| Spotlight on the 'Kyoto II' Climate Change Negotiations in Poznan |
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As world nations meet in Poznan, Poland, to continue negotiations on a new climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, serious questions are being raised about the possibility of slashing global carbon emissions by the necessary minimum of 50% by 2050. World temperatures already look certain to pass the 2 degrees centigrade mark (above pre-industrial levels) considered to be 'dangerous' by the EU. As the conference in Poland begun on Monday December 1st, a series of grim warnings were given about the prospect of war, hunger, poverty and sickness that could soon follow if the world fails to tackle worsening climate change. During the marathon two-week talks, delegates will be poring over an 82-page document with a range of proposals for action beyond 2012, when emissions-cutting pledges under the current Kyoto Protocol run out. The negotiation process, which begun in Bali before Christmas 2007, is intended to be completed at another UN conference this time next year in Copenhagen. But with stock markets around the world plunging, signs are emerging that policymakers could be inclined to back away from climate protection goals in the face of the financial crisis. As the article by Spiegel shows below, the auto manufacturing industry, currently suffering from the onset of recession, has been increasing calls in Europe to delay the introduction of more stringent rules aimed at decreasing CO2 emission from cars. The UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, has also stressed the need to "focus on the opportunities for green growth", indicating that market expansion will continue to be prioritised over the radical social changes that will be needed in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. The reality of what such radical social change could mean, assuming we are to achieve an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 as proposed by both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, is pondered below by George Monbiot. New research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research suggests that even this range of cuts, which means reducing emissions by an average of 2% each year, is likely to commit the world to at least 4 or 5 degrees of warming - meaning the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable, asks George? I have to admit, he says, that we might already have left it too late. If we are still to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, it could mean a 10% annual cut in energy consumption across the world, which would require a 10% annual cut in total consumption - a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. Meanwhile, delegates in Poland are privy to more reports being released about the harsh consequences of inaction and the world's unpreparedness to deal with the climate changes already set in motion. According to one study by the WWF UK environmental group, the world needs a new UN pact to compensate victims of climate change or else risk a tangle of billion-dollar lawsuits linked to heatwaves, droughts and rising seas. At present, no UN schemes exist to provide compensation deals for damage from climate change. In another report, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) says that hundreds of billions more dollars are likely to be needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a 2030 target. In other words, climate change is not just about cutting greenhouse gas emissions; it is equally about helping the most vulnerable people and nations to adapt to the degree of climate change that they are already experiencing. The true challenge of a global climate deal is to find a way of lifting the 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day out of poverty without unmanageable increases in carbon emissions. If not, the rich countries may need to be prepared for one of the biggest mass migrations in history as people flee their homelands in search of somewhere new to live. Another critical issue left out of the discussions in Poland is agricultural policy. As argued in the article below by Annie Shattuck, peasant farmers may seem like unconventional advisors for the climate change discussions, but they could be the most important. Small farmers are not only the victims of global warming, she says, but they also pose a major solution - through small-scale organic farming systems that are more resilient to climate change, more sustainable, more just, and more able to "help cool the planet". Can the Climate Survive the Financial Crisis? By Spiegel New U.N. pact may be needed for climate victims: WWF Cost of reducing emissions by 2030 likely to surge: UN report The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us. By George Monbiot
Can the Climate Survive the Financial Crisis? 1st December 08 - Spiegel For years, the world has known it was coming. And yet now that the next level of negotiations on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol is beginning in Poznan, Poland on Monday, things have suddenly got more complicated. The global financial crisis and concurrent economic downturn threatens to weaken the resolve of the 186 countries present to take far-reaching steps against climate change. "The financial crisis will have an impact on climate change," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on Sunday. "You already are seeing around the world a number of wind energy projects being pushed back." The Poznan conference will see 10,000 delegates continue the process, begun in Bali last December, of cobbling together a new global treaty to replace Kyoto, which expires in 2012. The timeline agreed to last year calls for the new greenhouse gas emissions reduction agreement to be ready in 2009, allowing plenty of time for the treaty to be ratified by participating countries. But with stock markets around the world now plunging and a number of industries, particularly auto manufacturing in the United States and Europe, facing difficult futures, calls have been increasing in Europe to delay the introduction of more stringent rules aimed at increasing fuel efficiency and decreasing CO2 emissions from cars. In Germany, many of those calls have been coming from Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives. The latest voice in the chorus is the new Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer, until recently the Minister of Agriculture in Berlin. In a letter to Merkel last week, he wrote that protecting the climate cannot be allowed to result in a loss of jobs in the auto-manufacturing industry. His plea echoes similar warnings from Christian Democrat honchos Christian Wolff and Jürgen Rüttgers. The comments have primarily been aimed at Brussels. The European Union has long been planning to introduce strict rules on the amount of CO2 cars manufactured in the 27-member bloc are allowed to emit. The financial crisis has led to a renewed debate on the limits, set to be passed at an EU summit in the middle of December. Merkel has long positioned herself as a leading protector of the environment, both within the EU and further afield. But she has largely remained silent on the current debate. Even her Environment Minister, Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, seems to be leaning toward