Climate Change News Part. 4
G20 leaders force Australia to back down on climate change language
Sunday 16 November 2014 08.18 GMT
Lenore Taylor, political editor
Sunday 16 November 2014 08.18 GMT
Lenore Taylor, political editor
Communique calls on countries to contribute to green climate fund, after negotiations ‘like trench warfare’
World leaders have forced Australia to include stronger language on climate change in the G20 communique, but Tony Abbott told the summit that as the leader of a major coal producer he would be “standing up for coal”.
The references demanded by other leaders, including the US president, Barack Obama, were reluctantly accepted by Australia at the last minute. They included a call for contributions to the international green climate fund that the prime minister has previously derided and for the “phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.
A European Union spokesman reportedly described the climate negotiations with Australia as being like “trench warfare”. Other officials said it had been “very difficult” and protracted. Speaking to the media after the summit, the Australian prme minister downplayed the importance of the “green climate fund” to which Obama pledged $3bn on Saturday and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, $1.5bn on Sunday. He took a similar line on the new greenhouse reduction pledges unveiled by Obama and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. He said all nations “support strong action … to address climate change”, but added: “We are all going to approach this in our own way and there are a range of [climate] funds which are there.”
Obama and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, both urged G20 countries to contribute to the green climate fund, which is seen as critical to a successful outcome at crucial climate negotiations in Paris next year. In the end, at Australia’s insistence, the communique called for contributions to financing funds “such as the green climate fund”.Obama said the US and Chinese agreement meant there was “no excuse for other nations” not to make similar commitments on greenhouse gas reductions.
But Abbott said by his reading the deal “means 80% of China’s power needs in 2030 are still going to be provided by coal”.
He said coal was critical to lifting 1.3bn people out of poverty, and “what we need to do is to ensure that the coal-fired power stations we need are as efficient as possible”. The Australian treasurer, Joe Hockey, also downplayed the deal earlier on Sunday. “Barack Obama has to get any initiative on climate change through a hostile US Congres,” he said. “So far he hasn’t had great success.” As Obama explained again on Sunday, the US “shaped that target based on existing authorities” to use Environment Protection Agency powers “rather than the need for additional congressional action”.
Abbott began the closed-door discussion on energy on Sunday morning by telling the world leaders that “as the world’s largest producer of coal, I’d like to stand up for coal”, sources told Guardian Australia. Speaking to the press after the meeting, Abbott denied Australia had been forced into climate discussions, saying “the very first draft [of the G20 communique] talked about climate change, all the way through we have been talking about energy efficiency and climate change”.
As revealed by Guardian Australia, the first draft did include climate change, but in very general terms. But European countries and the United States argued until late on Saturday to force the host country to strengthen the words - including the commitment to the green climate fund, which Abbott has previously said Australia would not support. Australia was also reluctant to include the reference to fossil fuel subsidies in the communique, but it was eventually included after forceful support from Obama. The communique calls on G20 members to “rationalise and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.
As the G20 progressed, the Queensland government was preparing to unveil new infrastructure spending to help the development of Australia’s largest coal mine.
.Abbott, who recently said coal was “good for humanity”, also endorsed the mine, proposed by the Indian company Adani, at the leaders’ meeting. The Queensland premier, Campbell Newman, has said the new spending would help coal development in the Galilee basin, which has been under a cloud because of the declining coal price. The announcement is expected to be made during the visit of the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who is addressing federal parliament on Tuesday, and the chairman of the Adani group, Gautam Adani. “We are prepared to invest in core, common-user infrastructure. The role of government is to make targeted investments to get something going and exit in a few years’ time,” Newman said. “It will be open access [infrastructure]. We want a new coal basin to open.”
In an interview from Brisbane with the Indian Express, Adani said the Australian government had given all environmental and regulatory clearances for the $7.5bn coal, rail and port project. The Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin is the one of the largest thermal coal mines in the world, and the largest in Australia. It requires a 388km rail line to a new terminal at Abbot Point. But the project has been under pressure as coal prices fall to five-year lows. Adani told the Indian Express a South Korean firm, Posco, had been given the contract to build the railway line and sources suggested the Newman government might be preparing to underwrite the project.
The director of energy finance studies for the Institute of EnergyEconomics and Financial Analysis, Tim Buckley, said the Newman government’s plans were “absolutely farcical”. “I have not spoken to a single person in finance who thinks this can proceed or that it is commercially viable. Eight major international banks have said they won’t go near it,” he said.
Adani says it has already invested $2bn in Australia, but it has no equity here. It bought the rights to the Abbot Point port with loans from a syndicate headed by the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, and another loan from the State Bank of India.
The full text of the communique PDF document.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/16/g20-leaders-australia-back-down-climate-change-language
World leaders have forced Australia to include stronger language on climate change in the G20 communique, but Tony Abbott told the summit that as the leader of a major coal producer he would be “standing up for coal”.
The references demanded by other leaders, including the US president, Barack Obama, were reluctantly accepted by Australia at the last minute. They included a call for contributions to the international green climate fund that the prime minister has previously derided and for the “phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.
A European Union spokesman reportedly described the climate negotiations with Australia as being like “trench warfare”. Other officials said it had been “very difficult” and protracted. Speaking to the media after the summit, the Australian prme minister downplayed the importance of the “green climate fund” to which Obama pledged $3bn on Saturday and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, $1.5bn on Sunday. He took a similar line on the new greenhouse reduction pledges unveiled by Obama and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. He said all nations “support strong action … to address climate change”, but added: “We are all going to approach this in our own way and there are a range of [climate] funds which are there.”
Obama and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, both urged G20 countries to contribute to the green climate fund, which is seen as critical to a successful outcome at crucial climate negotiations in Paris next year. In the end, at Australia’s insistence, the communique called for contributions to financing funds “such as the green climate fund”.Obama said the US and Chinese agreement meant there was “no excuse for other nations” not to make similar commitments on greenhouse gas reductions.
But Abbott said by his reading the deal “means 80% of China’s power needs in 2030 are still going to be provided by coal”.
He said coal was critical to lifting 1.3bn people out of poverty, and “what we need to do is to ensure that the coal-fired power stations we need are as efficient as possible”. The Australian treasurer, Joe Hockey, also downplayed the deal earlier on Sunday. “Barack Obama has to get any initiative on climate change through a hostile US Congres,” he said. “So far he hasn’t had great success.” As Obama explained again on Sunday, the US “shaped that target based on existing authorities” to use Environment Protection Agency powers “rather than the need for additional congressional action”.
Abbott began the closed-door discussion on energy on Sunday morning by telling the world leaders that “as the world’s largest producer of coal, I’d like to stand up for coal”, sources told Guardian Australia. Speaking to the press after the meeting, Abbott denied Australia had been forced into climate discussions, saying “the very first draft [of the G20 communique] talked about climate change, all the way through we have been talking about energy efficiency and climate change”.
As revealed by Guardian Australia, the first draft did include climate change, but in very general terms. But European countries and the United States argued until late on Saturday to force the host country to strengthen the words - including the commitment to the green climate fund, which Abbott has previously said Australia would not support. Australia was also reluctant to include the reference to fossil fuel subsidies in the communique, but it was eventually included after forceful support from Obama. The communique calls on G20 members to “rationalise and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.
As the G20 progressed, the Queensland government was preparing to unveil new infrastructure spending to help the development of Australia’s largest coal mine.
.Abbott, who recently said coal was “good for humanity”, also endorsed the mine, proposed by the Indian company Adani, at the leaders’ meeting. The Queensland premier, Campbell Newman, has said the new spending would help coal development in the Galilee basin, which has been under a cloud because of the declining coal price. The announcement is expected to be made during the visit of the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who is addressing federal parliament on Tuesday, and the chairman of the Adani group, Gautam Adani. “We are prepared to invest in core, common-user infrastructure. The role of government is to make targeted investments to get something going and exit in a few years’ time,” Newman said. “It will be open access [infrastructure]. We want a new coal basin to open.”
In an interview from Brisbane with the Indian Express, Adani said the Australian government had given all environmental and regulatory clearances for the $7.5bn coal, rail and port project. The Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin is the one of the largest thermal coal mines in the world, and the largest in Australia. It requires a 388km rail line to a new terminal at Abbot Point. But the project has been under pressure as coal prices fall to five-year lows. Adani told the Indian Express a South Korean firm, Posco, had been given the contract to build the railway line and sources suggested the Newman government might be preparing to underwrite the project.
The director of energy finance studies for the Institute of EnergyEconomics and Financial Analysis, Tim Buckley, said the Newman government’s plans were “absolutely farcical”. “I have not spoken to a single person in finance who thinks this can proceed or that it is commercially viable. Eight major international banks have said they won’t go near it,” he said.
Adani says it has already invested $2bn in Australia, but it has no equity here. It bought the rights to the Abbot Point port with loans from a syndicate headed by the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, and another loan from the State Bank of India.
The full text of the communique PDF document.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/16/g20-leaders-australia-back-down-climate-change-language
Coal versus climate in Australia
Australia continues to frustrate efforts by fellow G20 members to include climate change on the agenda at the upcoming leaders' summit in the eastern city of Brisbane this weekend.
As the host nation sets the G20 meeting's agenda , Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott - an avowed sceptic of human-caused climate change - has resisted calls for global warming to be discussed when world leaders gather on November 15-16.
Despite a recent official draft summary of proceedings appearing to make token references to climate change, it remains unclear the level of importance afforded to the issue. Climate change was on the agenda at the previous eight G20 summits.
Since forming the government in September 2013, Abbott has repealed Australia's nascent emissions trading scheme and slashed funding to agencies and programmes promoting renewable energy and the environment. In 2009, he described the established science of climate change as "crap" and argued against imposing financial constraints on heavy polluters.
A decade-long boom in the minerals and resources industries has strengthened the sector's influence on politics and contributed to Australia becoming one of the world's leading carbon emitters per capita.
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane made clear the government's opposition to tackle climate change and raise costs in the mining sector in March. "The mining industry has been central to the Australian economy over the past decade and its contribution will be more important than ever in the years ahead," he said, adding scrapping the carbon tax would encourage the industry's growth.
Coal versus climate
The repeal of carbon pricing has raised questions on Australia's ability to meet modest carbon reduction commitments - five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Abbott champions a "direct action" scheme rewarding big polluters for cutting emissions.
Australia is the world's second largest net exporter of coal, one of the world's leading sources of carbon emissions.
The Minerals Council, an industry lobby group, said coal accounts for 4.6 percent of GDP, generating $50bn for the national economy and raising $24bn in taxes.
Campbell Newman, premier of Queensland state, put the political equation bluntly in June, saying: "We are in the coal business. If you want decent hospitals, schools and police on the beat, we all need to understand that." Opening a new coal mine in October, Abbott lavished unbridled praise on the industry,describing it as "good for humanity". While the comments confounded many who consider climate change an issue of critical importance, they surprised few engaged in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"Both Australia's major parties have either been captured by the mining lobby or are intimidated by it," Clive Hamilton, a professor in public ethics at Charles Sturt University, told Al Jazeera.
Mine expansion
Recent corruption scandals exposed extensive links and illegal deals between the resources industry and politicians.
An independent inquiry into corruption in the state of New South Wales identified 26 reforms to lessen corruption in the state's management of coal resources. "Corruption in NSW is small beer compared to the corruption of the policy process at a national level," said Hamilton.
Australia is in the middle of a production boom involving the opening or expansion of 120 new mines. Two of the biggest, the Carmichael and Alpha mines in Queensland's Galilee Basin, will add a combined 90 million tonnes to Australia's production each year. Their development will include expansion of port facilities in close proximity to the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef.
Government approval for the projects followed a highly critical UNESCO report, released in June, threatening to list the site as "in danger" should concerns over rapid coastal developmentwithin the reef's ecosystem not be assuaged. International investment banks have signaled an unwillingness to provide funds to the projects, citing UNESCO's concerns.
