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  • Copenhagen hands Kevin Rudd an emissions trading scheme dilemma

    Copenhagen hands Kevin Rudd an emissions trading scheme dilemma

    • Lenore Taylor and Sid Maher
    • From: The Australian
    • December 21, 2009 12:00AM

    THE Rudd government faces a dramatically more difficult task in selling its emissions trading scheme as a result of the weak result from the Copenhagen conference, which has delayed critical decisions on national targets and international timelines.

    The government has now conceded it will not be able to set its own emissions-reduction target until February at the earliest.

    That complicates its attack on Tony Abbott’s “direct action” climate plan, which is based on trying to prove that it would be a more expensive, less efficient way to meet the national target.

    The failure of Copenhagen to set clear timetables or targets will strengthen the Opposition Leader’s claim that Copenhagen was always a false deadline for the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

    Mr Abbott yesterday described the final outcome of the talks as an “unmitigated disaster” for Kevin Rudd and a vindication of the opposition’s anti-ETS position.

    “Kevin Rudd was very unwise to try to rush Australia into prematurely adopting a commitment in the absence of similar commitments from the rest of the world,” the Opposition Leader said.

    Climate Change Minister Penny Wong accused Mr Abbott of “willing the talks to fail”.

    She said the government remained committed to reintroducing into parliament in February the CPRS negotiated with the Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition, prior to his axing as opposition leader.

    The government will, in the meantime, be forced to decide its final emissions-reduction goal in private talks with other countries.

    These bilateral talks are necessary because of the Copenhagen summit’s failure to set targets or timetables to cut greenhouse gases.

    The so-called Copenhagen Accord, which continues to be bitterly opposed by some countries and was finally only “noted” by the UN meeting, sets out the range of emissions-reduction promises that developed and developing countries have already made – in Australia’s case, cuts of between 5 and 25 per cent by 2020.

    Senator Wong said major economies, many of which, like Australia, had made promises dependent on what others would do, would now have to talk privately about what final target each would take.

    The talks would occur after all countries had submitted their pledges by a deadline of February 1.

    “We will have to work with other nations to make clear what people are prepared to put forward under the Copenhagen Accord . . . these are discussions that will continue between the countries who back this agreement, which include the majority of the world’s nations and the majority of the world’s economies,” Senator Wong said as she prepared to leave the Danish capital.

    While the CPRS retains support from some key business groups and the powerful Australian Workers Union – the AI Group and AWU boss Paul Howes both yesterday continued to back the amended CPRS deal – the failure of Copenhagen has emboldened opponents of the scheme.

    The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Coal Association yesterday called for a rethink of the government’s plans in the wake of the Copenhagen summit.

    ACCI chief executive Peter Anderson said: “We now have the green light from the global community to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of what Australian industry is already doing, of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme versus the direct action ideas the Abbott-led Coalition might come up with, and versus other options or policy mixes comparable nations might develop.”

    Australian Coal Association chief executive Ralph Hillman said the coal industry’s treatment under the CPRS should be rethought as Copenhagen had left the issue of burden-sharing of emissions cuts among countries “ambiguous”.

    Mr Hillman said any ambitions for Australia to lift its emissions reduction towards 15 per cent from its current unconditional 5 per cent should be “put on the backburner” pending the signing of binding agreements.

    The weak and non-binding accord, muscled through by US President Barack Obama after a day of desperate bargaining to salvage something from the much-hyped meeting, aims to stop global temperatures from rising by more than 2C, but does not specify the cuts needed to get there, and allows developing countries to monitor their own emission reductions and report them to the UN every two years.

    The deal promises to deliver $US30 billion in aid over the next three years to combat global warming in the poorest countries.

    One of the Australian government’s preconditions for cuts of more than 5 per cent is that developed and developing nations must make their emission reduction promises part of an “international agreement”.

    So how the UN picks up the pieces after Copenhagen’s divided and confusing conclusion is likely to be critical to what Australia ultimately decides.

