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  • US to go to Copenhagen summit with proposed target on carbon emissions.

     

    America is the only major industrialised country that has yet to reveal its emissions reduction plan. The official did not give details on the stringency of the proposed cuts, but it is thought likely they would range from 14% to 20% from 2005 levels – still below those put forward by the EU and other industrialised countries.

    “The one thing the president has made clear is we want to take action consistent with the legislative process,” the official told reporters. “[We] don’t want to get out ahead or be at odds with what can be produced through legislation.

    The Observer reported on Sunday that the US was considering a “provisional target” at Copenhagen.

    Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, told the Observer: “What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation.”

    Stern, who was speaking in Copenhagen, where he was meeting Danish officials, said: “We are looking at that, there are people we need to consult with.”

    The administration official shared that caution today, saying: “Whatever number we put on the table will be with reference to what can come out of the legislative process.”

    Obama has yet to decide if he will join about 65 other leaders – including Gordon Brown and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel – who have said they will attend the climate change summit, the official told reporters.

    “What the president has always said is if it looks as though the negotiations have proceeded sufficiently that going to Copenhagen would give a final impetus, a push, to the process, then he would be willing to go,” the senior administration official said. “We’re making the judgment as to whether it makes sense for him to go.”

    The announcement that Obama would propose a target for cutting emissions marks a shift in strategy for the White House. His administration, until today, has resisted international pressure to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, fearing a domestic backlash if it were seen to pre-empt Congress in dealing with climate change.

    But the strategy led to growing frustration in the international community that the Copenhagen meeting would fail to produce the strong political agreement needed to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. The international community had been looking to Obama – who put climate change at the top of his agenda – to put America in the lead of efforts to deal with global warming. America has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other industrialised country.

    Sweden’s prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, had criticised the US failure to commit to targets for cutting emissions as “untenable”.

    Obama will still have to tread cautiously in proposing America’s emissions cuts, however. The president promised to cut emissions by 14% over 2005 levels by 2020 when he was running for the White House. The house of representatives narrowly voted on a climate change bill last June, which proposed a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020. A similar bill in the Senate proposed a 20% cut.

    But efforts to build a consensus around climate change legislation in the Senate have stalled. Senate leaders now say they do not expect to take up climate change law until February next year.

  • Global body needed to direct green technology, G77 says

     

    Developing nations argue that the costs should be paid by the rich nations, and that a new global body is required, perhaps working as part of the UN, to direct the world’s low-carbon transformation in sectors as diverse as power, transport and heavy industry.

    “We know that, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C, we’ll need a step change in global innovation and technology transfer,” said Shane Tomlinson of environment consultants E3G. “In the period to 2020, it’s vital we avoid high carbon lock-in. The infrastructure decisions that developing countries are taking today, such as new power stations, are going to determine their emissions pathways for 20-30 years.”

    In the short term, that means rolling out proven technologies such as onshore and offshore wind power, solar photovoltaics and energy efficiency measures. A recent analysis by the Climate Group found that, to meet the emissions targets already agreed by nations, 9.3bn tonnes of CO2 must be prevented from entering the atmosphere by 2020. But these will not be enough for the deep cuts – 80% or more on 1990 levels – that many rich countries will have to deliver by 2050, if the world is to limit warming to the 2C that scientists agree is the safe limit. By then, according to the International Energy Agency, 17 technologies will have to be developed and rolled out to deliver a reduction of 42bn tonnes of CO2. Most of that technology – ranging from carbon capture and storage, solar power and zero-emission vehicles – will need to be deployed in emerging economies.

    At Copenhagen, the first decision on technology will be to decide if a new co-ordinating body should have powers to command the clean tech roll out. “The G77 [group of developing nations] and China have proposed a new central executive, political body,” said Tomlinson. It would be part of the existing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which administers the Kyoto protocol.

    However, Europe and the US want only an advisory committee – their main concern is that a strong political body may end up channelling funds into state enterprises rather than keeping a level playing field for all businesses. Developing countries say an advisory body would have little power to drive the dramatic changes needed.

