agreement in 2009.
He also knows the US could succeed in removing the words from the final Bali declaration signed on Friday.
But among some environmental groups in Bali, Australia’s reluctance to stand by the words will jeopardise Mr Rudd’s ambition to take a leadership role.
The Australian (Australia)
Targets to be taken out of climate pact – BALI CONFERENCE
BYLINE: Matthew Warren, Environment writer
A REFERENCE to non-binding targets is likely to be stripped from the road map for global climate change negotiations to be launched by the UN conference atBali.
The US, Japan and Russia are reported to be pushing hard for the removal of any reference to developed countries needing to make cuts of between 25 and 40per cent by 2020.
The US is also opposing any quantified national emission commitments by developing countries, saying this could turn the new global deal after 2012 into another Kyoto Protocol, which it refuses to ratify.
Opening the high-level talks yesterday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said any agreement on targets would need further negotiation beyond Bali, indicating he did not want the current impasse to impede work on a new post-2012 climate deal.
”Some time down the road we have to agree on that (targets),” he told reporters. ”At this time, we need to launch these negotiations to discuss in a detailed manner how the international community should address this issue on an urgent basis. We need to work hard during the remaining three days to agree on a road map to launch these negotiations and, by the weekend, I’m reasonably convinced that we will be able to agree on all these issues.”
The EU has been pushing hard for the Bali mandate, which will guide the terms of any new climate deal, to make specific reference to the most aggressive emission reduction targets mentioned by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Pew Environmental Centre yesterday said the US was pushing for removal of all text referring to the underlying science, including a reference to halving global emissions by 2050, which has been opposed by some developing countries.
Australia’s evolving position reiterated yesterday by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is that the draft text should refer to, and beguided by, the full science and not just the specific reference to one target.
US negotiators yesterday said they recognised the science and the need for a long-term goal to cut emissions.
The inclusion of targets risked predetermining the formal negotiations which will conclude at Copenhagen in 2009, they said.
”The reality in this business is that once numbers appear in text, it predetermines outcomes and it tends to drive negotiations in one direction,” said lead US negotiator Harlan Watson. ”We want to be sure that the text we have before us is going to be neutral.”
A fresh draft of the crucial Bali road map retains the controversial reference to targets for the time being, and will be finalised by the world’s environment ministers in high-level meetings today.
The relatively soft language of the text requires calling for emissions reduction commitments for developed countries and measurable and reportable actions by developing countries.
Negotiations to establish mechanisms to transfer abatement technologies between developed and developing countries have broken down at Bali. The talks have been unable to find a practical way of preserving the intellectual property rights ofdevelopers and fast-track deployment.
Australian Conservation Foundation director Don Henry said Mr Rudd had positioned Australia well at these negotiations starting with the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. ”He’s keeping his options on the details,” Mr Henry said. ”The negotiations are washing around here and he’s obviously ruling out a commitment to binding targets here.”
More reports, and Matthew Warren’s audio analysis, at www.theaustralian.com.au
The Australian (Australia)
See threat as opportunity: Ban – BALI CONFERENCE
BYLINE: Matthew Franklin, Chief political correspondent
THE UN Secretary-General believes the world can deal with climate change without major financial pain, provided it acts now and makes an economic virtue out of developing green energy sources.
Ban Ki-moon has also warned that only co-ordinated global action involving all nations can deal with the threats of climate change.
Addressing the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali yesterday, Mr Ban said there was no longer any scientific doubt that climate change was real and would cause rising sea levels, droughts and higher temperatures. ”The time for prevarication is over,” Mr Ban said, describing the problem as ”the defining challenge of our age”.
”Climate change is happening. The impact is real,” he said. ”We can still address the problem in ways that are both affordable and promote prosperity.”
Mr Ban said there was no trade-off between tackling climate change and pursuing development. It was possible to achieve both aims by developing scientific answers to reduce carbon emissions, ushering in a new age of industrial development and treating the problem not as a threat, but an opportunity.
”This shift toward a greener future is in its infancy and needs more nurturing,” he said.
Mr Ban also said all nations had to accept the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities on climate change, noting that the problem had been largely caused by developed nations and that those least responsible would bear the greatest consequences.
”Our atmosphere cannot tell the difference between emission from an Indonesian factory, the exhaust from a North American SUV or deforestation in South America,” he said.
”We must be fair in reflecting the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Climate change affects us all but it must now affect us all equally.”
