At Bali, U.S. Joins Negotiations Towards New Climate Treaty
After two weeks of turbulent bargaining, discussions over the aims and timing of a new global climate change treaty have concluded in Bali.
The next step will be two years of negotiations over the new treaty itself, which will become a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Thousands of delegates took part in the United Nations-sponsored conference, to discuss the man-made emissions that most scientists believe are changing the earth's climate. The talks were held up in their final hours over the question of specific targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and whether rich countries will pay poorer countries to aid them rein in their emissions.
The so-called "road map" that came out of the Bali conference was deliberately vague on both questions, leaving hard work ahead for the negotiators. Still, the Bali Road Map has successfully put into motion two years of negotiations on a new international agreement to fight global warming.
The major topic of contention was whether emission reduction targets should be included in the Bali road map, or whether they should be agreed on between now and the end of 2009.
Scientists say that in order to avert the worst effects of global warming, average world temperatures must not be allowed to rise more than two degrees over what they were in pre-industrial times. In order to reach that goal, countries and environmentalists led by the European Union wanted the road map to specify sharp reductions in emissions: by the year 2020, they wanted emissions to be 25 to 40 percent lower than they were in 1990.
A group led by the United States, and including Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia, strenuously opposed including concrete reduction targets. In the final days of the conference, the EU-U.S. debate grew heated. Delegates said the U.S. was obstructing the talks.
There was talk of issuing the road map without U.S. support, but it was argued that a climate change effort without the participation of the U.S., one of the top emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, would be meaningless. As the U.S. delegation became increasingly isolated in the final hours of the conference, a compromise was reached in which emissions targets were made into a footnote at the end of the document.
The road map does call for global man-made emissions to peak in the next 15 years, and for emission levels recorded in 2000 to be cut in half by 2050. It also promotes a plan enabling wealthy countries to pay poor countries to keep remaining forests intact.
Convention delegates agreed on how to manage the Adaptation Fund, which is financed from carbon trading markets sponsored by the U.N. The fund will help developing nations adapt to the effects of global warming, such as flooding and drought. Negotiators also agreed to transfer more clean energy technologies from richer countries to poorer countries.
Further conferences to discuss the new climate pact are scheduled for Warsaw next year, and Copenhagen in 2009.
Al Gore: "It is Time to Make Peace with the Planet."
Former United States Vice President Al Gore has used the occasion of his Nobel Peace Prize lecture to proclaim to the world that climate change is a "planetary emergency" - a "real, rising, imminent and universal" threat to Earth's very survival.
"It is time to make peace with the planet", Mr. Gore said. "We still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?"
The ceremony marking the prize, which Mr. Gore shares with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of scientists, comes even as representatives of the world's governments are meeting in Bali to negotiate a new international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new treaty would replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
Mr. Gore called on the negotiators to establish a universal global cap on emissions and to ratify and enact a new treaty by the beginning of 2010, two years early. And he singled out the United States and China - the worlds largest emitters of carbon dioxide - for failing to meet their obligations in acting to mitigate climate change. "They will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act," he said.
He added: "Both countries should stop using the others behavior as an excuse for stalemate and develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment."
In his own address, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, gave a sober, statistics-filled account of the possible consequences of climate change. He said that the prize committees decision to award the Nobel to the panel "can be seen as a clarion call" for the world to face up to the gravity of the situation.
Both Mr. Gore and Mr. Pachauri are heading to Bali to join the international negotiations.
The Story of Stuff
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.
The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
Europe's Distant Diets
Europeans are eating and importing more food from outside the EU than ever before, concludes a study on European Food Systems in a Changing World.
The multidisciplinary study examined how complex technological and policy factors, including CAP reform, will affect the interactions between food availability, access and use. The research looked at where food comes from, and how it gets from the field to the fork. By studying what Europeans eat, scientists hope to understand the economic, political, and cultural impacts of food on European society.
Europeans' food increasingly comes from outside Europe because of today's globalised food market and the growth of major supermarket chains. In recent years, Europe has begun to trade with many more countries from the global South; due to inequities leading to much lower labour and production costs, these countries often grow and process food more cheaply than Europe.
