EU agrees 100billion euros a year required to reverse climate change

According to the Green bloc within the European parliament, the failure of the EU to commit to a fixed annual contribution for developing nations is a ‘calamitous result for climate change.’  I disagree. The EU is setting a precedent for others to follow. If the US can be persuaded to pledge a significant percentage of the proposed 100 billion euros over the coming weeks, the EU may then commit to a fixed rate contrbution. Dialogue is key.

Psychology, denial and eco-colonialism

Three interesting articles this week from the Guardian, The Spectator and New Scientist:

Without a deeper insight into people’s behaviour and motivations, a low-carbon world will remain out of reach, writes Adam Corner.

Renewal of climate change skepticism, by Marc Morano. 

Can Europe run on the Saharan sun? asks Fred Pearce.

Prelude to Copenhagen: the invisible hand or regulation?

The UK energy markets, regarded not so long ago as exemplifying the best of the Anglo-saxon model of capitalism, are undergoing transformation. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which is chaired by Lord Turner, has published a report calling for tighter regulation. The message could not be clearer: the invisible hand of the market is failing to deliver environmental reform. The CCC has claimed that so long as the market is left to its own devices, reform will be slow and targets missed. It recommends introducing compulsory emissions caps for cars, feed-in tariffs to assist producers of green power and carbon prices to be set by government at a minimum level in order to encourage ‘clean’ power practices.

Source: The Economist

According to journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal, the biggest obstacle to achieving a new global climate deal in the coming months may be how to pay for it. She cites the fact that up to $1 trillion will be needed to assist developing countries like India and Brazil ‘green’ their industrial infrastructure, as well as significant funds to protect the poorest nations from drought, rising sea-levels and natural disaster. Surely, what we can least afford at this time is inaction.

The impact on the wider economy of passing a US climate bill (which is pending in Congress) is also the subject of some consideration in a WBCSD article. Interestingly, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that such a bill would have a minimal impact on the standard of living for Americans.

Quick Links

See George Monbiot’s blog for the latest on his feud with Ian Plimer and animosity towards The Spectator magazine.

Despite contributing to increasing emission levels, population growth will not be on the agenda of major climate change summits this year. An interesting piece in the Ecologist considers this – ‘the topic politicians won’t discuss.’

According to a report by the International Energy Agency carbon dioxide emissions will fall by 2.6% in 2009 – the largest in 40 years. Declining industrial output during the recession and greater governmental intervention across the world have made such figures possible. See New Scientist blog for summary.

Climate change: An ‘inequality of responsibility’?

In an apparent rebuttal to attempts made by the Obama administration to ensure the primacy of domestic rather than international law in any forthcoming treaty over greenhouse gas reductions, emissions and carbon credits, Vandana Shiva wrote in the NewStatesman:

In a globalised economy, addressing pollution by setting emissions levels for each country is inappropriate for two reasons. First, not all the citizens of a country contribute to pollution. As a result of China becoming the world’s factory, its CO2 emissions outstrip those of the US, putting it in first place worldwide. In 2006, China produced 6.1 billion tonnes of CO2; the US produced 5.75 billion tonnes. But in the US, emissions were 19 tonnes of CO2 per capita, compared with 4.6 tonnes in China. And much of China’s CO2 could be counted as US emissions, because China is producing goods for US companies that America will consume. Wal-Mart, for example, procures most of what it sells from China.

In relation to the UK, Shiva highlights the fact that:

.. while only 2.13 per cent of the world’s emissions emanate from the UK’s domestic economy, CO2 is created on the UK’s behalf in China, India, Africa and elsewhere. The global carbon footprint of UK companies is not known, but estimates suggest that emissions associated with worldwide consumption of the top 100 UK products accounts for between 12 and 15 per cent of the world total.

According to Shiva, attempts to ‘offset’ the impact of climate change have so far penalised the poorest countries. In place of light touch regulation, she urges governments and the UN to impose carbon tax on corporations, both for production – wherever their facilities are located – and for transport, which the Kyoto Protocol does not account for.

In the same issue of the NewStatesman, political correspondent James Macintyre also advocates an urgent commitment from rich countries to cut emissions by at least 40% by 2020 to prevent a global warming increase of 2° or more. He asserts there being a clear ‘inequality of responsibility’ for carbon emissions across the world.

The spectre of natural disaster looms largest over poor countries. The total number of floods, cyclones and storms has quadrupled in the past two decades. Over the same period, the number of people affected by disasters has increased from roughly 174 million a year to more than 250 million on average. Environmental threat is acute in countries such as Bangladesh, where 119 million of the population subsist on less than $2 a day. For them and millions of others, talk of climate change is not a fad or fashion, a label to help “modernise” a political party, or the subject of dinner-party self-justification; it is literally a matter of life and death. For their sake, long-standing green campaigners and late-coming progressive converts alike must pray for a deal in December.

US-EU rift?

Key differences have emerged between the US and Europe just months before the Copenhagen conference. According to the Guardian, Europe’s push to retain the structures and systems made under the Kyoto protocol has been met with resistance from the US. The Obama administration is seeking to reassert the rights of national states to set their own carbon reduction targets. At present, greenhouse gas reductions are subject to an international system that regulates emissions and carbon credits.

At the same time as this emerging trans-Atlantic rift, the World Bank is urging an ‘equitable deal’ for the world’s poorest nations to be reached at Copenhagen. The argument that it is the ‘historic duty’ of industrialised nations to shoulder the responsibility for global climate change is now firmly in the mainstream.

U.N. confident of Copenhagen deal

‘24-carat bafflegab’

George Monbiot has launched a renewed attack on the ’Professor of denial’, Ian Plimer, and his ‘pseudoscientific gobble-degook’ . The suggested public ‘dual‘ between Monbiot and Plimer will not go ahead for reasons outlined here.

Monbiot compares climate change deniers with creationists who ‘never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won’t notice the trail of broken claims in their wake.’

It takes 30 seconds to make a misleading scientific statement and 30 minutes to refute it. By machine-gunning their opponents with falsehoods, the deniers put scientists in an impossible position: either you seek to answer their claims, which can’t be done in the time available, or you let them pass, in which case the points appear to stand.

This raises an important question. Should climate change deniers be given a public platform from which they can lay claim to ’science’? Further still, to what extent should environmental campaigners engage with denial discourse?

Climate change denial

The journalist George Monbiot has challenged climate change denialist, Professor Ian Plimer, to a ‘dual’. Monbiot has taken issue with a number of points made in Plimer’s book, Heaven and Earth, and seeks clarification on them in writing before a public debate begins. Here is a sample of points made in Plimer’s book that Monbiot, quite rightly, questions:

“the last two years of global cooling have erased nearly thirty years of temperature increase.”

“NASA now states that […] the warmest year was 1934.”

“the sea ice has expanded”

“If the current atmospheric CO2 content of 380 ppmv were doubled to 760 ppmv […] [a]n     increase of 0.5C is likely”

“About 98% of the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere is due to water vapour.”

“satellites and radiosondes show that there is no global warming.”

“The Hadley Centre in the UK has shown that warming stopped in 1998″

“Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined.”

“termite methane emissions are 20 times potent than human CO2 emissions”.

See here, for Monbiot’s questions in full.