Miliband calls on rich countries to make firm offers on cutting CO2

Ed Miliband urges the US to clarify its position ahead of a major economies forum in London
John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 13.51 BST
Britain has ramped up the pressure on the US and other countries to come up with firm targets and commitments to reduce carbon emissions to ensure a new international climate change treaty can be agreed in December in Copenhagen.
Speaking ahead of a two day meeting of the world’s 17 largest economies in London, climate change and energy secretary Ed Miliband called on the US to clarify its position.
“We are narrowing the gap [between countries]. China needs to make a substantial contribution. It’s important that the US makes as much progress as possible. They must come to Copenhagen with a clear sense of what they want to do.
“Different countries are at different stages. We do need developed countries’ numbers but also developing country actions. There is no solution to climate change without developing country actions,” he said.
Miliband said that global emissions were presently about 50 gigatonnes of C02 a year but these need to reduce to 20Gt by 2050 to hold temperature increases to 2C and avoid catastrophic climate change.
“We need to reduce emissions to about 44Gt by 2020 and 35Gt by 2030. We already have offers on the table to get to 48Gt by 2020,” he said.
The major economies forum (Mef) which starts this weekend will cover most of the issues now deadlocked in the UN climate talks but it is not an official part of the negotiations. But with just five days of formal talks left before negotiators and politicians go to Copenhagen to thrash out a final deal, the Mef is seen as an essential forum for governments to prepare their positions.
Brazil this week became the latest major developing country to propose emission cuts, suggesting it could cap its greenhouse gas emissions at 2005 levels by 2020. “We can reach 2020 with levels similar to those of 2005, even with economic growth of 4% annually,” said environment minister Carlos Minc.
It follows India, China, Indonesia and Mexico, which have all indicated they are prepared to pass national legislation to curb emissions.
Asked whether the developing countries have done enough to fulfil their sirde of the bargain, Miliband said: “Numbers are essential at Copenhagen. We are going all out to get them. The most important thing is the mid term actions, [ie 2020]. Targets for 2050 are important but it’s more important to have near term targets,” said Miliband.
However, there is little prospect that the US will go to Copenhagen with firm figures and proposals because the domestic legislation that it needs to pass is held up in Congress. President Obama has indicated that the US will need more time, potentially forcing the talks into 2010.
Also expected to be discussed in London will be the size and form of the financial package to be offered by industrialised countries to developing countries to help them to adapt to climate change. Britain has proposed $100bn a year from the international community, but developing countries expect far more.
The 17 major economies participating are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the UK, and United States.
The EU and the US have insisted that most countries agree to curb emissions, even though developing countries are not historically responsible for climate change. The poorest countries in the world would not be obliged to cut emissions.

The environment in the decade of climate change

‘The world is locked into insanely complex talks, and green groups and government shout as one that we have only a few years to avoid apocalypse’

