It did not attract as much media attention as COP15 in Copenhagen did in 2009. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, COP16 folded on a slightly more positive note than the disappointing edition of the previous year. But the agreement reached may have saved the UN process, Greenpeace said, but not the climate.

In an official press release, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) said “nations launched a set of initiatives and institutions to protect the poor and the vulnerable from climate change and to deploy the money and technology that developing countries need to plan and build their own sustainable futures. And they agreed to launch concrete action to preserve forests in developing nations, which will increase going forward”.

The conference produced a package of resolutions dubbed “Cancun Agreements” that was seen as a step forward, although it could have gone further, according to analysts.

Agreement

According to a report in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the most promising aspect of the agreements sealed in Cancun is the mechanism to prevent deforestation in developing nations, a major source of emissions and biodiversity loss.

Still according to the Guardian, a fund of $100bn a year by 2020 will be raised to help poor nations cope with the impacts of climate change and help them make a shift to low-carbon technologies.

Not enough

“What Cancun has done is restore confidence in the negotiation machinery that last year’s Copenhagen experience left in tatters,” said Dr. Kenneth Graham, of New Zealand’s Green Party. “But when the substance of current pledges is analyzed, we must realise we’re in danger of cementing in national pledges that are insufficient to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Dr. Graham says the combined pledges fall short of the agreed goal of keeping temperatures from rising less than 2º Celsius. The combined pledges made in Copenhagen result in a reduction to about 49.5 Gt while it’s necessary to reduce them to 45 Gt.

Greenpeace
The international environmental organization welcomed the deal but singled out the US, Russia and Japan for criticism, saying the three countries had a negative influence on the negotiations. Russia and Japan were unhelpful by their statements against the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, Greenpeace said. The US’s commitment to reduce emissions was “meagre”, they said.

Greenpeace added that it was positive that governments acknowledged the gap between their current weak pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the goals they should aim for. They also recognized that these goals need to be in line with science (25-40 per cent cuts by 2020) and global temperature rise needs to be kept below two degrees.

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(Reuters) – Developing countries accused Japan on Wednesday of breaking a pledge to extend a U.N. pact for fighting global warming beyond 2012 and said that climate talks in Mexico would fail unless Tokyo backed down.

Japan, among almost 40 industrialized nations curbing greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol until 2012, said it will not extend cuts unless other big emitters like the United States and China also join in.

“There will be no successful outcome for Cancun” if Japan sticks to its refusal to extend cuts under Kyoto, said Abdulla Alsaidi, the chair of the group of 77 and China, the main body of developing nations at the two-week talks in Mexico.

Nearly 200 nations are trying to draft a modest package to help avert floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas. But Wednesday’s tensions show that hurdles remain in building trust between rich and poor countries since the 2009 Copenhagen summit failed to agree a treaty.

“It does not make sense” to extend Kyoto, Hideki Minamikawa, a deputy Japanese environment minister, told a news conference. He said a broader deal was needed as Kyoto countries now account for only 27 percent of heat-trapping emissions.

“We need to achieve global reductions,” he said, adding that Japan wanted to register all post-2012 cuts in a new deal, building on a non-binding Copenhagen Accord agreed last year by 140 nations accounting for 80 percent of emissions.

Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said Japan had made similar statements in the past and warned all sides that a clear decision on Kyoto’s fate was not expected to be taken in Cancun.

“Given the diversity of positions on the Kyoto Protocol, it is not going to be possible for Cancun to take a radical decision one way or another on the Kyoto Protocol,” she said.

That means ever less time to agree on what happens to Kyoto before its first period ends on December 31, 2012.

“WILLINGNESS TO COMPROMISE”

Kyoto obliges its members to cut emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012 and they are meant to agree new cuts.

Kyoto underpins carbon markets, which want assurances of policies beyond 2012 to guide investments. The International Energy Agency says $18 trillion needs to be spent by 2030 to ensure a shift from fossil fuels toward cleaner energies.

The European Union and other Kyoto backers also want others to join in beyond 2012 but have been less outspoken. The United States never ratified Kyoto, arguing that it would cost U.S. jobs and wrongly omitted 2012 targets for China and India.

Overall, Figueres said the talks were on track.

“The start is constructive, it’s positive and we have very public expressions of the willingness to compromise,” she said of countries including top emitters China and the United States.

Cancun will seek a package of measures including a “green fund” to channel aid to the poor, ways to help developing nations adapt to the impact of climate change and efforts to protect tropical forests that soak up carbon as they grow.

In Brazil, the government said deforestation in the Amazon region fell to its lowest level on record, marking what could be a watershed in the conservation of the world’s biggest rainforest.

The government wants to showcase that it is one of the few major economies slashing greenhouse gases, which in Brazil come mostly from burning or rotting trees.

In Cancun, carbon market lobbyists and some countries called for a U.N. decision to commit to continue trade in carbon offsets under Kyoto after 2012, regardless of whether a new climate deal is agreed.