The Alpha and Carmichael mines, both backed by Indian mining companies looking to secure supply to India's coal-fueled power stations, have met opposition in Australia and India. Environmental groups claim burning coal for electricity production is responsible for between 85,000 and 110,000 deaths in India each year. Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust (CAT) has initiated legal proceedings in Australia's courts opposing the Carmichael mine's development, on the basis of the resultant environmental damage in India and Australia.
"Burning an additional 60 million tonnes of Australian coal in India would add to the number of deaths and increase the number of people suffering from asthma and chest ailments," said Debi Groenka from CAT. Coal is considered a cheap energy source, but the electricity it produces is out of reach for one-quarter of India's population. Groenka said affordable renewable energy sources are more likely to provide electricity to India's impoverished millions than a new fleet of coal-fired power plants.
"The establishment of new coal power stations in India will result in the loss of biodiversity and deplete the natural resources on which 300 million Indians - who live below the poverty line and have no electricity - are dependent for their survival," said Groenka.
Carbon tipping point
The financial and environmental stakes on the climate change debate are high. According to Greenpeace, emissions burned from Galilee Basin projects alone would be enough to create a global carbon tipping point. Despite the coal rush, prices are at five-year lows, having halved since 2011. In Australia, miners are tightening their belts - shedding hundreds of jobs in recent months in search of efficiency gains - but remain set to triple production by the decade's end.
"Australia's politicians should take a deep breath and look for other options," said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. "Realistically, there will be no recovery of coal prices in the foreseeable future, and a response other than one that produces more of something that's not profitable is required."
In June, the United States released plans to oversee 30-percent reductions in carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.
Such mandated cuts are expected to see coal power stations there made redundant.
Any discussion of the need for a concerted effort to reduce emissions at this week's G20 meeting will make uncomfortable discussion for Prime Minister Abbott, unable to escape attendance as he did at September's UN Climate Change summit in New York.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/coal-versus-climate-australia-051623692.html#TdrI38b
As the host nation sets the G20 meeting's agenda , Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott - an avowed sceptic of human-caused climate change - has resisted calls for global warming to be discussed when world leaders gather on November 15-16.
Despite a recent official draft summary of proceedings appearing to make token references to climate change, it remains unclear the level of importance afforded to the issue. Climate change was on the agenda at the previous eight G20 summits.
Since forming the government in September 2013, Abbott has repealed Australia's nascent emissions trading scheme and slashed funding to agencies and programmes promoting renewable energy and the environment. In 2009, he described the established science of climate change as "crap" and argued against imposing financial constraints on heavy polluters.
A decade-long boom in the minerals and resources industries has strengthened the sector's influence on politics and contributed to Australia becoming one of the world's leading carbon emitters per capita.
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane made clear the government's opposition to tackle climate change and raise costs in the mining sector in March. "The mining industry has been central to the Australian economy over the past decade and its contribution will be more important than ever in the years ahead," he said, adding scrapping the carbon tax would encourage the industry's growth.
Coal versus climate
The repeal of carbon pricing has raised questions on Australia's ability to meet modest carbon reduction commitments - five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Abbott champions a "direct action" scheme rewarding big polluters for cutting emissions.
Australia is the world's second largest net exporter of coal, one of the world's leading sources of carbon emissions.
The Minerals Council, an industry lobby group, said coal accounts for 4.6 percent of GDP, generating $50bn for the national economy and raising $24bn in taxes.
Campbell Newman, premier of Queensland state, put the political equation bluntly in June, saying: "We are in the coal business. If you want decent hospitals, schools and police on the beat, we all need to understand that." Opening a new coal mine in October, Abbott lavished unbridled praise on the industry,describing it as "good for humanity". While the comments confounded many who consider climate change an issue of critical importance, they surprised few engaged in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"Both Australia's major parties have either been captured by the mining lobby or are intimidated by it," Clive Hamilton, a professor in public ethics at Charles Sturt University, told Al Jazeera.
Mine expansion
Recent corruption scandals exposed extensive links and illegal deals between the resources industry and politicians.
An independent inquiry into corruption in the state of New South Wales identified 26 reforms to lessen corruption in the state's management of coal resources. "Corruption in NSW is small beer compared to the corruption of the policy process at a national level," said Hamilton.
Australia is in the middle of a production boom involving the opening or expansion of 120 new mines. Two of the biggest, the Carmichael and Alpha mines in Queensland's Galilee Basin, will add a combined 90 million tonnes to Australia's production each year. Their development will include expansion of port facilities in close proximity to the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef.
Government approval for the projects followed a highly critical UNESCO report, released in June, threatening to list the site as "in danger" should concerns over rapid coastal developmentwithin the reef's ecosystem not be assuaged. International investment banks have signaled an unwillingness to provide funds to the projects, citing UNESCO's concerns.
The Alpha and Carmichael mines, both backed by Indian mining companies looking to secure supply to India's coal-fueled power stations, have met opposition in Australia and India. Environmental groups claim burning coal for electricity production is responsible for between 85,000 and 110,000 deaths in India each year. Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust (CAT) has initiated legal proceedings in Australia's courts opposing the Carmichael mine's development, on the basis of the resultant environmental damage in India and Australia.
"Burning an additional 60 million tonnes of Australian coal in India would add to the number of deaths and increase the number of people suffering from asthma and chest ailments," said Debi Groenka from CAT. Coal is considered a cheap energy source, but the electricity it produces is out of reach for one-quarter of India's population. Groenka said affordable renewable energy sources are more likely to provide electricity to India's impoverished millions than a new fleet of coal-fired power plants.
"The establishment of new coal power stations in India will result in the loss of biodiversity and deplete the natural resources on which 300 million Indians - who live below the poverty line and have no electricity - are dependent for their survival," said Groenka.
Carbon tipping point
The financial and environmental stakes on the climate change debate are high. According to Greenpeace, emissions burned from Galilee Basin projects alone would be enough to create a global carbon tipping point. Despite the coal rush, prices are at five-year lows, having halved since 2011. In Australia, miners are tightening their belts - shedding hundreds of jobs in recent months in search of efficiency gains - but remain set to triple production by the decade's end.
"Australia's politicians should take a deep breath and look for other options," said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. "Realistically, there will be no recovery of coal prices in the foreseeable future, and a response other than one that produces more of something that's not profitable is required."
In June, the United States released plans to oversee 30-percent reductions in carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.
Such mandated cuts are expected to see coal power stations there made redundant.
Any discussion of the need for a concerted effort to reduce emissions at this week's G20 meeting will make uncomfortable discussion for Prime Minister Abbott, unable to escape attendance as he did at September's UN Climate Change summit in New York.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/coal-versus-climate-australia-051623692.html#TdrI38b
Invest now or face 'irreversible' effects of climate change, U.N. panel warns
By Steve Almasy, CNN November 2, 2014 -- Updated 1954 GMT (0354 HKT)
By Steve Almasy, CNN November 2, 2014 -- Updated 1954 GMT (0354 HKT)
(CNN) -- The cost of fighting climate change will only climb if industrialized nations don't take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations' panel on the matter warned Sunday in its wrap-up report.
In its "synthesis report," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the hundreds of authors involved in the study were even more certain than before that the planet is warming and humans are the cause. "If left unchecked, climate change will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems," the report said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that action must come soon. "Leaders must act. Time is not on our side," he said.
The report said there are solutions to keeping the rise in temperatures from crossing a 2-degree Celsius increase, the goal of many governments. "It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy," said Youba Sokona, the co-chairman of IPCC Working Group III. "But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change."
Previously the group has said that about half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age has been produced since 1990. On the current path, global average temperatures could go up anywhere from 3.7 to 4.8 degrees C (6.7 to 8.6 F) over pre-industrial levels by 2100. According to the IPCC, to stay below a 2-degree C increase, greenhouse gas emissions need to fall as much as 70% around the world by 2050 and to zero by 2100. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report is "another canary in the coal mine" and added that "ambitious, decisive and immediate action" is needed. "We have that opportunity, and the choice is in our hands," R. K. Pachauri, chairman of the group, said in the report.
John Coleman, a weather forecaster and a founder of the Weather Channel, said climate change is "not happening." "There is no significant man-made global warming now. There hasn't been any in the past, and there's no reason to expect any in the future," Coleman told CNN's "Reliable Sources." Coleman said governments pay scientists to study the issue and researchers reach expected conclusions in order to continue to receive funding. Therefore the large percentage of climate scientists who agree there is climate change is a "manipulated figure," he said.
"They don't have any choice," added Coleman, who said he is a skeptic, not a denier. "If you're going to get the money, you have got to support their position."
But David Kenny, CEO of the Weather Channel, said Coleman's opinion is at odds with the channel's stance, which he said has been "unwavering" since 2007. The Weather Channel's statement says that the Earth is indeed warming and cites "strong evidence that the majority of the warming over the past century is a result of human activities."
Weather Channel distances itself from a founder
"The science is really clear, and I don't like our brand being associated with something that's not scientifically based," Kenny told "Reliable Sources," adding that Coleman hasn't been associated with the channel in decades. The chief scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Office said the IPCC report gives governments the science to help make policy decisions.
Julia Slingo added that supercomputing will also advance the science. "By doing this we can provide a solid evidence base to ensure UK investment decisions, and our future prosperity, remain resilient to future climate risk," she said in a written statement.
The report didn't estimate a price for global changes. "The Synthesis Report finds that mitigation cost estimates vary, but that global economic growth would not be strongly affected," it said. Ban said it is a myth that fixing climate change will be expensive. Inaction will have large financial and societal costs, he said. He pointed to renewable energy and increased efficiency as two ways to address the issue. The IPCC said the report is based on 30,000 scientific papers studied by about 830 authors and 2,000 reviewers.
The reports from the IPCC are aimed at guiding world leaders as the United Nations attempts to work out a new treaty to limit emissions. Paris will host the next major international climate summit, scheduled to start November 30, 2015. Previous rounds of talks have been strained by disputes between the biggest emitters -- China, the United States and European countries -- and poorer countries whose populations could see the worst impacts first.
CNN's Richard Roth contributed to this report.
/edition.cnn.com/2014/11/02/world/ipcc-climate-change-report
In its "synthesis report," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the hundreds of authors involved in the study were even more certain than before that the planet is warming and humans are the cause. "If left unchecked, climate change will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems," the report said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that action must come soon. "Leaders must act. Time is not on our side," he said.
The report said there are solutions to keeping the rise in temperatures from crossing a 2-degree Celsius increase, the goal of many governments. "It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy," said Youba Sokona, the co-chairman of IPCC Working Group III. "But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change."
Previously the group has said that about half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age has been produced since 1990. On the current path, global average temperatures could go up anywhere from 3.7 to 4.8 degrees C (6.7 to 8.6 F) over pre-industrial levels by 2100. According to the IPCC, to stay below a 2-degree C increase, greenhouse gas emissions need to fall as much as 70% around the world by 2050 and to zero by 2100. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report is "another canary in the coal mine" and added that "ambitious, decisive and immediate action" is needed. "We have that opportunity, and the choice is in our hands," R. K. Pachauri, chairman of the group, said in the report.
John Coleman, a weather forecaster and a founder of the Weather Channel, said climate change is "not happening." "There is no significant man-made global warming now. There hasn't been any in the past, and there's no reason to expect any in the future," Coleman told CNN's "Reliable Sources." Coleman said governments pay scientists to study the issue and researchers reach expected conclusions in order to continue to receive funding. Therefore the large percentage of climate scientists who agree there is climate change is a "manipulated figure," he said.
"They don't have any choice," added Coleman, who said he is a skeptic, not a denier. "If you're going to get the money, you have got to support their position."
But David Kenny, CEO of the Weather Channel, said Coleman's opinion is at odds with the channel's stance, which he said has been "unwavering" since 2007. The Weather Channel's statement says that the Earth is indeed warming and cites "strong evidence that the majority of the warming over the past century is a result of human activities."
Weather Channel distances itself from a founder
"The science is really clear, and I don't like our brand being associated with something that's not scientifically based," Kenny told "Reliable Sources," adding that Coleman hasn't been associated with the channel in decades. The chief scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Office said the IPCC report gives governments the science to help make policy decisions.
