World must shift to low-carbon economy by 2014 or face dangerous climate change, says WWF

Delay in low-carbon technologies will make it impossible to cut CO2 quickly enough to avoid worst impacts of global warming
Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009 11.05 BST
The world must start a “complete” shift to a low carbon economy by 2014 — or risk making dangerous climate change almost inevitable, a report warned today.
The study for conservation charity WWF showed that waiting until after 2014 to fully develop the clean industries needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as renewable energy, would leave it too late to halt temperature rises of more than 2C.
With low-carbon industry only able to grow at a certain rate, a delay in taking action will make it almost impossible for countries to roll out the technology in time to cut emissions by the amounts needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
The research by analysts Climate Risk (pdf) also said countries must take action across a range of industries at once, including renewable energy, technology to capture the carbon emissions from fossil fuel power stations, preventing deforestation and improving energy efficiency.
If countries fail to tackle emissions across all sectors, they will end up getting the lowest-cost industries up and running first and not developing other areas until they are affordable.
This would make it impossible to meet targets to reduce emissions, the study warned.
The report, published as representatives of 17 countries meet in the UK for the Major Economies Forum as part of efforts to secure a new global agreement on cutting emissions at UN talks in Copenhagen in December, called for long-term investment strategies to support clean technology.
Policies are also needed to improve energy efficiency standards, pay people set tariffs for generating power from renewables and end subsidies for the use of fossil fuels.
Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF-UK, said: “Clean industry sectors can only expand so far, so quickly.
“If we wait until later than 2014 to begin aggressively tackling the problem, we will have left it too late to ensure that all the low-carbon solutions required are ready to roll out at the scale needed if we intend to keep within the world’s remaining carbon budget.
He said the report highlighted the need for a “complete industrial shift towards a low-carbon future” which must begin with a fair and binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen in December.
An over-reliance on carbon trading - which by putting a price on pollution encourages cutting emissions where it costs least - would lead to a step-by-step approach to developing a low carbon economy that would leave the world struggling to reduce emissions on a sufficient scale and speed to prevent climate change, the study said.
The report also said that, even without a price on carbon, renewable energy could become competitive with fossil fuels between 2013 and 2025.

Old-Fashioned Energy Play

By MATTHEW CURTIN
Forget windmills. Investing in Drax, owner of a 35-year-old British coal-fired power plant, could be a savvier way to profit from Europe’s efforts to cut carbon-dioxide emissions.
Sound far-fetched? Not when considering the skewed incentives and lack of certainty in the EU’s policy of reducing CO2 emissions 20% by 2020 partly through ensuring renewable energy meets 20% of demand.
The chief uncertainty surrounds the EU’s emissions-trading system, which has led to volatile and unexpectedly low prices, below €15 ($22) a ton, less than half last year’s peak. There is no visibility on what carbon will cost after 2020. That is a serious issue given the life of a new power plant is measured in decades, and new technology — such as carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) — is years from commercialization.
Unless governments address the uncertainty pushing up the cost of capital for new low-CO2 generation, too little capacity may be built to meet future demand and environmental targets. The recession has simply delayed the crunch, because it has also deterred new investment. In the U.K., plans for two new coal-fired power stations were suspended last week and with them opportunities to test CCS technology.
The U.K. may need 22 gigawatts of new capacity by 2020, and not just to replace aging facilities. Extra capacity will have to be built if wind is to provide a fifth of energy supply, because it is an intermittent power source. Should enthusiasm for wind wane, the double-digit earnings multiples windmill-makers like Gamesa, Vestas Wind Systems and Nordex are trading on may prove too high.
Extending the life of existing plants looks the likely way to ensure the lights don’t go out in the U.K. and other countries, requiring politicians to rethink policy. Take Germany’s tentative re-evaluation of nuclear power and Belgium’s recent decision to delay nuclear decommissioning by a decade.
Should this happen in the U.K., it would benefit Drax because, as a low-cost, pure-play supplier meeting 7% of domestic demand, it is highly geared to any life-extension. The slump in U.K. energy prices this year has left Drax with an enterprise value of just five times 2010 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. That is barely half the level enjoyed by its bigger utility and renewable-energy rivals. Barring an environmental-policy shakeup, “yesterday’s” technology is starting to look unjustly undervalued.
Write to Matthew Curtin at matthew.curtin@dowjones.com