    An extraordinary game of brinkmanship between the world’s superpowers and biggest greenhouse gas emitters – the US and China – saw Mr Obama finally clinch a deal with China, India, South Africa and Brazil for a watered-down agreement brokered earlier with more than 20 countries, including Australia.

    Mr Obama then unilaterally announced the deal at a private news conference for US journalists, and flew out of Copenhagen late on Friday night.

    Developing countries – outraged at the process and the weak content of the deal – threatened to block it when it was presented to the meeting for approval.

    Angry debate continued through the night until the accord was finally “noted” late on Saturday morning, Copenhagen time.

    Sudan, Venezuela, Bolvia, Nicaragua and Tuvalu blocked the accord from being adopted by the meeting.

    The Australian-based negotiator for Tuvalu, Ian Fry, said the money being offered from a proposed climate change fund for poor countries was not enough to make up for the effect on the small island of rising seas.

    “In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future and our people – our future is not for sale,” Mr Fry said.

    In a statement, Sudanese negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping said it was “a solution based on the very same values, in our opinion, that channelled six million people in Europe into furnaces”.

    And a Venezuelan negotiator cut her own hand, asking if she had to bleed to be able to speak.

    The accord does little to advance moves to try to get legally binding treaties covering developed and developing nations, which was the summit’s main aim, but according to leaders it avoids the “disaster scenario” of negotiations for binding treaties being closed down.

    Developed nations now hope that a binding deal can be sealed at next November’s conference in Mexico.

    Mr Rudd conceded that, at times during the chaotic negotiations, disaster had been close.

    “There was a very strong parallel push to see this thing not produce anything, and to collapse the negotiations,” the Prime Minister said.

    “We prevailed. Some will be disappointed by the amount of progress. The alternative was, frankly, catastrophic collapse of these negotiations.”

     

  • This fiasco will further alienate an angry public

     

    In light of the Copenhagen non-agreement, there will be increased pressure by EU members states to water down unilateral emissions targets that are conditional on an international treaty. Just like Japan, it will be impossible for Europe or, indeed, the UK to continue with policies that are burdening national economies with huge costs and damaging their international competitiveness.

    Climate politics face a profound crisis. Revolts among eastern European countries, in Australia and even among Obama’s Blue Dog Democrats are forcing law-makers to renounce support for unilateral climate policies. In the UK, the party-political consensus on climate change is unlikely to survive the general elections as both Labour and the Tories are confronted by a growing public backlash against green taxes and rising fuel bills.

    However, the biggest losers of the Copenhagen fiasco appear to be climate science and the scientific establishment who, with a very few distinguished exceptions, have promoted unmitigated climate alarm and hysteria.It confirms beyond doubt that most governments have lost trust in the advice given by climate alarmists and the IPCC. The Copenhagen accord symbolises the loss of political power by Europe whose climate policies have been rendered obsolete.

    It is a remarkable irony of history that when the leading voices of the radical environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s occupy governmental power in most western nations, their political and international influence is on the wane. The weakening of global warming anxiety among the general public and the marked decline of western influence and authority on the international stage is a clear manifestation of the green slump.

    • Dr Benny Peiser is the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation

  • The Copenhagen farce is glad tidings for us all

     

    Watts was reporting a conversation she had had with an unnamed “European negotiator” after South Africa decided to join the quartet of America, India, China and Brazil in putting its name to a statement rejecting any binding emissions targets, and thus comprehensively sabotaging the entire conference. “South Africa has signed up to this!” the delegate told Watts. “They’re going to fry — and they’ll deserve it.”

    One’s heart does not warm to anyone expressing such sentiments, but it’s easy to understand the fury that must have overcome this delegate. Here was Europe offering to impose vast costs on its own industries and peoples to save Africa from the alleged perils of runaway CO2 emissions — and that continent’s most powerful international voice says, thanks very much for the offer, but we think we can best provide health and prosperity to our people by being free to expand our economy exactly as you did in the industrial revolution, by using the wonderfully cheap forms of energy that nature affords: fossil fuels. After all, why is it that in the US many fewer people die as a result of very high temperatures than used to be the case a hundred years ago? Air-conditioning.