Julia Slingo added that supercomputing will also advance the science. "By doing this we can provide a solid evidence base to ensure UK investment decisions, and our future prosperity, remain resilient to future climate risk," she said in a written statement.
The report didn't estimate a price for global changes. "The Synthesis Report finds that mitigation cost estimates vary, but that global economic growth would not be strongly affected," it said. Ban said it is a myth that fixing climate change will be expensive. Inaction will have large financial and societal costs, he said. He pointed to renewable energy and increased efficiency as two ways to address the issue. The IPCC said the report is based on 30,000 scientific papers studied by about 830 authors and 2,000 reviewers.
The reports from the IPCC are aimed at guiding world leaders as the United Nations attempts to work out a new treaty to limit emissions. Paris will host the next major international climate summit, scheduled to start November 30, 2015. Previous rounds of talks have been strained by disputes between the biggest emitters -- China, the United States and European countries -- and poorer countries whose populations could see the worst impacts first.
CNN's Richard Roth contributed to this report.
/edition.cnn.com/2014/11/02/world/ipcc-climate-change-report
UN climate report offers stark warnings
Published November 02, 2014 Associated Press
Published November 02, 2014 Associated Press
COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday. The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's giant climate assessment didn't offer any surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three earlier reports released in the past 13 months.
But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous. Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people and the environment, the report said. Some impacts are already being observed, including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.
Amid its grim projections, the report also offered hope. The tools needed to set the world on a low-emissions path are there; it just has to break its addiction to the oil, coal and gas that power the global energy system while polluting the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas. "We have the means to limit climate change," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. "The solutions are many and allow for continued economic and human development. All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change."
The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made. Today only a small minority of scientists challenge that mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity. Sleep-deprived delegates approved the final documents Saturday afternoon after a weeklong line-by-line review in Copenhagen that underscored that the IPCC process is not just about science. The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.
The rift between developed and developing countries in the U.N. talks opened up in Copenhagen over a box of text that discussed what levels of warming could be considered dangerous. After a protracted battle, the delegates couldn't agree on the wording, and the box was dropped from a key summary for policy-makers to the disappointment of some scientists.
"If the governments are going to expect the IPCC to do their job," said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the IPCC's second report, they shouldn't "get caught up in fights that have nothing to do with the IPCC." The omission of the box meant the word "dangerous" disappeared from the summary altogether. It appeared only twice in a longer underlying report compared to seven times in a draft produced before the Copenhagen session.
But the less loaded word "risk" was mentioned 65 times in the final 40-page summary. "Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts," the report said. World governments in 2009 set a goal of keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) compared to before the industrial revolution. Temperatures have gone up about 0.8 C (1.4 F) since the 19th century.
Meanwhile, emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has already used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.
"This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal ... there is nowhere to hide," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. "You can't wait several decades to address this issue." Pointing to the solution, the IPCC said the costs associated with mitigation action such as shifting the energy system to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.
And Pachauri said that cost should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting "all species that live on this planet" at peril. The report is meant as a scientific roadmap for the U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. That's the last major conference before a summit in Paris next year, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.
The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what, with rich countries calling on China and other major developing countries to take on ambitious targets, and developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC carefully avoided taking sides in that discussion, saying the risks of climate change "are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development."
www.foxnews.com/weather/2014/11/02/un-climate-report-offers-stark-warnings-hope
But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous. Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people and the environment, the report said. Some impacts are already being observed, including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.
Amid its grim projections, the report also offered hope. The tools needed to set the world on a low-emissions path are there; it just has to break its addiction to the oil, coal and gas that power the global energy system while polluting the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas. "We have the means to limit climate change," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. "The solutions are many and allow for continued economic and human development. All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change."
The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made. Today only a small minority of scientists challenge that mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity. Sleep-deprived delegates approved the final documents Saturday afternoon after a weeklong line-by-line review in Copenhagen that underscored that the IPCC process is not just about science. The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.
The rift between developed and developing countries in the U.N. talks opened up in Copenhagen over a box of text that discussed what levels of warming could be considered dangerous. After a protracted battle, the delegates couldn't agree on the wording, and the box was dropped from a key summary for policy-makers to the disappointment of some scientists.
"If the governments are going to expect the IPCC to do their job," said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the IPCC's second report, they shouldn't "get caught up in fights that have nothing to do with the IPCC." The omission of the box meant the word "dangerous" disappeared from the summary altogether. It appeared only twice in a longer underlying report compared to seven times in a draft produced before the Copenhagen session.
But the less loaded word "risk" was mentioned 65 times in the final 40-page summary. "Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts," the report said. World governments in 2009 set a goal of keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) compared to before the industrial revolution. Temperatures have gone up about 0.8 C (1.4 F) since the 19th century.
Meanwhile, emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has already used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.
"This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal ... there is nowhere to hide," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. "You can't wait several decades to address this issue." Pointing to the solution, the IPCC said the costs associated with mitigation action such as shifting the energy system to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.
And Pachauri said that cost should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting "all species that live on this planet" at peril. The report is meant as a scientific roadmap for the U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. That's the last major conference before a summit in Paris next year, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.
The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what, with rich countries calling on China and other major developing countries to take on ambitious targets, and developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC carefully avoided taking sides in that discussion, saying the risks of climate change "are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development."
www.foxnews.com/weather/2014/11/02/un-climate-report-offers-stark-warnings-hope
What is Permaculture?
Permaculture is an innovative framework for creating sustainable ways of living.
It is a practical method of developing ecologically harmonious, efficient and productive systems that can be used by anyone, anywhere. By thinking carefully about the way we use our resources - food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs - it is possible to get much more out of life by using less. We can be more productive for less effort, reaping benefits for our environment and ourselves, for now and for generations to come.
This is the essence of permaculture - the design of an ecologically sound way of living - in our households, gardens, communities and businesses. It is created by cooperating with nature and caring for the earth and its people.
Permaculture is not exclusive - its principles and practice can be used by anyone, anywhere:
City flats, yards and window boxes
Suburban and country houses/garden
Allotments and smallholdings
Community spaces
Farms and estates
Countryside and conservation areas
Commercial and industrial premises
Educational establishments
Waste ground
Permaculture encourages us to be resourceful and self-reliant. It is not a dogma or a religion but an ecological design system which helps us find solutions to the many problems facing us - both locally and globally..
Writer Emma Chapman defines it as:
"Permaculture, originally 'Permanent Agriculture', is often viewed as a set of gardening techniques, but it has in fact developed into a whole design philosophy, and for some people a philosophy for life. Its central theme is the creation of human systems which provide for human needs, but using many natural elements and drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems. Its goals and priorities coincide with what many people see as the core requirements for sustainability."
Permaculture tackles how to grow food, build houses and create communities, and minimise environmental impact at the same time. Its principles are being constantly developed and refined by people throughout the world in very different climates and cultural circumstances.
Subscribe to Permaculture and become a part of a growing community of like-minded people and a positive key to the change we all wish to see being brought to this planet.
Useful resources
www.permaculture.co.uk/what-is-permaculture
It is a practical method of developing ecologically harmonious, efficient and productive systems that can be used by anyone, anywhere. By thinking carefully about the way we use our resources - food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs - it is possible to get much more out of life by using less. We can be more productive for less effort, reaping benefits for our environment and ourselves, for now and for generations to come.
This is the essence of permaculture - the design of an ecologically sound way of living - in our households, gardens, communities and businesses. It is created by cooperating with nature and caring for the earth and its people.
Permaculture is not exclusive - its principles and practice can be used by anyone, anywhere:
City flats, yards and window boxes
Suburban and country houses/garden
Allotments and smallholdings
Community spaces
Farms and estates
Countryside and conservation areas
Commercial and industrial premises
Educational establishments
Waste ground
Permaculture encourages us to be resourceful and self-reliant. It is not a dogma or a religion but an ecological design system which helps us find solutions to the many problems facing us - both locally and globally..
Writer Emma Chapman defines it as:
"Permaculture, originally 'Permanent Agriculture', is often viewed as a set of gardening techniques, but it has in fact developed into a whole design philosophy, and for some people a philosophy for life. Its central theme is the creation of human systems which provide for human needs, but using many natural elements and drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems. Its goals and priorities coincide with what many people see as the core requirements for sustainability."
Permaculture tackles how to grow food, build houses and create communities, and minimise environmental impact at the same time. Its principles are being constantly developed and refined by people throughout the world in very different climates and cultural circumstances.
Subscribe to Permaculture and become a part of a growing community of like-minded people and a positive key to the change we all wish to see being brought to this planet.
Useful resources
- Permaculture Info (our sister site)
- The UK Permaculture Association
- Permaculture Principles - great resources to get you started
www.permaculture.co.uk/what-is-permaculture
Rising to "the greatest challenge in human history"
Source: Rahim Kanani Media Group, Inc - Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:21 GMT
Author: José Graziano da Silva
Source: Rahim Kanani Media Group, Inc - Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:21 GMT
Author: José Graziano da Silva
Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Different obstacles to food security need different solutions. Experience shows that a combination of actions is needed to reduce hunger and guarantee food security in the longer run. They include shifting towards more sustainable food systems, facilitating access and strengthening social protection.
Within this framework, to sustainably rise to “The Greatest Challenge in Human History,” the central theme of this year’s Borlaug Dialogue, one imperative is to channel more public and private resources to supporting agricultural innovation and knowledge systems that respond to different geographic and climatic conditions and that make them accessible to different producers. This is especially true for small-scale and family farmers who often do not benefit from the innovation, either because they are out of their reach or because they do not respond to their needs and realities.
According to current projections, feeding the expected world population of over 9 billion in the year 2050 will require us to increase food output by 60%, mostly using land already under cultivation.
Eradicating hunger, food security and malnutrition in a world where water, soil and many other natural inputs all face resource constraints puts a premium on knowledge. Science and innovation will be judged on their ability to do more with less, which means we need to consider the way we frame and conduct research, covering the full range from farm to fork.
Researchers must show what the Nobel Peace Prize judges called Norman Borlaug’s “pragmatic eclecticism.”
Doctor Borlaug, who is famous for developing highly-yielding wheat varieties that assured food production matched surging global populations, grew up on a rural Iowa farm with mixed crops and livestock.
Borlaug’s legacy shows research has been absolutely critical in increasing food supply. All studies demonstrate that agricultural R&D has had a significant impact on productivity, growth and poverty alleviation. The Green Revolution is credited to have saved hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia. We need to expand these investments to ensure that continues. Borlaug’s legacy also shows the importance of being innovative in responding to the problem at hand. We need the same spirit of innovation that drove the Green Revolution, adapted to the reality and the constraints the world faces today.
Today we know that input intensive production methods cannot be indefinitely replicated. Given climate change, resource depletion and our renewed focus on the importance of nutrition, we need to be as sustainable as we are productive, generating more resilient food systems that produce more with less impact on the environment.
We will require more than one agricultural knowledge system to respond to “The Greatest Challenge in Human History.”
Finding ways to help large-scale commercial farming lower its high-level use of chemical and energy inputs, as well as mitigating the ecosystem costs of mono-crop agriculture, is a clear priority. Increasing global food output will require devising sustainable farming techniques, solving food-storage problems, enforcing judicious water use, at times integrating agricultural subsectors such as fisheries and forestry, and in some cases trying out existing production methods in new places, such as taking Argentina’s no-till practices to Africa.
Meanwhile, the research needs of the world’s more than 500 million family farms, who are our main agents of actual change, vary enormously from place to place. A good rule of thumb is it should be demand-driven, relevant for farmers and local communities, and include them as protagonists in the process. In many situations, the value of research may lie as much in its distribution as its scientific content.
FAMILY FARMERS IN FOCUS
Family farmers account for by far the lion’s share of global investment in agriculture, and to leverage their efforts we must hone our own. Governments must work to create an enabling environment, one in which international organizations, regional agencies, civil-society groups, the private sector and research institutions all participate. Enabling includes actions to assure market access, as evidence clearly shows this greatly accelerates the rate at which family farmers adopt innovative ideas and practices, and the use of social protection programs to make sure that poor people have access to the food they need. Both areas warrant more research of their own and have much to contribute to creating more resilient food systems.
