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Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • New Zealand’s “Kyoto forests” sow the seeds foa a massive emissions surge

     

    All was well, it said. The 600,000 hectares of forests that were planted in the 1990s would soak up all the excess CO2 – around 90m tonnes of it between 2008 and 2012. In fact, the country was likely to be ahead of its Kyoto target of stabilising emissions at 1990 levels.

    But back home this policy is controversial, to say the least, with many experts accusing the government of a sleight of hand. They include the independent but prestigious Sustainability Council of New Zealand.

    The central problem seems to be that when it comes to carbon, Middle Earth is a scientific minefield. And the Kyoto rules give the government considerable potential to pick and choose which carbon emissions and which carbon sinks from forests it declares for the purposes of meeting its targets.

    There are, it turns out, two sets of carbon accounts.

    The full statistics delivered to the UN Climate Change Convention show that the New Zealand landscape is, as the government says, absorbing more carbon today than it did in 1990. But only a bit more. Enough to cut its emissions growth from 22% to 185. That is nowhere near enough to bring New Zealand into Kyoto compliance.

    But, as the spokesman for the climate change minister, Nick Smith, pointed out to me this week, those are not the only numbers. “The convention inventory includes a wider set of activities than under the Kyoto protocol.” In a nutshell, the Kyoto protocol allows New Zealand to ignore what is happening across the wider landscape and simply report the growth of its 600,000 hectares of new forests, planted mostly during the 1990s.

    That sounds dodgy, though within the Kyoto rules. Even so, if these “Kyoto forests” had been specifically planted as part of a genuine policy to cut the country’s long-term contribution to global warming – we might still applaud.

    Unfortunately it is not quite like that. Those forests are not long-term sinks; they are commercial plantations. As Smith’s spokesman told me, they “are likely to be harvested in the 2020s”. And, he added: “The government has no intention to ban the harvest.” When they are harvested their carbon will return to the atmosphere.

    The Sustainability Council of New Zealand attacked the government on this very point in a report on the country’s climate policies published last week. It said: “The official Kyoto accounts … have given a misleading impression of New Zealand’s emissions position … treating carbon absorption by forests as income rather than credit.” Claiming the forests as a carbon sink today is cynically offloading the problem to the next generation, it said.

    Sometime in the 2020s, New Zealand will become responsible for a massive surge in emissions from its forests – just at the time when global demands for ever-deeper cuts in emissions are likely to be going into overdrive.

    The government’s own civil servants seem to agree. The New Zealand Treasury recently called the carbon accumulating in the Kyoto forests a “contingent liability”. It warned that negotiators should take this into account when agreeing future emissions targets – such as a Copenhagen deal on 2020 emissions.

    There is a final problem for New Zealand’s carbon credentials. The government’s scientists have, in the past couple of years, been reassessing all their figures in a way remarkably beneficial to the government. Last April, they reported to ministers of the incoming government that emissions from deforestation were almost 10m tonnes a year less than previously supposed “due to new data showing smaller trees being felled”. Meanwhile, they said, the Kyoto forests were absorbing a quarter more carbon than previously supposed “due to the trees not being thinned and being planted on better soils”.

    Very handy. But even Smith was moved to note the “volatility” of the numbers.

    A number of scientists have been pointing out for some years that the Kyoto rules on forests were an Achilles heel in the protocol. “If [countries] plant sink forests and make inflated claims for them, they know it will be impossible to either prove or disprove those claims. It really is a cheat’s charter,” warned Michael Obersteiner of the forestry division of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a thinktank based in Laxenburg, Austria, back in 2000.

    It may not be cheating, but New Zealand seems determined to prove him right.

    • For regular updates before and during the Copenhagen summit and other green news sign up for the Guardian’s environment email newsletter, Green light.

     

  • Heartfelt plea from young girl to world leaders

    Please watch this hearfelt impassioned plea to the world leaders by a yonng girl.
    You will find it very moving and emotive from our younger generations, who have
    to suffer decisions we are now making,
     
    Neville Gillmore.
     