Time for Inaction on Global Warming

Congress should consider the costs before passing “cap and trade.”
By PETE DU PONT
“Global” and “warming” are perhaps the two most important words used to justify the approaching governmental control of our economy. In reality, global warming is barely occurring: In the 30 years starting in 1977, warming amounted to 0.32 degree Fahrenheit per decade, and in the next hundred years it is estimated to be about half a degree per decade.
So global warming looks like neither the alarmists’ serious threat, nor an immediate crisis that requires governmental control of America’s economy to reduce it. Nevertheless the government solution to these increases–the Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the House earlier this year–is estimated to lower global temperatures only about 0.18 degree Fahrenheit in the next 90 years.
And now comes the new Boxer-Kerry Senate bill, which would require a 20% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020.
As a practical matter, what would such a reduction mean to us and our economy? Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute calculates that a 20% reduction would mean cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions to our 1977 levels, and that would radically change both the U.S. economy and our personal lives.
As Mr. Hayward notes, we had 220 million people in America then; today we have 305 million. In 1977 our economy was produced $7.2 trillion (in 2008 dollars); today it is twice as large, at $14.2 trillion. Back then we had 145 million vehicles on the road; today we have 251 million. America has substantially grown, and our energy needs have grown as well.
So what would we have to do get back to 1977 emission levels and meet the Boxer-Kerry requirement? First, car and truck miles travelled would have to be reduced by one-third (or fuel efficiency improved by one-third, hard to do in 10 years), which would seriously reduce travel and transportation, and likely force changes in automobile design that consumers would not like.
Next, the amount of coal burned to generate electricity would have to be cut in half. So we would close more than 200 of our coal-fired power plants, and as Mr. Hayward says that would reduce our electricity supply by some 800 million megawatts. To replace those millions of megawatts with non-hydro renewable power sources like wind, solar and geothermal power would be virtually impossible. We have about 130,000 megawatts generated by them now, and the growth rate of these power sources over the last five years suggests it would take 97 years to make up for the shutdown of 200 coal-fired plants.
Nevertheless, the Boxer-Kerry bill, at least in its draft form, is an improvement over Waxman-Markey. It is in favor of nuclear power–which, in Sen. John Kerry’s words, “needs to be a core component of electricity generation if we are to meet our emission reduction targets”–though it does not mention the construction of the 70 to 100 nuclear plants we would need to add to the 104 we now have in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It is also in favor of expanding offshore drilling and natural-gas exploration and production, something that Waxman-Markey does not support.
On the other hand, Boxer-Kerry would be as bad for our economy as Waxman-Markey in two respects. First, it too contains the protectionism of the Waxman “border adjustment program” to begin a new American policy of putting tariffs on goods imported from counties that do not adopt acceptable environmental standards, which surely would result in retaliation tariffs on our exported goods.
And the bill aims to achieve targeted emission declines through a similar cap-and-trade program involving carbon permits. This is said to cover only 2% of U.S. businesses, but it would drive up the cost of electricity, food and other goods for all households and businesses, and its 20% emission reduction is even larger than the 17% in that bill (our current recession has already reduced emissions by 6%, which Sens. Kerry and Barbara Boxer apparently think is real progress). The bill would reduce the portion of emissions covered by the caps, eliminating regulation of methane emissions from coal mines, landfills, and oil and gas pipeline distribution.
Both bills include offsets which would allow emitters (and the politicians in Washington) to claim we are hitting our reduction targets while actually emitting more carbon by “investing” in projects in the U.S. and other countries that ostensibly reduce carbon (whether or not they actually do)–a process that is fraught with potentials for fraud and abuse.
And both bills suffer from the flawed logic of thinking a cap-and-trade system would actually work, when we know it has not worked in Europe, and that the only way a cap-and-trade system could meet its emission targets in the U.S. is by shrinking our economy.
Congressional Budget Office director Douglas W. Elmendorf testified last week before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the cap-and-trade provisions of the House bill would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 0.25% to 0.75% in 2020 ($60 billion to $180 billion), and by 1.0% to 3.5% in 2050.
Like Waxman-Markey, Boxer-Kerry would expand the control the government has over the American economy, businesses, and individuals. It would have little impact on reducing global warming but would significantly depress our economy. One wonders if the purpose of the Boxer-Kerry bill is really just to give the U.S. something to take to Copenhagen for the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in December.
High-cost policies with low-impact results are not in America’s best interests, so we should postpone both bills and think through more clearly our desired energy policies.