And the United Nations urged a global phase-out of old-style light bulbs and a switch to low-energy lighting that it said would save billions of dollars and combat climate change.

Article by Alister Doyle and Timothy Gardner; edited by Stacey Joyce and John O’Callaghan; appearing courtesy Reuters.

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(Reuters) – About 45 nations met on Thursday to seek ways to raise billions of dollars in aid to help the poor combat climate change as the United Nations warned them of a long haul to slow global warming.

Environment ministers and senior officials in Geneva were reviewing whether rich nations, hit by austerity cuts, are keeping a promise of $30 billion in “new and additional” climate aid for 2010-12 made at the U.N.’s Copenhagen summit.

“The funds are critical” to build trust between rich and poor, Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s climate chief, told Reuters in an interview.

About 120 countries in Copenhagen also pledged to increase aid for developing nations to $100 billion aid a year from 2020.

Figueres said cash could be a key to unlock progress on other climate problems, such as sharing clean technologies or protecting carbon-storing forests at the next meeting of environment ministers in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10.

Swiss Environment Minister Moritz Leuenberger told the start of the two-day talks that “the regulation of the financial issues is a key precondition for the successful conclusion of the climate negotiations in Cancun.”

But Figueres predicted there would be no new global treaty to combat climate change in Cancun, even though she said that extreme weather such as floods in Pakistan or Russia’s heat wave were “warning bells” about the risks of inaction.

“I don’t think that governments are considering (a treaty) for Cancun,” she said. A year ago, many nations were hoping that the Copenhagen summit in December would be a “big bang” deal to help solve climate change.

But that didn’t happen and Figueres said it was more realistic to look for gradual progress in solving climate change, adding that there was no “magic bullet.”

Cancun could end up setting a new deadline for working out a more binding deal, perhaps by the end of 2012.

CANCUN

Figueres said it was vital that developed nations be able to point to $10 billion allocated to climate aid for 2010 by the time they meet in Cancun. But she urged developing nations to give leeway in judging if it was truly “new and additional” as agreed in Copenhagen.’

She said that all nations’ 2010 budgets were agreed by national parliaments by the time of the December summit. “There are justifiable reasons to see why 100 percent of this allocation (in 2010) will not be additional,” she said.

The Netherlands plans to launch a new website on Friday to track climate promises.

An overview by Reuters shows that aid promises total $29.8 billion for 2010-12, but it is unclear how much is new. Japan, for instance, has pledged the most aid, at $15 billion, but much of that was decided several years ago.

Figueres told a news conference that the Copenhagen pledge meant $100 billion a year from 2020 was a “minimum” required.

She also said that the world could make progress even if the United States did not pass legislation to curb emissions by 2020 in line what she called a “pledge” by President Barack Obama in Copenhagen. U.S. legislation has stalled in the Senate.

Article by Alister Doyle, edited by Noah Barkin; appearing courtesy Reuters.

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(Reuters) – Aid promises from rich nations to help poor countries slow global warming are reaching the $30 billion goal agreed in Copenhagen but analysts say much of that is old funding dressed up as new pledges.

Officially, the promises total $29.8 billion, Reuters calculations show, apparently meeting a pledge of “new and additional” funds “approaching $30 billion” for 2010-12 made at the U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December.

But austerity policies to combat government debt problems and a re-labeling of past promises will undermine real funding that is vital to unlock a new U.N. climate deal by showing that the developed world is serious about taking a leadership role, analysts say.

“I’m afraid the pledges of Copenhagen will not be realized,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It would be a little political miracle if it happened. I’m fairly pessimistic.”

He said that Germany, the biggest European Union economy, was unlikely to fulfill its promises even though it had fewer economic problems than most EU nations, struggling to plug huge budget deficits.

Climate aid is widely seen as a key to build trust between rich and poor in the run-up to the 2010 U.N. meeting of environment ministers, in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29-December 10.

The cash was meant as a “fast start” for action to slow floods, droughts, heat waves and rising seas. Donors say projects are starting, from Nepal to Mali.

Many poor nations say “new and additional” means cash above an unmet 1970 U.N. target for rich nations to give 0.7 percent of their gross national product in aid — OECD figures show that aid totaled $120 billion, or 0.31 percent of developed countries’ combined GNP, in 2009.

Developed nations have varying definitions of what counts.

RENAMING AID

“It’s hard to know what’s really new and additional,” said Clifford Polycarp of the Washington-based World Resources Institute, which tracks pledges by all nations. Some funds were “restated or renamed commitments already made.”

Japan’s pledge of fast start funds is by far the highest — $15 billion — but much of the money stems from a “Cool Earth Partnership” agreed several years ago to run from 2008-12.

Among other big pledges, the EU plans $9.6 billion for 2010-12 and U.S. President Barack Obama plans $3.2 billion for 2010-11. But some money was committed before Copenhagen to climate funds, for instance managed by the World Bank.