Indeed, the research process must itself forge better ways to embrace women and youth, recognize indigenous knowledge and cultural norms, and promote, develop and preserve local agricultural knowledge systems. These are all potential assets, not obstacles; they are signals, not noise. No single body or single approach has the authority or capacity to tackle the challenges of urbanization, climate change and environmental degradation, none of which tend to respect geographic or even disciplinary borders. We need to share and learn from each other.
Farmer Field Schools, in which local farmers study problems together in the field and experiment with solutions, may warrant more institutional support. Participants in FAO’s field school program in East Africa had 61% higher incomes than non-participants, and the method appeared particularly effective in engaging women and less literate people. Public and private sector institutions must work to bolster linkages and cooperation between research organizations, extension systems and rural communities so that researchers’ work can better and more effectively help farmers, including those in remote settings.
The knowledge systems we need vary from place to place, case to case and over time. The research community has a special duty to ensure family farmers can carry out their big role in the process of driving innovation geared to reducing food loss and waste, increasing awareness of ecosystem services and of course contributing to sustainable food security and rural development. José Graziano da Silva has worked on food security, rural development, and agriculture issues for over 30 years, most notably as the architect of Brazil’s Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) program and now as the Director-General of FAO.
As the 2014 Borlaug Dialogue takes place October 15-17 in Des Moines, Iowa, the World Food Prize Foundation and CGIAR Fund are co-hosting an online, high-level op-ed series titled The Greatest Challenge in Human History: Sustainably Feeding 9 Billion People By 2050. This will highlight how agricultural research and development are not only tied to food security and nutrition, but that they are also central to achieving many of the forthcoming UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
www.trust.org/item/20141020142137-qgjhu/?source=dpagetopic
Different obstacles to food security need different solutions. Experience shows that a combination of actions is needed to reduce hunger and guarantee food security in the longer run. They include shifting towards more sustainable food systems, facilitating access and strengthening social protection.
Within this framework, to sustainably rise to “The Greatest Challenge in Human History,” the central theme of this year’s Borlaug Dialogue, one imperative is to channel more public and private resources to supporting agricultural innovation and knowledge systems that respond to different geographic and climatic conditions and that make them accessible to different producers. This is especially true for small-scale and family farmers who often do not benefit from the innovation, either because they are out of their reach or because they do not respond to their needs and realities.
According to current projections, feeding the expected world population of over 9 billion in the year 2050 will require us to increase food output by 60%, mostly using land already under cultivation.
Eradicating hunger, food security and malnutrition in a world where water, soil and many other natural inputs all face resource constraints puts a premium on knowledge. Science and innovation will be judged on their ability to do more with less, which means we need to consider the way we frame and conduct research, covering the full range from farm to fork.
Researchers must show what the Nobel Peace Prize judges called Norman Borlaug’s “pragmatic eclecticism.”
Doctor Borlaug, who is famous for developing highly-yielding wheat varieties that assured food production matched surging global populations, grew up on a rural Iowa farm with mixed crops and livestock.
Borlaug’s legacy shows research has been absolutely critical in increasing food supply. All studies demonstrate that agricultural R&D has had a significant impact on productivity, growth and poverty alleviation. The Green Revolution is credited to have saved hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia. We need to expand these investments to ensure that continues. Borlaug’s legacy also shows the importance of being innovative in responding to the problem at hand. We need the same spirit of innovation that drove the Green Revolution, adapted to the reality and the constraints the world faces today.
Today we know that input intensive production methods cannot be indefinitely replicated. Given climate change, resource depletion and our renewed focus on the importance of nutrition, we need to be as sustainable as we are productive, generating more resilient food systems that produce more with less impact on the environment.
We will require more than one agricultural knowledge system to respond to “The Greatest Challenge in Human History.”
Finding ways to help large-scale commercial farming lower its high-level use of chemical and energy inputs, as well as mitigating the ecosystem costs of mono-crop agriculture, is a clear priority. Increasing global food output will require devising sustainable farming techniques, solving food-storage problems, enforcing judicious water use, at times integrating agricultural subsectors such as fisheries and forestry, and in some cases trying out existing production methods in new places, such as taking Argentina’s no-till practices to Africa.
Meanwhile, the research needs of the world’s more than 500 million family farms, who are our main agents of actual change, vary enormously from place to place. A good rule of thumb is it should be demand-driven, relevant for farmers and local communities, and include them as protagonists in the process. In many situations, the value of research may lie as much in its distribution as its scientific content.
FAMILY FARMERS IN FOCUS
Family farmers account for by far the lion’s share of global investment in agriculture, and to leverage their efforts we must hone our own. Governments must work to create an enabling environment, one in which international organizations, regional agencies, civil-society groups, the private sector and research institutions all participate. Enabling includes actions to assure market access, as evidence clearly shows this greatly accelerates the rate at which family farmers adopt innovative ideas and practices, and the use of social protection programs to make sure that poor people have access to the food they need. Both areas warrant more research of their own and have much to contribute to creating more resilient food systems.
Indeed, the research process must itself forge better ways to embrace women and youth, recognize indigenous knowledge and cultural norms, and promote, develop and preserve local agricultural knowledge systems. These are all potential assets, not obstacles; they are signals, not noise. No single body or single approach has the authority or capacity to tackle the challenges of urbanization, climate change and environmental degradation, none of which tend to respect geographic or even disciplinary borders. We need to share and learn from each other.
Farmer Field Schools, in which local farmers study problems together in the field and experiment with solutions, may warrant more institutional support. Participants in FAO’s field school program in East Africa had 61% higher incomes than non-participants, and the method appeared particularly effective in engaging women and less literate people. Public and private sector institutions must work to bolster linkages and cooperation between research organizations, extension systems and rural communities so that researchers’ work can better and more effectively help farmers, including those in remote settings.
The knowledge systems we need vary from place to place, case to case and over time. The research community has a special duty to ensure family farmers can carry out their big role in the process of driving innovation geared to reducing food loss and waste, increasing awareness of ecosystem services and of course contributing to sustainable food security and rural development. José Graziano da Silva has worked on food security, rural development, and agriculture issues for over 30 years, most notably as the architect of Brazil’s Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) program and now as the Director-General of FAO.
As the 2014 Borlaug Dialogue takes place October 15-17 in Des Moines, Iowa, the World Food Prize Foundation and CGIAR Fund are co-hosting an online, high-level op-ed series titled The Greatest Challenge in Human History: Sustainably Feeding 9 Billion People By 2050. This will highlight how agricultural research and development are not only tied to food security and nutrition, but that they are also central to achieving many of the forthcoming UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
www.trust.org/item/20141020142137-qgjhu/?source=dpagetopic
China and Climate Intensity Targets
Posted on October 19, 2014 by Wil Burns
Posted on October 19, 2014 by Wil Burns
As any climate change instructor knows, China’s ability to arrest its burgeoning emissions of greenhouse gas emissions is critical if the globe is to avoid passing critical climatic thresholds. China’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen an astounding 280% since 1990. The nation’s share of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions has now reached 28%, double that of the next highest country, the United States. Its projected 10.4 billion tons of carbon emissions this year will likely be greater than the U.S. and the European Union combined. Moreover, China’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions have recently overtaken those of the European Union.
Some commentators have taken comfort in China’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce its carbon intensity (the quantity of GHG emissions in relation to the economic output of a country) by 40-45% from 2005 levels by 2020, as well as the 17% emissions intensity reduction target set in its 12th Five Year Plan (2010-2015). However, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that China may struggle to meet these goals, palpably demonstrated by the 3% rise in carbon intensity between 2002-2009. As the study’s authors conclude, Chinese policy may be “leading away from its ambitious carbon intensity improvement goals.”
The study, which focuses on the period of 2002-2009, utilized a decomposition technique to assess the significance of two factors that can drive carbon intensity changes: efficiency improvements within sectors and production structure changes.
Ultimately, the study’s authors conclude that it’s highly unlikely that emissions intensity targets can be an effective emissions control strategy in emerging economies characterized by high economic growth.
This could be a good reading to assign for a module on medium and long-term climate policy making. Among the questions it could generate are the following:
/teachingclimatelaw.org/china-and-climate-intensity-targets
Some commentators have taken comfort in China’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce its carbon intensity (the quantity of GHG emissions in relation to the economic output of a country) by 40-45% from 2005 levels by 2020, as well as the 17% emissions intensity reduction target set in its 12th Five Year Plan (2010-2015). However, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that China may struggle to meet these goals, palpably demonstrated by the 3% rise in carbon intensity between 2002-2009. As the study’s authors conclude, Chinese policy may be “leading away from its ambitious carbon intensity improvement goals.”
The study, which focuses on the period of 2002-2009, utilized a decomposition technique to assess the significance of two factors that can drive carbon intensity changes: efficiency improvements within sectors and production structure changes.
- China’s commitment to a “carbonizing production structure more than outweighs effects from improvements of sectoral carbon efficiency” in many interior economies that follow the national Great Western Development Plan. For example, Inner Mongolia has focused on highly energy-intensive industrial development, e.g. mining, metal smelting and cement production, with the latter two sectors seeing 14-fold increases in production between 2002-2009. In Guizhou in Southwest China, coking sector production increased by a factor of 11 while carbon efficiency only improved by 60%;
- Large sectors appear to be the primary “laggards” in terms of reducing carbon intensities. It appears that such sectors were given a relative pass in reducing emissions in Western and Central provinces;
- A primary driver of Chinese economic policy in recent years has been capital accumulation, which has proven to be the nation’s most effective mechanism for riding out the global recession. Unfortunately, such policies fuel market demand for large-scale production in energy-intensive sectors, e.g. cement, steel and other emission-intensive processed materials. While the Chinese central government sets both climate and economic targets, the primary factor in evaluating the performance of local governments has remained GDP;
- China has imported and developed many low-carbon technologies, including super-critical and ultra-super critical power plants; the national government could accelerate the penetration of such technologies into areas characterized by high energy intensity, including by linking less-developed interior regions with its developing emissions trading scheme;
- China should explore options of linking its emissions trading scheme with that of the European Union.
Ultimately, the study’s authors conclude that it’s highly unlikely that emissions intensity targets can be an effective emissions control strategy in emerging economies characterized by high economic growth.
This could be a good reading to assign for a module on medium and long-term climate policy making. Among the questions it could generate are the following:
- Should emissions intensity targets considered to be an inadequate commitment per se by developing countries in the post-2020 regime given the results in this study?
- What incentives could the international community provide to nations e.g. China to increase penetration of low-carbon technologies in inner regions?
- What role can China’s new emissions trading scheme play in bending its emissions trading curve?
/teachingclimatelaw.org/china-and-climate-intensity-targets
Department Of Defense On Climate Change: This Is A Matter Of National Security
AYESHA RASCOE, REUTERS OCT. 13, 2014, 6:55 PM
AYESHA RASCOE, REUTERS OCT. 13, 2014, 6:55 PM
U.S. Secretary of Defense Hagel speaks during a joint news conference with French Minister of Defense Le Drian following their meeting at the Pentagon in Washington
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday laid out its plan to respond to climate change, arguing that rising temperatures and more frequent destructive weather around the globe pose "immediate risks to U.S. national security." Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel unveiled the Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap at the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas held in Arequipa, Peru.
"Climate change is a long-term trend, but with wise planning and risk mitigation now, we can reduce adverse impacts down range," Hagel said.
The plan calls for the department to identify and assess effects of climate change on the military, integrate climate considerations and collaborate with other federal agencies and state governments on meeting challenges.
President Barack Obama has made combating climate change a priority of his second term. With climate legislation stalled in Congress, Obama has pledged to use the executive branch to help with reining in greenhouse gas emissions.
Republicans have criticized the Obama administration's focus on climate, saying it has come at the expense of the economy and that taxpayer dollars might be better spent. While it may not be possible to precisely project all of the impacts of climate change, Hagel said that uncertainty "cannot be an excuse for delaying action."
Rising sea levels, extreme weather events and other consequences of a changing climate could exacerbate "many challenges, including infectious disease and terrorism," the department said. "The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters," the plan noted.