I’d choose nuclear power over a climate crash. But will the government grow up and clean its mess up?

Nuclear power is our only workable low-carbon energy source but what will we do with the waste – and who will pay for it?
There’s little doubt that nuclear power could be produced safely and cleanly. There’s also little doubt that it seldom has been. The contrast between the way things are and the way they should be threatens to split the environmental movement from top to bottom.
The movement has many roots, but one is the terror of nuclear weapons in the 1960s, and the recognition that the atomic power industry in its early days was little more than a cover for weapons manufacture. “Nuclear power – no thanks” was the defining slogan of the older generation of greens. It a rational response to the greatest threat to life on Earth. Their continuing repulsion was justified by a shocking series of accidents and leaks, not only at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but also at Dounreay, Sellafield and many other sites.
Today, while the threat of nuclear war hasn’t disappeared, it is less urgent than the prospect of climate breakdown. The two industries – weapons and power – were split up (though in reality long after it came into force) by the Euratom treaty and modern reactor designs are much safer than their predecessors. As nuclear energy produces less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than coal or gas, and as uranium mining, though hideous, causes less damage than opencast coal, the argument has changed. Now the issue comes down to this: whether the nuclear waste will be disposed of safely, and whether it can it be done without the massive use of state funds.
Until the government chooses a site and produces detailed plans for a nuclear waste repository, neither question can be answered. To commission a new generation of nuclear power stations before we know what will happen to the waste we already have offends the most basic environmental principle: you don’t make a new mess before you’ve cleared up the old one.
There’s no mystery about how it should be done. No argument against a deep repository in a geologically stable rock formation withstands examination. The notion that some future generation might accidentally dig up our nuclear waste pile is preposterous: if our descendants possess the knowledge and technology required to mine through thousands of metres of backfill and break through all the layers of defence to find this worthless treasure, they would also possess the knowledge and technology required to understand the warning signs.
Nor do I have a problem, unlike some Guardian colleagues, with the notion of shoring up the carbon price, to allow this or any other low-carbon technology to become viable. The price of carbon has always been an artefact of policy, and the absence of a floor price – below which it cannot fall – is a persistent impediment to green investment of all kinds. If the government really intends to guarantee that the price will be €30 or more, as reported in yesterday’s Guardian, this is something we should welcome: it cannot assist the nuclear industry in this way without also assisting the renewable and energy-saving industries.
Ideally it would simply set the carbon floor price, lay down the wider environmental criteria, then let the different technologies fight it out.
But the persistent trouble with nuclear power – like any other potentially polluting industry – is that doing things the right way is expensive, while doing them the wrong way is cheap. My newfound complacency about nuclear power – it’s ugly, but not nearly as bad as a global climate crash – was shaken by the discovery last month of a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. The ship was one of 42 believed to have been scuttled by the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. Most were sunk off the coast of Somalia.
The wreck appears to be stuffed to the gunwhales with Norwegian nuclear waste, despite the fact Norway has some of the strictest environmental regulations on Earth. The UN has pointed out that it costs roughly 400 times as much to dispose of dangerous waste legally as it costs to look the other way. The temptation to cut corners often proves overwhelming. I would choose nuclear power over coal, and nuclear dumping over climate breakdown, but I would rather have neither.
Monbiot.com

Maldives sends climate SOS with undersea cabinet

The Maldivian president and ministers held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting on Saturday, in a symbolic cry for help over rising sea levels that threaten the tropical archipelago’s existence.

Aiming for another attention-grabbing event to bring the risks of climate change into relief before a landmark U.N. climate change meeting in December, President Mohamed Nasheed’s cabinet headed to the bottom of a turquoise lagoon.

Clad in black diving suits and masks, Nasheed, 11 ministers the vice president and cabinet secretary dove 3.8 meters (12 feet, 8 inches) to gather at tables under the crystalline waters that draw thousands of tourists to $1,000-a-night luxury resorts.

As black-and-white striped Humbug Damselfish darted around a backdrop of white coral, Nasheed gestured with his hands to start the 30-minute meeting, state TV showed.

