Somalia: UN envoy welcomes international gathering to help Government

The top United Nations envoy to Somalia today welcomed the announcement of a meeting tomorrow of over 30 countries, known as the International Contact Group (ICG), to examine what concrete measures can be made to support the beleaguered Somali Government.

Somalia: UN envoy welcomes upcoming international gathering to bolster Government

The top United Nations envoy to Somalia today welcomed the announcement of a meeting tomorrow of over 30 countries, known as the International Contact Group (ICG), to examine what concrete measures can be made to support the beleaguered Somali Government.

Plastic plane takes to the skies

A revolutionary new airliner with a plastic body and many other novel features took off for the first time yesterday

Venezuelan President Chávez violates independence of judiciary - UN rights experts

Decrying what they called “a blow by President Hugo Chávez to the independence of judges and lawyers in the country,” three independent United Nations human rights experts today called for the immediate release of a Venezuelan judge arrested after ordering the conditional release of a prisoner held for almost three years without trial.

Divisions Persist On Core Questions As Leaders Arrive

Sharp Disagreements on Reductions, Aid
By JEFFREY BALL, STEPHEN POWER and ALESSANDRO TORELLO
COPENHAGEN — The United Nations’ effort to muster global action against climate change appeared to move backward Tuesday, as the world’s leading economies traded barbs over the most basic questions about how to divide responsibility for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Environmental reporter Jeffrey Ball reports from the Copenhagen climate conference where tensions are flaring between developed nations and emerging countries over interpretations of arcane details.
World leaders began arriving Tuesday for the climax of the two-week U.N. climate conference in the Danish capital as disagreements deepened among negotiators for the U.S., the European Union and a bloc of developing nations led by China.
Several leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, have begun calling their counterparts in various countries in an attempt to salvage a deal by the Friday deadline, according to people familiar with the calls.
The disagreements involve fundamental issues: the size of emission reductions that individual countries should take on, the amount of money rich countries should pay poor countries to help fund a cleanup, and the extent of monitoring that countries should have to accept so other nations can verify they actually are implementing whatever environmental steps they promise to take.
“This is not a climate-change negotiation,” said Janos Pasztor, director of the U.N. secretary-general’s climate-change support team. “It’s about something much more fundamental. It’s about economic strength.” Countries, he added, “just have to slug it out.”
As the wrangling continued, a new draft agreement circulated Tuesday moved backward from an earlier proposal, lacking any targets for carbon cuts and financing.
The new draft stipulated that developed countries were historically responsible for most global emissions of greenhouse gases and so “must take the lead in combating climate change” by abating their carbon emissions and providing money and technology to poorer nations. That was a bow to developing nations, following a protest Monday by members of the Group of 77, which includes poor countries as well as large emerging economies like China, India and Brazil, whose representatives briefly walked out of the talks.
The anger and distrust spilling into the open in Copenhagen have been building over more than a decade of climate diplomacy.
An existing climate-change treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, requires developed countries that ratified it to cut their emissions by a collective 5% from 1990 levels by 2012. But that accord doesn’t curb greenhouse gases from the world’s two biggest emitters, which together account for 40% of greenhouse-gas emissions. China, as a developing country, isn’t required to cut its emissions, and the U.S. didn’t ratify the treaty. The basic purpose of the Copenhagen conference was to come up with some way to rein in emissions world-wide.
The U.S. and China each announced specific pledges to address greenhouse-gas emissions before the conference started. But the two have been locked in a standoff over the U.S.’s insistence that China commit to a legally binding agreement — a step China has resisted — and the degree to which China’s actions should be open to international review.