    —– Original Message —–

    From: Footprints
    To: cawg@lists.nsw.greens.org.au
    Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 5:17 AM
    Subject: [CAWG] Footprints – special watch this.

    All of you who read Footprint should look at this

    and ponder your next action, next purchase, next thought – very carefully.

    The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes.

    John James

    .....................................................

     

     

     

  • How 7.4% of Americans can block humanity’s efforts to save itself

  • The Nation‘s politics editor Chris Hayes: What Ails the Senate.
  • Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein: Want real reform? Let’s start with Congress.
  • Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster.
  • Washington Post column Harold Meyerson: The do-nothing Senate.
  • Annie Lowrey: How the Senate filibusters the world.
  • Jonathan Krasno and Gregory Robinson: Time to rein in the filibuster.
  • Benjamin Sarlin and Samuel P. Jacobs: Senate Stonewallers: Capitol Hill’s most ornery No Men.
  • Matt Yglesias: Can The Filibuster Be Reformed?
  • Kevin Drum: Reforming the Senate.

    •  

    Here’s one thing to add to the discussion. The Copenhagen climate talks are coming up. The Obama administration has been scrupulously careful not to promise anything in international negotiations that it can’t deliver—i.e., that it can’t get past the U.S. Senate.

    Senate ratification of an international treaty requires not just 60 but 67 votes. Say 34 senators rally to block such a treaty—senators from, oh, Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. Thus can representatives for 22,540,352 people—7.4% of the population—block the will of the other 281,519,372. Indeed, senators representing 7.4% of Americans can thwart the entire world’s efforts to address the climate crisis.

    Killing a treaty is easier than killing a clean energy bill. Why, killing a clean energy bill requires representatives for 25,289,049 people—fully 8.3% of the population!—to thwart the will of the remaining 278,770,675. (If you’re keeping score, the guilty parties here would be: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Iowa.)  For the record, 15 of those 21 states (71%) voted for Bush in 2004.

    Now of course it won’t be these precise coalitions of senators that kill the COP15 treaty and the clean energy bill. They’ll snag high-population senators like Cornyn and Hutchison from Texas. But the point remains: the Senate, already unrepresentative thanks to the disproportionate influence of rural, low-population states, has become, thanks to the routine use of filibusters and holds, grotesquely undemocratic.

    The country just can’t be governed this way. And consequently, the world community cannot coordinate to effectively meet the climate threat.

    • This article was shared by our content partner Grist, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • Catastrophic Climate Change

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    MARIAN WILK

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    Catastrophic climate change

    Environment reporter Adam Morton looks at the perils of inaction on climate change.

    URGENT action to cope with the impact of rising sea levels needs to start now, including improving evacuation routes for coastal communities during extreme storms and flooding.

    As well, a sweeping federal parliamentary report calls for an overhaul of the building code to make homes more resilient and for the legal liability for future property losses to be sorted out.

    Warning that ”the time to act is now”, the bipartisan report brought down last night states that thousands of kilometres of coastline have been identified as at risk from the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

    The committee, led by Labor’s Jennie George and with the Liberal Mal Washer as co-chairman, wants the Government to take a far greater role in preparing coastal towns and cities to adapt to the impact of sea level rise.

    Their report recommends a new intergovernmental agreement on the coastal zone to be worked out between Canberra, the states and councils to set out actions and guidelines on the enormous coastal challenges from climate change.

    “The first clarion call from everybody was the need for national leadership,” Ms George told the Herald. “We have taken up that call”.

    Eighty per cent of Australians live in the coastal zone facing major pressures, says the report. The concentration of people and infrastructure makes Australia “particularly vulnerable to the coastal erosion and inundation that will accompany increases in sea level”.

    There are about 711,000 addresses within three kilometres of the coast and less than six metres above sea level but government in the coastal zone is described as ”complex and fragmented”.

    The committee accepts the United Nations’ scientific findings that sea levels will rise about 80 centimetres globally by 2100, but it says this could be an underestimation if greenhouse gas emissions are not slowed and the polar ice caps melt. It notes each centimetre of sea level rise could push the shoreline back a metre or more.