“We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” a dripping Nasheed told reporters as soon as he re-emerged from the water.

The archipelago nation off the tip of India, best-known for luxury tropical hideaways and unspoiled beaches, is among the most threatened by rising seas. If U.N. predictions are correct, most of the low-lying Maldives will be submerged by 2100.

“SOS” MESSAGE

Nasheed and the ministers used a white plastic slate and waterproof pencils to sign an “SOS” message from the Maldives during the 30-minute meeting.

“We must unite in a world war effort to halt further temperature rises,” the message said. “Climate change is happening and it threatens the rights and security of everyone on Earth.”

World leaders will meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and industrialized nations want all countries to impose sharp emissions cuts.

“We have to have a better deal. We should be able to come out with an amicable understanding that everyone survives. If Maldives can’t be saved today, we do not feel that there is much of a chance for the rest of the world,” he said.

The developing world wants rich countries to shoulder most of the burden, on the grounds they contributed most to the problem.

Nasheed and the cabinet trained for two weeks and were assisted by professional divers to pull off his latest eye-catching move related to climate change.

Nasheed, barely a month after entering office last year, declared he would establish a sovereign fund to relocate his country’s 350,000 people if sea levels rise, but later admitted it was not feasible given the state of the Maldivian economy.

Earlier this year, he vowed to make the Maldives carbon neutral within a decade by switching to renewable energy and offsetting carbon emissions caused by tourists flying to the Maldives.

Source:
Reuters, “Maldives sends climate SOS with undersea cabinet“, accessed October 17, 2009

India’s complex game of carbon trade-offs

Never mind the rhetoric: New Delhi may yet be stealthily moving towards embracing emissions cuts
India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, did the rounds in Washington and New York last month, trying to persuade US officials, thinktanks and journalists that New Delhi was open to revising its longstanding climate policy.
Ramesh even offered specifics on the changes India would be prepared to make.
So it was a bit bewildering to see the Indian delegation revert to the traditional negotiating posture at the Bangkok climate change talks earlier this month.
In a nutshell, this is that, since it was the developed world that caused the global warming problem, and since incomes and carbon emissions are a fraction of those in the west, India refuses to accept limits on its growth in order to make emissions cuts.
India helped lead the attack by developing countries on an Australian proposal that would allow individual countries great latitude on how much to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And it was even more confusing to learn that Ramesh apparently approved that negotiating position.
But now it seems the environment minister may be involved in his own delicate internal negotiations, trying to get the Indian bureaucracy to move away from a long-established position. The Times of India reports today on a leaked letter from Ramesh to India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
In it, the environment minister warns that India could suffer an international backlash if it is seen to be obstructing a climate change deal at the UN talks in Copenhagen in December. He advises that India distance itself from the developing countries, and ingratiate itself with the G20 industrialised economies.
“We should be pragmatic and constructive, not argumentative and polemical,” he says in the letter. “India must listen more and speak less in negotiations.”
Ramesh declined to comment further to the Times of India, and he did not immediately respond to an email from the Guardian. But it does seem as if India, along with Indonesia, Brazil, and China, is floating new proposals about how much it may be ready to do on climate change – in the hope, presumably, of getting some kind of commitment in return from the US and other industrialised countries to help adoption of new green technology they will need in the future.
How far India is really prepared to go will probably be a slow-reveal between now and Copenhagen, with Singh’s state visit to Washington on 24 November a key moment to watch.