    The polarised debate has led some to compare the sharing of IP in green technology to arguments over whether pharmaceutical companies should give up patents for expensively developed HIV or malaria drugs in those nations blighted by the illnesses. Alia al-Dalli, deputy resident representative in Morocco for the United Nations Development Programme, said that without local education programmes, the only winners from Copenhagen will be multinational technology companies. “Capacity-development is very important – people need to be educated and aware. You’ve got to be able to produce technologies by the south for the south, in the south,” she said. “It will not merely be technology transfer.”

    Ambuj Sagar, a professor of policy studies at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, said: “The best step would be if we stopped using the term technology transfer and started using something like innovation co-operation to signify that this is not a simple issue. It is not a hand-off from producers of technology to users of technology. We need co-operation instead of a simple reliance on markets to tackle what is an immense challenge.”

  • It’s Polluters Payday in Parliament House today

    Snap emergency actions tomorrow in
    Sydney and Melbourne
    Sydney: 1pm, Kevin Rudd’s office, 70 Phillip St (between Bent and Bridge Streets, closest train station is Circular Quay).
    Melbourne: 1pm, steps of the State Library marching to Lindsay Tanners office; call the Greens office for more info on 03 9912 2999.
    Letters to editors
    Always keep your letter to 150 words to give it maximum chance of getting published.
    It’s polluters’ payday in Parliament House.
    This is a polluters’ pact, giving another $5 billion to coal and more to other polluters.
    It is about saving Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd, not the planet.
    It is about being seen to do something, not about actually doing what is necessary.
    Families will pay more – another $5.8 billion – so that polluters pay less.
    The Greens are the only party with climate policies that are ecologically sensible and economically rational.
    The Prime Minister has adopted Coalition policy cloaked in Greens language. Australians will see through that and feel betrayed by a man they elected to tackle the climate crisis.
    The Prime Minister has loaded the dice against our children, giving them more than a 50% chance of facing catastrophic climate change.
    He has condemned the Great Barrier Reef and the Murray Darling.
    Watch and see as the CPRS triggers new investment in coal. How can that be a step forward?

    Adelaide Advertiser: submit letter here
    The Age: email letters to letters@theage.com.au
    The Australian: email letters to letters@theaustralian.com.au
    Australian Financial Review: email letters to edletters@afr.com.au
    Canberra Times: email letters to letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au
    The Courier Mail: submit letter at www.news.com.au/couriermail/editorial/letter
    The Daily Telegraph: email letters to letters@dailytelegraph.com.au
    The Herald Sun: submit letter at www.news.com.au/heraldsun/editorial/letter
    Mercury: email letters to mercuryedletter@dbl.newsltd.com.au
    Sydney Morning Herald: email letters to letters@smh.com.au
    The West Australian: email letters to letters@wanews.com.au.
    If any of these links don’t work, you can find them all at http://greensmps.org.au/help-spread-word-about-safe-climate-bill
     Follow us on Twitter for campaign updates and all the latest news from Canberra!
      Join Facebook and become a fan of the Australian Greens.

  • Global warming could create 150 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050

     

     

    President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, who presented testimony to the EJF, said people in his country did not want to “trade a paradise for a climate refugee camp”. He warned rich countries taking part in UN climate talks this week in Barcelona “not to be stupid” in negotiating a climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.

     

     

    Nasheed urged governments to find ways to keep temperature rises caused by warming under 2C. “We won’t be around for anything after 2C,” he said. “We are just 1.5m over sea level and anything over that, any rise in sea level – anything even near that – would wipe off the Maldives. People are having to move their homes because of erosion. We’ve already this year had problems with two islands and we are having to move them to other islands. We have a right to live.”

     

    Last month, the president held a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to the plight of his country.

     

     

     

     

    The EJF claimed 500 million to 600 million people – nearly 10% of the world’s population – are at risk from displacement by climate change. Around 26 million have already had to move, a figure that the EJF predicts could grow to 150 million by 2050. “The majority of these people are likely to be internally displaced, migrating only within a short radius from their homes. Relatively few will migrate internationally to permanently resettle in other countries,” said the report’s authors.

     

     

    In the longer term, the report said, changes to weather patterns will lead to various problems, including desertification and sea-level rises that threaten to inundate low-lying areas and small island developing states. An expert at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris recently said global warming could create “ghost states” with citizens living in “virtual states” due to land lost to rising seas.