“It’s horribly confusing,” said Gordon Shepherd, leader of the climate initiative at the WWF International environmental group. He said it was vital that governments outlined strings attached and what they meant by “new and additional.”

“Without that, people can’t get into honest and open negotiations,” he said.

NEW WEBSITE

Switzerland, Mexico and the Netherlands are among countries that favor setting up a voluntary website to track promises. The portal may be unveiled at an informal meeting of about 30 environment ministers in Geneva next week.

Analysts say new cash would help build trust after the Copenhagen Accord fell short of a new treaty. It set a non-binding goal of limiting a rise in world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times.

According to the Copenhagen Accord, aid is meant to surge to $100 billion a year from 2020 to help the poor curb dependence on fossil fuels and help adapt, for instance by improving defenses against floods like those devastating Pakistan.

Alden Meyer, of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said progress in raising $30 billion and confidence that the $100 billion “is more than vapid rhetoric is essential to the prospects of anything getting done in Cancun.”

The Cancun talks are unlikely to agree a new U.N. treaty but could make progress on issues such as protecting tropical forests, sharing new green technologies and sharing out the burden of curbs on greenhouse gases between rich and poor.

One problem is the lack of yardsticks to decide who pays what in aid. The Swiss government, for instance, is asking parliament to approve fast start funds totaling 140 million Swiss francs ($135.9 million) — 0.45 percent of $30 billion.

Franz Perrez, Swiss ambassador for the environment, said the contribution was based on the country’s 0.3 percent share of developed nations’ greenhouse gas emissions, boosted by the fact that Switzerland is wealthier than most developed countries.

Article by Alister Doyle; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Chisa Fujioka in Tokyo, Pete Harrison in Brussels, Louise Egan in Ottawa, Laura MacInnis in Geneva; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall; appearing courtesy Reuters.

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Ample blame exists for the demise of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate, from President Obama’s lack of political courage, to the environmental community’s overly ambitious strategy, to Republican intransigence. A way forward exists, however, to build on the rubble of the Senate’s failure to cap carbon emissions.

Following the rocky path of climate legislation in the U.S. Congress these past years brought me back to the 1980s, and my time as a crime reporter in New York City. After a shooting in those days, a homicide detective named Marty Davin would go to the hospital and intercept the gunshot victim on a gurney outside the emergency room. If the victim was conscious, Davin would lean over and ask, “Who killed you?”

That usually got the victim’s attention, along with an I’m-not-dead-yet protest. Davin would reply, “You are going to die. You might as well tell me who did it.”

As I interviewed the sponsor of whichever emissions-reduction bill had just been gunned down, I often thought of Davin. The politicians and climate campaigners would assure me that they were still alive — passage of a carbon cap was inevitable, they’d say — and I’d remind myself that they had survived countless near-death experiences.

But what happened last week, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would not even try to bring a compromise climate bill to the Senate floor, was not just another setback. Sometimes dead really is dead — and for this Congress, barring a miracle, climate action is finished. With an ugly election looming in November, it may be years before we get another chance to debate a bill that prices carbon. And the consensus approach to federal climate action — the idea that cap-and-trade was the most politically viable policy — may well be dead, too.

This is a time to take stock. The first question is whether this was a failure of policy; a failure of politics, message, and messenger; or both? Second, is there a Plan B around which the climate campaign should now unify? And third, what needs to be done to allow a better outcome when the next opportunity finally does appear?

No one who follows climate politics could have been very surprised by Reid’s move. The bigger shock was his decision to remove from the bill a mandate that utilities must generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. (Proponents hope to offer it as a floor amendment.) It was if the Senate was saying: Anything remotely effective, we’re not going to do.

When Reid pulled the plug, I thought back to a snowy afternoon in Copenhagen last December. Sitting with Al Gore in an empty hotel café, I asked him to contemplate this very moment. “If the United States doesn’t act,” he replied, “if the Senate defeats the legislation or waters it down to a point where it is not even worth having a bill, that is an event horizon beyond which it is difficult to see.”

He parsed the same issues then that climate campaigners are parsing now: “It may mean there is a fundamental flaw in the international political approach, but I’m not sure there is a good alternative. The reality is so dire that a new plan would have to emerge — but just now I can’t imagine what it would be.”

It was as if the Senate was saying: Anything remotely effective, we’re not going to do.

Gore had a point. When the goal is emissions reduction, there aren’t many alternatives: You’ve got to reduce emissions. The Plan B options now being offered by various advocates should be vigorously debated, but all of them seem vulnerable to the same polluted politics that killed the cap. Advocates of the carbon tax are ready to take a run at their goal, and Godspeed — but it is hard to see how politicians who were terrified to support a cap (because opponents labeled it a tax) will suddenly become bold enough to support a carbon tax. Policy groups such as the Breakthrough Institute argue that instead of making dirty fuels more expensive, it’s time for intensive energy research and development to make clean fuels cheaper. That sounds reasonable, but without the revenue stream that a cap or tax would provide — and in an era of budget cutbacks — it is hard to see government supplying the massive, long-term funding their plan requires.