Developing nations, Mr Ban said, must continue to lead the effort to tackle climate change, particularly by developing a new prosperity through sustainable solutions.
”This is the moral challenge of our generation,” he said.
”Not only are the eyes of the world upon us, more importantly, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future.
”Let us turn the climate crisis into a climate compact.”
The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
US embracing the climate challenge
BYLINE: ROBERT MCCALLUM*
ON December 3, the US joined Australia and the other parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali for an important meeting that will be a key step for the global community in addressing the serious global challenge of climate change.
At this two-week conference, the US is working productively and constructively with other nations to develop a Bali Roadmap for a new global climate change framework by 2009.
This road map would help guide the parties towards a post-2012 agreement that includes both developed and developing nations and effectively addresses climate change, strengthens energy security and supports sustainable economic growth.
The US believes that a post-2012 framework for climate change must be environmentally effective. Emissions are global, so the solution will need to be global to be effective.
An approach in which only some countries take action to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions will not be effective because in our global economy, reduced emissions in one country will be replaced or exceeded by emissions from non-participating countries.
However, a future global framework should be flexible to accommodate a diverse range of national circumstances, as well as broad social and economic goals, so that different nations can meet their international responsibilities in the climate change framework in different ways. The US is working at home and abroad on a range of initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency.
We have a diverse portfolio of domestic policy measures including dozens of mandatory, incentive-based, market-based, and voluntary programs to reduce our domestic emissions.
Since 2001, we have devoted $37 billion in climate change science, programs and technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while allowing for the economic growth which is necessary to develop and deploy these remedies.
For example, in 2006 the US deployed more new wind energy capacity than any other country and a similar expansion is under way this year.
Today, 40 per cent of the world’s clean geothermal energy is produced in California.
All these efforts can be done in a manner consistent with sustainable economic growth.
From 2000-2005, the US population grew by 5 per cent and GDP grew by 12 per cent while our greenhouse gas emissions increased by only 1.6 per cent.
From 2005-2006, our economy grew 2.9 per cent, but our greenhouse gas emissions actually decreased 1.3 per cent.
Internationally, US climate change policies are part of a broader, sustainable development agenda. We have initiated or participated in many international partnerships addressing specific climate change issues in ways that promote economic growth, growth which provides a higher standard of living for millions of people previously living in abject poverty.
Two such examples are the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate and the Methane to Markets Partnership.
Building on these successes, the US convened 17 of the world’s major economies — representing some 80 per cent of the world’s GDP, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions — and the UN for an inaugural Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change in September 2007.
By working together constructively, the US believes the Major Economies process can contribute to and in fact accelerate the discussions under the UNFCCC.
At the conference in Bali, we are listening carefully to the ideas of others.
Climate change is one of the great challenges of our times, and the international community of nations will be judged ultimately by our deeds, not our words.
While there is no silver bullet solution, I am confident that, working co-operatively with Australia and other responsible, committed nations, we can and will succeed.
Robert D. McCallum Jnr is the US Ambassador in Australia
The Guardian (London)
The green room Thomas Bielby, climate campaigner
What is your biggest guilty green secret?
When I am really tired, I can’t be bothered to turn the TV off when I watch it in bed, so I end up putting it on standby until either my mum or older brother comes upstairs and then I ask them to turn it off.
Do you know your carbon footprint?
Well, I know how to measure my carbon footprint and where you need to go to measure it, but I have to confess that I don’t know how big it is at the moment – I would imagine that it’s not that large as I don’t drive a car and I always use local transport.
What is your favourite green habit?
I ask my dad and nana to get into a higher gear in the car so that the energy usage isn’t as much. If you can’t erase it, then reduce it.
If you could buy any green gadget, what would it be?
I would buy one of those water-heating systems (ground-source heat pumps) in which pipes are put underground and the heat is taken out of the ground to heat the water. It saves something like a third off your energy bills. The government should develop a housing policy that demands house-builders meet targets in which they have to cut energy consumption by a third.
What wakes you up in a sweat in the middle of the night?
One thing that gets on my nerves is when people drive around in 4×4s in a city when the average speed is 10mph and when ”terrain” is nonexistent.
What skill do you have for a post-oil world?
Even in a post-oil world there will still be a need for writers and campaigners. I would use these skills to persuade people that renewable energy is the only way forward.
What would you save, apart from your family and friends, come the floods?
Middlesbrough football team.