Hagel warned that the department was already beginning to see some of these impacts.
Climate change can also affect the military at home, they said. The plan warned that areas like the Hampton Roads region in southeastern Virginia, which houses the largest concentration of U.S. military sites in the world, sees recurrent flooding now and could experience a 1.5-foot rise in sea levels in the next 20 to 50 years.
More details on the report can be found here: http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint.pdf
www.businessinsider.com/r-us-military-lays-out-plan-for-coping-with-climate-change-2014-10
"Climate change is a long-term trend, but with wise planning and risk mitigation now, we can reduce adverse impacts down range," Hagel said.
The plan calls for the department to identify and assess effects of climate change on the military, integrate climate considerations and collaborate with other federal agencies and state governments on meeting challenges.
President Barack Obama has made combating climate change a priority of his second term. With climate legislation stalled in Congress, Obama has pledged to use the executive branch to help with reining in greenhouse gas emissions.
Republicans have criticized the Obama administration's focus on climate, saying it has come at the expense of the economy and that taxpayer dollars might be better spent. While it may not be possible to precisely project all of the impacts of climate change, Hagel said that uncertainty "cannot be an excuse for delaying action."
Rising sea levels, extreme weather events and other consequences of a changing climate could exacerbate "many challenges, including infectious disease and terrorism," the department said. "The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters," the plan noted.
Hagel warned that the department was already beginning to see some of these impacts.
Climate change can also affect the military at home, they said. The plan warned that areas like the Hampton Roads region in southeastern Virginia, which houses the largest concentration of U.S. military sites in the world, sees recurrent flooding now and could experience a 1.5-foot rise in sea levels in the next 20 to 50 years.
More details on the report can be found here: http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint.pdf
www.businessinsider.com/r-us-military-lays-out-plan-for-coping-with-climate-change-2014-10
Climate Change and Internal Displacement
October 10, 2014 By: The Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement
October 10, 2014 By: The Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement
Over the past five years, an average of nearly 27 million people have been displaced annually by natural hazard-related disasters. It has long been recognized that the effects of climate change will displace people and that most of this displacement will be within national borders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ very first report from 1990 stated that the greatest single impact of climate change may be on human migration. The report estimated that by 2050, 150 million people could be displaced by desertification, water scarcity, floods, storms and other climate change-related disasters. Scholars, practitioners and researchers have generally accepted the fact that climate change will result in large-scale movements of people and that developing states will bear the greatest costs. Indeed, the socio-economic impacts of climate change may further limit access to human rights as well as the implementation of the Millennium Development goals and human security. The effects of climate change also have the potential to trigger or exacerbate tension, conflict and violence thus leading to displacement.
The UN General Assembly’s resolution 64/162 of December 2009 recognized natural disasters as a cause of internal displacement and raised concerns that climate change could exacerbate the impact of both sudden- and slow-onset disasters, such as flooding, mudslides, droughts, or violent storms. In 2010, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognized that mobility – migration, displacement and planned relocations – is an important form of adaptation to climate change. In its “Cancun Adaptation Framework,” it invites all parties to go further in understanding, coordinating and cooperating on climate change-induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate, at national, regional and international levels.
This report is adapted from the August 2011 report to the Secretary-General by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced people, Chaloka Beyani. It explores the linkages between climate change and internal displacement from a human rights perspective. Drawing on the 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the report highlights key principles, concepts, and complexities around the issue and makes recommendations for future action.
www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/10/displacement-climate-change-un
The UN General Assembly’s resolution 64/162 of December 2009 recognized natural disasters as a cause of internal displacement and raised concerns that climate change could exacerbate the impact of both sudden- and slow-onset disasters, such as flooding, mudslides, droughts, or violent storms. In 2010, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognized that mobility – migration, displacement and planned relocations – is an important form of adaptation to climate change. In its “Cancun Adaptation Framework,” it invites all parties to go further in understanding, coordinating and cooperating on climate change-induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate, at national, regional and international levels.
This report is adapted from the August 2011 report to the Secretary-General by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced people, Chaloka Beyani. It explores the linkages between climate change and internal displacement from a human rights perspective. Drawing on the 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the report highlights key principles, concepts, and complexities around the issue and makes recommendations for future action.
www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/10/displacement-climate-change-un
PDF Document
Global energy efficiency market ‘an invisible powerhouse’ worth at least USD 310 billion per year
8 October 2014 Verona, Italy
Global energy efficiency market ‘an invisible powerhouse’ worth at least USD 310 billion per year
8 October 2014 Verona, Italy
IEA report sees energy efficiency finance becoming established market segment in its own right.
The global energy efficiency market is worth at least USD 310 billion a year and growing, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency that confirms the position of energy efficiency as the world’s “first fuel”. The report also finds that energy efficiency finance is becoming an established market segment, with innovative new products and standards helping to overcome risks and bringing stability and confidence to the market.
“Energy efficiency is the invisible powerhouse in IEA countries and beyond, working behind the scenes to improve our energy security, lower our energy bills and move us closer to reaching our climate goals,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said at the Verona Efficiency Summit as she launched the IEA’s Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014.
The annual report, now in its second year, shows that investments in energy efficiency are helping to improve energy productivity – the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of GDP. Among 18 IEA countries evaluated in the report, total final energy consumption was down 5% between 2001 and 2011 primarily as a result of investments in energy efficiency. Cumulative avoided energy consumption over the decade from energy efficiency in IEA countries was 1 732 million tonnes of oil equivalent – larger than the energy demand of the United States and Germany combined in 2012.
Previous IEA analysis has shown that energy efficiency is not just a hidden fuel but is also the “first fuel” in the IEA’s largest economies. This year’s report shows that energy efficiency investments over the past four decades have avoided more energy consumption than the total final consumption of the European Union in 2011. Efficiency investments and policies are reducing a continent’s worth of energy demand in a time when fast-developing economies are adding energy demand to the global energy system.
Indeed, the report reveals that huge potential for energy efficiency exists in emerging economies outside the OECD, with efficient vehicles and transport infrastructure a major opportunity. The IEA estimates that efficiency can reduce up to USD 190 billion in fuel costs in transport globally by 2020 and can help alleviate local air pollution and even address critical congestion issues in rapidly developing urban transport systems.
According to the IEA, some 40% of the global energy efficiency market is financed with debt and equity, meaning that the financial market for energy efficiency is in the range of USD 120 billion per year. The number of products and the volume of finance have greatly expanded in recent years, with green bonds, corporate green bonds, energy performance contracts, private commitments, carbon and climate finance, and multilateral development banks and bilateral banks all offering expanded sources of finance for energy efficiency improvements. Bilateral and multilateral lending alone amounted to more than USD 22 billion in 2012.
“Energy efficiency is moving from a niche interest to an established market segment with increasing interest from institutional lenders and investors,” said the IEA Executive Director. “As energy efficiency is essential to meeting our climate goals while supporting economic growth, the increasing use of finance is a welcome development. To fully expand this market, initiatives to continue to reduce barriers will need to strengthen.”
Energy efficiency represents the most important plank in efforts to decarbonise the global energy system and achieve the world’s climate objectives: in the IEA scenario consistent with limiting the long-term increase in global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, the biggest share of emissions reductions – 40% – comes from energy efficiency.
Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014 is on sale at the IEA bookshop. Accredited journalists who would like more information or who wish to receive a complimentary copy should contact [email protected].
Download the following PDF resources :
Executive Summary
Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven's speech at the launch
The slides that accompanied the launch
Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014 factsheet
About the IEA
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an autonomous organisation which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 29 member countries and beyond. Founded in response to the 1973/4 oil crisis, the IEA’s initial role was to help countries co-ordinate a collective response to major disruptions in oil supply through the release of emergency oil stocks to the markets. While this continues to be a key aspect of its work, the IEA has evolved and expanded. It is at the heart of global dialogue on energy, providing reliable and unbiased research, statistics, analysis and recommendations.
Photo: © GraphicObsession
www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/october/name-126160-en
The global energy efficiency market is worth at least USD 310 billion a year and growing, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency that confirms the position of energy efficiency as the world’s “first fuel”. The report also finds that energy efficiency finance is becoming an established market segment, with innovative new products and standards helping to overcome risks and bringing stability and confidence to the market.
“Energy efficiency is the invisible powerhouse in IEA countries and beyond, working behind the scenes to improve our energy security, lower our energy bills and move us closer to reaching our climate goals,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said at the Verona Efficiency Summit as she launched the IEA’s Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014.
The annual report, now in its second year, shows that investments in energy efficiency are helping to improve energy productivity – the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of GDP. Among 18 IEA countries evaluated in the report, total final energy consumption was down 5% between 2001 and 2011 primarily as a result of investments in energy efficiency. Cumulative avoided energy consumption over the decade from energy efficiency in IEA countries was 1 732 million tonnes of oil equivalent – larger than the energy demand of the United States and Germany combined in 2012.
Previous IEA analysis has shown that energy efficiency is not just a hidden fuel but is also the “first fuel” in the IEA’s largest economies. This year’s report shows that energy efficiency investments over the past four decades have avoided more energy consumption than the total final consumption of the European Union in 2011. Efficiency investments and policies are reducing a continent’s worth of energy demand in a time when fast-developing economies are adding energy demand to the global energy system.
Indeed, the report reveals that huge potential for energy efficiency exists in emerging economies outside the OECD, with efficient vehicles and transport infrastructure a major opportunity. The IEA estimates that efficiency can reduce up to USD 190 billion in fuel costs in transport globally by 2020 and can help alleviate local air pollution and even address critical congestion issues in rapidly developing urban transport systems.
According to the IEA, some 40% of the global energy efficiency market is financed with debt and equity, meaning that the financial market for energy efficiency is in the range of USD 120 billion per year. The number of products and the volume of finance have greatly expanded in recent years, with green bonds, corporate green bonds, energy performance contracts, private commitments, carbon and climate finance, and multilateral development banks and bilateral banks all offering expanded sources of finance for energy efficiency improvements. Bilateral and multilateral lending alone amounted to more than USD 22 billion in 2012.
“Energy efficiency is moving from a niche interest to an established market segment with increasing interest from institutional lenders and investors,” said the IEA Executive Director. “As energy efficiency is essential to meeting our climate goals while supporting economic growth, the increasing use of finance is a welcome development. To fully expand this market, initiatives to continue to reduce barriers will need to strengthen.”
Energy efficiency represents the most important plank in efforts to decarbonise the global energy system and achieve the world’s climate objectives: in the IEA scenario consistent with limiting the long-term increase in global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, the biggest share of emissions reductions – 40% – comes from energy efficiency.
Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014 is on sale at the IEA bookshop. Accredited journalists who would like more information or who wish to receive a complimentary copy should contact [email protected].
Download the following PDF resources :
Executive Summary
Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven's speech at the launch
The slides that accompanied the launch
Energy Efficiency Market Report 2014 factsheet
About the IEA
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an autonomous organisation which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 29 member countries and beyond. Founded in response to the 1973/4 oil crisis, the IEA’s initial role was to help countries co-ordinate a collective response to major disruptions in oil supply through the release of emergency oil stocks to the markets. While this continues to be a key aspect of its work, the IEA has evolved and expanded. It is at the heart of global dialogue on energy, providing reliable and unbiased research, statistics, analysis and recommendations.
Photo: © GraphicObsession
www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/october/name-126160-en
Obama urges world to follow US lead on climate
September 24, 2014
September 24, 2014
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The only thing rising faster than heat-trapping gases Tuesday were the statements of urgency by world leaders, who told each other at a United Nations summit how seriously they take global warming. Binding commitments and action are to come.
President Barack Obama pressed other countries to follow the United States' lead on the issue, even as the summit revealed the many obstacles that stand in the way of wider agreements to reduce heat-trapping pollution. "The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions," Obama said. "Today I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, but right now. Because no nation can meet this global threat alone."
But none of the pledges made at the one-day meeting was binding. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders to discuss climate was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global climate-change treaty. It also revealed the sharp differences that divide countries on matters such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production:
Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, said it would not sign a pledge to halt deforestation by 2030. — The United States decided not to join 73 countries in supporting a price on carbon, which Congress has indicated it would reject.