Is the cap so fundamentally flawed that it should be abandoned forever? I don’t think so. I believe it needs to be liberated from legislative bloat and rehabilitated as a modest first step: a tool for regulating power sector emissions, the job it performed so successfully in the 1990s, when America tamed acid rain. It’s worth remembering that while climate politics were bogging down, climate policy mechanisms were being improved. Clever wonks found ways to cushion consumers and high-carbon industries from the price impact of the cap, while preserving a price signal for generators. Trading restrictions were added to keep speculators out of the carbon game. Though the term cap-and-trade has been demonized, the cap itself isn’t broken.

Some will argue that this latest setback is proof that the U.S. will never cap carbon. I reject that view. All we can say for sure is that the U.S. will never cap or price carbon until the politics of the issue change — so the first order of business must be to begin improving the political atmosphere. During the three years I worked on The Climate War, a narrative of the campaign to pass a carbon cap, I came to realize I was writing a political thriller, a whodunit with multiple culprits. Let’s look for lessons by considering some of the culprits, starting with the most obvious.

1. The Professional Deniers. Gore and environmental leaders made a tactical error several years ago when they declared the science “settled” and refused to engage the forces of denial and delay. The basic science was indeed settled, but the resulting message vacuum was the perfect medium for those who sow doubt and confusion about global climate change. It shouldn’t be surprising that so many Americans remain skeptical about global warming. For 20 years, this loose network of PR pros, working for industry associations and anti-tax think tanks, has spread doubt about climate science and fear about climate economics, claiming that any attempt to cap CO2 would wreck the American economy. Their disinformation, amplified via the Internet, helped poison the debate. To counter the deniers’ campaign, President Obama needs to speak out forcefully, and champions of the clean energy economy must point to the new jobs that are already being created by the renewable energy economy and show Americans precisely where they fit into it.

2. Senate Republicans. Most climate campaigners understand the folly of trying to remake the American energy system without bipartisan support. But it’s hard to forge centrist solutions when an entire party is denying there’s a problem and vilifying the solutions. A scaled-back approach, one that can be sold as a modest, incremental step and not a new industrial revolution, might fare better.

It’s hard to forge centrist solutions when an entire party is denying there’s a problem.

There was a time — 2007 and 2008, to be precise — when some Republicans were moving away from deny-and-delay tactics. (In 2007, briefly, Newt Gingrich supported the carbon cap.) More recently, opposition to climate action has become a litmus test in the GOP. Arizona Republican John McCain, who sponsored the Senate’s first serious climate bills but now faces a primary challenge from the right, recently called a successor bill “a farce.” His mantle of Republican climate courage passed to Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who took so much heat from his own party that he withdrew from the climate bill he helped write. Graham’s position has been incoherent since then, but he has signaled support for a cap on the power sector. That could be something to build on.

3. Senate Democrats. After Reid pulled the plug, Democrats were quick to blame Republicans for obstruction. But what about the obstructionists within the Democratic ranks? Harry Reid didn’t have the clout to force action on this issue because a dozen or more centrist Democrats — from states that either mine coal or produce much of their electricity from it — were dug in against it. It is impossible to tell if the senators were truly concerned about what the cap would do to their state economies — nonpartisan studies suggest its impact would be minimal — or just worried about what attack ads would do to them. Again, a more modest first step could change the dynamic. The crucial thing is to get started.

4. The Green Group. At a meeting in February 2007, the Green Group, an unofficial association of the leaders of the big U.S. environmental non-profits, told Harry Reid they supported a single legislative goal: An economy-wide cap. Their strategy was to assemble the broadest possible coalition to push the broadest possible bill. Given the magnitude of the crisis and the need to reduce emissions quickly, this made sense. Politically, though, it proved disastrous, because it led to bills of such cost, scope, and complexity that they scared the pants off timid legislators.

The Green Group wanted too much and ended up with nothing.

The Green Group held out for an economy-wide bill even after it became clear, in late 2009, that it was unachievable in the Senate. Only recently did environmental leaders try to negotiate a compromise cap on electric power plants, which account for 40 percent of U.S. emissions. Passing a utility cap would have been a great first step, but the talks got started too late. The Green Group wanted too much and ended up with nothing.

5. The Power Barons. When the eleventh-hour search for a compromise began, the utilities got too greedy. If they had to go it alone, they argued, they deserved virtually all of the carbon allowances in the program for free. This left too few for other crucial purposes, such as cushioning manufacturers from higher electricity prices. Worse, in exchange for supporting a carbon cap, some utilities demanded relief from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations governing conventional pollutants such as mercury. Like the greens, they asked for too much and got nothing. (The greens, however, were overreaching on behalf of the planet, not their own coffers.) Some utility bosses were relieved to see the bill die. Those feelings may prove short-lived as the battle to reduce emissions moves to the EPA and the courts.