Thomas Bielby, 16, was one of four young people from across the world selected by Plan International (plan-uk.org) to travel to Bali and participate in the UN’s climate-change conference.
The Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)
UN chief backs Canada at climate talks
BYLINE: The Canadian Press
Canada’s bid to water down climate-change targets at a world environmental conference earned the high-profile backing of the head of the United Nations yesterday.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon agreed that a demand for rich nations to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 might be too ambitious for this week’s climate talks.
His intervention came as a relief to Canada, which is pitted alongside the United States, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand against the European Union and developing countries.
Environment Minister John Baird rejects the EU’s 2020 target on two counts: he says Canada could not attain it and argues that the Bali conference should avoid any divisive debate over targets.
Baird says countries should simply agree to launch negotiations toward a post-2012 world climate treaty, set basic guidelines for the talks and agree to complete them by 2009.
Developing countries and most developed ones want a statement that would ask rich countries to seek 25-to-45 per cent emissions reductions from 1990 levels by 2020.
The UN chief appeared determined to avoid a stalemate over the 2020 figure.
Ban urged richer countries to be flexible, referring specifically to the United States.
He suggested that any talk about tough targets might have to wait.
The two-week conference brings together delegates from nearly 190 countries tasked with launching negotiations for an international accord to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
It wraps up tomorrow.
Investor’s Business Daily
Chilled By The Heat
If the zealots are right, global warming is the cause of just about any earthly ill or phenomenon. Hotter weather? It’s caused by global warming. Colder weather? Global warming again. More rain? Global warming. Drought? Global warming.
Even an increase in vampire moths, insects that consume human blood, has been blamed on global warming.
In a tribute to rational thinking, and a welcome repudiation of silliness, John Brignell, a British engineering professor, has compiled ”a complete list of things caused by global warming.” Each of the more than 600 entries links to a story in which some so-called expert or ”researcher” blames global warming for an unusual event, man-caused or no.
Taken individually, the items might seem to have some foundation in reality. It’s plausible, of course, that a warmer world could cause glaciers to retreat or trigger an increase in malaria. But taken cumulatively (see numberwatch.co.uk), the foolishness quickly comes into focus.
For example, is global warming really causing both more and less rainfall? Larger and smaller harvests? Shrinking and growing ice sheets? How about dying and flourishing coral reefs, or rising and falling fish stocks?
Also attributed to global warming are: riots, nuclear war, frostbite, Earth fever, the Minneapolis bridge collapse, a boom in kittens and sharks, a bust in ducks and geese, struggling brothels, faster ocean waves, higher sewer bills, a spider invasion of Scotland, an end to cremation, and pay raises for lawyers.
There’s also the inevitable catalog of extinctions — everything from wood lice to humans and leeches to pikas (rabbit-like creatures that live in the mountains).
One outcome Brignell doesn’t have on his list — oblivion — can now be added. That is what awaits, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday at the United Nations global warming conference in Bali, if a comprehensive agreement on stopping climate change is not reached.
Not a lot of science in that statement, but it’s just the sort of mystical nonsense that can be expected out of the United Nations.
But it took a spiritual man to bring clarity to the issue. In remarks planned for Pope Benedict XVI’s annual World Peace Day address on Jan. 1, released Wednesday, the pontiff reminds the world that the global warming debate should be based on science, not ”ideological pressure” used ”to draw hasty conclusions.”
Climate Change: The Midwest is frozen stiff, but global warming alarmists won’t cool off. Not bound by clear thinking, they can aver that blistering hot and bitter cold are both caused by man burning fossil fuels.
The Irish Times
Climate change road map to lack specific targets
Bali: The green lobby will not be pleased, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
The UN Conference on Climate Change is likely to end with an agreement on a Bali ”road map” for a two-year round of more intensive negotiations to tackle global warming – but without specifying any targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
This 13th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – or ”COP-13″ – is expected to produce a mandate for negotiations to begin next year, with a deadline of December 2009 for reaching agreement on all issues.
The lack of specific figures in the final text, which is now being negotiated by environment ministers and senior officials on all sides, will be seen as a fudge by environmentalists who are seeking commitments from rich countries to cut their emissions.
There will also be concern over the likely ”constructive ambiguity” of the text on issues such as deforestation, technology transfer and funding to help poorer countries – which are expected to be hit hardest – adapt to the effects of global warming, such as drought and floods.
”The Bali road map needs to be more than a shell”, said Richard Worthington, of Earth Life Africa.