John Vidal
The Guardian, Saturday 17 October 2009
My, how things have changed! In 2000, scientists from the Worldwatch thinktank in Washington teamed up with the UN to spot the greatest threats to the planet over the coming years. Top of the list was ecosystem collapse, such as deforestation and the demise of corals; second were health and diseases, such as Sars and Aids; and third was global poverty. The world’s top environmental analysts gave climate change only four paragraphs in an eight-page essay – little more than malaria, trade, air pollution, population, fresh water or food supplies. Carbon emissions, they reported, were “continuing to decline” and global temperatures were “steady”.
How quaint. Ten years later, climate change is equal top of the international agenda. The world is locked into insanely complex talks to reduce emissions, and green groups and government shout as one that we have only a few years to avoid apocalypse. The polar bear on the melting ice flow has become an iconic picture of the decade, business has painted itself green, we’ve changed our lightbulbs and wind power has taken off. As Al Gore – in 2000 the new presidential nominee of the Democratic party – said, “We are all environmentalists now.”
All this in a decade? What on earth happened?
Climate change took off on the back of science and a storm of weather-related disasters. The huge floods in Mozambique that displaced millions of people in January 2000 laid down a marker of what was to come. Within months, India was struck by one of its worst droughts, and 4.5 million people were made homeless by floods in Cambodia and Thailand. By 2003, record numbers of cyclones, hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, fires, whirlwinds and floods killed tens of thousands of people.
It took record temperatures in Britain and 30,000 people to die in the 2003 European heatwave to bring climate change closer to home, but what perhaps clinched the big idea that Earth was in trouble was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 300,000 people. It had nothing to do with global warming but it reinforced the idea of the power of nature. Eight months later, Hurricane Katrina swept away parts of Louisiana along with much of the US’s scepticism for climate change.
Meanwhile, more studies linked weather extremes to man-made emissions. Isolated contrarians claimed warming was natural, linked to sunspots and would be good for growing grapes in Britain. But in 2007 the Met office announced that 11 of the last 13 years had been the warmest on record, while a consensus of 2,000 UN climate scientists said climate change was not just “unequivocal” but most of it was man-made.
Corporate greenwash reached new heights in 2000, with BP rebranding itself Beyond Petroleum and the global nuclear industry calling itself “environmentally indispensable”. The action then moved to Wall Street and the City; by 2007, Lehman Brothers in New York had set up an internal global council on climate change, and the same companies that had grown fat financing opencast coal mines, oil rigs and SUV plants began advising clients to Get Into Green.
In 2006, Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist at the UK Treasury, reported that business as usual in a climate-changing world meant economic meltdown. Politicians, industry, bankers and the media jumped aboard the green express, seeing dollar signs in emerging carbon markets and new technologies.
In fact, several other important events defined the environmental decade. One was China, which in 2008 officially overtook the US as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Its dash for development matched the west’s consumption boom, and sucked in forests, minerals and fuel from all over the world. But by mid-decade its scientists and politicians had seen the plunging water tables, choked on the coal pollution and realised that it could not continue. China now leads the world in rolling out technological solutions.
Over the decade the world’s population grew from just over 6.1 billion to about 6.9 billion. That increase is equivalent to nearly 12 new Britains, or three new Americas, or a new Africa; or almost exactly the number of people alive in 1750. The majority were born in the poorest countries, off the west’s radar, but it’s clear that population and climate will define the centuries ahead,
As 2009 ends, the climate situation appears to be worse than anyone had thought, with 4C temperature rises a certainty within 50 years if nothing changes. But like the calm before the storm in 2000, temperatures are steady and carbon emissions are falling because the recession has temporarily reduced industrial production and consumption.
So what about deforestation, the decline of coral reefs, the loss of fresh water, the rise of global diseases, pollution and all that poverty the UN feared?
Oh yes, they all got worse. But at least we can blame climate change now.

Sun sets on the solar-powered revolution

Geoffrey Lean is afraid to say that the solar-powered chickens may be fluttering home to roost.

By Geoffrey LeanPublished: 6:09PM BST 16 Oct 2009
Over long years I have developed a rule of thumb on the launching of government initiatives: the bigger the fanfare, the glitzier the setting, and the greater the array of ministers in attendance, the more insubstantial it will turn out to be. For British officialdom has mastered an art that eluded Mark Antony – burying something while praising it.
At first, this summer’s launch of the Government’s much-trumpeted plans for a green industrial revolution – 650 ponderous pages of documents, including a renewable energy White Paper – seemed to avoid these perils. The press conference was in a dingy basement in Lord Mandelson’s Business Department – and though a batch of ministers, headed by the power-soaked peer himself, were duly on display, they fell short of truly ominous numbers.