    I know that for those thousands of “climate activists” who descended on Copenhagen, the idea of air-conditioning in African homes is something almost too revolting to contemplate; but then they have never understood that, for the real inhabitants of the developing world, the American example of achieving health and comfort through technology and subverting harsh nature for human ends is something to be emulated, not shunned.

    The climate catastrophists naturally insist that if the developing countries — notably China and India — follow the American path, the planet will become uninhabitable. The most quoted expression of this came in 2004 from Britain’s chief government scientist then, Sir David King, when he said that if we did not act to reduce our carbon emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the world’s only habitable continent.

    Even if you share King’s view of what some of the climate models project in terms of anthropogenic CO2’s effect on global temperatures, his apparent belief that man is completely unable to adapt to a changing environment suggests that, whatever his claims as a scientist, he knows next to nothing about either human nature or history.

    Unfortunately for those in the same camp as King, the leak of lethally embarrassing emails from the world’s foremost academic climate research unit, at the University of East Anglia, confirmed the suspicions of roughly half the British population, that too much political faith had been placed in the omniscience of a small group of scientists.

    The most interesting of those leaked emails came from Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. After observing — this was an email dated October 12, 2009 — that in freezing Boulder, “We have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record … it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F”, Trenberth turned to the fact that the planet’s average temperature over the past 10 years seemed to have been static and wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Two days later he reiterated: “We cannot account for what is happening in the climate system.”

    Asked last week by the BBC about these emails, King would say only that their leak and publication in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit had to be the work of some malign national agency (the CIA? The Russians?). Since we know that a Briton with Asperger’s syndrome, working on a domestic dial-up internet connection, managed to hack into the Pentagon’s most secret codes, King’s insistence that only a national agency could have hacked into a non-secure academic research unit’s emails seems as sensible as the assertion that we must all plan to settle in Antarctica. Even if he is right that UEA’s emails were put in the public domain as a result of theft, he deserves as much respect for his reaction as any MP whose only response to the leak of Commons expenses claims had been that the newspaper that bought the disc with all the information had broken the law. As a matter of fact, no MP was quite so arrogant.

    King’s old boss, Tony Blair, turned up in Copenhagen to give his take on the leaked emails. The former prime minister declared that they did not lessen by one jot what he called “the need for action” and added: “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be.” Blair is clearly not troubled by irony, since this approach is exactly the one that got us into such a mess over Saddam Hussein’s suppositious biological threat. The actual evidence was tenuous at the time — but to persuade the public of the need for action, Blair was prepared to say that it was watertight. For weapons of mass destruction, read weather of mass destruction.

    Blair now argues that even if the science is less clear than is claimed by the climate catastrophists, we have to act because of the risks to humanity if their worst fears turn out to be well founded. This would make perfect sense if there were no risks attached to what he calls “action”, just as it would if there had been no lives put at risk by attacking Iraq. In fact, there are vast costs involved in the war against weather, which could actually cost lives. The highly respected climate economist Professor Richard Tol, a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that the CO2 tax required to bring emissions down to the levels demanded by the IPCC would reduce global GDP by an amount that would equate — in 2100 — to $40 trillion (£25 trillion) a year. It’s pretty obvious, really: just as cheap energy has transformed the lives of millions for the better, it follows that reversing the process would have an opposite effect.

    Carbon cap and trade, recommended by the EU as an alternative to tax, has its own malign effect. Just ask the 1,700 employees being made redundant at Corus’s steel plant in Redcar. The owners of Corus could receive up to $375m (£230m) in carbon credits for laying off those British workers. Then, if they switch production to a so-called clean Indian steel plant, Corus could also receive millions of dollars annually from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund. The net effect of all that on the environment could be safely estimated as zero.