a compromise. He suggested over the weekend that rules under consideration to mandate maximum automobile emissions of 120 grams of CO2 per kilometer by 2012 be pushed back to 2015 -- though at the same time insisting that the much stricter 2020 goal of 95 grams per kilometer be maintained. But as policy makers seem inclined to back away from climate protection goals in the face of the financial crisis, there is evidence in Germany that the exact opposite tactic may be called for. Carmaker Audi, for example, claims that it is planning to hire more experts and engineers in 2009 in order to optimize fuel-efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions in its models. Over at Siemens, a company report indicates that sales of environmentally-friendly products and technologies rose from €17 billion to €19 billion in a single year. "Any economic stimulus program should match up with climate and energy savings targets," says Norbert Walter, chief economist at Deutsche Bank. "The government should only stimulate purchases of those cars that are environmentally sustainable." An unpublished report produced by the German Environment Ministry, seen by SPIEGEL, comes to the conclusion that, were Berlin to target CO2 reductions of 40 percent relative to 1990 levels, the creation of 500,000 jobs would be the result. (The country has already cut emissions by 22.4 percent relative to 1990 levels and measures already agreed on will result in a 34 percent reduction, say experts.) "It is especially important in the economic crisis that the automobile industry focuses on saving energy and on efficiency," says Tanja Gönner, the Christian Democrat Environment Minister in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Mercedes is headquartered. "Those that develop cars with low CO2 emissions now will have a great opportunity on the world market of tomorrow." US President-elect Barack Obama appears to be in favor of such a philosophy. Although he will not be sending a delegation to Poznan, he has indicated that under his leadership the US will take a leadership role when it comes to climate change, once he is inaugurated in January. It would mark a radical shift in direction from the environmental foot-dragging that characterized the eight years under President George W. Bush. Still, there is concern that climate negotiations this year and next could be overshadowed by the worsening global economy. Yvo de Boer warned against making "cheap and dirty" choices when it comes to energy investments. "We must focus on the opportunities for green growth." New U.N. pact may be needed for climate victims: WWF 3rd December 08 - Alister Doyle, Reuters The world may need a new U.N. pact to compensate victims of climate change or risk a tangle of billion-dollar lawsuits linked to heatwaves, droughts and rising seas, according to a study released during the climate change talks in Poland. The report, commissioned by the WWF UK environmental group, said the world already had compensation deals for accidents from nuclear power, oil spills, or even objects launched into space. But there were no U.N. schemes for damage from climate change. "The likelihood of legal action against major-emitting countries is increasing," according to the 37-page study of options written by two climate lawyers. Among options were an international compensation fund set up by some future U.N. treaty to compensate victims, according to the report, released on the sidelines of December 1-12 U.N. talks in Poland on fighting climate change. "You need to address this. The science is progressing far enough to make these kinds of claims legitimate," said Peter Roderick, a director of the Climate Justice Program and a co-author of the study. "It makes more sense to come up with a system, rather than people starting to litigate," he told Reuters. The U.N. Climate Panel said last year it was at least 90 percent certain that human activities, led by burning of fossil fuels, were to blame for most of the warming in the past 50 years. "Potential claims for compensation could be way above any precedented damage in the past," said Kit Vaughan, a climate change adaptation adviser at the WWF UK, such as billion-dollar settlements linked to health damage from tobacco or asbestos. Many small island states, for instance, fear that rising sea levels threaten to wipe low-lying coral islands off the map. The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a nation of more than 600 islands in the western Pacific with a population of 107,000, said the rising seas were caused by emissions from nations thousands of miles (km) away. "The cost will be enormous...It shouldn't be the burden of the FSM to carry -- this is climate change caused by trans-boundary pollution," said M. J. Mace, a FSM delegate at the December 1-12 conference. Small island states have been calling for an International Climate Fund and an insurance mechanism since 1991. Tuvalu in the Pacific once spoke of trying to sue the United States for emissions. Roderick said one problem is that most international funds compensate for abrupt accidents -- not creeping damage such as rising sea levels that are projected by the U.N. Climate Panel to rise by 18-59 cm this century. Pledged funds under main U.N. schemes to help countries cope with climate change total only about $300 million. Many studies project that tens of billions of dollars a year will be needed to help adapt. "We risk a massive shortfall," Vaughan said. He said the study was meant to provoke discussions on options. Cost of reducing emissions by 2030 likely to surge: UN report 3rd December 2008, AFP Hundreds of billions more dollars are likely to be needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a 2030 target, according to UN estimates published on Friday ahead of global talks on climate change. The report, to be presented at the December 1-12 conference in Poznan, Poland updates 2007 estimates that said investment to mitigate carbon emissions had to be ramped up in the coming years, reaching between 200-210 billion dollars annually in 2030. The goal, in this benchmark scenario, is to reduce levels of global-warming pollution to 25 percent below 2000 levels in 2030. In the new report, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said the emissions goal was virtually unchanged. But it said the estimates of financial needs for mitigation had been revised sharply upwards -- by "about 170 percent." It cited "higher projected capital costs," especially in the energy sector, to introduce solar panels and fuel cells that had yet to become competitive with fossil fuels. There was also the potential bill for implementing carbon storage, a technology that is still at the pilot stage, said the report. Under carbon storage, carbon dioxide (CO2) is captured from big polluting sources such as coal-fired power plants, rather than released into the atmosphere where it would add to the greenhouse-gas effect. Instead, the CO2 would be pumped deep below ground, in disused gas fields or other geological chambers and stored there indefinitely. Most the funding needs will have to be focussed in developing countries, the UNFCCC report said. China has now outstripped the United States as the world's No. 1 carbon emitter, and India is set to become third largest, according to estimates released in September by the research consortium the Global