The BBC should report climate change facts rather than political spin

Science reporting that downplays sober science in favour of the shrill shriek of climate denialists is nothing but propaganda
A controversy has erupted over a recent blog post by Paul Hudson that turned into a news story on BBC online with the title “What happened to global warming?” Does it mark an “amazing U-turn” of the BBC on climate, or was this a legitimate piece of reporting as the BBC maintains?
Perhaps my view as a climate scientist is of interest. To put it upfront: I think Hudson’s article is more political spin than news reporting.
The piece starts with a bold assertion: “For the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” To be correct, this should have read: “If we cherry-pick a particular data set which excludes the part of the globe that warmed most, and also cherry-pick a time interval that starts with the warmest year of the 20th century and ends with the coldest year of the 21st, then we just manage to find a nearly flat piece of temperature curve.”
We discussed the details of all this recently on RealClimate. The bottom line: Hudson referred to temperature data of the British Met Office that show a smaller warming recently because they leave out the Arctic, which is where most recent warming has occurred (as the Met Office confirms in its own study, (Simmons et al. 2009). And he cleverly compared 1998 (a year that stands out well above the climate trend due to an El Niño event in the Pacific) to 2008, a year that happens to be below the climate trend line, again due to natural variability. But note that in the global Nasa temperature data, even the cherry-picked trend over 1998-2008 is warming.
Hudson claims that the data contradicts climate models – which would be untrue even if temperatures had in fact stagnated. The models and data both show that due to natural variability, warming is never smooth and steady, and the observed temperature data are entirely consistent with the climate models.
Hudson goes on to present two fringe ideas. The first, by Piers Corbyn, is that some undisclosed solar mechanism is “almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperature.” But solar activity over the past years has been at an all-time low since satellite observations began in the 1970s, so if anything, it has worked towards cooling. The second is by Don Easterbrook, claiming that oceanic changes explain global warming of the past decades. But if the oceans were responsible for atmospheric warming, they would have had to release heat to the atmosphere – just the opposite of what the data shows. The oceans are soaking up heat, slowing down global warming.
When questioned by the Guardian’s Leo Hickman, the BBC responded that “The point [Hudson’s] article is making is that views about climate change are hotly contested.” That is not quite right. The article was trying to create the false impression that views about climate change are hotly contested among credible scientists, which they are not. The article did that by dressing up maverick global warming denialists as if they were credible scientists.
Hudson should have made clear that Corbyn has no scientific track record as a “solar scientist”: according to the citation database Web of Science, his only peer-reviewed publication was on pebble sizes on Chesil Beach, published in 1967 and never cited since. And Easterbrook, while having a past record as geologist, is retired, has no scientific track record on the specific issue he is talking about and likewise has no peer-reviewed publication that would support his claims. As usual in such articles, reputable climate scientists such as my German colleague Mojib Latif are also cited – but among these there is no disagreement about the basic facts of human-caused global warming.
The BBC’s Richard Black argues that if their reporting gets criticised equally from both sides, it must be about right. But for science reporting, I would prefer journalists to stick with more old-fashioned indicators of good science: peer-reviewed publications and personal reputations built on a solid track record of relevant research. And they should remember that old wisdom: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
• Stefan Rahmstorf is a climate scientist and oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and author of the upcoming book, The Climate Crisis

US Chamber of Commerce falls victim to ‘fraud’ over climate hoax

Environmental activists held spoof press conference announcing U-turn in the organisation’s stance on climate legislation
It looked – at first – eerily like a routine news event. A man in a nondescript dark suit standing at a podium in one of the smaller meeting rooms on the 13th floor of the National Press Club. But then suddenly it wasn’t.
“There is only one way to do business and that is to pass a climate bill quickly so this December President Obama can go to Copenhagen and negotiate with a strong position,” said the speaker – who said he represented the US Chamber of Commerce.
The statement represented a complete repudiation of the Chamber’s earlier opposition to climate change legislation. The hard line had triggered walk-outs from Apple and a handful of other high-profile companies in the past few weeks. The companies are trying to press the business organisation to support the bill by the senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer that is to be debated by the Senate next week.
Or maybe not. Barely 20 minutes into the Q&A section of the press conference, an agitated spokesman for the Chamber burst into the room, screaming that the event was a hoax.
Score one for the Yes Men, who claimed responsibility for the prank. A number of news organisations and environmental groups were taken in.
Several green organisations tweeted or blogged on the about-face. Reuters news agency put out a straight news story about the Chamber’s apparent U-turn, and the Washington Post and New York Times put the story on their news sites (both later removed the stories from their websites). CNBC actually sought – and got – comment from analysts. It also broke its programming to have a reporter read out the fake press release.
The spoof got under way with a press release inviting journalists to a morning news conference. Most reporters overlooked the misspelling of the Chamber president’s name.
The phony spokesman said the Chamber was not happy with the bill before the Senate and would push for a carbon tax – not the greenest of positions. But he added: “If cap and trade is all we can get we have to take it so at least we can have something to put in President Obama’s hands when he goes to Copenhagen.”
He went out even further on a limb when he called clean coal “a hoax”, saying the money would be better spent on solar energy research. “Clean technology has not only not been proven. It basically doesn’t exist,” he said.
It was about that time, the real Chamber spokesman burst into the room – and had a mild shoving match at the podium. “What happened today was a fraud and I believe illegal,” Eric Wohlschlegel said. The spokesman said he learned of the hoax when a reporter came to the Chamber office looking for the press conference. Wohlschlegel said he immediately leaped into a taxi.
The spoof appears to be a joint production of the Yes Men, a group of activists who get their point across by impersonating greedy executives. Last month, the Yes Men took on global warming, producing fake copies of the New York Post with a banner headline declaring: “We’re screwed”. Two other activist groups also claimed credit.
In a statement today, the Yes Men said the stunt was intended to show how climate policy was being held hostage to corporate greed.
“The Chamber’s position against climate legislation is completely troglodytic,” said Andy Bichlbaum, who impersonated the Chamber spokesman. “The rest of the world sees the need for urgent action on the climate. The rest of the world’s rich countries have pledged large emissions reductions. With scientists saying if we don’t reduce carbon emissions, then sooner or later we’re doomed, the Chamber represents corporate America at its most backwards.”
The statement went on to flag up a Yes Men rally tomorrow morning and the release of their new documentary later this week.
And while a number of reporters still pressed Wohlschlegel for signs of a shift in the Chamber’s position, he soon set them straight. The Chamber was as opposed to climate change legislation as ever.

