The Panama talks were the last official meeting before the annual Conference of Parties scheduled for Durban from 28 November – 9 December 2011.

The G77 and China (now 132 countries) have expressed themselves well-pleased with their effort and the progress of the talks. Civil society groups, presumably at the same meeting, gave the developed countries a fair rollicking. Furthermore they express a complete lack of confidence in South Africa “to ensure an inclusive, transparent and democratic process, unlike what happened in Cancun and Copenhagen.”

The Maldives say the talks are “stupid and endless”.

What’s going on?

The developing countries are quite used to the rich countries promising much and delivering little or nothing. On this occasion the rich countries have promised less than the poor countries have offered. The developing countries say the EU should accept what China, India, Brazil etc are offering and sign up to binding cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.

This Bloomberg report sounds positive up front – the EU may go ahead with a Kyoto extension without Canada, Japan and Russia – but the further you read the worse it gets. They are shooting for a “declaration of intent” in Durban, a plan for a plan, and it looks like a bridge too far. Priority one, two, three, and four is for the US to join up and bring more to the table. They won’t unless China, India and Brazil join up on the same basis, which they won’t.

Any way Capitol Hill is infested with climate change deniers, so they can’t.

Then China must say when it expects its CO2 output to stop rising. They won’t.

Former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, predicts a “very difficult meeting”. He thinks we “need to move to a comprehensive treaty that embraces all nations.” He also thinks it would be a hard sell in difficult economic times for the EU to sign up to a legally-binding target when the United States, Canada, Russia and Japan won’t.

Indeed the EU have said they will need to see a road map indicating when the biggest emitters – led by the United States, China and India – are prepared to sign up.

Still they might be able to patch something up:

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said that one solution would be for some economies to recommit under Kyoto “to uphold the rules-based system,” with other nations making pledges that are “rigorous” but outside the treaty.

Meanwhile India is set to become more aggressive, seeking the inclusion of three agenda items at Durban:

India wants to include three contentious issues — on unilateral trade measures, intellectual property rights (IPR) and equitable access to sustainable development — in the provisional agenda of the 17th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 17) to be held in Durban, South Africa, Nov 29-Dec 10.

I think international trade issues refers to moves like the EU putting a carbon tax in incoming air flights.

The concern for intellectual property rights relates to free access to relevant new technologies.

“Equitable access to sustainable development” is called in this Hindustani Times report “a right to have equal access to global atmospheric space”. I think it means the right to emit carbon in the name of development.

The conference is also bound to make progress on specific issues like putting a price on shipping. A report from Oxfam and the World Wildlife Fund have come up with a proposal:

According to the proposal, applying a carbon price of $25 per tonne to bunker fuel would help cut emissions while generating $25 billion per year by 2020. The finance would be used both to compensate developing countries for marginally higher import costs that could result from the carbon price, and to provide more than $10 billion per year to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

According to the report, the carbon price would only increase the costs of global trade by 0.2% – equivalent to $2 for every $1000 traded.

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.

One of the more interesting scenarios for stabilisation I’ve seen recently came from Bill Hare of Potsdam in Chapter 2 of the Worldwatch Institute State of the World 2009 report:

Figure 1: Bill Hare's stabilisation trajectory for a safe climate

This he reckons is the “emissions pathway required to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius with higher confidence”. Start early, go hard and reach zero emissions by 2050, then go negative. The trajectory is designed for a safe landing. After flirting with 2C the temperature is meant to come back to 1C above pre-industrial in the latter part of this century.

The same sort of thinking was contained in the Climate crunch issue on Nature where Malte Meinshausen did much of the heavy lifting. The basic concept here was that there is a limited remaining budget of gigatonnes of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere before we hit 2C. The cumulative quantity of emissions is what’s important. Since industrialisation we’ve already used up half our allowable budget. We can do the same again and that’s it.

It is commonly thought that if we start later we have to cut harder, but that’s OK provided we reach the same end point by 2050. What Meinshausen et al are saying is that if we start later we have to hit that end point sooner. It’s the area under the line on the graph, stupid!