Some advocates, such as Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund, regard the decision to negotiate with the power barons as the height of folly. Washington, they argue, should simply dictate the terms of surrender to the polluters. Such a stance ignores an important fact: It isn’t possible to remake the U.S. energy system without negotiating with the power barons. Punishing generators means punishing households that pay electricity bills. That doesn’t mean, however, that the politicians should give the barons everything they want. But there was only one player with the clout to cut a fair deal with them, and he was missing in action.

6. The President. Barack Obama chose not to lead on this issue. His decision to address health care reform before energy and climate change doomed the latter. With advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod whispering that climate was a losing proposition (a self-fulfilling prophesy, to be sure), Obama never threw himself behind a particular climate bill. He left it to the Senate, the Green Group, and the power bosses — all of whom were sorely in need of adult supervision.

The real grownups in this tale were Rep. Henry Waxman and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last year surprised the Obama Administration by taking a comprehensive climate bill to the House floor. The White House had no choice but to help whip the vote, and it passed. Then Obama stopped trying, and the Senate refused to take up the legislation. It was a colossal failure of nerve, and a decision that likely destroyed any chance of achieving climate action in Obama’s first term.

Since the president and his political advisers thought an economy-wide cap was too heavy a lift, Obama should have led a tactical retreat to what, in the past several months, became the last-ditch compromise position: the cap on the electric power sector. Had negotiations focused on this months ago instead of weeks ago, and had the president thrown his weight behind it then, we might today be celebrating a step forward instead of mourning another failure. Only Obama had the authority to call this audible early. The environmental NGOs and their allies were too invested in the economy-wide approach; they needed Obama to lead them.

Welcome to the ‘glorious mess’ — the tangle of regulation and litigation that follow when Congress fails to act.

He refused. To the bitter end, the White House pursued what his aides called a “stealth strategy” that deployed the president only sparingly. As a result, he failed to take advantage of the BP oil spill. When its terrible scope became apparent, in June, Obama began talking about the need to cap carbon and accelerate the transition to clean energy. But it was a fleeting moment. Many climate campaigners knew the climate bill was dead on June 15, when Obama gave his long-awaited Oval Office address on the oil spill. Instead of making an explicit connection to the climate bill — and explaining that by capping carbon the U.S. could speed its transition to clean energy and help break its addiction to fossil fuels — Obama whiffed. He had a road map but didn’t try to share it with the people. “We don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there,” he said. Today, with that map in shreds, we surely don’t.

As climate campaigners wait however long it takes to get another shot at legislation, there is important work to be done. Greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have been dropping — and not just because of the recession. The task is to build on this trend during the economic recovery. Changes in our energy infrastructure are making this possible. In Texas, our highest-emitting state and a bastion of climate skepticism, carbon emissions have been declining since 2004 thanks in part to a renewable energy standard — signed into law by then-Gov. George W. Bush — that accelerated the installation of wind power and created thousands of jobs along the way.

The Department of Energy now has 7,000 clean energy projects across the country — projects that save money, create jobs, and reduce emissions. According to an analysis by the World Resources Institute, by leveraging existing authority over the next ten years the U.S. could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent to 12 percent below 2005 levels. This is far short of the 17 percent reduction Obama promised in Copenhagen and nothing close to what needs to be done. But if we continue cutting emissions before asking voters to embrace a cap, we prove that cuts are both technologically feasible and economically sustainable. And we’ll be in a better position when the next legislative opportunity comes.

Until then, the climate war will be waged by cities, states, regional cap-and-trade programs, and, above all, the EPA, which early next year is set to begin regulating stationary sources of CO2 — power plants and large factories.

Welcome to the “glorious mess” — Michigan Rep. John Dingell’s phrase for the tangle of regulation and litigation that will follow when Congress fails to act. We are about to experience precisely the sort of costly, protracted, plant-by-plant trench warfare the cap was intended to avoid. Since the utilities and the manufacturers weren’t willing to cut a deal, this is what they get. The fragile period of compromise and cooperation between environmentalists and big business may now be coming to an end. Green groups that have invested time and money into the legislative process are now putting on their war paint and returning to the courts, with a renewed focus on stopping new coal-fired power plants and shutting down the oldest and dirtiest ones.

Tough new EPA rules for conventional pollutants will help, and so will new EPA carbon regulations. Perhaps these strict new regulations will refresh the power bosses’ appetite for a cap. But they have plenty of lawyers, and the long, ugly battles over implementation of EPA regulations could extend the current period of uncertainty by many years. Republicans (and some Democrats) will try to strip EPA of its authority over carbon, or at least delay implementation of its new rules.

In effect, the Senate will be saying that Congress alone should have the power to act — so that it can then not exercise that power. Obama’s aides say the president will be fully engaged in the battle to save EPA authority over carbon. It is a fight that he can’t possibly duck, because it is our last line of defense. As Gore reminded me in Copenhagen, “The fact that this is extremely hard doesn’t mean we should quit.”

