Amongst the myriad other things that Barack Obama (touch wood) will have to deal with, it’s negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that’s of the greatest long-term importance.
While it’s always risky to equate campaign positions with how a politician will actually govern, the noises from the Obama campaign have been reasonable. This is particularly so given the peculiar American fixation with “energy independence”. Their policy position is straightforward: domestically, an 80% cut by 2050 through cap-and-trade, with 100% auctioning of permits. Internationally, they want to re-engage with the “UNFCC – the main international forum dedicated to addressing the climate problem”. They will also create a Global Energy Forum of the world’s largest emitters “to focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues”. It’s still inadequate, certainly, but it’s a heck of a lot closer to the ballpark than the current administration.
Meanwhile, the other big polluters have been starting to firm up their positions pre-Copenhagen (or, technically, pre the next round of talks in Poland in December), but the road to a deal is as clear as mud at this point. While a number of eastern European countries – and Italy – have tried to renege on Europe’s commitments to a 20% cut in emissions by 2020, the broader EU seems to be holding firm on its position. But the biggest unknown is China. China recently released its own white paper on climate change. It details in some detail, and without sugarcoating, the potential domestic effects on climate change. It also details a large number of domestic policies to reduce emissions growth. But as far as international targets go, it’s extremely vague, with lots of praise for the Clean Development Mechanism but very little about what it might take for the Chinese to sign up to anything stronger.
It seems like there’s lots of horsetrading to go before – if – we get a deal in Copenhagen.
How good would it be if Obama said at his inauguration speech something along the lines of:
“I believe it should be the goal of the United States to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, while maintaining our standard of living, by the end of the coming decade.”
Phraseology sound familiar? It should…
(And yes, yes, I know that one can play with words like “dependence”, “maintaining” and even “foreign.” And some may quibble over “coming decade.” But what is needed is a circuit breaker, something inspirational and aspirational – both strong points for Obama.)
Great CN Link RM, taa.
That would be the
but this would be difficult because of its dependence on coal. Chinese ambassador Zhang Junsai says co-operation between Australia and China on clean coal technology is crucial. “Australia is the biggest coal producer of coal exports and China is the biggest coal … consumer,” he told an Australian Strategic Policy Institute luncheon. “We need to develop this kind of clean coal technology to reduce emissions.”
?
It’s all very well noting the white papers and speeches but it’s probably also instructive to look where the investment yuan is going: The OZ company (LINC) that was allowed to turn on the underground coal gasification -> diesel demo plant in Queensland a few weeks ago
We can see where that’s going:
diesel(TrucksDozersEtc) + coal(ground) -> diesel(FuelStocks) + CO2(atmos) + mega$$(profit),
(at Royalties-> QldTreasuryBudgetBalancing scale), and I fail to see how that can be considered clean like LINC are being allowed to spin it
What national/international interest (climate) consideration as part of foreign investment review board approval? Wayne Swan & Mar’n Fer’s'n love it : as if they’re gonna get in the way of someone that’s gonna help bail Anna out. In fact Wayne Swan acted as a drawcard for Linc Energy’s first Brisbane investor function, acting the urger with this toss
I suspect that China’s enthusiasm for the Clean Development Mechanism and their vagueness about targets relates to their desire to manufacture all the gear the world needs for more efficient energy regimes right there in their own backyard. Anything else would be an offense to their idea of the natural order of things. LSE Robert Wade says economist says that China is “investing heavily in information systems to help Chinese firms engineer their way around Western patents.”
Whether the world can survive what they do to the environment in the process is a good question.
Der Spiegel has a useful article on the bickering in Brussels in trying to conclude an agreement before the Poznan meeting in Poland in December. Eastern European countries are asking for exemptions on coal-fired electricity until 2020. Italy says the 20/20/20 plan is madness.
There is always brinkmanship and jockeying for advantage before the EU decides these things. The newer members are no doubt hoping the older ones will make up the difference. But Italy is one of the older members, France already has a high proportion of energy provided by nuclear and Germany seems to be sliding quickly into recession.
I don’t have a link, but I’ve heard twice on the radio that the EU has deferred it’s proposed car emissions regulations for a further 3 years because of the financial crisis at the behest of the German car industry. And they are starting to get into pre-election mode.
India is very keen on “common but differentiated responsibility” and see their responsibility as alleviating poverty, albeit without putting the brakes on mindless consumption on the part of their elites.
This is an interesting comment from Herr Edenhofer
Then this:
And they know it.
None of this would surprise Immannuel Wallerstein who says that nation states have been competing for advantage and indeed for hegemony within the capitalist world system for 500 years. One of the ways they maximize capital accumulation and maintain profits is to externalise costs. In the case of the environment we’ve been externalising costs to the future. Unfortunately it’s game over. It’s time to pay. Wallerstein pretty much says this in more eloquent words in this article.
We need an approach that puts human well-being and the well-being of the planet first and the economy as a support system.
We need a degree of cooperation short of world government that can make decisions in the long term interest of the planet and all the beings that live thereon and make the decisions stick. And we need to do what’s necessary in a manner that is just and provides equal opportunities for a dignified and satisfying life everywhere.
