Other stories below: Merkel Demands China, India and Brazil Reduce Emissions; China Says Economic Woes No Excuse for Climate Action
Science not politics must drive Durban climate talks
Global climate talks need to focus on the growing threat from extreme weather and shift away from political squabbles that hobble progress toward a tougher pact to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, the head of the U.N. climate panel said.
Negotiators from nearly 200 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, on Monday for two-week talks, with minimal expectations of major progress toward an agreement that will eventually bind all major economies to emissions caps.
Rajendra Pachauri warned the latest round of talks risked being bogged down by “short-term and narrow political considerations.”
“It is absolutely essential that the negotiators get a continuous and repeated exposure to the science of climate change,” Pachauri told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday.
“If we were to do that it will definitely have an impact on the quality and outcome of the negotiations, after all these are human beings, they have families, they are people also worried about what is going to happen to the next generations.”
China says economic woes no excuse for climate inaction
Economic problems in Europe and elsewhere should not get in the way of a new pact to fight global warming, China’s top climate official said on Tuesday ahead of major climate talks in South Africa.
“After the financial crisis, every country has had its problems, but these problems are just temporary,” Xie Zhenhua, vice-director of the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters on Tuesday.
Officials in Beijing have suggested economic turmoil in Europe and political unrest in North Africa have pushed climate change far down the list of global priorities, overshadowing next week’s talks and undermining plans to provide cash and technical support to poor nations to adapt to climate change.
“Climate change isn’t unimportant at this stage, but it isn’t so salient, and I think it will again draw the attention of the global community in 2015 after the (new round of) scientific assessments are carried out,” said Xie.
He was referring to a review of nations’ emissions reduction pledges and a major 2013-14 report by the U.N. climate panel.
Europe may find itself isolated at a meeting of Major Economies Forum in Washington this week with India and United States being on the same page on opposing the legally binding climate treaty. The forum will be discussing the future of the existing climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, and the ambit of the proposed new climate treaty under long term cooperative action to fight climate change.
The European Union has sought that the second commitment period of the protocol, starting from 2013, should have legally binding emission reduction targets for all nations, which India and United States have opposed.The EU has proposed that after 2020 there should be a mandatory emission reduction targets for all countries including developing nations such as India and China. Between 2013 and 2020, the countries will have to commit on their voluntary climate change actions without any conditions.
India has declared to reduce its emission intensity by 20-25% of its 2005 levels by 2020 with a condition that rich nations would provide money and transfer clean technology to meet the target. So far, rich nations have been dithering on funding the clean technology transfer mechanism and providing finance to the developed world to fight climate change.
Angela Merkel: China, India, Brazil must cut CO2 emissions
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday large emitters of greenhouse gases among rapidly-growing economies such as China, India and Brazil must agree to cut their emissions.
Merkel said in parliament: “Worldwide CO2 emissions this year were higher than ever. We are in an extremely difficult situation where the Kyoto Protocol expires, we have not got far and an extension of the protocol will unfortunately not happen in Durban.
Negotiators from almost 200 countries meet from November 28 in South Africa for a U.N. climate summit, where only modest steps are expected toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions despite warnings from scientists that extreme weather will likely increase as the planet warms.
The Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. plan obliging some 40 industrialised nations to cut emissions, expires next year. Rich nations are reluctant to target major emission cuts beyond 2012 without commitments from big developing economies to curb theirs. The latter want to see deeper cuts from wealthy nations.
The World Meteorological Organization said on Monday the three main greenhouse gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in 2010.
On COP17 Climate Change Conference, Brazil Keeping The Faith
According to a poll by The Economist taken during last week’s virtual Global Energy Conference, just 15% of respondents think that any substantial deals on climate change will be reached at next week’s COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. Brazil, on the other hand, is keeping the faith.
A signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, Brazil has its own set of national laws that bind the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and invest in new, cleaner tech. The country’s ambassador for the UN Climate Change Conference, Luis Alberto Figueiredo Machado, said that the country feels no pressure to reduce carbon emissions to meet international Kyoto agreements. They’re going to meet those goals easily.