But then followed a self-congratulatory ministerial bash in the Science Museum – not quite in the same league as the City’s Guildhall and Whitehall’s Banqueting House, ornate portals to oblivion both – but worrying. I was not invited, but turned up anyway, to sense a whiff of doom. I wrote at the time of my doubts of whether the revolution was for real. And now it seems, in at least one important respect – enabling families to become more self-sufficient in energy – the solar-powered chickens may be fluttering home to roost.
It’s a shame. For if households can properly insulate their homes and install small-scale renewable technologies – such as solar panels – they become independent of energy companies, and turn a tidy profit by selling electricity back to the grid. This can reduce the need for large generating stations – whether powered by fossil fuels, the atom, or the wind – and simultaneously cut Britain’s carbon emissions. David Cameron’s Conservatives have grasped the concept’s importance. But it is hated by officials, who loathe the idea of millions of people making decisions instead of them. They have diligently reined it back, by slashing grants, whenever it looked like taking off. And despite last summer’s fanfare, this seems to be happening again.
There’s huge potential for generating energy at home. A report backed by Lord Mandelson’s department last year concluded that under a “plausible policy scenario” nine million dwellings – about one in three in Britain – could be exploiting such “micropower” by 2020, producing as much energy as five large nuclear power stations. A less expensive programme could equip three million homes.
Instead – under plans on which public consultation ended on Thursday – the Government is aiming at a modest 870,000, producing just two per cent of Britain’s power, one sixteenth of the technical potential. Solar electricity, the most promising of all the technologies, is planned to provide only half a percentage point – even, as David Cameron pointed out yesterday, though similarly cloudy Germany last year installed about 250 times as many panels.
Hopes were high of a rooftop renewable revolution this year after the Government finally agreed (or rather was forced to do so by a Tory resolution in the House of Lords) to introduce “feed-in tariffs”, the secret of Germany’s success. But the consultation documents show that rates for generating renewable power have been fixed at a level apparently designed to stop it succeeding. The European Photovoltaic Industry Association says that the tariffs should provide an 8-12 per cent annual return on investment for sustainable micropower growth. India has just launched a scheme with a 19 per cent return. But the Government’s plans provide for just 5-8 per cent.
Again, solar electricity seems to be being particularly discouraged, at 4 per cent. The official Energy Savings Trust estimates it will take some 15 years to recoup the capital cost – and families on average live in a home for just seven. Ministers say that micropower took off in Germany at similar tariffs: but there it was part of a package that offered householders low-interest loans for the whole capital cost. The Government has ruled out similar help here.
Loans have been promised for energy-saving measures – to be paid back out of savings on energy bills – but again ministers are dragging their feet. They accept that the loans must be attached to the home, so that succeeding owners continue repaying out of their savings. But this would require legislation, which they have no plans to introduce. Instead they are setting up four pilot projects, which will not report until 2011 and, without the law change, will not be true trials. Which all suggests that the Science Museum was the wrong place for the launch. Ministers should have gone next door, to the Natural History Museum, to celebrate under the long dead bones of the dinosaur.

Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy’s recipe for greener Britain and better NHS

Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester: The Saturday Interview
Sir Terry Leahy became chief executive of Tesco in 1997, just as Tony Blair was walking through the door of No 10. Within ten years he had turned the “pile it high and sell it cheap” food chain into a global supermarket brand. Tesco became new Labour’s success story, a red, white and blue symbol of the classless society where everyone from the dustman to the duchess could pick up a pint of milk.
Even as the Government stumbled and the country went into recession, the company went from strength to strength. Now £1 in every £6 spent on the high street goes to Tesco and it employs 470,000 people worldwide and runs 4,308 stores.
Sir Terry, the Everton fan who grew up in a prefab, has always been one step ahead of the consumer. He knows when the West Country has been converted to couscous and how much Hackney is willing to pay for a pound of cheese. He can do fair trade, budget, gourmet and green.
Politicians love to court the supermarket king, who works out of an unprepossessing industrial estate in Hertfordshire. Labour has studied the Tesco Clubcard to learn how to reach niche groups in an election. Now the Tories are discussing everything from education to eco-homes with the man who has his finger on the pulse of Middle England.

