EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • What was agreed at Copenhagen- and what was left out

     

    Temperature

    “The increase in global temperature should be below two degrees.”

    This will disappoint the 100-plus nations who wanted a lower maximum of 1.5C, including many small island states who fear that even at this level their homes may be submerged.

    Peak date for carbon emissions

    “We should co-operate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible, recognising that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries …” This vague phrase is a disappointment to those who want nations to set a date for emissions to fall, but will please developing countries who want to put the economy first.

    Emissions cuts

    “Parties commit to implement individually or jointly the quantified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020 as listed in appendix 1 before 1 February 2010.”

    This phrase commits developed nations to start work almost immediately on reaching their mid-term targets. For the US, this is a weak 14-17% reduction on 2005 levels; for the EU, a still-to-be-determined goal of 20-30% on 1990 levels; for Japan, 25% and Russia 15-25% on 1990 levels. The accord makes no mention of 2050 targets, which dropped out of the text over the course of the day.

    Forests

    “Substantial finance to prevent deforestation; adaptation, technology development and transfer and capacity.”

    This is crucial because more than 15% of emissions are attributed to the clearing of forests. Conservation groups are concerned that this phrase lacks safeguards.

    Money

    “The collective commitment by developed countries is to provide new and additional resources amounting to $30bn for 2010-12 … Developed countries set a goal of mobilising jointly $100bn a year by 2020 to address needs of developing countries.”

    This is the cash that oils the deal. The first section is a quick financial injection from rich nations to support developing countries’ efforts. Longer term, a far larger sum of money will be committed to a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund. But the agreement leaves open the questions of where the money will come from, and how it will be used.

    Key elements of earlier drafts dropped during yesterday’s negotiations:

    An attempt to replace Kyoto

    “Affirming our firm resolve to adopt one or more legal instruments …”

    This preamble, killed off during the day, was the biggest obstacle for negotiators. It left open the question of whether to continue a twin-track process that maintains Kyoto, or whether to adopt a single agreement. Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada are desperate to move to a one-track approach, but developing nations refused to kill off the protocol.

    Deadline for a treaty

    “… as soon as possible and no later than COP16 …”

    This appeared in the morning draft and disappeared during the day; it set a December 2010 date for the conclusion of a legally binding treaty. The final text drops this date, but small print suggests it will still be next year.

  • Copenhagen negotiators bicker and filibuster while the biosphere burns.

     

    Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn’t allowed in either), it struck me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There’s a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, when the world’s governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of Berlin in 1884. It’s as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.

    At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the world’s people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they can – to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process couldn’t have been better designed to produce the wrong results.

    I spent most of my time at the Klimaforum, the alternative conference set up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a hitch. (I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There the barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration of planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to those won by humans after the second world war. It changes the legal relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from ownership to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation which gives nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the people who depend on them.

    Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

    Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

  • Portion of the Final day Copenhagen addresses.

     

    12.31pm:
    More despair at Obama’s speech.

    ActionAid’s climate expert, Raman Mehta, said:

    Obama has said nothing to save the Copenhagen conference from failure.

    The US is the one major player yet to move. Developing countries have come here to negotiate in good faith but feel they have been cheated and it looks like they will leave empty handed.

    Greenpeace US’s executive director Phil Radford said:

    The world was waiting for the spirit of yes we can, but all we got was my way or the highway.

    He [Obama] crossed an ocean to tell the world he has nothing new to offer, then he said take it or leave it. By offering no movement on US global warming pollution cuts he showed his disregard for the science and the victims of climate change in the United States and abroad. He now risks being branded as the man who killed Copenhagen.

    He said all parties must move, but he offered no movement. He said the decades long split between the rich world and poor needs to end, but his vision of a deal here would give us a 3C temperature rise and devastate Africa and the small island states.

    12.21pm:
    Friends of the Earth is “deeply disappointed” by Obama’s speech.

    Andy Atkins, its executive director,

    The President is right that the endeavours in Copenhagen will go down in history – but unless we see a massive shift in the US position, it will be for all the wrong reasons.

    If the President’s idea of action is to cut US emissions by 4% on 1990 levels then we’re heading for climate catastrophe. Barack Obama should have taken the opportunity to up his proposed cuts to at least 40% by 2020 and ditch carbon offsetting.

    Obama has deeply disappointed not just those listening to his speech at the UN talks – he has disappointed the whole world.

    12.20pm:
    A British official at the talks said the prospects of securing agreement were “not great” but Gordon Brown was committed to staying until “the very last minute” to secure a deal, according to PA.

    12.06pm:
    You can now see that leaked UN analysis for yourself here. The three page document says countries ‘ought’ to limit global warming to 2C, but does not bind them to do so.