Hare was looking at a safe climate scenario. Meinshausen based his calculations on the riskier kind of scenario being adopted politically around the world of a 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050 and zero by about 2080:

Figure 2: Meinshausen’s stabilisation path and related temperature values

This scenario has a 75% chance of not breaching the 2C limit. The graph comes from an article by Stefan Rahmstorf, where he puts the situation in, well, very plain and simple German. (For plain English, see RealClimate.) The budget for 2000-2050 is 1000gt of CO2 (or around 1500gt CO2e). But oops! we’ve blown a third of it already in the years 2000-2008! So our options are spelt out in Meinshausen’s second graph:

Figure 3: Meinshausen’s emissions reduction options

If we leave peaking global emissions from 2010 until 2015, the penalty is that the annual reduction rate goes up from 2% to 3.6%. I was actually shocked by the difference every five years makes. Remember the words of our elders!

50% reduction by 2050 depends on peaking in 2010. If you leave it until 2015 it has to be 90% by 2050 for the same climate outcome. Leave peaking to 2020 and we need zero by 2045.

Now the Germans have taken the remaining emissions budget and looked at the implications for individual countries if the budget is allocated equitably, based on population. Then they’ve specified how many years it would take major emitters to blow their budget at current emissions rates. Here are some of the results:

Figure 4: Future responsibility for emissions

A few things stand out. Firstly, the US is in a hopeless situation. If, say, they bought credits from India and other developing countries there would be a massive transfer of wealth.

Secondly, no-one should be buying credits from China, which might come as a surprise to them.

Third, the future of the planet does depend critically on what the US and China do.

Australia presumably is worse placed than the US.

What the world has been doing lately is illustrated in Will Steffen’s recent report which contained this graph:

Figure 5: CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2007

The Raupach et al 2007 paper which contained the original graph indicated that 70% of the increase in emissions was coming from developing and transitional economies. There is obviously an urgent need to equip these countries with renewable energy technology.

I think the Germans’ approach is rational and gives a new gloss to the phrase “common but differentiated responsibility”. Paying for the external cost of our lifestyles and exercising responsibility towards both the planet and posterity. We know that that the world does not operate according to reason but what the Germans have done provides a useful perspective with which to judge the outcomes of Copenhagen.

Speaking of which, it is not yet clear, to me at least, what we can expect from Copenhagen. This BBC story suggests three main options. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) said:

Three options were on the table, said Mr de Boer: a completely new document, an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, or a “series of decisions” made at the Copenhagen talks.

The developing countries are insisting on specific pledges of cuts by the developing countries, which would come from an extension of the Kyoto protocol. A completely new treaty is not going to happen at Copenhagen; there is no time.

What they are shooting for now, it seems, is a political framework

an “overarching decision” that sets individual targets for industrialized countries, and determines what level of emissions reductions major developing countries are willing to make by 2020.

Then leaders need to

set a deadline for a treaty that works out those details.

They will also need to settle on an assistance package for developing countries. In this regard the EU is now proposing a 100bn euros a year to 2020 of which they will supply about a quarter. It’s not a lot. Whether this is a circuit breaker remains to be seen.

Stephen Chu’s attendance at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium notwithstanding, (it happened just after the publication of the Nature “Climate Crunch” issue, so he would have seen the graphs) he has to bring the American people, or at least Congress along with him. The US may not commit at all unless the Senate passes the climate bill.

Obama won’t go Copenhagen to make things happen. He’ll only go if things do happen without him. Besides he’ll be busy collecting his Nobel prize.

The target of a 17% reduction from 2005 levels I understand equates to 4% from 1990. So at best we’ll get a FAIL from the US in terms of what the world needs from them. Not even close.

The difficulty domestically in the US is well-illustrated by the report that 10 Democrat Senators want a protective tariffs provision to shield the steel industry against imports from China and other developing nations. That would make the Chinese “very frustrated and angry”. But the US senators may not play ball unless China itself comes up with some commitments. They would be looking for numbers.

Please note that the planet doesn’t benefit except perhaps marginally from the export of the American steel industry.