”We would like to see a reference to the increase in temperatures being kept below two degrees, if we are to avoid hundreds of millions of environmental refugees.”
Stephan Singer, of the World Wildlife Fund, complained that the EU was not showing enough leadership in confronting countries such as Canada and Japan, which were ”playing a very destructive role here”, according to Nur Hidayati, of Greenpeace in southeast Asia.
Mr Singer said emissions cuts of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 reflected the latest scientific assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and needed to be included.
”Whatever we lose here, we won’t get back over the next two years,” he warned.
Mr Worthington claimed that the US was using other countries as ”stalking horses” to ensure that the Bali road map would be as non-specific as possible.
”If it doesn’t include a range of reductions [ for developed countries], it would end up as a shell,” he said.
But Paula Dobriansky, head of the US delegation, insisted that it was playing a constructive role in Bali, saying global climate change ”requires a comprehensive response” that would be ”environmentally effective and economically sustainable” in dealing with all of the issues.
”Emissions are global and the solution, to be effective, must be global. We want the world’s largest economies, including the United States, to be part of a global arrangement. An approach in which only some are committed to acting cannot be environmentally effective.”
Dr Dobriansky, under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, restated US opposition to including specific targets for cuts, saying ”we don’t want to to be prejudging outcomes here . . . We’re at the beginning of a fluid process and we have to see where it goes.”
For the first time, representatives of the media were ordered to leave the tiered press briefing room at the Bali conference centre yesterday morning so that it could be ”swept” by armed police with sniffer dogs in advance of the arrival of the US delegation.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said he wanted to remind ministers at the conference that they ”must deliver on the call by world leaders for a breakthrough in Bali”.
”We work for success not failure. We must be able to launch negotiations to reach an international agreement by end of 2009. It will be a difficult and complicated process. But what we want to see is the need to start it with a clear time-bound agenda.”
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said that if the Bali summit did not move the process forward, it would not be ”a failure of the UN” because it had provided ”the science that is driving the policy debate”.
He also singled out for praise countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Norway and New Zealand for ”committing themselves to a path [ of development] that five years ago would have been regarded as science fiction” – the idea of adopting national targets for achieving ”carbon-neutral” economies.
Costa Rica aims to achieve this goal as early as 2021, to coincide with the bicentenary of its independence from Spain, and one of the key measures it adopted – as long ago as 1996 – was to impose an extra 3.5 per cent tax on fossil fuels, to finance afforestation.
Los Angeles Times
The World ;
Meeting, not setting, goals is key;
U.N. climate summit is focused on targets for reducing carbon output, with little discussion on how it will be done.
BYLINE: Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer
Here’s a recipe to head off the worst effects of global warming:
1. Start with 30 new nuclear power plants around the world.
2. Add 17,0000 wind turbines, 400 biomass power plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and 42 coal or natural gas power plants equipped with still-experimental systems to sequester their carbon dioxide emissions underground.
3. Build everything in 2013. Repeat every year until 2030.
It’s an intentionally implausible plan presented this week by the International Energy Agency to make a point: For all the talk about emissions reductions, the actual work is way beyond what the world can achieve.
As delegates from 190 countries gather here on the Indonesian island of Bali to negotiate a ”road map” for the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, some experts are wondering whether the meeting has lost touch with the reality of tackling climate change.
So far, the thousands of delegates have been consumed by a debate over caps on emissions of greenhouse gases that are the primary cause of global warming.
The United States and China — the two biggest carbon polluters, each accounting for about 20% of worldwide emissions — have opposed any hard caps.
But while the debate continues, the most fundamental question of what it will take to achieve meaningful reductions has gone largely forgotten.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in its landmark reports this year that annual worldwide emissions must be cut at least in half by 2050 to avoid the most serious consequences of global warming, such as severe rises in sea levels and prolonged droughts.
The recipe from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based research group, is one way to get there while still meeting the world’s rising demand for power. But no one is banking on it being implemented any time soon.
”When the governments or the people in the negotiations decide on such a target reduction as 50% by 2050, they have to realize the implications,” said Nobuo Tanaka, head of the group and a top energy authority.
The talks in Bali are built around the idea that reductions would be driven by an international trading system for greenhouse gas emissions. The system would in essence be a stronger version of Kyoto, which expires at the end of 2012.