  • Vidtory for developing nations as rich countries abandon effort to kill off Kyoto

     

    Negotiations have been deadlocked for a week as developing countries resisted efforts to replace or downgrade the 1997 protocol, which places legally binding commitments on rich – but not poor – nations.

    Now, less than a day before more than 115 world leaders take over the reins, the chair of the talks gave up an attempt to ram through a “Danish text”, leaked to the Guardian last week, which would have ended Kyoto. In a victory for the developing world, negotiators will now move forward on a two-track basis, one part of which maintains the integrity of Kyoto.

    Hillary Clinton gave a further boost to the flagging negotiations by pledging US involvement in the $100bn (£62bn) a year international fund to help poor nations adapt to climate change. The Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also gave ground by saying his country would accept tighter international monitoring of greenhouse gases, following China’s indication yesterday that it had softened its opposition to an inspection regime.

    But huge differences remain over levels of emissions cuts, financing and monitoring. The chaotic end game to the negotiations could mean that world leaders only have time to hastily paper over a face-saving agreement.

    The Indian environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said: “We have lost a day and a half. I don’t want to point fingers. We must get talks back on a substantive track by the time the world leaders meet tomorrow.”

    Other countries were also working to resuscitate the talks. A UK official said: “We are not giving up. The irony is that on substance we have had considerable movement in the last few days. For the talks to be in this state simply over matters of procedure rather than substance is immensely disappointing.”

    China – the world’s biggest emitter and an essential component to any deal – also said it was still committed to the negotiations. The Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters in Beijing: “China hopes the Copenhagen meeting is successful, and has always taken a constructive attitude.”

    The impasse over the Kyoto protocol stems from its status as the only legally binding agreement on climate change, requiring industrialised nations – but not developing nations – to cut their emissions. Rich nations want a fresh treaty, arguing the world has changed and the major emerging economies such and China and India must commit to curbing their huge and fast growing national emissions. But the developing nations argue that rich nations grew wealthy by polluting the atmosphere and must take primary responsibility for it, which can only be guaranteed by Kyoto.

     

    The Maldives president, Mohamed Nasheed, whose island country could be almost entirely submerged by rising seas, said he was staring at failure.

    “We will not have a draft. There is no draft. We are facing a situation where it is possible that nothing comes out of [Copenhagen] unless the heads of state decide to come up with it themselves,” Nasheed told an NGO meeting last night.

    “I am very nervous and very disappointed. During the course of the past two years, negotiators were supposed to have come up with a document for us to see and consider tomorrow, but they have failed.”

    In a story headlined Denmark gives up, the influential Berlingske newspaper quoted a senior source in the host delegation, who said the failure to agree on a single text was a monumental disappointment to the Danes.

    “During the whole process, the problem is that this is a huge puzzle where all the pieces had to fall in place at the same time. But to do that, the countries had to make a serious effort and they have been unwilling to do so,” the source was quoted as saying

  • Leaked UN report shows cuts offered at Copenhagen would lead to 3C rise

     

    With the talks entering the final 24 hours on a knife-edge, the emergence of the document seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last day of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

    A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government – as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, more flooding and droughts.

    Tonight hopes of the summit producing a deal were rising after the US, the world’s biggest historical polluter, moved to save the talks from collapse. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton committed the US to backing a $100bn-a-year global climate fund from 2020 to shield poor countries from the ravages of global warming. Barack Obama is expected to offer even more cash when he flies in tomorrow.

    Another key obstacle – the fate of the Kyoto treaty – was solved, with China and the developing world seeing off attempts to kill the protocol. But the UN analysis suggests much deeper cuts will have to be agreed tomorrow to achieve the stated objective of limiting temperature rises to 2C.

    The document was drafted by the UN secretariat running the Copenhagen summit and is dated 11pm on Tuesday night. It is marked “do not distribute” and “initial draft”. It shows a gap of up to 4.2 gigatonnes of carbon emissions between the present pledges and the required 2020 level of 44Gt, which is required to stay below a 2C rise. No higher offers have since been made.

    “Unless the remaining gap of around 1.9-4.2Gt is closed and Annexe 1 parties [rich countries] commit themselves to strong action before and after 2020, global emissions will remain on an unsustainable pathway that could lead to concentrations equal or above 550 parts per million, with the related temperature rise around 3C,” it says. It does not specify a time when 3C would be reached but it is likely to be 2050.

    Greenpeace campaigner Joss Garman said: “This is an explosive document that shows the numbers on the table at the moment would lead to nothing less than climate breakdown and an extraordinarily dangerous situation for humanity.

    “The UN is admitting in private that the pledges made by world leaders would lead to a 3C rise in temperatures. The science shows that could lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, and that’s just the start of it.”

    Bill McKibben, founder of the campaign 350.org, said: “In one sense this is no secret – we’ve been saying it for months. But it is powerful to have the UN confirming its own insincerity.” He did not know why his name was written on the top of the document.