    Gordon Brown, who seems to be embarking on a scorched earth economic policy in his final months in power, evidently regards this as worth it — he wants to go down in history as the man who saved the climate. Yet this government — or the next one — has been given a golden opportunity by the farce in Copenhagen: to abandon the carbon witch hunt altogether. If India, China, America, Brazil (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) carry on with “business as usual”, then anything Europe does to cut its emissions is irrelevant, at best: it will cause pain and hardship for its own citizens to no purpose whatever.

    So let’s toast the negotiators of Copenhagen. By failing so spectacularly, they have presented us with a wonderful Christmas present. All we have to do is open it.

  • Rich and poor countries blame each other for failure of Copenhagen deal

     

    “Today’s events are the worst development for climate change in history,” said a spokesperson.

     

    Pablo Solon, Bolivian ambassador to the UN, blamed the Danish hosts for convening only a small group of countries to prepare a text to put before world leaders. “This is completely unacceptable. How can it be that 25 to 30 nations cook up an agreement that excludes the majority of the 190 nations.”

     

    But rich countries said that developing countries had wasted too much time on “process” rather than the substance of the talks. An epic stand-off over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol‘s legal distinctions between developed and developing countries and their obligations to cut their emissions caused a huge delay to the negotiations.

     

    But Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank for developing countries said, “Developing countries are very disappointed because they’ve invested a lot of time in the documents they’re negotiating here.”

     

    Politicians from all corners of the world were blamed widely for not setting ambitious enough targets to counter climate change. “They refused to lead and instead sought to bribe and bully developing nations to sign up to the equivalent of a death warrant. The best outcome now is no deal,” said Tim Jones, climate policy officer from the World Development Movement.

     

    China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, blamed a lack of trust between countries: “To meet the climate change challenge, the international community must strengthen confidence, build consensus, make vigorous efforts and enhance co-operation.”

     

    But indigenous Bolivian president Evo Morales blamed capitalism and the US. “The meeting has failed. It’s unfortunate for the planet. The fault is with the lack of political will by a small group of countries led by the US,” he said.

     

    Even veterans of previous environmental negotiations were disappointed. “Given where we started and the expectations for this conference, anything less than a legally binding and agreed outcome falls far short of the mark,” said John Ashe, chair of the Kyoto protocol talks.

  • What happens to us when the Earth is 2 degrees warmer

     

    • Most coastal cities such as London, Rome and New York would become uninhabitable for many. Metros would be flooded, sewage and stormwater flows would be overwhelmed, and most cable infrastructure would be affected. More drastically, most docks would be underwater so that food and oil could not be landed, even if it could be loaded onto the ships in the first place.
    • Enormous areas of the most productive agricultural land would be underwater. One thinks immediately of Bangladesh and the North Sea farms in Holland and Anglesea. In addition frequent floods, droughts and storms would cause sever losses every year. The reduction in food production would be so severe that half the world’s population would be hungry or starving.
    • The alteration in the cold water flow that drives the great deep-sea currents of the world would have a profound impact on the Gulf Stream, with completely unpredictable results. The eastern US and Europe may become hotter or colder or more storm-ridden. No matter which, the outcome spells serious changes for some of the most advanced cultures on earth.
    • Decreased availability and quality of fresh water bring hardship to between 1.2bn and 3bn people in almost every country. The Red Cross has said that it does not expect international aid to be able to keep up with the impact of climate change.
    • Suburbia would break down, for shopping and income are dependent on the motor car and the truck – to get to shops and offices and to transport food to centralised shopping malls.
    • Transportation will be limited as deliveries of oil become more difficult. Paved roads will go unrepaired and potholed and blocked by abandoned cars.
    • Repair of existing plant and machinery will become increasingly difficult as spare parts are used up and the industrial infrastructure declines. Those who can remember how they lived in the Depression years of the 1930s will be the experts.
    • The bankruptcy of the insurance industry would diminish replacement of industry and houses from fire and extreme events.
    • Lastly, and most significantly for a world that is now awash in guns, people, in their millions, will be on the move for survival. This would lead to economic and political instability, both nationally and internationally, and even to wars as refugees seek new homes and countries clash over scarce water and food supplies. The industrial countries would be under immense pressure from huge numbers of refugees