Text of Draft Document
Developing countries argue that wealthy nations have reneged on past pledges to address climate change. In particular, China suggests the U.S. has failed to honor its agreement under a broad document called the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change to constrain U.S. emissions and to provide money for developing countries to curb their own greenhouse-gas output. The U.S. was a party to the 1992 accord, even though the U.S. didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which grew out of the framework.
Wealthy countries are “not willing to take any real action,” said Xie Zhenhua, the head of China’s delegation at the talks.
China also doesn’t want to submit to international verification of whether it is meeting emissions targets that it funds on its own.
U.S. officials say they are only asking Chinese officials to give substance to a joint statement issued by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Mr. Obama when the U.S. president visited China last month.
Amid the bickering, one arcane detail has taken on great symbolic importance: the fact that the U.S. wants to use 2005 as the “baseline” year for cutting emissions, instead of 1990 as called for in earlier agreements.
Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate negotiator, said that change was justified, allowed and not very important.
“The reality is we didn’t become part of Kyoto, and the framework convention has a 1990 baseline. But it was in a nonbinding, aspirational context,” he said.
European leaders are concerned the U.S. and China will try to opt out of any binding deal by blaming each other for not offering ambitious proposals.
The EU has said it will cut its emissions 20% by 2020, and by 30% if a strong global deal is reached. The EU doesn’t want to “sell [its] targets cheap,” said Andreas Carlgren, environment minister of Sweden.
But U.S. officials say they are being unfairly criticized. Europe’s proposed emissions cuts are measured against 1990 — which was before the Soviet Union’s breakup sent Eastern Europe’s economy, and its emissions, plummeting.
Measured against 2005, said Mr. Stern, the EU’s target for 2020 amounts to an emissions cut of only 13%. And that, he said, isn’t as aggressive as the 17% cut from 2005 that the U.S. has promised.—Alessandro Torello and Jing Yang contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com, Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com and Alessandro Torello at alessandro.torello@dowjones.com

Our future is in your hands, Prince of Wales tells Copenhagen summit

Philippe Naughton in Copenhagen

Financial institutions with more than $13 trillion in assets are relying on the summit in Copenhagen to give them the certainty that they need to invest in a low-carbon world, the Prince of Wales told delegates last night.
His address came as the summit began its final phase, which is due to end with the signing of an emissions agreement on Friday. That deal was far from secure, the Prince acknowledged, urging ministers: “The eyes of the world are upon you and it is no understatement to say that, with your signatures, you can write our future.”
The Prince pushed the need for corporate responsibility, saying: “We appear intent upon consuming the planet. It seems likely, on current patterns of use, that our global fisheries will collapse by 2050 and, already, fresh water is becoming scarcer, placing global food security at ever greater hazard.
“In the last 50 years we have degraded 30 per cent of global topsoil and destroyed 30 per cent of the world’s rainforests. All of these issues are linked to each other and to climate change — a truly vicious circle. However, it is these links, together with our common humanity and the unprecedented connections of today’s global community, which might, perhaps, provide us with a solution.”

On corporate involvement, he said: “The need fully to engage the private sector reflects not only the growing determination of business to act in a sustainable way but, crucially, its determination to listen to customers. And what customers are saying ever more loudly is that they want their investment choices to make a positive difference to climate change.”
The Prince took some credit for pension funds that are setting climate solutions at the centre of investments. “To ensure a large-scale deployment of capital, these pension funds need clear long-term policies to be agreed here this week,” he said. “This request is supported by the 191 financial institutions with assets of over $13 trillion which signed the international investor statement on climate change.”

Fishermen to get bigger quotas if they carry CCTV

Home staff

Britain’s fishermen are to be offered extra catches next year if they agree to fit “big brother” closed-circuit television cameras on to their boats to monitor conservation measures.
The plan was part of an EU deal struck last night on fisheries cutbacks amid continued warnings that dwindling stocks of species need more time to recover.
All fleets face reductions in catch quotas next year, but those accepting cameras — three per vessel — can add 5 per cent to their share.
The EU-wide move was proposed by the UK, Denmark and Germany and accepted by the European Commission.

The onboard CCTV is regarded as having a double benefit — a check on the reliability of the science on the state of fish stocks and a witness when fishermen illegally dump unwanted fish back into the sea in an attempt to keep within quota limits.
Huw Irranca-Davies, the UK Fisheries Minister, hailed the scheme as a breakthrough.“Sound science is essential in helping to conserve fish stocks while also allowing the industry to thrive,” he said.

Rich-poor deadlock in Copenhagen

Developed nations are trying to water down their emission commitments – no wonder the rest of the world is angry

Martin Khor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 December 2009 10.30 GMT