India ‘may accept’ greenhouse gas cuts ahead of climate change summit

India may yet accept Western demands to make cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as part of its campaign for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, according to a leaked letter from its environment minister.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi Published: 4:14PM BST 19 Oct 2009
In the letter to the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, Jairam Ramesh warned that India should play a constructive role in negotiations to strike a new deal to tackle climate change at the Copenhagen summit in December.
India should break away from the G77 group of developing nations pushing for greater financial aid to tackle climate change and play a bigger role with other developed countries in the G20, he said.

Failure to engage as a “dealmaker” would damage India’s dreams of permanent membership of the UN Security Council and formal acknowledgement of its status as a global power.
Mr Ramesh’s proposal marks a dramatic change of heart which, if accepted by his prime minister, could improve the chances of a climate change deal being struck at Copenhagen.
Until now India has argued that Western decadence and decades of industrial development were to blame for climate change, and that developed countries should pay for its impact in countries like India where floods and droughts have wreaked havoc.
Ministers had contrasted India’s greenhouse gas levels as “survival emissions” with the West’s “luxury emissions”.
It has rejected all suggestions that it should reduce its growing emissions by adopting new clean and renewable energy production rather than continue its dependence on coal-fired power stations.
In the letter, which was leaked to the Times of India newspaper, Mr Ramesh said: “India must listen more and speak less in negotiations” because its position is “disfavoured by the developed countries, small island states and vulnerable countries. It takes away from India’s aspirations for permanent membership of the Security Council.”

Is an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen still on the cards?