    Sea level rise will also cause a disproportionately large increase in the frequency of flooding and erosion that will come with high tides and storm surges.

    More than 200,000 buildings on the NSW coast are likely to be vulnerable. Queensland is most at risk, but every state and territory faces huge challenges, from Darwin Harbour to Fremantle.

    Among the committee’s recommendations is for the Surf Life Saving network to be brought into the emergency planning system to deal with the impact of increasing storm hazards.

    The report also recommends the Australian Emergency Management Committee examine an improved early warning system for coastal areas in the event of extreme seas, storm surges, major erosion or flooding.

    During its 18 months of work, the committee heard pleas from the Torres Strait, where thousands of people face the prospect of losing their homes. It recommends a study into the vulnerability of the area by the CSIRO, the Department of Climate Change and the Queensland Government.

    It also wants more research on tropical diseases migrating south, especially dengue fever.

    Ms George said one of the most vexed issues before the committee was insurance coverage for home owners close to the beachfront. The report recommends the Productivity Commission begin an inquiry into the impact of climate change on insurance, including gaps that already exist.

    Evidence before the committee revealed insurers were already unwilling to cover so-called ”saltwater risks” that included the erosion of beachfront properties or flooding by sea water.

    The committee also wants the commission to examine a prohibition on the occupation of land that is extremely vulnerable to sea rise hazards.

    The committee will deliver its report to the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, and the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett. It recognises the Government has already begun a series of studies and actions to adapt to climate change. Senator Wong is expected to deliver the first major assessment of the vulnerability of Australia’s coast to sea level rise next month.

    But the committee found serious gaps in the planning guidelines, the law, insurance and emergency planning that needed to be addressed.

    One of its main recommendations is that the Federal Government consider adopting a nationally consistent benchmark on projected sea level rise as states and local governments struggle to work out their response

  • Are your emissions ‘survival or ‘luxury’ ?

    Are your emissions ‘survival’ or ‘luxury’?

    Daniel Scharf

    11th November, 2009

    A runner-up in the Ecologist/nef essay competition, Daniel Scharf suggests that the whole concept of a carbon ‘market’ is radically flawed…

     

    How do you price the extra tonne of carbon that, once burned, tips the balance
and triggers potentially catastrophic, irreversible global warming?

    The answer is 42 Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Yen or Yuan  or in whatever currency we will be pricing the meaning of human life when it comes to an end.

    Meanwhile, the question is how we can continue to contemplate quantifying, or placing a monetary value on the infinite. Global warming is the greatest ever market failure says Lord Stern, so fix the market and the error will be corrected?

    Since the Stern Review was published in October 2006 the whole concept of the ‘market’ has been discredited in almost every area in which it has been applied. While the banks are being trusted to reform their ways and to continue to fuel most areas of economic life, the credit crunch might have come at the right time to spread the sense that the marketeers should not be trusted to commodify; that is, to price and trade in carbon. If market economics or capitalism are unlikely to save the whale, the rain forest, or the atmosphere, will it be down to the command economy – discredited during the last century – to ride to the rescue? 

    Ditch discounting

    Suppose that we have ten years to reverse the trend of adding carbon to the atmosphere, ten years before the tonne of greenhouse gas that broke the camel’s back is emitted from a power station chimney or the back of a camel: the mechanism of control has to be capable of dealing with both carbon and methane (and possibly account for water vapour).

    The value must be applicable to the producer and the sequesterer, to the fossil fuel burner and to owners of flatulent beasts. In ten years – and the earlier the better – the market economist has to revisit the rule of discounting whereby the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and whereby future benefits are given less value due the uncertainty of their manifestation.

    It is true that a tonne of carbon saved today is worth very much more in terms of reducing global warming than the same tonne saved ten years down the line. However, the tonne that needs to be saved in ten years to prevent irreversible global warming would actually have an infinite value if oblivion is to be avoided. So much for economics as we know it, putting a price on everything and knowing the value of nothing.