To complicate matters, senators Boxer and Kerry have now cooked up an energy bill (mentioned in the earlier link) proposing a reduction of 20% from 2005 levels. It seems that the Republicans will ensure that nothing goes anywhere, at least until after Copenhagen.

China’s Hu Jintau recently made a splash by pledging at a UN summit to cut “carbon intensity,” or the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each dollar of economic output, over the decade to 2020. There is a question as to what that actually means. In all probability it means, inter alia, (a) that Chinese emissions will continue to grow, but not as fast as they might have done, and (b) that Chinese reliance on coal, currently at about 70%, would remain for at least several decades.

We live in a world where both population and per capita GDP are expanding. Adam Barnes has calculated that we need to reduce emissions per unit of GDP by 66% by 2050 if we just want to keep emissions at their present dangerous levels. That’s based on a population increase of 50% and a mere doubling of per capita GDP.

If we are shooting for an 80% reduction by 2050 we’ll need a 96% reduction in emissions per unit of GDP, assuming 50% population growth and 3% pa growth in per capita GDP.

China plans to cut “energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010.” If you believe them, at their GDP growth rate that would still lead to rising emissions.

Raupach et al found that world energy intensity in relation to GDP had steadily decreased during the 20th century, but began to increase in the 21st. We need to do something about it but by itself it’s not enough.

China plans to get 15% of its power from renewables by 2020. That’s less than Australia’s RET of 20% but makes for a very large industry. I’m not sure whether it includes nuclear, very likely it does.

On a recent thread Roger Jones commented that the Chinese are working on a big integrated model with all their energy sectors to peak emissions and decline within three decades. The scientists think it can be done, the policy makers are not yet convinced. This finds support in a recent BBC story where the best prospect held out is peaking at 2030. More likely 2040.

Given where they would be then, this is also a “fail” in terms of what the world needs.

As everyone heads off to Barcelona for the penultimate gabfest, to me the prospects for Copenhagen, at best, don’t look all that good.

I’ll finish with some comments from me, totally unqualified lay person. First, two degrees isn’t safe. This from the RealClimate link:

We feel compelled to note that even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.

Second, I would understand that the Meinshausen scenarios are worked out with models that don’t include the longer term feedbacks James Hansen talks about. Even reaching Bill Hare’s 1C target would leave ice melting more than it is at present.

Third, as we saw in looking at Susan Solomon’s work, if we hit zero emissions tomorrow the climate would take a long time to recover. Delays measured in decades have consequences measured in centuries.

Fourth, no-one really knows when we might hit one of those dreaded tipping points that could by themselves ramp up the temperature a couple of degrees, or perhaps freeze Europe over.

That and more is why I’d prefer to take Bill Hare’s stabilisation path and shorten it to reach zero by 2030. But I guess it will take the world at least 10 years to wake up. By then it will be desperately close to game over as far as our emissions budget is concerned.

I think at least some of the European policy makers know. It’s the Americans, the Chinese and the rest of us that need to wake up.

The Holocene has been good for us as a species, but right now I fear we are heading somewhere else.

Update: I’ve added below an image from Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, who is head of the Potsdam Institute and the boss of Rahmstorf and Meinshausen mentioned in the post.

Figure 6: Stabilisation scenarios using the 'carbon budget' approach

This is a different way of representing the carbon budget approach as it equitably applies to representative countries in Figure 4 above. Germany is a fairly typical advanced economy with per capita emissions similar to Great Britain and France. High polluting countries like Australia, if they are not to bludge on the efforts of others, should hit zero about 2020. If we don’t do that we should be prepared to pay others not to pollute in order to make up the difference.

Remember that all this is based on a 67% chance (scarily inadequate) of staying within the ‘guard rail’ of 2C. People like Scellnhuber, Rahmstorf and Meinshausen know that 2C is too high for a safe climate. They invented the concept in the mid-199s and it took over a decade to be accepted by policy makers. Menwhile the science meanwhile had moved on.

All this is profoundly depressing.