     

    The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts sea-level rise in the range of 18-59cm during the 21st century. Nearly one-third of coastal countries have more than 10% of their national land within 5 metres of sea level. Countries liable to lose all or a significant part of their land in the next 50 years, said the EJF report, include Tuvalu, Fiji, the Solomon islands, the Marshall islands, the Maldives and some of the Lesser Antilles.

     

    Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Chad and Rwanda, could see large movements of people. Bangladesh has had 70 climate-related natural disasters in the past 10 years.

     

     

    “Climate change impacts on homes and infrastructure, food and water and human health. It will bring about a forced migration on an unprecedented scale,” said the EJF director, Steve Trent. “We must take immediate steps to reduce our impact on global climate, and we must also recognise the need to protect those already suffering along with those most at risk.”

     

    He called for a new international agreement to address the scale and human cost of climate change. “The formal legal definition of refugees needs to be extended to include those affected by climate change and also internally displaced persons,” he said.

  • Crumbling icesheets could add 5m to sea levels

     

    In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels would rise 18 to 59cm by 2100, but this estimate did not factor in the potential impact of crumbling icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

    Today many of the same scientist say that even if heat-trapping CO2 emissions are curtailed, the ocean watermark is more likely to go up by nearly a metre, enough to render several small island nations unlivable and damage fertile deltas, home to hundreds of millions.

    Related Coverage

    More than 190 nations gather in Copenhagen next month to hammer out a global climate deal to curb greenhouse gases and help poor countries cope with its consequences.

    University of Texas professor Jianli Chen and colleagues analysed nearly seven years of data on ocean-icesheet interaction in Antarctica.

    Covering the period up January 2009, the data was collected by the twin GRACE satellites, which detect mass flows in the ocean and polar regions by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity field.

    Consistent with earlier findings based on different methods, they found that West Antarctica dumped, on average, about 132 billion tonnes of ice into the sea each year, give or take 26 billion tonnes.

    They also found for the first time that East Antarctica – on the Eastern Hemisphere side of the continent – was likewise losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of about 57 billion tonnes annually.

    The margin for error, they cautioned, is almost as large as the estimate, meaning ice loss could be a little as a few billion tonnes or more than 100.

    Up to now, scientists had thought that East Antarctica was in “balance”, meaning that it accumulated as much mass and it gave off, perhaps a bit more.

    “Acceleration of ice loss in recent years over the entire continent is thus indicated,” the authors conclude.

    “Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea level rise.”

    Another study published last week in the journal Nature reported an upwardly-revised figure for Antarctic temperatures during prior “interglacials”, warm periods such as our own that have occurred roughly every 100,000 years.

    During the last interglacial which peaked about 128,000 years ago, called the Eemian Period, temperatures in the region were probably 6C higher than today, which is about three degrees above previous estimates, the study said.

    The findings suggest that the region may be more sensitive than scientists thought to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that were roughly equivalent to present day levels.

    During the Eemian, sea levels were five to seven metres higher than today.

  • Sticking with GDP could be the best safeguard for nature.

    Sticking with GDP could be the best safeguard for nature

    Tom Levitt

    20th November, 2009

    Although much maligned as a measurement of progress, some believe a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurement that includes natural capital could be the way forward

    Economic growth is ‘destroying more than it is creating’, said French President Nicholas Sarkozy in September 2009 as he called for an end to what he described as ‘GDP fetishism’.

    As others – including the New Economics Foundation – have indicated, our current GDP metric offers no indication of whether a country is becoming richer or poorer in terms of its natural resources.

    And as Professor Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth, points out, if the current rate of GDP growth continues the global economy will be 80 times the size it was in the 1950s by the end of the century.

    ‘It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival…and has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystems,’ says Jackson.

    Valuing nature

    So what is the best way to halt this degradation?

    The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report (TEEB), a mammoth three-year project funded by a host of EU countries and published last week, argues that neglect and degradation comes from a failure to value ‘natural capital’ and include that within existing gross domestic product (GDP) calculations.

    ‘It is a psychological flaw in human thinking that does not understand that our existence depends on this place called earth,’ says the report’s lead author Paven Sukhdev, a senior banker at Deutsche Bank.