People's expectations of the availability of certain foods have changed because supermarkets, which source many of their goods globally, are not reliant on seasonal food products and can offer customers any type of food all year round.
Furthermore, according to the study results, Europeans are buying more pre-cut, pre-cooked and pre-packaged 'convenience food' in the form of ready-meals. These often contain ingredients that have been imported from many different countries. Also, the cutting, cooking and packaging of 'ready-meals' is often done in more than one place, resulting in food that is well-travelled even before it is ready to eat, reveals the study.
Regarding the impact of Europeans' growing taste for overseas foods, the study foresees a greater impact on the environment, mainly due to protective packaging for transport. On average, five percent of what is bought in supermarkets is packaging. In addition, food travelling around the globe results in more road congestion, greater damage to infrastructure, and higher emissions of pollutants, including greenhouse gases.
Bali Call for Global Economic and Energy Transition
125 prominent citizen leaders from around the world have launched a "Bali Call" for climate talks to accelerate global economic and energy transition.
The call appeals to governments to create a parallel set of negotiations for a "Global Economic and Energy Transition." In the face of the deadlock among government negotiators, the citizen leaders offer a detailed plan to jumpstart the deliberations in a form that more appropriately addresses the enormity of the climate crisis in addition to other major environmental crises we are facing and that deals with the economics of energy equity.
The Bali Call urges negotiators to pursue three vital paths:
1.Deeper Emissions Cuts, With Equity: The Call supports the goal of creating deeper binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum average of at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, while ensuring that richer nations, and the richer segments within all nations, bear the greatest burden of adjustment.
2.Profound Economic and Energy Transitions: Governments need to create new rules, incentives, and institutions to shift our villages, cities, countries, and world toward socially just and ecologically sound economies.
3.New Global Institutions: Governments should create new global mechanisms that help nations keep fossil fuels in the ground, finance North-South resource transfers, cut back oil production and consumption, advance rights to clean water, and protect forests, fisheries, biodiversity, fragile ecosystems, and endangered species.
The call has been coordinated by the Institute for Policy Studies and the International Forum on Globalization, which jointly run the Global Project on Economic Transitions that has engaged and involved scholars, scientists, activists and policy makers from around the world.
Europeans Increasingly Favor EU Action on Environment and Energy
The first results of a Eurobarometer survey show that the belief that many policy decisions are best made jointly within the EU, rather than by national governments alone, is a widespread one and furthermore is on the rise: citizens exhibit a strong and increasing faith in the capacity and suitability of the EU to act on a wide range of issues.
The level of favour of EU action on protecting the environment rose from 69% in the spring of 2007, to 73% in the autumn of 2007. Likewise, EU action on issues relating to energy rose from 61% to 68%.
In interpreting results from this survey, it is important to analyse them in the context of developments in opinion over the last year. Fuelled by the performance of the European economy and a sense of optimism surrounding the end to the institutional gridlock in the EU, results showed a large increase in support for membership of the EU, positive images of the EU and trust in its institutions.
Local Action: The New Paradigm in Climate Change Policy
While traditionally framed as a national and international problem, climate change is also an important local issue. For the past fifteen years, while nations have fought over the terms of emissions reductions and the Kyoto Protocol, local governments and communities in the United States have been enacting innovative measures that not only prevent emissions of significant quantities of greenhouse gases but also reduce air pollution, save money, and improve the overall quality of life.
In the absence of a serious national policy in the United States that addresses global warming, these grassroots efforts can and have made a difference. Since 1993,when fourteen pioneering local governments first began to develop programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a national and international movement has formed to fight global climate change through concerted local action. These communities are having a significant effect. A handful of jurisdictions in the United States are preventing over twenty million tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere annually and have saved over four hundred million dollars in the process. These initiatives include greening the local building codes, creating commercial waste reduction programs, encouraging water conservation, promoting bicycling and fuel-efficient vehicles, upgrading city buildings, advocating for the use of biodiesel for municipal transportation, and designing innovative systems and policies for reduced paper use. Two in-depth case studies-- Fort Collins, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon--demonstrate how two cities have created and implemented climate-friendly and environmentally sound habitats.