Entering its second week, just days before the arrival of the political leaders, the Copenhagen climate conference is in the grip of a serious deadlock.
Developing countries, led by the Africans, on Monday insisted that the conference place top priority on the developed countries’ emission reduction commitments, and on the continuation of the Kyoto protocol (KP), which is the legally binding treaty under which the commitments are to be made.
For a whole morning, the work in several “contact groups” stopped while the developing countries’ leaders met with the Danish climate change minister Connie Hedegaard, who apparently agreed that the KP track of the Copenhagen talks would be given due attention. She also tried to allay fears that the Danes would throw in their own new draft for the heads of governments to consider and adopt on 18 December.
Fears and suspicions abound in the conference, and the stakes are high. Many contentious issues are still far from resolution and no one knows how much the gaps can be closed in the next days.
The first issue is the shape and fate of the future global climate regime, which was at the heart of the developing countries’ actions on Monday. The developing countries are outraged by the now clear attempt by developed countries that are members of the Kyoto protocol to desert it. There is wide misconception that the KP expires in 2012 and that a new agreement is being negotiated to replace it. In fact, the KP has a first “commitment period” under which developed countries are legally bound to cut emissions by 5.2% by 2012 compared with 1990 levels. The first period ends in 2012 and the protocol mandates members to enter a second period after that. In the past four years the countries have been negotiating emission reduction figures for this second period.
When Europe two months ago said that it wanted a new “single agreement”, it was indicating it would join Australia, Japan and others to jump ship from KP to a new treaty in the UN climate convention, which would include the United States, a KP non-member.
The US in turn indicated that in the new climate system there would not be internationally binding emission commitments, but instead what NGOs term a “pledge and review” system. This involves countries stating what their parliaments or cabinets are able to undertake, and their performance being reviewed by other countries. This “bottom up” approach is contrary to the top-down KP system in which countries decide how deep a cut is needed in aggregate, and then negotiate what each country will have to do.
Movement towards agreement on the KP second period has been glacially slow despite four years of talks and the deadline for concluding the talks at the end of the Copenhagen conference. This, together with the now stated intention that several if not all the developed country parties don’t want to continue with Kyoto, has angered the developing countries.
The danger of a “bottom up” approach of merely collecting what each country can do is shown by the extremely low level of commitments so far. According to a widely used estimate by the Aosis (alliance of small island states), the aggregate of the announced national targets of developed countries (including the US) is only a 13%-19% emissions cut by 2020 compared with 1990. After counting “offsets” and other mechanisms, the real domestic effort is significantly lower than this. This is far below the 40-plus per cent that developing countries are demanding, in line with recent scientific findings.
We thus face the shocking prospect of the developed countries downgrading their mitigation commitment both in terms of the legal status of the commitment and the rate of emission reduction, at a time when the world is so concerned about the need to act on climate change.
On top of this, the developed countries are attempting to shift the burden of adjustment to the developing countries and in ways not agreed to when the mandate of the present negotiations was agreed to in Bali two years ago.
In the most glaring example of this, the developed countries have proposed that Copenhagen adopts the goal of a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050 (compared with 1990) while they would themselves cut by 80%. This implies that developing countries have to cut their emissions by 20%. However, this would entail rich countries undertaking a 80% cut per capita while developing countries cut by 60% per capita (as their population will double in this period while the population in developed countries will be stable, according to UN projections).
In this scenario, developing countries would have to cap their emissions at very low levels, which would drastically constrain their economic performance at current technology levels. It is true that the climate convention promises financial and technology transfers to the developing countries but this has remained on paper so far. The way the talks are going in Copenhagen, the prospect for future technology transfer is not bright, while long-term finance is still a promise.
At Bali it was envisaged that there would be a three-part bargain on mitigation. First and most important, those developed countries that are members of the KP would take on new commitments for a second period with deep enough emission cuts. Second, the US would agree to a comparable effort. Third, the developing countries would for the first time take mitigation actions that are “measurable, reportable and verifiable”, supported by finance and technology.
With the first leg of this bargain now facing collapse as the developed countries jump ship from the KP, and with the US taking on such weak tentative target (about a 4%-7% cut by 2020 from 1990 levels), the world faces the prospect of an almost unbelievably low target by the developed countries as a whole. “We will be the laughing stock of the world come 18 December if these numbers are not raised,” predicts the chair of the group negotiating the KP.
The developing countries have the most to lose if Copenhagen does not come up with a credible conclusion. They are thus demanding that those countries that put most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that promised to take the lead in global actions to combat climate change live up to that promise in Copenhagen. This explains why they requested the survival of the Kyoto protocol, and the commitment to credible emission cuts by each country be top priorities at Copenhagen.
The next few days will tell if Copenhagen ends as a partial success, with enough progress to propel another year of talks to success, or as an utter failure, with the unravelling of the global climate regime amid a finger pointing blame game.