    ‘If you had a house you wouldn’t start taking it apart, burning your front door for fuel. You don’t destroy your home yet we are destroying our forests and seas.’

    The TEEB report attempted to put a value on ecosystems services like forests, lakes, soils, water quality and fisheries. In the words of Sukhdev, ‘we only value what we can measure’.

    Coral reefs, for example, are calculated to provide annual services to humans worth $1.2 million per hectare. In Venezuela, investment in the ‘national protected area’ system is preventing sedimentation that otherwise could reduce agricultural earnings by around $3.5 million a year.

    The report also showed how this value could be shown in a balance sheet. Planting and protecting nearly 12,000 hectares of mangroves in Vietnam costs just over $1 million but saved annual expenditures on dyke maintenance of well over $7 million.

    Retaining GDP

    Sukhdev says that although patently inaccurate, retaining GDP but including within it additional natural capital flows was still the best way to protect the environment.

    ‘GDP is understood by both policy-makers and the general public – it is a single number that is simple to grasp and apply,’ he argues.

    There are already measurements in existence that attempt to adjust for the shortcomings of GDP. The UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) is one; WWF’s Ecological Footprint, produced as part of its Living Planet report, is another.

    These were both designed as alternative measures of progress.

    Making politicians listen

    However, Sukhdev argues that only by ‘monetising’ nature will policy-makers, governments and economists start properly valuing it.

    ‘Policy-making is about trade-offs. Often these trade-offs compare apples with oranges. By assigning monetary values to creation/depletion of natural capital, we can size and assess their unstated impacts on the economy, allowing for far more informed decision making and public debate.

    ‘GDP is just a flow of stocks and capital. If we include the flow of nutrients from forests – i.e. if we take timber, we will lose flood protection, air quality etc – then the net effect will be reflected on the balance sheet,’ says Sukhdev.

    The Sarkozy-commissioned report on GDP led by U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz explains this argument further:

    ‘If I have disinvested this year [in my natural capital] to finance my consumption, this implies that I am poorer at the end of the year. Eventually, I will have the possibility to do the same next year to maintain this level of consumption. But I know that I will not be able to do so indefinitely: one day or later, I will have to adjust my consumption demands.’

    Treasury delay

    So what’s the delay? The UK Treasury, seen by former government sustainability adviser Jonathon Porritt as a ‘barrier’ standing in the way of new approaches to economic measurement, says GDP is ‘crucial to all kinds of economic surveillance’, and that it wouldn’t act alone in changing the measurement.

    The Office of National Statistics (ONS), which collects the data used in GDP measurements, accepted the criticisms that ‘impacts of logging, reduction of forests or mining of natural resources are currently viewed as additions to economic acticity within GDP’.

    However, like the Treasury it said GDP as a measurement was defined and coordinated by the UN and that in the most recent update, due to be introduced in the next few years, there were ‘no significant changes to the framework related to the treatment of natural capital.’

    ‘There has been considerable research in developing alternative measures of GDP. These include environmental adjusted or ‘green’ GDP. But there is no agreed definition for these adjusted versions of GDP and these tend to be undertaken by research institutions rather than national statistical institutions,’ said a ONS spokesman.

    There is however an environmental index being developed by the EU Commission as a result of its report, ‘Beyond GDP’, published earlier this year. The Commission plans to run a pilot of the index in 2010 and publish the results alongside standard GDP figures.

    No more GDP

    However, for some critics neither this parallel measurement nor Sukdev’s natural-capital adjusted GDP would be a satisfactory measure of progress.

    ‘You can improve GDP, make it more meaningful by including natural resources and that would send a signal to decision-makers about how they are managing their natural resources,’ admits Aniol Esteban, head of environmental economics at the New Economics Foundation.

    ‘However, this does not make it acceptable as the sole guiding measure of progress. Even with this natural resource flow it doesn’t tell you whether society is benefiting, whether peoples’ well-being is improving. It’s a step forward but still far away from the situation where national policy is guided by something other than just economic growth.’

    Useful links
    New Economics Foundation
    EU Commission report, ‘Beyond GDP’
    Prosperity Without Growth
    The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report (TEEB)
    The Happy Planet Index