    However, Bob Ward, at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics and colleague, said current ambitions could still be consistent with a 50% chance of meeting the 2C target. “But it would require steeper reductions after 2020, which are likely to be more costly, to be well below 35 billion tonnes in 2030 and well below 20 billion tonnes in 2050.”

    The goal of keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 2C, relative to pre-industrial levels, has become the figure that all rich countries have committed to trying to achieve in Copenhagen. However, 102 of the world’s poorest countries are holding out for emission cuts resulting in a temperature increase of no more than 1.5C.

    Anything below that, they say, would leave billions of people in the world homeless, unable to feed their people and open to catastrophic weather-related disasters. But such an ambitious target would mean carbon would have to be removed from the atmosphere.

    The internal paper says: “Further steps are possible and necessary to fill the gap. This could be done by increasing the aggregated emission reductions [in rich countries] to at least 30% below the baseline levels, further stronger voluntary actions by developing countries [such as China and India] to reduce their emissions by at least 20% below business as usual and reducing further emissions from deforestation and international aviation and marine shipping.”

    Oxfam International’s climate adviser, Hugh Cole, said: “At this stage, a deal that fails to keep temperature rises below two degrees is simply not good enough.”

    Earlier this week Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that even with 1.5C rises, many communities would suffer. “Some of the most vulnerable regions in the world will be worst affected. These will be the largest countries in the developing world. They have little infrastructure that might protect them from climate change. The tragedy of the situation is that those countries that have not at all contributed to the problem of climate change will be the ones most affected,” he said.

    “Some parts of the world, which even with a 1.5C rise, will suffer great hardship and lose their ability to lead a decent and stable form of existence. If we are going to be concerned about these communities, then maybe 1.5C is what we should be targeting. But if we can find means by which those communities can be helped to withstand the impact of climate change with substantial flow of finances, then maybe one can go to 2C.”

  • US bids to break Copenhagen deadlock with support for $100bn climate fund

     

     

    “The US is prepared to work with other countries to jointly mobilise $100bn a year by 2020,” Clinton told a press conference on a day that began with reports that the summit’s Danish hosts had given up hope of reaching a deal.

     

    However, she warned: “In the absence of an operational agreement that meets the requirement that I outlined there will not be the final commitment that I outlined – at least from the United States.”

     

    The $100bn figure was formally put on the table at the conference last night by the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who is head of the African group of nations. It is much lower than many developing nations say is necessary to help them adapt to climate change and develop green technologies.

     

    Zenawi acknowledged that his proposal would disappoint some in Africa. But he said: “My proposal dramatically scales back our expectation of the level of funding in return for more reliable funding and a seat at the table in the management of such fund.”

     

    Standing with reporters when the news broke, the UK prime minister’s official spokesman was surprised by the timing of Clinton’s announcement, despite the fact that one of Gordon Brown’s chief negotiators, Jon Cunliffe, had been on the phone with his American counterpart overnight.

     

    “Obama said he wanted to be as helpful as he could but was concerned about public opinion at home,” said one official. Another added: “This is a very serious move by the Americans. We were waiting for it”.

     

    Clinton also made it clear that America would not budge on its demand for greater accountability from rapidly emerging economies like China and Brazil that they are living up to whatever pledges they make to cut emissions.

     

    Without such transparency, she said, there would be no deal. And without a deal, there would be no money for African and low-lying countries that have the most to lose from rising sea-levels brought by climate change.

     

     

    Even as 115 world leaders began arriving to put their personal imprint on a deal, the summit hosts were admitting they had failed to broker an agreement. Informal talks on finance and the overall format of the deal were continuing yesterday, but the spokesman for the bloc of African countries warned about the perils of pushing poor countries to a cosmetic deal at any cost.

     

    “Any bad solution for the developing countries is worse than no deal at all in particular for Africa and for the developing countries,” said the spokesman for the African nations. “Those who are forcing the process who are trying to jeopardise what we are doing I am not sure humanity will forgive them at least for the next 50 years.”

     

    The chaotic end game to the negotiations could mean that world leaders only have time to hastily paper over a face-saving agreement.

     

    In a story headlined Denmark gives up, the influential Berlingske newspaper quoted a senior source in the host delegation, saying the failure was a monumental disappointment to the Danes.

     

    “During the whole process, the problem is that this is a huge puzzle where all the pieces had to fall in place at the same time. But to do that, the countries had to make a serious effort and they have been unwilling to do so,” the source was quoted as saying.

     

    However, Denmark could try to revive the process by formally introducing a version of a negotiating draft from last week and imposing it on the summit. However, the draft – the Danish text leaked to the Guardian last week – has infuriated developing countries, and its re-entry could trigger chaos.

     

    • Additional reporting by Allegra Stratton