“A big achievement of this meeting is that governments have made it clearer what they want to see in the Copenhagen agreed outcome,” said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change. “In my view, an ambitious and effective agreed outcome in Copenhagen is in sight – an outcome that provides a strong and definitive answer to the alarm raised by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

But a news item from the official site was headed Bonn talks yielded little consensus.

According to the French delegate Brice Lalonde:

“Everybody knows that global emissions have to be halved by 2050 (compared with 1990 levels), which implies that industrialized countries reduce theirs by 80 percent. And everyone knows that emissions by developing countries have to start falling by 2025 at the latest,” Lalonde said.

“But nobody’s signing up.”

It seems that there is considerable agreement on the 2050 goals, but the developing countries are not signing up to quantitative targets. One reason is the lack of ambition on the part of industrialised countries on 2020 targets. According to Deutsche Welle UN climate chief Yvo de Boer “…there is no question that the industrialized countries must raise their sights higher in terms of midterm emission cuts, and yes, time is short, but we still have enough time.” He identifies four points that the UN will have to agree on in Copenhagen:

“Ambitious emission reductions targets from industrialized countries; efforts by developing countries to limit the growth of their emissions; stable, significant predictable finance for adaptation and mitigation; and an equitable government structure.”

Developing countries are particularly critical that they are expected to come up with mitigation and adaptation programs when they don’t know the quantum of aid forthcoming.

While China and the rest are still insisting on a 40% CO2 emissions cut for the rich countries by 2020, it looks as though the US may have blinked on quantifiable targets for developing countries. But it seems likely that the US still will insist on China adopting a measurable and accountable path towards a cleaner economy against the ‘business as usual’ trajectory. See for example the interview by Der Spiegel with US deputy climate change envoy Jonathan Pershing. According to Pershing:

Major economies with large total emissions like China should take additional steps, including a quantitative and quantifiable set of actions with a legal requirement to implement those actions.

The US, according to Pershing, wants differentiated but identifiable programs for the various developing countries, at least the major emitters amongst them, and wants some countries such as South Korea moved into the industrialised category.

The Bonn meeting was the second of five such leading up to Copenhagen. That’s actually another 6 weeks of solid negotiations with all parties involved, plus other meetings. The US is experienced in playing the long game in trade negotiations, so nothing is final until it’s over. As one negotiator said, “The Big Bang comes at the end.”

Meanwhile the US target for 2020, watered down from 20% to 17% of 2005 levels, has been roundly criticised. Whether they’ll get away with this is doubtful. But if they increase their 2020 targets you can bet there will be a contra deal involving the developing countries.

Meanwhile back in Oz, Laura Tingle had an interesting article in last Friday’s AFR. She sees the Barnaby-led National position as staying put, but sees the Liberals splitting with their coalition partners to join Labor in passing the CPRS after Copenhagen. Thus the double dissolution will be avoided, Labor’s attempt to paint the Liberals a climate change sceptics will fail and the election can be fought principally on the economy.

It will be interesting if the industrialised countries eventually have to go for more than 25% by 2050. Japan has incurred the wrath of green groups by announcing a target of 15% below 2005 levels. Australia could argue that we were granted an extra 8% at Kyoto and if you look at it in per capita terms as a reduction from that higher level our target exceeds 40%. I’m not sure how much but I think you’d get little change out of 45%.

That may be seen as making a silk purse out of a sows ear, but there is a line of reasoning behind it. And it I’m not wrong it roughly represents the reality of what we would have to achieve from present levels.

To be honest, the CPRS and the whole Copenhagen saga seem strangely unreal in light of the kind of urgency that has been warranted by the science for a couple of years now. I feel with Paul Gilding that Copenhagen and the CPRS are just a training exercise for when the real game begins.

Gilding outlined his ideas on how the world would need to, and would, change in an excellent talk on Background Briefing on Sunday. A transcripts should be up in a couple of days time.

This morning in a complete coincidence a feed I take drew my attention to a BBC piece where the head of the UNFCCC, one Yvo de Boer, tells us they have now put on the table for the first time a “real negotiating text”. The text is available from this site or if you prefer, go directly to the pdf document.