    This is the future that we are bequeathing our children and ourselves if any of us are younger than eighty. This is happening in our times, to our families and loved ones, and is no longer a distant scenario. It is here.

    Those who live in the country will be better prepared than those who live in the city. A city is a place that consumes a great deal and produces little, at least in terms of essentials. A city without incoming food or water collapses rapidly, whereas a small community closely tied to the natural environment can more easily adjust to technological and economic change.

    It could spell extinction for most of us, and for the planet we love,
    and, of course it will be enormously worse when temperatures go above 2°C.

    We have very little time to act now. Governments must stop talking and start spending. We already have the technology to solve most of these problems and still meet our growing need for energy. We even have the money! We have to get government to act

  • Copenhagen climate conference: The grim meaning of ‘meaningful’

     

    The climate change summit had three big tickets on its agenda: emissions, financial assistance and the process going ahead. And on each of these counts the accord – which was effectively hammered out not by the whole conference, but rather by the US, India, China and South Africa – fell woefully short. There was no serious cementing of the positive noises on aid that had emerged earlier on in the week. On emissions, a clear-eyed vision for the distant future was rendered a pipe dream by outright fuzziness about the near term. And most alarmingly of all, there was no clear procedural roadmap to deliver the world from the impasse that this summit has landed it in. Outright failure to agree anything at all would have been very much worse, but that is about the best thing that can be said.

    The course of the summit as a whole – which moved from bold rhetoric, through blame games to eventual grudging concessions – was neatly epitomised in Barack Obama‘s flying visit. The newly-crowned Nobel laureate opened his brief speech in near-identical terms to those we recently deployed – in common with 56 newspapers worldwide – in a shared editorial which called on global leaders to do the right thing.

    Stating climate change was a frightening fact, the president pronounced his determination to act. Soon, however, he broke his own rhetorical spell by following his eloquent overture not with a magnanimous announcement, but with some none-too-subtle pointing of the finger at China. He may have been technically accurate in implying that it nowadays emitted more than the US, but this cheap point distracted from the reality that much of China’s – in any case low – per-head emissions are incurred in serving western consumers.

    Later on he stood back from the brink. First, by conceding some language on monitoring emissions which addressed China’s concerns about sovereignty, and secondly – at a late-night press conference – by making a nod towards UN scientists who have this week been warning that the offers tabled so far would set the mercury surging by a catastrophic 3C.

    Obama’s singular failure to raise the American game no doubt reflects his having one eye on the Senate, whom he still needs to persuade to enact his climate laws. Other leaders, however, proved equally unable to transcend parochialism when the crunch came.

    China’s premier Wen Jiabao used his own speech to harry the developed world to make good on the cash it has pledged to the poor, an important demand but one that would have carried more force if it had been married to the explicit acceptance that China will soon have to find the means to prove to a sceptical world that it will curb its emissions as it promises.

    Throughout the evening, Europe seemed bent on clinging to its trump card of increasing its emissions offer from a 20% to a 30% cut, refusing to think beyond the horse-trading that has been failing the climate for years.

    Only two years ago, the world’s leaders swore this would be the summit to build a new carbon order. The threadbare agreement thrashed out last night has not even laid the foundations. The progress on financial assistance over the fortnight is welcome, but with much of the money earmarked for climate adaptation, the global community is left resembling an alcoholic who has decided to save up for a liver transplant rather than give up drink.

    It is a sad tribute to collective failure that the all-important question at the end of Copenhagen is: what happens next?