MIT re-invents the wheel, for bicycles

MIT’s Copenhagen Wheel is an electronic bike conversion that provides a KERS energy-saving system for smart bicycles. It can also track traffic via an iPhone connection

MIT researchers have unveiled the Copenhagen Wheel, which boosts power using a Formula One-style KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). It also provides a sort of Cycling 2.0 system by tracking friends, smog, traffic, and how fit you’re getting.
The Wheel, shown at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, has a bright red hub stuffed with electronics. Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory and the Copenhagen Wheel project, says:
When you brake, your kinetic energy is recuperated by an electric motor and then stored by batteries within the wheel, so that you can have it back to you when you need it. The bike wheel contains all you need so that no sensors or additional electronics need to be added to the frame and an existing bike can be retrofitted with the blink of an eye.
The wheel also has a Bluetooth connection to the user’s iPhone, which can be mounted on the handlebars. The system can “monitor the bicycle’s speed, direction and distance traveled, as well as collect data on air pollution and even the proximity of the rider’s friends,” says MIT. It can also send you an SMS message if the bike is stolen.
Christine Outram, the Wheel team project leader, says:
One of the applications that we have discussed with the City of Copenhagen is that of an incentive scheme whereby citizens collect Green Miles — something similar to frequent flyer miles, but good for the environment.
The prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel were developed with Ducati Energia and the Italian Ministry of the Environment, and the system should go into production next year.
The press release doesn’t provide any data that I can see about the weight of the new wheel (it could be 5Kg or more), or the efficiency of its KERS system, including heat dissipation. As Formula One teams have already found, KERS sounds like a great idea but it may not provide a big enough advantage to be worth the extra weight. It’s also not clear whether there are any plans to support other mobile phones beyond the iPhone, because that could also limit the potential market.
There’s also no information on the possible price, but I’d guess it’s likely to be £500 or more, based on a quick scan of UK Electric Bike & Trike prices.
Finally, there’s the security aspect. As BernhardHofmann commented on Twitter: Sexiest “Steal me” bike sign I’ve ever seen
Given that electric bikes and ebike conversion kits have had limited success, it’s not clear that the Copenhagen Wheel will change the world, but it’s worthwhile research.

Compliance Checks Prove a Big Hurdle

By STEPHEN POWER
WASHINGTON — If the Copenhagen climate summit produces an agreement among nations to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions, a contentious issue will remain: How to catch countries that cheat.
Climate diplomats prefer words such as “transparency” to blunt terms like “cheat.” Either way, the concern in developed countries is that projects designed to cut carbon-dioxide emissions in poor nations aren’t really generating the promised reductions.
Debate has flared in Copenhagen. A United Nations panel has claimed that China has been manipulating a system under which rich countries can invest in carbon-abatement projects in poor countries and get carbon credits that can be traded. Chinese officials have called the U.N. panel’s process of reviewing such projects opaque and unfair.
Senior Obama administration officials Tuesday said that climate negotiations in Copenhagen were in “a difficult state” and that clashes over verification of emission reductions and other fundamental issues could stymie a final agreement.
But the officials, who spoke in a news briefing, said they continued to have “very constructive” dialogue with their counterparts from China, a linchpin for a successful conference.
Lack of a robust system for monitoring countries’ emissions could hurt efforts to forge a climate treaty in two ways, says U.S. government scientist Pieter Tans: Some countries might sign on hoping to exploit the system’s opacity. Others might refuse to sign on, fearing the system will be gamed.
Governments that do agree to cut their emissions “don’t want to be seen as having failed, so they’ll be inclined to slant their emissions numbers somewhat,” Mr. Tans says.
As greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide tend to be distributed fairly evenly in the atmosphere, any inspection regime must be able to detect small differences in countries’ emissions levels. Many scientists say existing instruments and methods for measuring emissions aren’t adequate to ensure compliance.
Verifying compliance with a climate treaty is likely to be “orders of magnitude more difficult” than verifying other international agreements, such as arms-control treaties, says Kenneth Lieberthal, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
For China, he adds, “the main concern is sovereignty, and a desire not to allow others to dictate what they see, and the conditions on which they see it.”
Although China is a party to the Montreal Protocol — a treaty to eliminate chemicals that contribute to ozone depletion — its willingness to comply with a treaty involving greenhouse-gases is viewed with suspicion by some in Congress.
U.S. officials note a statement by Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Obama last month said any pact should “provide for full transparency with respect to the implementation of mitigation measures and provision of financial, technology and capacity building support.” Raising transparency in Copenhagen, a U.S. official said Tuesday, is “about giving meaning and substance to those provisions that [Chinese officials have] already agreed to.”
Under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, countries, including the U.S., are expected to report emissions levels to the U.N. But such reporting isn’t required for all countries, and while power plants and other CO2 emitters in the U.S. and Europe generally have equipment to monitor emissions, that’s often not the case in developing countries.
“You can do all the accounting you want from the bottom up, but you also need someone standing back and examining whether you’re getting results,” says James Butler, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
Write to Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com