Sir Terry’s next project is to save the planet. Yesterday he announced an agreement between 30 global corporations, including Coca-Cola, Unilever and News International, which owns The Times, before the Copenhagen summit on climate change. “It is going to take a long time for countries to reduce their carbon emissions but consumers can do it overnight just by changing their behaviour. We need a second consumer revolution,” he says.
He thinks that Tesco customers are ready. The supermarket will put carbon footprints on hundreds of products, making clear the environmental damage they cause. Sir Terry plans to replace “buy one, get one free” offers, which he thinks encourage waste, with “buy one, get one free later” deals. As part of an effort to become carbon neutral by 2050, he will install green refrigerators, windmills and generators in Tesco stores. “The rise of mass consumption was a miracle of the 20th century. Everyone wanted a better life, from Britain to Asia, but we can’t keep doing it in such a carbon-insensitive way.”
Companies must turn consumers into part of the solution. “You need to work with the grain of human nature. If you force people, they don’t take on board the reason for the change and alter their wider behaviour. Take cars and petrol: there is a huge tax on it but it didn’t change how much they drove. You have to get society to make lowcarbon living desirable and cool. People used to see success as living in a mansion in America. Now it has to be a zero-carbon house and an electric sports car.”
Sir Terry has turned his 1930s suburban family home into a green grotto. “I have solar panels, new boilers and a hybrid car. We do all our own recycling and compost and water recovery. I don’t want to portray myself as a green zealot — it would be better to say I was an ordinary agnostic — but the science is incontrovertible and the implications are terrible, so I do what an ordinary person does.”
Will he stop selling green beans from Zambia? “It may be bad to fly in goods but then growing food under glass in Europe may be as bad,” he replies. “If you start saying you can only eat in season or eat British, it doesn’t work. If you start deciding for people how they live their lives you make mistakes — they know their own lives best. On a grand scale that becomes state planning of the economy, and that makes for lousy decisions.”
He is reluctant to promise to cut packaging. “That’s more complicated because we don’t make anything but we have reduced the number of plastic bags by 50 per cent in two years. It’s been done voluntarily: if you re-use a bag you get a Clubcard point.”
One problem is that supermarkets, led by Tesco, have encouraged people to stop using local shops and to drive to out-of-town stores. Surely Sir Terry must see a contradiction between this and his new green message?
“The rise of the modern supermarket just reflects the changing needs of families — more women working, people having less time and more disposable income.” His wife, Alison, works as a doctor and they share the weekly Tesco trip.
As a child, he went to the shops with his mother every day. “We were about six miles from the city centre. There was a little sweetshop, a grocer’s, a greengrocer’s and a butcher’s. You queued in each of them for the little they had, then you went to town to the department store to buy a slice of ham and look at the other things that you couldn’t afford to buy.
“I passionately believe supermarkets have been part of democracy in Britain — they’ve given people huge power over their lives, they’ve been liberating for women.” Sir Terry admits that he feels some guilt about forcing small shopkeepers out of business. “But the truth is this is part of change, it’s the creative destruction of markets. With winners come losers.” Critics say that the “Tescofication” of Britain has created clone towns, mushroom-risotto identi-food and Identikit grey uniforms for children. But Sir Terry defends the dominance of his brand.
“Around the world people choose the same things. The iPhone is chosen in Brazil, Japan and North America because it is better. It’s a democratic choice, but the price of that is you don’t get cultural variety.”
How has he stopped people from tiring of Tesco? “We are very counter to management theory which says you have to have your niche market. Whether you’re on income support or you’re a millionaire, you get treated the same. You have to give a lot up because it’s not completely bespoke, but it fits reasonably well, so you think the compromises you make are worth it for what you get back.”
The public services need to perform the same trick. Sir Terry thinks that government has become too controlling and centralised. “All my business experience has taught me that people are pretty wise and know what is best for their lives. You’ve got to put responsibility locally and trust people. There’s no officer class at Tesco, it doesn’t matter what your background is, you can get to the top. We trust people to take decisions on the ground.”
Too many Whitehall targets, he says, have been counterproductive. “It’s better to have teams on the ground with more authority. Take the NHS, there are many incredible specialisms, from cleaning to anaesthetics, that have to come together. That’s hard to do from a long way away.”
As one of the biggest employers in Britain, he thinks that the education system is failing. “Too many schools aren’t good enough. I don’t think that’s a controversial statement.” The answer is better teachers. “Teaching has got to be a more important profession in society — better paid and with more talented people going into it.” Tesco already has 800 apprentices and a degree course. Would Sir Terry consider helping the Tories with their free schools? “Tesco would always work constructively with the government of the day on the programmes that they’re trying to achieve.”
He is an obvious candidate for a peerage and a ministerial post in a Cameron administration but he insists that he would never go into politics. “I wouldn’t be any good at it, for a start. I’m a private person, this is about as public a role as I would ever want to do.”
The man who started out stacking shelves and washing floors says that he has never wanted to be a banker either. For him, running a supermarket is a form of public service. “I’ve never done it for the money. Some people run away from their background, I never have. I’m very comfortable in Liverpool. Essentially I’m still working-class.”
CVBorn February 28, 1956 Education St Edward’s College, Liverpool. University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology Career 1978: management trainee at Co-op. 1979: Tesco marketing executive. 1992: Tesco marketing director. 1997: Chief executive. Salary £1.3 million Family Married to Alison, a doctor, with three children Interests Special adviser to Everton Football Club
Quick-fireEverton or Liverpool? Everton Sushi or sausages? Sausages Suburbs or rural? Suburbs Are You Being Served? or The Good Life?Are You Being Served?V-necks or round-necks? V-neck Tesco Finest or two-for-one? Tesco Finest

High points in media coverage of the Samoa tsunami

Trade in rhino horn fuels massive poaching surge in South Africa

South Africa is witnessing a massive surge in rhino poaching, an activity blamed on criminal syndicates striving to meet an “insatiable appetite” for rhinoceros horn in east Asia.