Article by Eric Pooley, appearing courtesy, Yale Environment 360.

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(Reuters) – U.S. Senate Democrats said on Thursday they will wait until September at the earliest to take up broad climate-change legislation, a potentially fatal blow to the White House push to curb greenhouse gases.

The delay means Democrats have little time to advance the complex legislation amid intense political pressure in the weeks before November congressional elections.

It also could derail global climate change initiatives, as the world’s major economies and greenhouse gas emitters insist the United States play a leading role.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he plans to bring up a narrower energy bill next week that would revamp offshore oil drilling rules in the wake of the BP oil spill while returning to the broader legislation sometime after senators return from their summer recess in September.

“Unfortunately at this time we don’t have a single Republican on board,” Reid told reporters.

Democrats said they hope to pass the scaled-back bill before leaving town for their August recess.

Some Democrats hoped to attach climate legislation to that bill with the hope of attracting Republican support.

But Reid said he could not get any Republicans to back a comprehensive energy bill that would include provisions intended to combat climate change such as caps on carbon emissions or mandates for power companies to generate more alternative energy.

“We will fight that out in September,” said a Democratic senator who did not wish to be quoted by name. “It will be tough to win.”

Republicans have been near unanimous in their opposition to climate change legislation, saying the bill would be little more than an energy tax that would imperil an economy struggling to recover from recession.

SERIOUS SETBACK

President Barack Obama has made action on climate change a priority and the House of Representatives approved a wide-ranging bill last year. But lawmakers and environmentalists are increasingly doubtful a comprehensive bill can pass the Senate this year. If Republicans make gains in November’s elections, the effort could be stalled for some time.

Environmentalists said the decision to delay action on the broad climate legislation marked a serious setback.

“It would seem like the longest of long shots to me because the window for opportunity in the fall before the election season goes into high gear is very small,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an activist group.

Democrats need at least some Republican support to advance legislation in the Senate since they control 59 seats, one short of the 60 needed to overcome procedural hurdles.

The scaled-back energy bill would promote natural-gas vehicles in a bid to cut oil imports. It also would promote energy-efficient houses and businesses, Reid said.

Reid said the bill would ensure that BP pays for the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and prevent future disasters, though he did not offer specifics.

Several Democrats said they thought the bill had enough support to pass the Senate — including Senator Ben Nelson, who frequently votes against his own party.

Utility stocks in the Dow Jones Utility Average closed up 1.6 percent, slightly lagging the broader market.

‘NOT GOING AWAY’

Democrats hope to pass legislation that would curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that scientists say contribute to rising global temperatures.

U.S. scientists have said that this year has been the hottest on record across the world.

Congressional inaction would cast a pall on global talks that have lost momentum since December’s summit in Copenhagen.

“This must not stand, it will hurt us, hurt our children and hurt the regard the world has for U.S. leadership,” said David Hawkins, the director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council activist group.

China, which led a bloc of developing-world countries opposed to mandatory carbon limits, might impose more pollution controls on its economy than the United States. China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, plans to launch a carbon trading market during the next five years to boost energy efficiency, according to the China Daily newspaper.

Obama has pushed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take unilateral action if Congress fails to pass a bill. The EPA has begun issuing rules to cut emissions from cars and requiring power plants to have permits to emit carbon dioxide.

Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joe Lieberman have crafted a bill that would impose carbon caps on utilities. Previous legislation also would have put caps on emissions from manufacturers and transportation.

Some power companies such as Duke Energy want a climate bill so they can move ahead with billions of dollars in investments in new low-carbon power plants.

Lieberman said the Senate could take up their bill in September. “I think there’s going to be a lot of interest in doing something broader when it comes to energy independence than just oil spill,” he said.

Kerry was upbeat that a climate bill with carbon caps would eventually pass.

“This is not going to die, absolutely rest assured this is not going away,” Kerry told visitors to Congress.

“As long as I am in the Senate and I’ve got another four years … we are going to keep pounding away on this.”

He said he met earlier on Thursday with one Republican, who has “indicated willingness” to work toward greater coalition in the Senate for a larger climate change bill.

Article by Timothy Gardner and Thomas Ferraro; additional reporting by Andy Sullivan, Alina Selyukh, Tom Doggett, Ayesha Rascoe and Emma Ashburn; writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Russell Blinch and Will Dunham; appearing courtesy Reuters.

photo: cliff1066™

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China, which last year walked away from COP 15 without agreeing to anything, now wants to hold its own climate talks.

The talks, scheduled for October, according to the UN’s top environmental official, Achim Steiner, will take place in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, northwest of Beijing.

Government officials around the industrialized world are hoping that the Tianjin talks will pave the way for a new, binding, climate change treaty after COP 15’s spectacular failure, and that the neutral and unofficial platform will offer some clues how to proceed during the Nov. 29 – Dec. 10, 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, or COP 16) talks scheduled in Cancun, Mexico.