Countries would be assigned caps on their total emissions. If a country polluted below its quota, it could sell its surplus allowance on the market. If it exceeded its cap, it would have to purchase allowances. Over time, as caps were lowered and the price of allowances rose, it would become cheaper to invest in carbon-cutting technology and clean-energy alternatives than to keep polluting.
But some economists said that the trading scheme is too weak to generate the massive investments needed to wean the world off fossil fuels.
To begin with, there is no easy way to enforce such agreements.
”Nobody is going to invade France, Russia or the United States, or break off diplomatic relations or boycott a country,” said Thomas Schelling, a University of Maryland economist who studies environmental policy.
Exhibit A is Kyoto itself. Japan, Canada and most of Western Europe are not on pace to meet the relatively modest targets set by the protocol.
”I can’t imagine anything effective coming out of Bali,” Schelling, a Nobel laureate, said. ”Frankly, they just don’t know what else to do.”
Schelling said that countries must begin to focus on ways to encourage the development of cleaner-energy technologies. He and 36 other experts, including two other Nobel laureates, recently called upon the U.S. government to increase spending on carbon-neutral energy development tenfold to at least $30 billion a year, in an effort they likened to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program.
”We went into World War II with biplanes and came out with jet fighter planes,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University and coauthor of the petition. ”If we took this problem seriously, a decade from now there would be no need to make cars that emit CO2 to the atmosphere.”
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, countered that a sizable chunk of research in the U.S. was funded by private investments.
He also pointed to recent government investments in wind power, as well as billions of dollars spent over many years to develop nuclear fusion.
Tanaka, of the energy research group, said his agency did not consider the possibility of clean fusion energy because the technology seemed unlikely in the next 30 years.
But he added: ”Who knows what will be the new technology breakthroughs? Maybe 2050 is still a little early for fusion, but it is possible.”
–
alan.zarembo@latimes.com
Los Angeles Times
The World;
U.S. prevails, Ban says;
Specific targets for carbon emissions are ‘too ambitious’ for Bali climate summit, U.N. chief acknowledges.
BYLINE: Alan Zarembo, Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writers
As the United Nations climate conference here was drawing to its conclusion, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday acknowledged that the United States’ goal of deleting specific emission reduction guidelines from a draft agreement had succeeded.
”Realistically, it may be too ambitious if delegations would be expected to be able to agree on targets of greenhouse gas emission reductions” here in Bali, he told reporters. ”Practically speaking, this will have to be negotiated down the road.”
The Bali meeting was convened to draw up a ”road map” for negotiations on a new treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. An early draft of the guidelines called for industrialized countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, but the Bush administration has resisted the inclusion of any targets.
Chief U.S. negotiator Harlan L. Watson reiterated that position Wednesday. ”The reality in this business is that once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction,” he said.
Another contentious section of the draft called for global emissions to peak in 10 to 15 years and be reduced to at least half of 2000 levels by 2050, proposed requirements that have been vigorously opposed by China and India.
Both countries’ emissions have more than doubled since 1990, and both want only voluntary standards for developing nations.
”If we want to take a voluntary approach for 70% of the world’s emissions, I think that is just a nonstarter, it doesn’t work,” said John Baird, Canada’s environment minister.
He argued that if wealthy countries were the only ones to accept emissions targets, pollution would simply be shifted to developing nations.
”We can close a steel mill today in Canada. But if we just import the steel from China, what will we have accomplished? Absolutely nothing,” he said.
China’s climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, said his country might eventually be willing to adopt caps, but only if it received major technology assistance from Western nations for developing cleaner energy processes. Such assistance has not been forthcoming, he added.
Indian representatives also called for technical assistance and said their nation’s economy was too immature and fragile for them to accept emission caps.
”We are not ripe enough to make any binding commitments. We are a developing country,” said N.N. Meena, junior environment minister.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who flew in to Bali on Wednesday after accepting his share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo this week for his contributions to the fight against global warming, said the United States was deliberately impeding progress here.
”The position of the administration in the U.S. right now appears to be to try to block any progress in Bali. I hope that will change,” he said.
He did offer some optimism. ”I know from experience,” he said, ”that when breakthroughs do occur, they usually happen in the last 48 hours.”
Australia had a partial shift in its position Wednesday. The country has long argued against adopting the Kyoto treaty, which calls for 36 industrialized nations to reduce their emissions 5% below 1990 levels by 2012 — in part because its emissions have grown by 26% since 1990.