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Why are we asking this now?
Yesterday Gordon Brown, at a meeting of ministers from 17 “major economies” held in London to discuss the talks, warned that countries were not moving fast enough to reach an agreement.
What is at stake?
A global deal to cut the carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, industry, transport and deforestation which, all governments now accept, are causing the atmosphere to heat up, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of us.
That seems like a no-brainer. Why shouldn’t all countries agree to that?
While all countries now recognise the problem – a no-brainer is right – they have very differing views about what their role in the solution should be. Cutting CO2 and other greenhouse gases can be done, but not with the wave of a wand. It means redesigning whole economies on a low-carbon model, which involves a lot of effort and a lot of expense; among much else, you have to close down your coal-fired power stations or fit them with costly equipment to capture their CO2 and bury it underground. And the argument at Copenhagen will essentially be about how the effort and the expense should be shared out between nations. If that can be agreed, a deal will be done. If it can’t, the world is in for trouble.
So who’s arguing?
In the simplest terms, two sides have to come together to do a deal: the rich, mainly western countries of the developed world, such as the US and Britain, and the poorer (but rapidly growing) nations of the developing world, led by China and India. The argument is about responsibility and fairness, and it turns on the fact that most of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere now (and it remains for a century or more) has been put there by the rich countries, who have been pumping the stuff out since the industrial revolution 200 years ago; but most of the extra CO2 that will go into the atmosphere in the future will be put there by the developing nations, who are now embarked on a period of unprecedented, explosive economic growth, much of it powered by burning coal, with the principal purpose of drawing their peoples out of poverty.
Throughout the 20th- century the US was the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world; but in the last two years China has overtaken it, having doubled its carbon emissions from 3bn to 6bn tonnes in a mere decade, and they will continue to grow. So you might say that China, with India, Brazil, Indonesia and their fellow developing economies, are now making the problem worse – and they are; but that the US, with Britain, and Germany and France and the other rich countries, started the problem in the first place – and we did. (And we too are worsening the problem every day, of course, with our own carbon emissions.)
What are the implications for responsibility and fairness?
The principal one is that the rich West has to lead the way in cutting carbon, and this has been recognised by all sides since the first global warming treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The treaty said that the international community had “common but differentiated responsibilities” with regard to the climate, and this principle was put into effect in the Kyoto Protocol to the treaty, signed in 1997.
Under Kyoto, the rich industrialised countries agreed to cut their carbon emissions by fixed amounts by 2012, but the developing nations were not required to make any cuts at all. They were allowed to carry on with business as usual.
Has anything changed since then?
Yes. First, although most of the rich countries, including Britain, accepted Kyoto, the US Congress would not ratify the treaty, as many US politicians felt it was giving a free ride to countries such as China who were economic competitors; George Bush withdrew the US from Kyoto in 2001. Second, the carbon emissions of China and India and their fellows have mushroomed in a way that no one imagined possible in 1997, and they will represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth; if unchecked, they will derail all other efforts to control climate change. So the point is, the Chinas and Indias now have to make emissions cuts themselves, or first, the US will not join in a new treaty, and second, the fight to limit atmospheric CO2, and thus future temperature rises, will be lost. But China and India have always argued that they are only growing in the way the West did, and that is true; and now they find the western nations saying: ‘don’t do what we did, do what we say’, which is clearly unfair. The deal at Copenhagen is essentially about what the West can offer to make that unfairness acceptable, and what carbon-cutting actions the Chinese and Indians and other developing countries can take, which will in turn be acceptable to the West.
What might be the offers?
The rich countries have to make clear commitments to cut their own CO2 significantly by 2020, and will have to agree massive financial help – billions and billions of dollars – for the poorer nations to continue their growth in a low-carbon way. For their part, the developing nations will have to agree some sort of numerical targets to cut their own CO2 – something which was once anathema to them, as they saw the imposition of targets on them as a ruse by western competitors to hold back their growth. All sides now have to do things which are demanding.
Then why might the talks fail?
The European Union is signed up to tough emissions cuts and backs a big financial help package; even nations such as Japan and Australia, formerly laggards, have started setting serious CO2 targets. It is the position of the US which is crucial. President Barack Obama has to take something substantial to the table in Copenhagen in December in terms of US domestic action, but the Bill which will define US climate policy is stuck in the Senate, and will not go through until Mr Obama’s healthcare package is dealt with, which may not be in time. Can Mr Obama offer something to China and its fellows which Congress will ratify? Maybe. The British Government is optimistic that he will. But if he can’t, there will be no deal.
Is that the only threat?
That’s the major threat, but it’s by no means the only one. This is a treaty whose initial text was 200 pages long and contained 2,000 “square brackets” – points of disagreement. It has to be agreed line by line by 192 countries whose representatives are all playing to different domestic agendas and who might have difficulty agreeing on the colour of an orange. If anybody tells you this is a simple matter, don’t listen. It’s true we have the technology to solve global warming, but this is not about technology. This is about politics, about the art of the possible. And it’s the most difficult piece of politics the world has ever seen.
Could the Copenhagen climate meeting end in failure?
Yes
*The US may fail to come to the table with an adequately serious offer on climate.
*Citing the needs of their people, China and India may make offers of action that the US find inadequate.
*The huge financial agreement that is proposed may unravel because of the differing needs of each nation.
No
*When the time comes, President Obama’s US will almost certainly try to offer what is needed.
*China and India are already recognising that they need to act themselves.
*All sides realise that the financial package is an essential part of any finally agreed deal.