The purpose of this post is to share thoughts and any other sources, with a few initial thoughts of my own.

But first we are going to have to learn a new language. So to enable you to dip into the document at any point I’ve had a go at identifying the acronyms. Corrections and additions are welcome.

COP Conference of Parties

EGTT Expert Group on Technology Transfer

ESTR Environmentally sound technology rewards

LDCs Least developed countries

MRV Measurable, verifiable or reportable*

NAMA Nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing countries

NAPA National adaptation programme of action (developing countries too, I think)

ODA Official development assistance

REDD Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries

SBSTA Subsidiary body for Scientific and Technological Advice

SIDS Small island developing states

TNA Technology needs assessment

TRIPS Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (a WTO term – as in TRIPS Agreement)

* From an article on India, linked below.

The one that perhaps needs explanation is the COP. It’s the 192 members of the UNFCCC meeting in conference. Copenhagen will be COP-15.

From the above it can be seen that a lot of work is being put into the administrative arrangements for implementation and cooperation.

The text is in typical UN form with alternative texts included. The WTO does not use this technique, preferring a ‘chairman’s text’, which is the source of endless grief. The UN approach gives reasonable hope, I think, of some sort of an agreement.

CO2 targets of 350, 400 and 450ppm seem to be in contemplation (see para 12, p.8), with global emissions reduction targets ranging from 50% by 2050 to more than 85%. The top bid for the developed countries is to reduce emissions by more than 95% (see para 14 b).

Emissions reductions targets by 2020 range from “by at least 25 to 40″ to “at least 45″.

That’s all from a 1990 baseline.

A guard rail of 1.5C is mentioned as an alternative to 2C.

The options for peaking of emissions range from “between 2010 and 2013″ and “in the next 10-20 years.

In para 15 they’ve had a shot at targets for developing countries with 2020 as the main benchmark. I think that para will get knocked out.

If it does the adequacy of the whole thing will depend on whether they choose the ambitious end of the spectrum and whether the NAMA approach for developing countries under the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ will deliver or just lead to gaming in individual state’s perceived interests.

On the positive side we have China demanding 40% emissions cuts of the rich countries by 2020. If they turn out to be gaming the situation Paul Krugman suggests we should just whack on some tariffs.

India will take a hard line in wanting clear and quantified commitments of aid to the developing countries. In total:

During negotiations, China and India have called for 1% of the developed world’s gross domestic product (GDP) to be committed to developing countries for emission cuts. As of now, negotiation submissions do not mention any concrete financial commitments.

From the above Australia might not be lead in the saddlebag, but no help either with their ambitions firmly to the bottom of the range. It would be better for the world if they just shut up. Attend, but keep their heads down and just shut up.

As to whether Copenhagen as such saves the world, that depends in part on how badly the world needs saving. Based on the work done in the Climate Crunch issue of Nature I’ve head one estimate that if we continue to increase emissions at 3.5% a year we’ll use up our carbon budget in maybe 11 years (that was David Spratt the other day on Bush Telegraph on the radio).

Via a link from the thread at Rooted MIT reckon warming could be double that previously predicted:

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees.

The UNFCC draft mentions periodically reviewing progress (para 16) and a comprehensive review by 2016 in the light of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report. But that’s only progress, not the targets and goals until presumably 2016. Even if they are ambitious at Copenhagen, I’ll wager they’ll be back at it before then. Especially since according to Ronald Prinn, the lead author of the MIT study, their modeling:

may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback “is just going to make it worse,” Prinn says.

The pictures that emerge are of ambivalent participants, and clunky principles that demand attention. The winning photograph is a local solar installer in a residential project in South Africa. The photographer has tried to use an on camera fill flash, but doesn’t seem to have applied any exposure compensation, so the subject – an installer awkwardly crouching – is rather underexposed. The third placed photo, ‘Indian Sugar Power’, also feels like an uneasy moment has been captured. A boy is holding a loose sugar cane on a (presumably moving – we can’t tell because the shutterspeed is set too high) truck and glaring, unemotionally into the camera. The four placed photo, ‘Mount Bagasse’, actually shows some aesthetic effort, though it’s hardly in line with the intent of the competition – to showcase the way the CDM is ‘changing lives’. Instead, the subjects are thoroughly dominated by technology and the flattened by the landscape as if in an ironic homage to the romantic modernists.