This COP 16 itself is expected to deliver the key elements of a new climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement ever put in force.

Unfortunately, expectations are like soap bubbles, and the Kyoto Protocol – adopted in December of 1997, made official in February of 2005, and ratified by 187 states as of November of 2009 – has never gained the signature of the United States, a member nation, or the unqualified approval of China, a non-member nation.

Several other nations, members and non-members alike, remain equally undecided, and how this is going to change at COP 16 has never been fully explained. Given the current Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, even the venue is uncertain.

But the question of China’s position on emissions may in fact be moot, even though many analysts have said that China’s reluctance to submit to emission reductions is directly related to its desire to catch up to the developed world.

If so, China’s reluctance is understandable. In order to become fully industrialized – and reach a level of economic prosperity closely paralleling (if never meeting, let alone exceeding) the developed world – China will have to focus its efforts on making and selling the “stuff” the Western world craves.

In order to do this, China has to partially ignore the emissions issue, which it rightly considers unfair, since developed nations have already achieved their prosperity at the expense of the environment (and atmospheric, biological and ocean carbon levels), but now want to make sure that nations like China and India can’t do the same.

In fact, China is tackling its emissions problem outside the conventional frameworks like Kyoto and COP (COnference of the Parties), opting instead to regulate carbon simply because energy efficiency and renewable energy are elements of the kind of 21st century economy it wants to construct anyway, according to Premier Wen Jiabao, who has already threatened to use force to close “energy hog” facilities like the Guangzhou Steel plant.

So why is China proposing a pre- UNFCCC meeting? The behavior, which many Western analysts see as disturbingly schizophrenic, may in fact be nothing more complex than “saving face”, a cultural and psychological tool highly valued among Asian peoples like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (but also esteemed in Latin American countries, where “face” has overtones of masculine aggression and dominance).

The concept of “face” originated with the Chinese. Their understanding of the term is extremely complicated, and seemingly ambiguous at times, but loosely means a perception of one’s own worth based on: social status; what one expects of oneself; and what is expected of one by others.

For example, if a Chinese diplomat offers a concession that looms large in his personal lexicon of values, and it is rejected out of hand and without discussion by someone whose values are different, the diplomat will experience a severe loss of face, both on the social and moral plain, especially if the rejection take place in public.

China, which is currently the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, is clearly losing face over its emissions stance, and the Tianjin talks may be more about ego bolstering than emissions reduction, but who can blame Chinese diplomats?

China (and India, and other emerging economies) will never get the same-sized slice of the prosperity pie as the U.S. and the EU achieved in the run-up-to-recession years starting in mid-1999, simply because there aren’t enough natural resources left on Earth to allow that to happen.

Western diplomats at COP 16 might want to give China back its face. There is little left to offer in the name of continued peace and prosperity.

Article by Jeanne Roberts, appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: KyFlick

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United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, appointed Costa Rican expert on climate change, Christiana Figueres, as the new U.N. climate chief on May 17th. She will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) on July 1st.

De Boer, of the Netherlands, announced his resignation last February after the Copenhagen climate summit where 120 world leaders failed to come to a binding agreement on global warming.

Figueres, 53, is the first person in this U.N. position to come from a developing country. She has been a member of Costa Rica’s negotiating team on climate change since 1995. She represented the Caribbean and Latin American on the Executive Board of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism in 2007, and from 2008 to 2009, Figueres served as vice president of the Bureau of the Convention.

Figueres said in a statement issued by the U.N., “I come to the secretariat with great respect for the institution and a deep commitment to the UNFCC process. There is no task that is more urgent, more compelling, or more sacred than that of protecting the climate of our planet for our children and grandchildren.”

When Figueres assumes her post on July 1st, it will only be five months until the next climate change meeting scheduled to take place this November in Cancun, Mexico. In an interview with Reuters, she said that crafting a new deal to fight global warming was not a priority for 2010, but that wealthy companies much first fulfill their pledges to provide financial support to aid climate change. Wendel Trio, Greenpeace’s climate policy coordinator, was quoted in an article in the Telegraph, noting that Costa Rica has already set an ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2021, with “the type of attitude we need on the global stage.”

A graduate of Swarthmore College with a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics, Figueres resides in the U.S. Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, served as president of Costa Rica three times.

Article by Julie Mitchell appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: Steve Cadman

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It might seem odd that South America, too often the victim of corporations looking for cheap labor and even cheaper natural resources, would become Mother Earth’s most vociferous advocate.

Yet it has, confirming a belief that suggests adversity creates heroes. This is certainly true in South American countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and even Venezuela , where some of the most egregious examples of corporate pollution have left South Americans, and their indigenous counterparts, thoroughly disgusted not only with capitalism but with Western civilization as a whole.