Eighty-four rhinos have been killed by poachers in the country so far this year, a jump from the 13 deaths in 2007.

Kruger Park, a worldwide tourist attraction, has been hardest hit, suffering the loss of 33 rhinos since January. Nineteen have been killed in KwaZulu-Natal province, and some privately owned reserves have lost seven animals.

Conservationists say it is the biggest spike in poaching for 15 years and blame the smuggling trade connected to countries, such as China and Vietnam, where rhino horn can fetch thousands of pounds for its perceived medicinal value.

They say that Asian countries’ strengthening trade links with Africa have shortened the illegal supply chain. They also say more sophisticated poaching methods are being used, with organized criminal gangs flying in to game reserves by helicopter to kill rhinos, hack off their horns and make a quick getaway.

South Africa has about 1,490 black rhinos, more than a third of the world population of this critically endangered species. There are about 16,275 southern white rhinos, 93% of the global total. (Distribution of white rhino at left)

Yolan Friedmann, chief executive of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, said the number of rhinos lost to poaching had altered from an average of 10 a year to 100. “There has been a rampant increase in South Africa,” she said. “Poaching figures for this year have already surpassed the whole of last year. It’s probably the worst it’s been for 15 years. There’s a lot more money going into poaching and it’s becoming more hi-tech. It’s no longer just a man with a bow and arrow wading through the bush. These guys are using helicopters and AK-47 rifles.” (See right for distribution of black rhinos)

She warned that initiatives used previously could not meet the new threat. “Despite the once successful Save the Rhino project, rhinos are under siege. South Africa is facing a crisis. We’ve done extremely well in rhino conservation, but something has changed in the past 18 months, there’s an insatiable appetite for rhino horn in the far east.”

Ground up and added to liquids, rhino horn has been used for millennia in traditional Asian medicine to treat fevers and other ailments.

Rumors have recently been circulating on the internet that a Vietnamese government official claimed rhino horn cured his cancer, potentially fueling demand.

Last year a Vietnamese diplomat was caught on camera taking delivery of contraband rhino horn outside the Vietnamese embassy in Pretoria.

There is also a lucrative market in Yemen and Oman for daggers with rhino-horn handles‚ frequently given to boys during rites of passage.

Poaching gangs, often from nearby countries, are believed to earn about $200 (£125) a horn but once the material has been transported, ground and mixed with other substances it can sell for thousands of pounds on the black market. Poachers’ sentences and fines are usually negligible. (Right: rhino horns from poaching)

Friedmann said that seemingly legitimate parties also exploited loopholes. “Their hunting permits say they are only allowed to mount the rhino horns on the wall but we’re finding they use the byproducts to sell illegally. Price is not an issue. A hunt was sold last year to Vietnamese hunters for more than R1m [£84,000]. That’s a record price for white rhino.”

Luxury private game reserves seem to have been caught out by the upsurge; many employ guards but the men tend to lack training in wildlife protection.

In July a meeting in Geneva of the Convention onInternational Trade in Endangered Species warned that rhino poaching around the world was set to reach a 15-year high, and there was growing evidence of Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai nationals’ involvement in the illegal procurement and transport of horn out of Africa.

The South African government has been criticized for disbanding the police’s endangered species protection unit in 2003. But Buyelwa Sonjica, the environmental affairs minister, recently announced the formation of a special investigations team to tackle poaching.

South African National Parks has said it will spend R2m (£165,000) to provide an additional 57 game rangers in Kruger Park and equip them with motorbikes. Patrols along the park’s 280-mile South Africa and Mozambique border, where all 33 poached rhinos were killed, are also set to resume after being suspended three years ago.

At least 14 poachers, all Mozambican, have been arrested and several illegal firearms seized in Kruger this year. Nationwide, 22 poachers were caught. In January an international rhino-smuggling ring was smashed and 11 people were arrested.

Rhino numbers have been increasing worldwide thanks to various governments and NGOs. But Cathy Dean, director of the UK-based Save the Rhino International, warned: “The gains of the last decade are in real jeopardy. The underlying concern is that this upsurge in rhino poaching – a major issue in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa – is no longer opportunistic poaching by individuals but carried out by … highly sophisticated criminal gangs.”

Source:The Guardian, “Trade in rhino horn fuels massive poaching surge in South Africa“, accessed October 15, 2009