This is what I think Wallerstein is on about. A new political/economic/social system that still has provision for capital accumulation, even perhaps the private ownership of capital, and of course markets, but not within the world capitalist system as we know it.
The only problem is that we don’t have the 30-50 years nominated by Wallerstein to sort it all out and patchwork, piece-meal muddling through might not get us there.
End of rant. I’ll crawl back under my rock now.
Aw Brian, it’s good when you come out from under your rock. Don’t be back under there too long.
Too true, but the ability to successfully reverse-engineer and tweak to get around royalty payments isn’t always a sufficient condition for market success. The “China -developed” EVD format they went hard on to fit HDTV on existing optical media, not Blu-ray etc, and avoid mpeg etc payments, even though the chinese gov’t mandated manufacturers to implement it in their players, went nowhere.
Reading between babelfish machine-translation-from-mandarin lines make me think they even started making tamiflu ( great white birdflu medication hope) via a slightly different synthetic pathway to what Roche was using in an attempt to break the patent stranglehold. I ain’t crying : one of the major shareholders in the ultimate owner of the patent, Gilead, is …. Donald F’n Rumsfeld. Talk about ambulence chasing.
That’s really interesting, danny, but I’m sure they’ll keep trying. Back in 1950s “made in Japan” signified crap. I remember my brother cursing when he fitted a new drill bit made in Japan and it simply unravelled.
I think the problem is that China and other transitional economies think it’s their right to do their share of polluting on the way to a wealthier society. The problem is that what the ‘advanced’ economies did was to bring the planet to the edge of disaster. The aspiring countries have to see that the same path is no longer open.
Brian: Too right, except I’d say :
It’s a hard arguement to counter from, ‘frinstance, a Qld position, where not only are we up there on the chart of per capita emissions, we’ve done nothing much productive with all that energy. We have an economy which is dependent for funding hospitals and schools on maintaining and furthering our status as baddest pusher on the block of the coal drug, at least they give it a go to do something smart like produce patentable (real) industry outputs. We just PR strip mine overseas students for overpriced mickey mouse degrees and call it an export industry. Have a look at edu.au financials for how much our universities earn from royalties and licences etc, approximately zip cf low-hanging overseas student fee fruit. Much of which is from Chinese students, it has been noted.
We certainly haven’t used our ill gotten gains for a noble purpose like seeding a solar technology industry, like china has: it’s annual PV production capacity reached almost 1,590 megawatts by the end of the (2007), well ahead of any other country, 9 percent below all of Europe.
Instead, as above, we’re going further and finding ways of extracting more dirty dollars and releasing yet more CO2 from even crappier, high sulfur, previously uneconomic depth, coal (by adapting stalin era technology, with the assistence of those well-known champions of sustainable ecological practices, the Russians,) to turn it into diesel. Or take perfectly good farm land, like at Felton Valley near Toowoomba, open cut mine it, and produce dimethyl ether as a fuel, and calling it clean coal. Meanwhile being the upstream vandals stashing Darling basin water while downstream goes to hell. And the underground-burn coal grab is putting our last-resource artesian water at risk. Craven is the word I think, like only a junkie can be.
The only thing we can show China is how to put ex-government members, for instance a treasurer, in positions where they can be privately enriched via current same-party government decisions. (Who’s Chairman of the board for Cubbie Station, about to strike it rich with water allocation buy-backs?)
We haven’t got leg to stand on, let alone get up on a soapbox to lecture China about anything, except hard core civil liberty offences…. mind you it would be interesting to see how the Palm Island story is being written up CN-side.
Danny: You’re asserting that building a solar PV panel manufacturing industry in Australia is a sensible thing to do.
Frankly, the evidence for that is dubious.
RM: I take your point, am uneasy about embedded energy aspects of PV. I wish titanium oxide dyes, (or some other way of reverse engineering thylakoid discs and the other magic bits of photosynthetic CO2 Fixation) were further down the commercialisation track.
Or someone would put their hand up and say, here we’ll sacrifice a local saline ecosystem to grow a ginormous geneticall-engineered-algae-to-fuelcell-fuel field. Like Spencer Gulf, or the Caspian Sea. Or something that a) fixes carbon which can be recovered as energy, b) doesn’t deplete rarifying freshwater resources.
I’ve asked around, folks seem to think the old chestnut that solar pv is a net energy dud is just that, a chestnut, but I admit, my instinct is that silicon, glass, doped with rare earth elements, manufacture sounds like a bunch of highly energy intensive processes.
What’s your answer?
http://www.cagle.com/working/050822/trever.gif
Most of the case studies I’ve seen suggest that the energy payback for solar cells occurs within a fraction of their expected lifetime. That’s not the problem.
It’s just not clear yet whether solar cells will make up a major component of the world’s future energy supply needs, or forever remain a small-scale, specialized tool for remote areas. Furthermore, even if they become a mainstream energy source, it’s not necessarily Australia who’s best placed to manufacture them.
Nick Stern and Ross Garnaut are pushing the line that the global financial crisis is an opportunity for a climate change agreement in Copenhagen.
Indeed such a structural break could be a good opportunity. There will be more global will to cooperate.