Though the aesthetics of industrial waste gas destruction are conspicuously absent from the photo contest (they make up a disproportionate number of Certified Emissions Reductions), the GAO provides a nuanced view from experts on the issue. Some believed it a good move because it probably wouldn’t have happened anyway, and these cheap ($1, sold on for $25) offsets are finite and rapidly diminishing.

However the sense that the CDM, in a Frankenstein-esque move has overtaken its original role as provider of, well, finance for some clean development projects and devoured other development pathways (such as direct legislation) is perhaps the most notable punchline of the GAO report, which notes that

… using the CDM to involve developing nations in efforts to address climate change may not always have positive effects. For example, some experts said the mechanism encourages host countries to rely on external funding from industrialized nations. Others went further, saying the CDM can dampen or delay efforts by host countries to reduce emissions on their own. The CDM does not credit emission reductions that result from newly imposed policies or standards, in part because it would be difficult to demonstrate that emission reductions were a direct result of the law. This may pose a dilemma for host countries that want to implement low-carbon policies but also want to attract investment through the CDM. Given these considerations, many experts and researchers have said the CDM would best be used as a temporary tool to help transition countries toward broader commitments (p.38).

Which isn’t to say that policy insiders are aware of this problem. Flows through the CDM will almost certainly be explicitly pulled if developing countries don’t signal an intent to get on board an international mitigation effort down the track. Perhaps the most telling data from the work of the auditors was this graph which shows the inherent ambiguities in the notion of ‘additionality’:

The CDM isn’t just asphyxiating alternative technological development, but propping up industries that were well on their way too:

According to a review of available research, between one-third and one-half of CDM projects involve some type of technology transfer. Such transfer is much more common in certain types of projects, such as industrial gas projects that utilize “end-of-pipe” technologies developed in Europe and Japan. Apart from industrial gas destruction, the project types most likely to involve technology transfer appear to be wind power, landfill gas capture, and agriculture (biogas). However, one expert pointed out that most of the wind power capacity represented in the CDM project pipeline is sited in India and China, countries that have supported domestic wind industries prior to the CDM (p.44).

In Australia, of course, has devised its own solution to the question concerning technology. Cars in, wind out. One might be forgiven for thinking that our debate is completely arse backwards if we can’t even figure out how to transition away from fossil fuel dependent stationery energy, let alone what some abstract carbon target should be. Howard was a denialist through and through, but at least he put his priorities on the table – like looking after Australia’s natural advantages. Like having babies. and digging things up.

On a more positive – if entirely unrelated – note, get your daily does of hope and the sublime in one hit from Sarah Wilson’s extraordinary documentary slideshow of Texas School for the Blind prom.

Update: Point Carbon is reporting that a ruling on whether to include new HFC-23 production in the CDM has been delayed until June. Looks like it’s part of a broader trend of delays to hit the process.

Elsewhere: Kevin Smith in New Matilda: Money Can Save the World:

The winners are energy intensive companies, whose profit margins have benefited enormously in the short term through the lucrative trade in the credits themselves. Because of fundamental flaws in the design of the CDM, industry has been able to buy cheap carbon credits to meet their emissions commitments and avoid the cost of shifting to low carbon technologies. Add these savings to potential windfalls from new trading options in derivatives and other exotic financial services and it’s no surprise there is such a gold rush for this lucrative market.

Conversely, Southern countries have lost out enormously. Many projects, such as the waste incinerator in India, have been imposed on communities without their prior, informed consent…

Political will must instead be directed at ensuring that Northern countries meet their commitment to providing finance to the South that isn’t tied to undemocratic institutions like the World Bank and that doesn’t lock those countries further into the spiral of debt.