And minutes after Obama said "nobody gets a pass," Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli insisted the world treat developing nations, including China, differently than developed nations, allowing them to release more heat-trapping pollution. China, the No. 1 carbon-polluting nation, signed on in support of pricing carbon and vowed to stop the rise of carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as possible. Obama said global warming "will define the contours of this century more dramatically than" terrorism, disease or inequality. "Today we must set the world on a new course," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who added that pricing carbon was critical. "Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future."
In some ways, the summit, which was part of the annual U.N. General Assembly, answered that call. The European Union said its member nations next month were set to approve a plan that would cut greenhouse gases back to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The EU also called for using renewable energy for 27 percent of the bloc's power needs and increasing energy efficiency by 30 percent. The United States will not release its new emissions targets until early next year. "There were not that many surprises," said Connie Hedegaard, the top climate official for the European Commission, referring to Obama's speech.
Hedegaard said the first-ever limits on carbon from power plants, proposed by Obama back in June, were "a good signal to send, but after today we will still have to wait until first quarter of 2015 to see how ambitious the United States will be."
By 2020, China will reduce its emissions per gross domestic product by 45 percent from 2005 levels, Zhang said. But because economic growth in China has more than tripled since 2005, that means Chinese carbon pollution can continue to soar. Still, outside environmentalists hailed the country's promises because they went beyond any of China's previous statements.
More than 150 countries set the first-ever deadline to end deforestation by 2030, but that goal was thrown into doubt when Brazil said it would not join. Forests are important because they absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The United States, Canada and the entire European Union signed onto a declaration to halve forest loss by 2020 and eliminate deforestation entirely by 2030. If the forest goal is met, the U.N. says it would be the equivalent of taking every car in the world off the road. A group of companies, countries and nonprofits also pledged to restore more than 1 million square miles of forest worldwide by 2030. Norway promised to spend $350 million to protect forests in Peru and another $100 million in Liberia.
World leaders pledged to spend at least $5 billion making the world more sustainable. France promised $1 billion. Korea pledged $100 million. Others, like Chile, pledged cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The U.N. claimed that when business and non-governmental groups' rough promises were tossed in, the total was up to $200 billion. By the end of the day, Ban was beaming and calling the proceedings historic. "I asked for bold announcements from governments, business, finance and civil society in five key areas," Ban said. "The summit delivered."
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro chastised "polluting powers" for causing an "evil of such planetary dimensions" and then trying to barter their way out of their responsibilities. Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and scientist Rajendra K. Pachauri warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said, the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming. Five years ago, leaders pledged to keep world temperatures from increasing by another 2 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius).
Pachauri, who headed a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists that studied the issue, and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a U.N. building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in New York in 2012. Pachauri said it will get worse with droughts, storms and food and water shortages. He foresaw even more violent climate-driven conflicts.
And, Pachauri said, "a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world's poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?
www.mail.com/int/scitech/news/3112662-obama-urges-world-to-follow-us-lead-climate
Bloomberg News By DAVID J. LYNCH
President Obama yesterday urged world leaders at a United Nations summit to reach a global agreement to combat climate change “while we still can.”
Speaking before more than 120 officials, the president cited more frequent droughts and flooding in warning, “The climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it.” Obama took credit for putting the United States on course to reduce its carbon emissions by 2020 to a level 17 percent below that of 2005. U.S. financial support is helping 120 nations skip the “dirty phase of development” and move directly to low-carbon energy sources, he said.
The president tied calls for action on global warming with a pledge to help other nations cope with climate disruption that earlier inaction has now rendered inescapable. “I call on all countries to join us – not next year, or the year after, but right now, because no nation can meet this global threat alone,” Obama said. Speaking after a summer he called the “hottest ever recorded,” the president unveiled a series of initiatives designed to help developing nations protect themselves against the ravages of a warming planet. And he detailed several public-private partnerships the U.S. government is joining to combat climate change.
Under the U.S. plan, poorer nations will be given access to improved weather risk assessments as well as new global elevation data. The protective measures will “harness the unique scientific and technological capabilities of the United States,” the White House said in a statement. The president, who took credit for expanding energy production from wind and solar power, also issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their international development programs on recipient nations’ ability to withstand rising temperatures.
Fresh from a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, representing the absent Chinese president, Obama said the U.S. and China – the world’s two largest economies and largest emitters of carbon – shared “a special responsibility to lead” in addressing climate woes. Zhang, though, said that China will “take on responsibilities commensurate with our development levels” – a signal it will likely agree to less ambitious cuts than rich nations.
Still, the climate summit – designed to create momentum for a draft international agreement by year’s end – was overshadowed by the U.S.-led bombing attacks in Syria. And some environmentalists said the U.S. needs to do much more. “U.S. policy on the whole does not reflect the urgency of the president’s rhetoric,” said Raymond Offenheiser, president of the antipoverty group Oxfam America. “It will be impossible to fulfill the agreements” made five years ago to limit rising temperatures “without more substantial action by Congress and the president.”
The brainchild of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the daylong meeting sought to create momentum for negotiations on a draft global agreement in time for another meeting in December in Lima and a formal accord one year later in Paris. For the president, climate change is among the issues that defined his campaign for the White House. In June 2008, accepting the Democratic nomination, he said future generations would recall: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
The president’s goal for ambitious action ran into opposition from congressional Republicans, many of whom regard climate change as the product of politicized science. They ridiculed his vow to prevent the ocean’s rise with Peter Wehner, in Commentary magazine, likening the president to King Canute and writing that “the Great and Mighty Obama” would have no better luck with the tides than the 11th century monarch. Public opinion is largely behind the president’s view. In a newNew York Times/CBS News poll, 74 percent of Americans said global warming is having or will have a serious impact; 24 percent say the phenomenon will not have a serious impact.
By 54 percent to 31 percent, Americans say human activity rather than natural fluctuations explain the rising temperatures.
In the absence of support from Congress, the Obama administration ultimately embraced regulatory action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. And U.S. emissions last year were down 10 percent from 2007, according to Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Rather than seeking a legally binding agreement like the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, which the U.S. never ratified, this time the U.N. wants countries to offer pledges of specific actions. With them will come financial contributions from richer nations to offset the impact on developing countries of transitioning to low-carbon fuels.
The summit opened after a choreographed run-up including public demonstrations in cities including New York and London, pledges by corporations and investors and the release of fresh scientific data underscoring the urgency of action. The summit spotlight has landed firmly on the U.S. and China. The two nations combined account for about 45 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. As the president spoke, a member of the Chinese delegation could be seen snapping a photo of him. During previous international meetings, China has regarded climate change as the responsibility of wealthy nations such as the U.S. that have been polluting for centuries. As the air in Beijing and Shanghai has turned into a foul brown soup, and the Chinese public has demanded action, that stance has shifted, albeit slightly. “Responding to climate change is what China needs to do to achieve sustainable development at home as well as to fulfill its new international responsibility,” said Zhang.
China will cut the amount of carbon it produces per unit of gross domestic product by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, Zhang said, repeating a five-year old commitment.
Since the failure of earlier international summits, the U.S. profile on the issue also has improved. The shale gas revolution has helped reduce U.S. carbon emissions and cut imports of foreign oil. Monday, the White House took credit for what spokesman Josh Earnest called “the tremendous progress the U.S. has made” on cutting carbon pollution, promoting clean energy and prepare defenses against climate disruption. “Over the past five years, the United States has actually done more to reduce the threat of climate change domestically, and with the help of our international partners than in all of the 20 years before that,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a New York speech.
The administration worked with automakers to agree on fuel- efficiency standards that will require an average of 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. Those standards will cut oil consumption by 12 billion barrels and halve vehicle emission by 2025, according to the White House. After his re-election, Obama underscored his intent to take more aggressive climate steps by appointing John Podesta as a White House adviser. Last year, Obama issued a climate action plan, vowing the first-ever regulations limiting greenhouse gases from power plants, a cut in U.S. government financing for overseas coal plants and accelerated progress on efficiency standards for everything from microwave ovens to walk-in freezers. The power plant rules, the centerpiece of his plan, were proposed earlier this year and are set to be finalized next June.
The Obama administration also invested billions of dollars in clean energy, green lighted renewable projects on public land and reached an agreement with China to limit hydro fluorocarbons, chemicals used in refrigeration and air conditioning.
The legacy of the earlier U.S. failure to ratify the Kyoto pact and a domestic political climate that has sapped U.S. ability to act hasn’t gone away. Many foreign officials want to see the U.S. do more. “It’s important to have the American leadership together with other countries to move faster on a global agreement,” said Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister, in an interview in New York.
U.S. leaders need to “mobilize American society to face this. Yesterday, you started,” she added in reference to the New York protest last weekend. Prospects for concrete action at the world body this week are faint. The goal is to avert what French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday called “a real catastrophe.”
Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization reported that the main drivers of climate change are continuing to rise. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the most important contributor to man-made climate impacts, are now 42 percent higher than in 1750, the WMO said. The increase in CO2 from 2012 to 2013 was the largest annual change in the past 29 years, the report said.
Regulatory action pales beside what might have been done if Obama had been able to persuade congressional Republicans that climate change is real. Peter Ogden, former White House director for climate change in the Obama administration, said the president’s climate plan will achieve the same greenhouse gas reductions “in 2020 that would have been achieved under the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House in 2009.” The White House is trying to frame the climate change battle as a potential benefit for the U.S. economy rather than a certain cost. “There does not have to be a conflict” between economic growth and sound environmental policy, the president said.
“Yes, this is hard,” Obama said. “But there should be no question the United States is stepping up to the plate.”
www.concordmonitor.com/news/nation/world/13682782-95/obama-urges-action-on-climate
President Barack Obama pressed other countries to follow the United States' lead on the issue, even as the summit revealed the many obstacles that stand in the way of wider agreements to reduce heat-trapping pollution. "The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions," Obama said. "Today I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, but right now. Because no nation can meet this global threat alone."
But none of the pledges made at the one-day meeting was binding. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders to discuss climate was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global climate-change treaty. It also revealed the sharp differences that divide countries on matters such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production:
Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, said it would not sign a pledge to halt deforestation by 2030. — The United States decided not to join 73 countries in supporting a price on carbon, which Congress has indicated it would reject.
And minutes after Obama said "nobody gets a pass," Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli insisted the world treat developing nations, including China, differently than developed nations, allowing them to release more heat-trapping pollution. China, the No. 1 carbon-polluting nation, signed on in support of pricing carbon and vowed to stop the rise of carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as possible. Obama said global warming "will define the contours of this century more dramatically than" terrorism, disease or inequality. "Today we must set the world on a new course," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who added that pricing carbon was critical. "Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future."
In some ways, the summit, which was part of the annual U.N. General Assembly, answered that call. The European Union said its member nations next month were set to approve a plan that would cut greenhouse gases back to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The EU also called for using renewable energy for 27 percent of the bloc's power needs and increasing energy efficiency by 30 percent. The United States will not release its new emissions targets until early next year. "There were not that many surprises," said Connie Hedegaard, the top climate official for the European Commission, referring to Obama's speech.
Hedegaard said the first-ever limits on carbon from power plants, proposed by Obama back in June, were "a good signal to send, but after today we will still have to wait until first quarter of 2015 to see how ambitious the United States will be."
By 2020, China will reduce its emissions per gross domestic product by 45 percent from 2005 levels, Zhang said. But because economic growth in China has more than tripled since 2005, that means Chinese carbon pollution can continue to soar. Still, outside environmentalists hailed the country's promises because they went beyond any of China's previous statements.
More than 150 countries set the first-ever deadline to end deforestation by 2030, but that goal was thrown into doubt when Brazil said it would not join. Forests are important because they absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The United States, Canada and the entire European Union signed onto a declaration to halve forest loss by 2020 and eliminate deforestation entirely by 2030. If the forest goal is met, the U.N. says it would be the equivalent of taking every car in the world off the road. A group of companies, countries and nonprofits also pledged to restore more than 1 million square miles of forest worldwide by 2030. Norway promised to spend $350 million to protect forests in Peru and another $100 million in Liberia.