    Few would dissent from another homily: that the best things in life are free to acquire and enjoy, and most if not all are free of or low in carbon content. That being the case, it should not be too difficult to see that pricing or regulating carbon so that its use is largely out of reach will not deprive people of those things that they value most. Whether it is through price or regulation, access must be given to ‘survival emissions’: those we need to subsist in both developed, over-developed and under-developed countries. On the other hand, through price or regulation it should be made universally difficult to emit ‘luxury emissions’: those attributed to the excesses of modern life that show no benefit in human welfare.

    A third category of carbon emissions are those associated not with survival or luxury, but with the alleviation of poverty, hunger and disease in all parts of the world. These could only be delivered, through a world carbon bank and national agencies, according to need, and not the ability to pay.

    What price a Bengali mother?

    Thus we have the carbon ‘market’ cut in three, where access to, and consumption of, these distinctive tonnes of carbon and their subsequent emissions is the different between life and death. 

    Perhaps there are clever bankers in city towers even now being offered bonuses to work out the formula that would put a value on a tonne of carbon that would be considered fair by a Bengali mother whose home will be flooded and a Sudanese farmer whose pasture will be wasted at, say, 3 degrees of warming that might, at the same time, provide warmer winters to a Muscovite family and improve the crops of an arable farmer in Alberta?

    Bankers need to be dissuaded from widening the ‘market’ to embrace the emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. If the tonne of carbon that pushes the climate over the edge is a ‘luxury emission’ then it should logically have a value close to infinity such that the market would prevent it from being emitted.

    Unfortunately it could be a tonne of emissions relating to the survival of the 9 billionth inhabitant of this crowded planet, by denying them the benefits of an item of energy, water or food. A Malthusian revenge. This outcome being within the realms of possibility, if not probability, should suggest to the market economist that a price should be put on the process of procreation, if the existence of more souls to be fed, sheltered and watered is causing both intolerable carbon concentrations, and death would arise from their prohibition.

    Or would the market economist rather work at the other end and calculate the scale of bribe that would attract volunteers for an early but very green funeral? Economists will soon find that some of the externalities to which significant carbon effects can be attributed are not just hard to quantify but are taboo subjects. Would they want to be the ones responsible for a revised concept of human rights?

    No, Lord Stern, climate change has not been a failure of markets. Global warming is no more and no less than a failure of global governance, and a measure of general deference to economists and reliance on markets. Economists have drawn the net around what to value and include on balance sheets too narrowly. But the answer is not to always try to include externalities, but to acknowledge that some goods are beyond quantification, atmospheric carbon being one of them. The quicker we abandon the concept of placing a price on carbon the better. The use and access to goods that cannot be traded needs instead to be regulated, allocated or rationed.

    To read the winning entry to the Ecologist/nef essay competition, click here

  • Trillions of dollars needed to cut climate change

    World leaders will need to invest more than $10 trillion to halt climate change by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

    The World Energy Outlook 2009, the annual flagship publication from the IEA, was presented by Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the agency in London this week.

    Mr Tanaka believes this huge investment will be more than offset through savings in transport, buildings and health care.

    While pointing out energy use has fallen in the past 12 months, as a result of the economic downturn, Mr Tanaka fears it will ‘soon resume its upward trend if government policies don’t change’.

    If policies don’t change Mr Tanaka sees a ‘reference situation’ where demand will increase by 40% between now and 2030.

    He said: “The cumulative incremental investment of $10.5 trillion is needed in low-carbon energy technologies and energy efficiency by 2030.

    “In addition to avoiding severe climate change, this cost is largely offset by economic, health and energy-security benefits.

    “Energy bills in transport, buildings and industry alone are reduced by $8.6 trillion globally over the period 2010-2030.”

    He also highlighted the energy poverty challenge with 1.3 billion people still without electricity in 2030, a small decrease from 1.5 billion today.

    He said: “Universal access could be achieved with investment of only $35 billion per year in 2008-2030.”

    Luke Walsh