But on Wednesday, newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented ratification papers for the treaty to Ban, eliciting a long round of applause from the delegates. Australia’s signature leaves the U.S. as the only major industrialized country not to have ratified the protocol.
In his talk, Rudd chided the United States, whose emissions have risen more than 16% since 1990. ”We expect all developed nations — those within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and those outside that framework — to embrace comparable efforts in order to bring about the global outcomes the world now expects of us.”
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alan.zarembo@latimes.com
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
Zarembo reported from Nusa Dua and Maugh from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Dinda Jouhana in Nusa Dua contributed to this report.
The Mirror
CLIMATE TALKS ARE ‘CRITICAL’
BYLINE: BY EMILY BEAMENT
TALKS on a new international agreement on climate change are at a ”make or break” stage, Environment Minister John Gormley said yesterday.
Mr Gormley said it was the ”last chance saloon” for more than 180 countries to pledge to negotiate a deal on cutting emissions.
Speaking at the conference in Bali he said: ”The time for rhetoric is over.
It’s now action, action, action and urgent action.”
Mr Gormley added it was vital a draft deal included the need for developed countries to make cuts of 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 were kept in, despite resistance from the US Government.
He said: ”This is an agreement, you have to spell it out.”
The New York Times
Focus of Climate Talks Shifts to Helping Poor Countries Cope
BYLINE: By PETER GELLING
With little progress on the primary goal of United Nations climate talks here — preventing further climate change — a secondary quest to help poor countries cope with the effects of a warming world has now become a central theme of the gathering.
”Climate change affects us all, but it does not affect us all equally,” Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, told ministers and heads of state on Wednesday at the opening of high-level sessions of the talks, which began Dec. 3. ”Those who are least able to cope are being hit hardest. Those who have done the least to cause the problem bear the gravest consequences.”
Under an agreement the delegates reached Tuesday, developing countries and other institutions will have direct access to an adaptation fund established in Kyoto in 1997, which is expected to streamline the financing of crucial projects in the developing world.
The meeting in Bali is part of negotiations on how to invigorate a faltering 1992 treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to replace the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 addendum that requires three dozen industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2012.
The adaptation fund, which is managed by the Global Environment Facility, an independent financial organization also established in Kyoto in 1997, has been criticized for being too difficult to tap and for raising paltry sums of money.
Now, a 16-member board of representatives from rich and poor countries will oversee the fund.
The adaptation fund is to be maintained using a 2 percent tax on transactions in the Clean Development Mechanism, under which rich nations receive carbon credits for investing in sustainable projects in developing countries. The fund is intended to help protect those most vulnerable to the ill effects of climate change, like drought, flooding and severe storms.
”For the poor, this is clearly a recognition that participants here in Bali are serious about their concerns,” said Monique Barbut, chief executive officer of the Global Environment Fund. ”They can see that there has been a shift at the conference. It is not all about who is emitting, but it is also about the ones who are suffering from those emissions.”
In the past few years, negotiations over a global climate treaty have developed a dual focus — mitigating climate change and adapting to it.
Some analysts, however, are skeptical about just how significant the establishment of the adaptation fund will be for the world’s defense against environmental disasters associated with rising temperatures.
A recent United Nations Human Development Report detailed how the poor, especially along the equator, are the most vulnerable to climate hazards and attacked rich countries for not honoring their original financial commitments to help.
The report said that an additional 600 million people would be hungry, 200 million more displaced by floods and 400 million more exposed to diseases like malaria and dengue, if the world’s temperature were to rise just 2 degrees Celsius.
Kevin Watkins, lead author of the report, said much uncertainty remained about the level of resources that would be mobilized under the new agreement.
”This is not a final solution,” he said on the sidelines of the Bali conference. ”But we can see how the issue is starting to force its way up the climate change agenda.”
Carbon trading is expected to become a $70 billion a year industry by the time the adaptation fund goes into effect in 2008. Still, garnering only 2 percent of that amount means the fund will fall well short of projected needs in the developing world. The Human Development Report called for $86 billion annually in new and additional financing for pro-poor adaptation.
Although not included in the agreement this week, the idea of extending the 2 percent tax to other financial mechanisms was discussed and could be included in later drafts. But until then, analysts expressed hope that spending the money wisely would make up for not having enough.
”It is not simply a question of additional money; it is using the money you already have in a smart way,” said Hans Verlome, director of the Global Climate Change Program for World Wildlife Fund. ”You will get more bang for your buck by investing in climate smart projects.”