World leaders pledged to spend at least $5 billion making the world more sustainable. France promised $1 billion. Korea pledged $100 million. Others, like Chile, pledged cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The U.N. claimed that when business and non-governmental groups' rough promises were tossed in, the total was up to $200 billion. By the end of the day, Ban was beaming and calling the proceedings historic. "I asked for bold announcements from governments, business, finance and civil society in five key areas," Ban said. "The summit delivered."
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro chastised "polluting powers" for causing an "evil of such planetary dimensions" and then trying to barter their way out of their responsibilities. Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and scientist Rajendra K. Pachauri warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said, the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming. Five years ago, leaders pledged to keep world temperatures from increasing by another 2 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius).
Pachauri, who headed a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists that studied the issue, and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a U.N. building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in New York in 2012. Pachauri said it will get worse with droughts, storms and food and water shortages. He foresaw even more violent climate-driven conflicts.
And, Pachauri said, "a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world's poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?
www.mail.com/int/scitech/news/3112662-obama-urges-world-to-follow-us-lead-climate
Bloomberg News By DAVID J. LYNCH
President Obama yesterday urged world leaders at a United Nations summit to reach a global agreement to combat climate change “while we still can.”
Speaking before more than 120 officials, the president cited more frequent droughts and flooding in warning, “The climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it.” Obama took credit for putting the United States on course to reduce its carbon emissions by 2020 to a level 17 percent below that of 2005. U.S. financial support is helping 120 nations skip the “dirty phase of development” and move directly to low-carbon energy sources, he said.
The president tied calls for action on global warming with a pledge to help other nations cope with climate disruption that earlier inaction has now rendered inescapable. “I call on all countries to join us – not next year, or the year after, but right now, because no nation can meet this global threat alone,” Obama said. Speaking after a summer he called the “hottest ever recorded,” the president unveiled a series of initiatives designed to help developing nations protect themselves against the ravages of a warming planet. And he detailed several public-private partnerships the U.S. government is joining to combat climate change.
Under the U.S. plan, poorer nations will be given access to improved weather risk assessments as well as new global elevation data. The protective measures will “harness the unique scientific and technological capabilities of the United States,” the White House said in a statement. The president, who took credit for expanding energy production from wind and solar power, also issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their international development programs on recipient nations’ ability to withstand rising temperatures.
Fresh from a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, representing the absent Chinese president, Obama said the U.S. and China – the world’s two largest economies and largest emitters of carbon – shared “a special responsibility to lead” in addressing climate woes. Zhang, though, said that China will “take on responsibilities commensurate with our development levels” – a signal it will likely agree to less ambitious cuts than rich nations.
Still, the climate summit – designed to create momentum for a draft international agreement by year’s end – was overshadowed by the U.S.-led bombing attacks in Syria. And some environmentalists said the U.S. needs to do much more. “U.S. policy on the whole does not reflect the urgency of the president’s rhetoric,” said Raymond Offenheiser, president of the antipoverty group Oxfam America. “It will be impossible to fulfill the agreements” made five years ago to limit rising temperatures “without more substantial action by Congress and the president.”
The brainchild of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the daylong meeting sought to create momentum for negotiations on a draft global agreement in time for another meeting in December in Lima and a formal accord one year later in Paris. For the president, climate change is among the issues that defined his campaign for the White House. In June 2008, accepting the Democratic nomination, he said future generations would recall: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
The president’s goal for ambitious action ran into opposition from congressional Republicans, many of whom regard climate change as the product of politicized science. They ridiculed his vow to prevent the ocean’s rise with Peter Wehner, in Commentary magazine, likening the president to King Canute and writing that “the Great and Mighty Obama” would have no better luck with the tides than the 11th century monarch. Public opinion is largely behind the president’s view. In a newNew York Times/CBS News poll, 74 percent of Americans said global warming is having or will have a serious impact; 24 percent say the phenomenon will not have a serious impact.
By 54 percent to 31 percent, Americans say human activity rather than natural fluctuations explain the rising temperatures.
In the absence of support from Congress, the Obama administration ultimately embraced regulatory action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. And U.S. emissions last year were down 10 percent from 2007, according to Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Rather than seeking a legally binding agreement like the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, which the U.S. never ratified, this time the U.N. wants countries to offer pledges of specific actions. With them will come financial contributions from richer nations to offset the impact on developing countries of transitioning to low-carbon fuels.
The summit opened after a choreographed run-up including public demonstrations in cities including New York and London, pledges by corporations and investors and the release of fresh scientific data underscoring the urgency of action. The summit spotlight has landed firmly on the U.S. and China. The two nations combined account for about 45 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. As the president spoke, a member of the Chinese delegation could be seen snapping a photo of him. During previous international meetings, China has regarded climate change as the responsibility of wealthy nations such as the U.S. that have been polluting for centuries. As the air in Beijing and Shanghai has turned into a foul brown soup, and the Chinese public has demanded action, that stance has shifted, albeit slightly. “Responding to climate change is what China needs to do to achieve sustainable development at home as well as to fulfill its new international responsibility,” said Zhang.
China will cut the amount of carbon it produces per unit of gross domestic product by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, Zhang said, repeating a five-year old commitment.
Since the failure of earlier international summits, the U.S. profile on the issue also has improved. The shale gas revolution has helped reduce U.S. carbon emissions and cut imports of foreign oil. Monday, the White House took credit for what spokesman Josh Earnest called “the tremendous progress the U.S. has made” on cutting carbon pollution, promoting clean energy and prepare defenses against climate disruption. “Over the past five years, the United States has actually done more to reduce the threat of climate change domestically, and with the help of our international partners than in all of the 20 years before that,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a New York speech.
The administration worked with automakers to agree on fuel- efficiency standards that will require an average of 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. Those standards will cut oil consumption by 12 billion barrels and halve vehicle emission by 2025, according to the White House. After his re-election, Obama underscored his intent to take more aggressive climate steps by appointing John Podesta as a White House adviser. Last year, Obama issued a climate action plan, vowing the first-ever regulations limiting greenhouse gases from power plants, a cut in U.S. government financing for overseas coal plants and accelerated progress on efficiency standards for everything from microwave ovens to walk-in freezers. The power plant rules, the centerpiece of his plan, were proposed earlier this year and are set to be finalized next June.
The Obama administration also invested billions of dollars in clean energy, green lighted renewable projects on public land and reached an agreement with China to limit hydro fluorocarbons, chemicals used in refrigeration and air conditioning.
The legacy of the earlier U.S. failure to ratify the Kyoto pact and a domestic political climate that has sapped U.S. ability to act hasn’t gone away. Many foreign officials want to see the U.S. do more. “It’s important to have the American leadership together with other countries to move faster on a global agreement,” said Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister, in an interview in New York.
U.S. leaders need to “mobilize American society to face this. Yesterday, you started,” she added in reference to the New York protest last weekend. Prospects for concrete action at the world body this week are faint. The goal is to avert what French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday called “a real catastrophe.”
Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization reported that the main drivers of climate change are continuing to rise. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the most important contributor to man-made climate impacts, are now 42 percent higher than in 1750, the WMO said. The increase in CO2 from 2012 to 2013 was the largest annual change in the past 29 years, the report said.
Regulatory action pales beside what might have been done if Obama had been able to persuade congressional Republicans that climate change is real. Peter Ogden, former White House director for climate change in the Obama administration, said the president’s climate plan will achieve the same greenhouse gas reductions “in 2020 that would have been achieved under the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House in 2009.” The White House is trying to frame the climate change battle as a potential benefit for the U.S. economy rather than a certain cost. “There does not have to be a conflict” between economic growth and sound environmental policy, the president said.
“Yes, this is hard,” Obama said. “But there should be no question the United States is stepping up to the plate.”
www.concordmonitor.com/news/nation/world/13682782-95/obama-urges-action-on-climate
Record Climate Change March in New York City Monday
by Clayton Browne September 22, 2014, 1:25 pm
by Clayton Browne September 22, 2014, 1:25 pm
The People’s Climate March was apparently a rousing success. Organizers say that more than 310,000 people attended the climate change rally in New York City on Monday, making it the largest climate-change related demonstration ever.
The demonstrators, who included homeowners flooded by Hurricane Sandy, NYC political leaders and indigenous people fighting oil company developments on their lands, chanted, sang and danced to draw attention to the growing threat of climate change.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, former U.S. vice president Al Gore, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and actors Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio were among the demonstrators at the climate change march. Ban Ki Moon announced just last week that DiCaprio was officially named a U.N. Messenger of Peace for his lifetime commitment to important environmental causes. Of note, over 1,100 environmentally-focused organizations endorsed and.or participated in the climate change march, including well-known groups such as 350.org, Avaaz, the Sierra Club, Climate Justice Alliance and the Service Employees International Union.
First of a series of events to highlight “Global Warming Week”Today’s demonstration in the Big Apple is the first in a series of events held to be held across the globe this week to highlight the global warming issue ahead of the U.N. summit on the topic Tuesday. U.S. President Obama and other world leaders as well as well-known business magnates will be at the U.N. to present initiatives designed to reduce global warming.
Statements from climate change march participants“I’m totally passionate about our planet and what’s happening with our life here,” said Heather Snow, 57, a massage therapist from Wilmington, N.C. who attended the climate change rally. “The whole Congress, everyone has gone insane, and it’s time to end the insanity. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but it’s got to happen soon. We’re running out of time.”
Bill McKibben, the executive director of 350.org, commented: “we need to demonstrate there are an awful lot of people that care about climate change and demonstrate that this is a huge issue for all kinds of people. Since the fossil fuel companies have money, we have to have something on our side, and that’s people.”
www.valuewalk.com/2014/09/record-climate-change-march-new-york-city-monday
The demonstrators, who included homeowners flooded by Hurricane Sandy, NYC political leaders and indigenous people fighting oil company developments on their lands, chanted, sang and danced to draw attention to the growing threat of climate change.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, former U.S. vice president Al Gore, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and actors Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio were among the demonstrators at the climate change march. Ban Ki Moon announced just last week that DiCaprio was officially named a U.N. Messenger of Peace for his lifetime commitment to important environmental causes. Of note, over 1,100 environmentally-focused organizations endorsed and.or participated in the climate change march, including well-known groups such as 350.org, Avaaz, the Sierra Club, Climate Justice Alliance and the Service Employees International Union.
First of a series of events to highlight “Global Warming Week”Today’s demonstration in the Big Apple is the first in a series of events held to be held across the globe this week to highlight the global warming issue ahead of the U.N. summit on the topic Tuesday. U.S. President Obama and other world leaders as well as well-known business magnates will be at the U.N. to present initiatives designed to reduce global warming.
Statements from climate change march participants“I’m totally passionate about our planet and what’s happening with our life here,” said Heather Snow, 57, a massage therapist from Wilmington, N.C. who attended the climate change rally. “The whole Congress, everyone has gone insane, and it’s time to end the insanity. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but it’s got to happen soon. We’re running out of time.”
Bill McKibben, the executive director of 350.org, commented: “we need to demonstrate there are an awful lot of people that care about climate change and demonstrate that this is a huge issue for all kinds of people. Since the fossil fuel companies have money, we have to have something on our side, and that’s people.”
www.valuewalk.com/2014/09/record-climate-change-march-new-york-city-monday
What to Expect from the UN Climate Summit
Joshua Meltzer, Tim Boersma, Elizabeth Ferris and Timmons Roberts | September 22, 2014 3:00pm
On Tuesday, September 23, heads of state and senior government officials will convene at the United Nations in New York for UN Climate Summit 2014. In advance of the summit, Brookings experts Joshua Meltzer, Tim Boersma, Elizabeth Ferris and Timmons Roberts offer their thoughts on the summit and key stakeholders.
Joshua Meltzer on the benefits of the summit, and on setting ambitions for Paris 2015
This week, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will convene a Climate Summit at UN headquarters in New York. The Summit aims to catalyze global action on climate change in the lead up to the UN Climate Change meeting in Paris 2015, when countries have agreed to reach a new climate change agreement that will include commitments on reducing GHG emissions post-2020. In a previous blog, I outlined how the UN Climate Change Summit could contribute to a successful outcome in Paris.