Carbon Project. The UNFCCC report said that its estimates for funding needs to help poor countries adapt to the impact of global warming were unchanged over 2007, "and remain in the tens of billions, possibly hundreds of billions of dollars, every year." The Poznan talks are a stepping stone towards a new pact, due to be sealed in Copenhagen in December 2009, for reducing emissions and boosting adaptation funds beyond 2012, when the current provisions of the UN's Kyoto Protocol expire. A Message for Climate Change Negotiators: Small Farmers Key to Combating Climate Change 3rd December 2008 - Annie Shattuck, Common Dreams As world leaders meet in Poznan, Poland this week to work out a foundation for a new international climate change treaty, they would do well to seek the council of some unconventional advisors: peasant farmers. Agricultural policy has been virtually ignored in "official" discussions of climate change. One place it hasn't been ignored is by farmers themselves. In October hundreds of small farmers from all over the world met in Maputo, Mozambique for the fifth international conference of La Via Campesina, a global movement of peasant farmers. A sense of urgency around climate change featured prominently in their final declaration. It's little wonder. The Via Campesina Declaration casts small farmers in the developing world as both global warming's victims and a potential solution. They are right! While industrial agriculture is one of the world's biggest climate culprits, small-scale farmers actually cool the planet. Agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions - largely from synthetic fertilizers and large animal operations. GHG emissions-soil carbon loss, methane, and nitrous oxide-are largely results of large-scale agricultural operations in which soil carbon is depleted, methane from large animal feedlot operations is released unchecked, and synthetic fertilizers release nitrous oxide-a gas with 300 times the warming power of CO2. The agricultural sector, including land use change for agriculture, has been estimated to make up anywhere from 28-33% of global emissions. Combined with the emissions created transporting food in our increasingly globalized food economy where the average bite to eat travels 1200 miles from field to fork, the industrial food system may be the largest single contributor to global warming. In small-scale organic farming systems however, carbon is actually stored in the soil at a rate of about four tons per hectare. The Rodale Institute estimates that if the U.S. converted to organic agriculture on all its farmland, 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be saved. Small-scale sustainable agriculture is also vastly more resilient to climate change. After Hurricane Mitch devastated much of the Central American countryside, a study of over 1800 conventional and sustainable farms showed that farmers using sustainable practices suffered less "damage" than their conventional neighbors. Diversified plots had 20% to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced fewer economic losses than their conventional farm neighbors. Not only can small-scale sustainable agriculture help cool the planet, it can provide a buffer against the worst effects of global warming. The small farmers of La Via Campesina know this. They are calling for an international shift towards food sovereignty - the right of all people over the resources to produce and consume abundant, culturally appropriate food. Their vision is one of agroecologically balanced, sustainable, family farms supported by local markets. Not only will this vision confront the injustices of a world food system where one billion people will go hungry this year while another billion are obese-it could help stave off climate disasters. Any "vision" that may emerge from negotiations in Poznan, Poland this week must include creating a food system that is more resilient, less polluting, and ultimately more just. Peasant farmers, who comprise more than half of all farmers worldwide, have much to offer a warming world. The fact that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture was on the agenda of farmers themselves before it is talked about on the world policy stage should send a strong message to Poznan: It is time we opened the climate debate to the ills of industrial agriculture, and the home-grown solutions that could save us. Annie Shattuck writes for Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy. The purpose of the Institute for Food and Development Policy - Food First - is to eliminate the injustices that cause hunger. Further resource: Small scale sustainable farmers are cooling down the earth, press release by La Via Campesina, 9 November 2007 The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us 25th November 2008 - George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK) George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America's wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000. His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble. If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror. Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest there is nothing that can be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun. Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic's "late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century ... in some models." But, as the new report by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc) shows, climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite falling to earth. Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1,000 miles inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere. It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes through the winter. The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated in any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed. Barack Obama's speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the Pirc report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement. A paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that if we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and decline by between 6% and 8% per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050. Even this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by more than 8% a year. Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission cuts greater than 1% have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval". When the Soviet Union collapsed, emissions fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable? The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse? This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels", which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people "to make short term, radical sacrifices", cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale. She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk's proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological new deal I favour inhabits the distant margins of possibility. Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No, we can't. World Development Movement Blog: by Tim Jones, policy officer attending the UN climate conference talks in Poland Official site: The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Poznań, Poland - COP 14 |
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