Take, for example, the Cochabamba protests of 2000 , incited by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation. Cochabama, Bolivia’s third largest city, has since become the permanent site for a yearly festival, the Feria del Agua (Water Fair).

This year’s event in mid-April was the tenth anniversary of “la guerra del agua (water wars)”, which saw the poor of Cochabamba’s La Zona Sur (southern zone) throwing out multinational Bechtel, which had latched on to all the water under World Bank approval. This uprising eventually saw the founding of Bolivia’s Water Ministry, the election of Evo Morales (an Aymara Indian), and similar anti-privatization and anti-corporate efforts all across the continent.

For the Feria del Agua, a loose confederation of water suppliers, the event is a celebration of their victory in overthrowing a tyrant and providing that most essential of services – potable water – to Bolivia’s poor.

Now, Cochabamba is the site of another environmental and sustainability revolution. The People’s Climate Summit , sponsored by Morales and held from April 19 to the 22, was a declaration of the rights of Mother Earth.

It is, according to Morales, one of the reasons why he rejected the most recent Copenhagen Treaty (COP15 ), which he described as an unacceptable compromise hatched by a “tiny group dominated by a few rich governments” which left the majority of the world’s people (read third world countries ) out in the cold.

The climate summit saw more than 31,000 attendees from 140 countries, represented by 48 heads of state or the like, who together drafted a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth aimed at establishing a legal framework for protecting the environment and raising global consciousness about Mother Earth.

It was a dramatic session, but in fact it merely built on the work of Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional amendment which gave “equal rights ” to Mother Nature. This nature, otherwise known as Pachamama (the Goddess Earth) is — according to the amendment — the place “where life exists, and has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

This puts nature on the same footing as corporations and individual humans, in that it redefines the human relationship with the earth as one where resources are not merely there to be exploited, but rather the property of an entity who has rights of Her own, and whose rights can be adjudicated when threatened by corporate greed.

For Ecuador, the rape of Pachamama has been at the hands of mining companies, and neither the nation nor President Rafael Correa have expanded the rights of the indigenous people sufficiently to allow them to defend their land against these corporate predators, in spite of the vociferous support of Acción Ecológica , the premier environmental organization in Ecuador. On the other hand, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all sweeping changes begin with a single impulse.

This impetus is beginning to spread. On April 22, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke vehemently about the need to respect and care for the Earth in order to insure the health and well-being of its inhabitants.

Last year, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution proclaiming the day of April 22 as International Mother Earth Day, and expressed its concerted belief that economic, social and environmental justice (or sustainability) depend on harmony with nature. Interestingly enough, the United nations has agreed to pay Ecuador not to remove oil.

Clearly, James Lovelock’s efforts have not been in vain; Gaia is becoming a meme in the human consciousness. Unfortunately, Gaia’s champion (we can hardly call him its creator) now says that the realization – that Earth is a single organism, just like the human body – has come too late to save Earth itself.

In spite of that, Lovelock doesn’t blame us poor mortals. We have, he notes, “pulled the trigger” on global warming with the innocent destructiveness of children who don’t know that every construct is finite, and that every wastrel today implies a regretful tomorrow.

Lovelock also insists that science and politics can’t help, and that using them to save the planet is a “lot of nonsense”. He is supported in this viewpoint by Adriana Marquisio, the former President of the Uruguayan Union of Water and Sanitation Workers, who said, of COP15, that it was a lot of non-governmental organizations talking about the effects of climate change on their people, but there was no allowance made for the people themselves to speak.

This, as many activists have noted, is the real root of the problem; governments can’t speak for people because the scale of governments is not really a human scale.

In South America, the people are changing this, taking back the reigns of social protest and environmental defense and bringing them to a very localized playing field where farmers, coops, water providers, conservationists, and field-level environmental regulators can begin a dialogue about local trees as opposed to the whole forest. And it is at this human scale, perhaps, where real change will begin.

That is, if we are in time. If it isn’t too late.

Article by Jeanne Roberts appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: kk+

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The CO2 reduction pledges made by 76 nations following last December’s Copenhagen climate conference will likely lead to a global temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Centigrade (5.4 Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to an analysis by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

In an article in Nature, the researchers described the current reduction commitments as “paltry” and said the goal of holding temperature increases to 2 degrees C is in “dire peril.”

Researcher Malte Meinshausen told the BBC, “There’s a big mismatch between the ambitious goal, which is 2 C, and the emissions reductions. The pledged emissions reductions are in most cases very unambitious.”

The pledges, which account for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, mean that total emissions will reach 48 to 53.6 billion tons by 2020, from roughly 35 billion tons today.

But if the world community has any hope of holding temperature increases to 2 degrees C, the Potsdam researchers said 2020 emissions must be between 40 to 44 billion tons.

Climate scientists say that temperature increases of 3 degrees C or more will likely lead to a destabilization of the global climate system, increased melting of polar ice sheets, and significant rises in sea level.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: Lars Plougmann

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