The main benefit of this Climate Summit will be convening leaders specifically on climate change issues – something that has not happened since the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 – to discuss the key elements of a climate change agreement that could be reached in Paris. President Obama plans on attending the Climate Change Summit. However, recent reports are that the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not be there. If this is the case then the Summit will fall short of this goal. This is because China, as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, must be part of any discussion about what can be achieved in Paris in 2015. India’s involvement is also crucial. As a developing country with significantly lower per capita emissions than China it will need room grow its GHG emissions as it addresses its development needs, including extending energy access to the approximately 400 million Indian citizens without access to electricity. The failure of Modi to attend the summit signals a lack of confidence that the UN negotiations are going to produce an outcome that India can accept.
Despite these leaders absence, the Summit can still make progress. Some of the outcomes to look for are commitments by governments to release their post-2020 GHG targets before the Paris meeting. This will allow for a review of each country’s level of ambition in light of the goal of keeping temperature increases below 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Commitments to provide adequate climate change finance including steps towards operationalizing the Green Climate Fund will be another necessary part of any deal coming out of Paris. Signals from the UN Climate Summit that governments are moving in this direction would help create a positive dynamic in the UN climate change negotiations.
Tim Boersma on Europe: still one of the most ambitious kids in the class
On September 10, President-elect Jean-Claude Juncker announced his new team of European commissioners, and, to put it bluntly, their job descriptions. In essence these contain positive news for the UNFCCC talks in Paris 2015, as described in this short piece: amongst many other issues, the proposed commissioners have been requested to establish policies to reach the renewables and carbon reduction targets for 2020 and 2030, to install a binding energy efficiency target, and make the EU the world’s primary leader on renewable energy.
Needless to say these things are easier said than done. Currently there is no agreement within the EU about renewable and carbon reduction targets for 2030, and there is significant disagreement between the 28 member states about the proposals that were published by the European Commission in January 2014. The cornerstones in these proposals are an overall renewables target for all EU member states of 27 percent, and a carbon reduction target of 40 percent for 2030. Next to the lack of political agreement, Europe has been suffering from low carbon prices. As a result, coal-fired electricity generation capacity has been operating at full speed, and carbon emissions have been on the rise, in part fuelled by cheap U.S. coal that is finding its way across the Atlantic Ocean.
Next to these internal challenges, Europe risks being the only kid in the class that wants to show ambition, as it remains to be seen whether other major emitters are willing to come to a meaningful agreement. Even if that were the case, Europe has reason to move full speed ahead. The often criticized energy transition in Germany has not resulted in black-outs as predicted by critics, and the large industrial consumers have by and large been exempt from paying the bills so far, making claims about being at a competitive disadvantage questionable. An in-depth study by my colleagues of experiences in Germany shows that reality is often more nuanced, and important lessons can be learned (as they can from Japan, and many U.S. states) as new targets for 2030 are finalized.
Europe faces tremendous challenges, number one probably being job creation and safeguarding its competitive position in global markets. The new European Commission has expressed its ambition to pursue the trajectory of increased renewable energy, carbon reduction, and energy efficiency. That is bold, yet the right way forward, and deserves recognition.
Elizabeth Ferris on how the humanitarian community can contribute to climate change adaptation
While the Summit is not part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and while no negotiations related to the convention will take place, the Summit offers an opportunity to keep the issue of climate change alive. I hope that at least some of the leaders in New York next week will focus on mobility as a climate change adaptation strategy. And I hope that at least some of the voices from the ‘climate front lines’ will refer to the fact that one of the most far-reaching consequences of climate change is likely to be on the movement of people. A couple of weeks ago, the UN Conference on Small Island Developing States was held in Samoa – a region of the world where displacement from the effects of climate change is not a rhetorical issue.
Indeed, the humanitarian community has significant expertise in dealing with people who are displaced -- expertise which will be needed if, as expected, hundreds of millions of people move because of climate change in the coming decades. But too often the humanitarians are left on the margins of discussions of climate change and too often humanitarian, development, and climate change actors work in their siloes – sometimes duplicating each other’s efforts and often talking past each other.
Let’s hope that the Climate Summit and the processes leading up to the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 can learn from each other, can build on the expertise that both sets of actors bring.
Timmons Roberts on why the summit is only as good as the march
Just as world leaders begin to assemble in New York for Ban Ki Moon’s summit to discuss how to increase global action to confront global warming, over 100,000 people took to the city’s streets demanding they do more than talk. Most of those leaders have been woefully behind the curve, but this may finally be the occasion upon which they have to listen and pay attention to citizens, who in growing numbers are calling for action. The devastating effects of the ongoing drought in California, the tragic impacts of Hurricane Sandy, and dozens of other extreme weather events have pushed public concern over a tipping point. Even the long silent Obama administration has begun to spend some political capital on the issue, with the President and his EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy sharply proclaiming public health threats from climate change like soaring asthma rates, the economic impacts of droughts and floods, and the moral irresponsibility of inaction.
In the past, climate change has largely lacked a noisy social movement to demand action. The People’s Climate March in NYC attempts to show that climate change is now a mainstream issue, by bringing together diverse groups of Americans. 1400 organizations have joined together to plan the march, which has framed itself as not an environmentalist affair but a much broader, commonsense, mainstream issue. Marchers lined up in six major blocks: Indigenous and minority communities in front, labor, families and students next, then workers and environmentalists, peace and justice groups, interfaith and scientist groups, and finally communities taking up the rear.
This is a much larger and more diverse crowd than we have ever seen assemble on climate change, anywhere. Parallel events are being organized around the world, including in London and Rio de Janeiro. The past two decades of “active inaction” by the world’s nations shows that action on this difficult problem will not progress without a powerful social movement to demand it. As the old bumper sticker once said, “If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.”
Failing that, we’re in for some very rough weather.
www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2014/09/22-un-climate-summit-preview
Joshua Meltzer on the benefits of the summit, and on setting ambitions for Paris 2015
This week, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will convene a Climate Summit at UN headquarters in New York. The Summit aims to catalyze global action on climate change in the lead up to the UN Climate Change meeting in Paris 2015, when countries have agreed to reach a new climate change agreement that will include commitments on reducing GHG emissions post-2020. In a previous blog, I outlined how the UN Climate Change Summit could contribute to a successful outcome in Paris.
The main benefit of this Climate Summit will be convening leaders specifically on climate change issues – something that has not happened since the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 – to discuss the key elements of a climate change agreement that could be reached in Paris. President Obama plans on attending the Climate Change Summit. However, recent reports are that the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not be there. If this is the case then the Summit will fall short of this goal. This is because China, as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, must be part of any discussion about what can be achieved in Paris in 2015. India’s involvement is also crucial. As a developing country with significantly lower per capita emissions than China it will need room grow its GHG emissions as it addresses its development needs, including extending energy access to the approximately 400 million Indian citizens without access to electricity. The failure of Modi to attend the summit signals a lack of confidence that the UN negotiations are going to produce an outcome that India can accept.
Despite these leaders absence, the Summit can still make progress. Some of the outcomes to look for are commitments by governments to release their post-2020 GHG targets before the Paris meeting. This will allow for a review of each country’s level of ambition in light of the goal of keeping temperature increases below 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Commitments to provide adequate climate change finance including steps towards operationalizing the Green Climate Fund will be another necessary part of any deal coming out of Paris. Signals from the UN Climate Summit that governments are moving in this direction would help create a positive dynamic in the UN climate change negotiations.
Tim Boersma on Europe: still one of the most ambitious kids in the class
On September 10, President-elect Jean-Claude Juncker announced his new team of European commissioners, and, to put it bluntly, their job descriptions. In essence these contain positive news for the UNFCCC talks in Paris 2015, as described in this short piece: amongst many other issues, the proposed commissioners have been requested to establish policies to reach the renewables and carbon reduction targets for 2020 and 2030, to install a binding energy efficiency target, and make the EU the world’s primary leader on renewable energy.
Needless to say these things are easier said than done. Currently there is no agreement within the EU about renewable and carbon reduction targets for 2030, and there is significant disagreement between the 28 member states about the proposals that were published by the European Commission in January 2014. The cornerstones in these proposals are an overall renewables target for all EU member states of 27 percent, and a carbon reduction target of 40 percent for 2030. Next to the lack of political agreement, Europe has been suffering from low carbon prices. As a result, coal-fired electricity generation capacity has been operating at full speed, and carbon emissions have been on the rise, in part fuelled by cheap U.S. coal that is finding its way across the Atlantic Ocean.
Next to these internal challenges, Europe risks being the only kid in the class that wants to show ambition, as it remains to be seen whether other major emitters are willing to come to a meaningful agreement. Even if that were the case, Europe has reason to move full speed ahead. The often criticized energy transition in Germany has not resulted in black-outs as predicted by critics, and the large industrial consumers have by and large been exempt from paying the bills so far, making claims about being at a competitive disadvantage questionable. An in-depth study by my colleagues of experiences in Germany shows that reality is often more nuanced, and important lessons can be learned (as they can from Japan, and many U.S. states) as new targets for 2030 are finalized.
Europe faces tremendous challenges, number one probably being job creation and safeguarding its competitive position in global markets. The new European Commission has expressed its ambition to pursue the trajectory of increased renewable energy, carbon reduction, and energy efficiency. That is bold, yet the right way forward, and deserves recognition.
Elizabeth Ferris on how the humanitarian community can contribute to climate change adaptation
While the Summit is not part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and while no negotiations related to the convention will take place, the Summit offers an opportunity to keep the issue of climate change alive. I hope that at least some of the leaders in New York next week will focus on mobility as a climate change adaptation strategy. And I hope that at least some of the voices from the ‘climate front lines’ will refer to the fact that one of the most far-reaching consequences of climate change is likely to be on the movement of people. A couple of weeks ago, the UN Conference on Small Island Developing States was held in Samoa – a region of the world where displacement from the effects of climate change is not a rhetorical issue.
Indeed, the humanitarian community has significant expertise in dealing with people who are displaced -- expertise which will be needed if, as expected, hundreds of millions of people move because of climate change in the coming decades. But too often the humanitarians are left on the margins of discussions of climate change and too often humanitarian, development, and climate change actors work in their siloes – sometimes duplicating each other’s efforts and often talking past each other.
Let’s hope that the Climate Summit and the processes leading up to the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 can learn from each other, can build on the expertise that both sets of actors bring.
Timmons Roberts on why the summit is only as good as the march
Just as world leaders begin to assemble in New York for Ban Ki Moon’s summit to discuss how to increase global action to confront global warming, over 100,000 people took to the city’s streets demanding they do more than talk. Most of those leaders have been woefully behind the curve, but this may finally be the occasion upon which they have to listen and pay attention to citizens, who in growing numbers are calling for action. The devastating effects of the ongoing drought in California, the tragic impacts of Hurricane Sandy, and dozens of other extreme weather events have pushed public concern over a tipping point. Even the long silent Obama administration has begun to spend some political capital on the issue, with the President and his EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy sharply proclaiming public health threats from climate change like soaring asthma rates, the economic impacts of droughts and floods, and the moral irresponsibility of inaction.
In the past, climate change has largely lacked a noisy social movement to demand action. The People’s Climate March in NYC attempts to show that climate change is now a mainstream issue, by bringing together diverse groups of Americans. 1400 organizations have joined together to plan the march, which has framed itself as not an environmentalist affair but a much broader, commonsense, mainstream issue. Marchers lined up in six major blocks: Indigenous and minority communities in front, labor, families and students next, then workers and environmentalists, peace and justice groups, interfaith and scientist groups, and finally communities taking up the rear.
This is a much larger and more diverse crowd than we have ever seen assemble on climate change, anywhere. Parallel events are being organized around the world, including in London and Rio de Janeiro. The past two decades of “active inaction” by the world’s nations shows that action on this difficult problem will not progress without a powerful social movement to demand it. As the old bumper sticker once said, “If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.”
Failing that, we’re in for some very rough weather.
www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2014/09/22-un-climate-summit-preview