While most books on global warming focus on national and international implications and policy approaches or serve as guides to help individuals live in an ecologically sound manner, Local Action: The New Paradigm in Climate Change Policy provides a blueprint for local governments to follow. Combining an analysis of existing federal policy with examples of successful local policy, they provide practical examples of measures that can be implemented by communities and local governments across the United States and elsewhere.
Dealing with Uncertainty in Greenhouse Gas Inventories
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria has published a policy brief on Uncertainty in Greenhouse Gas Inventories. The brief highlights some of the issues and challenges arising from uncertainty in estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and removals; explores how this uncertainty can be dealt with through uncertainty analysis techniques and improvements to science; and points to the implications of uncertainty analysis for policymakers working to reduce human impacts on the global climate.
The information contained in this briefing draws on the content of workshops held in Warsaw in September 2004 and at IIASA in September 2007. Here, researchers, inventory compilers, and policy experts met to discuss the state of the art in dealing with uncertainty and identifying areas requiring further research.
Further research is presented in the book Accounting for Climate Change edited by Daniel Lieberman, Matthias Jonas, Zbigniew Nahorski, and Sten Nilsson.
Renewables 2007 Global Status Report
The Renewable Energy Policy Network REN21 has presented a pre-publication summary of its 2007 Renewables Global Status Report. With renewable energy sources continuing their strong double-digit growth in 2007, the Report demonstrates that renewables are now a 'mainstream' source of energy.
The report underlines the importance of renewable energy as one of the best options for carbon emission mitigation, and demonstrates how appropriate policies are needed to make use of RE's huge potential. Unlike other technologies such as 'clean coal', renewables are here today - ready to be widely deployed without delay.
The 2007 Renewables Global Status Report concludes that current trends are set to continue as the costs of renewable energy technologies decline and the sector continues to diversify production and technology development to an ever broader base of countries, including emerging economies.
Barroso: Bali of Crucial Importance
European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso says the UN conference in Bali, Indonesia is crucially important in the fight against climate change.
Barroso says it is vital that EU leaders use Bali to launch serious negotiations on a post-2012 agreement on fighting climate change.
If talks are aimed at reaching an agreement by 2009 in Copenhagen there will be enough time for the new agreement to be ratified and in force before the end of 2012, the president says.
He stresses that the Commission is undertaking a number of measures to tackle climate change. It has just adopted the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan to speed up innovation of energy technologies by pushing industry to turn the threats of climate change and security of supply into opportunities to increase its competitiveness. This month, the Commission is also presenting legislative proposals to cut carbon dioxide car emissions to 120 grams per kilometre by 2012.
In addition, the EU executive will complete its legislative proposals to implement its energy and climate change package in January.
The Atlas of Climate Change
Todays headlines and recent events reflect the seriousness of climate change. Heatwaves, droughts and flooding are driving people from their homes, destroying livelihoods and causing death among vulnerable populations. Rigorous in its science and insightful in its message, The Atlas of Climate Change examines the possible impact of climate change on our ability to feed the worlds people, avoid water shortages, conserve biodiversity, improve health, and preserve cities and cultural treasures. It also reviews historical contributions to greenhouse gas levels, progress in meeting Kyoto commitments and local efforts to meet the challenge of climate change.
The atlas covers a wide range of topics, including warning signals, future scenarios, vulnerable populations, health impacts, renewable energy and emissions reduction. With more than 50 full colour maps and graphics, this is an essential resource for policy-makers, environmentalists, students and everyone concerned with this pressing subject.
AVAAZ Climate March and Message to World Leaders
AVAAZ is organizing a "virtual global march on Bali". The world's delegates are gathering there from 3-14 December 2007 to decide: will they take decisive action on climate change, or ramble and delay?
On 8 December, a wave of protests and marches will sweep the globe. AVAAZ invites you to join this virtual march by signing a message to world leaders. AVAAZ members in Bali will carry your flag and a sign with the number of people who have signed from your country.
In addition to the virtual march, hundreds of thousands of people will join physical marches around the world. On a map you can find and attend a climate rally near you.
