Tag Archive for 'copenhagen agreement'

Climate crunch and Copenhagen: the fierce urgency of now

Published
by
Brian
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change
. 135 Comments

Back in 2003 James Hansen was saying that we had about 10 years to get ourselves organised to tackle global warming and climate change. You ignore him at your peril.

For three days this May some of the best minds on the planet attended a curious meeting at Cambridge University, the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, to contribute their ideas and authority to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, in this case the climate crisis and its implications.

The choice of topic is not surprising. This was the second such meeting. The first was two years earlier at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. So the list of participants included one Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of said Potsdam Institute, Malte Meinshausen from the same place, Rachendra Pachauri, the IPCC head honcho, Lords Gidden and Stern, and a fella called Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy for the USA.

The message from our intellectual elders is captured in the phrase:

The fierce urgency of now…

As it happens the folk at Potsdam have been putting a bit of flesh on that message.

Continue reading ‘Climate crunch and Copenhagen: the fierce urgency of now’

Pre-Copenhagen positioning – where are we at globally?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 4 months ago
in China, Climate change, Developing world, Environment, Europe, International and USA
. 12 Comments

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.