He also said that despite the U.S. Congress generally in disagreement on climate change, with politicians out of lock step with most Americans who believe climate change is a problem, Brazil believes that the U.S. will deliver on climate change. Some day.
“We are absolutely convinced that the U.S. government will do what they said in terms of reducing CO2. They are a major party in (climate change) negotiations. We are confident,” he said during a press conference on Monday.
SocGen cuts EU, UN carbon price forecasts
Societe Generale cut its price forecasts for European Union and U.N.-backed carbon permits on Tuesday due to an expected drop in industrial emissions and flagging demand for permits due to prospects of a recession in the euro area next year.
Carbon permits called EU Allowances (EUAs) are traded under the EU’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS), which caps the emissions of 11,000 carbon-intensive power stations and industrial firms in 30 countries.
The benchmark EUA price slumped to a new 33-month low of 8.88 euros ($11.96) a tonne on Monday as worries mount about the EU’s economic health, shedding nearly 40 percent since the start of the year.
“This should lead to lower European industrial production and should be broadly unsupportive for carbon demand.” The bank said in a research note.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
“So far, rich nations have been dithering on funding the clean technology transfer mechanism and providing finance to the developed world to fight climate change.”
Well, isn’t that clever!
Next we’ll be hearing cries of alarm when Chinese made solar panels appear all over Africa. Government subsidy they cry. Unfair advantage. We can’t compete!
If you don’t play the game, you can’t compete. If you won’t even acknowledge the rules-setting procedure, you’re dealing yourself out. It’s that simple.
The Western world became rich by plundering the non-Western world. The amount looted by England from India alone would be in the trillions in current money. The colonial metastases, the USA, Canada, Australia etc, grew rich by exterminating the indigenous and then stealing everything. To expect them to change their spots now is crazy. The West will use the climate talks to attempt to foist all the costs on the poor world, and promises of money are, like other promises of aid for the poor world, simply PR lies, endlessly reiterated in ‘photo opportunities’, then ignored.
“Next we’ll be hearing cries of alarm when Chinese made solar panels appear all over Africa.”
Too late. Chinese solar’s been liberating rural African villagers from expensive and dangerous kerosene for years, now. The light’s apparently better, and it charges their mobile phones, too ;)
The world’s green nations should not wait for nations like the US and India to legally bind to a climate treaty. The green nations should take the lead, even without a global agreement, and drive themselves into a cleaner economy, with all the competitive advantages they will have in the long term when they will lead the market in green technology and sustainable energy production. The grey countries will loose competitiveness in the long term when the rest of the world is green and will have to pay the accumulated environmental and social bill.
trevi, you are a veritable fountain of sage advice. Sorry-couldn’t help myself! The only way to save ourselves is to go ahead with introducing new technologies, new ways of life, new economic orders etc, wherever we are able to do so, and see if it succeeds. The forces of Evil, the ‘market capitalists’ and ‘Western supremacists’ will do everything they can to undermine the effort, but they must be defeated or humanity will disappear-it’s as simple as that.
Go Adelady, Trevi and Mulga and keep asking those questions EDpeak. It’s coming up to crunch time now. So many people, and countries, now know it that something is going to have to give. However that resolves itself is to be seen.
However, I remain strongly of the view that humanity is not suicidal and despite our recent attempt [last 250 years] at it, we will decide on life.
Barry, how can China, or the rest of Asia or Africa for that matter, make its voice heard in international forums if they do not have the only thing the West cares about which is economic clout? ME
Speaking of global warming, any (semi)experts care to comment on
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-25/global-warming-rate-could-be-less-than-feared/3694896
“Global warming rate could be less than feared”?
My first criticism is merely the cautionary point that many many many studies suggest why it could be higher than predicted, while this is just one study saying less.
On top of that, the precautionary principle, and it’s clear what the policy imperatives are.
They tried to “reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last ice age 21,000 years ago” rather than since 1850 and the reason for optimism today [they say without irony] is that their research “shows that even very small changes in the ocean’s surface temperature can have an enormous impact elsewhere” thus they predict only 2.3C warming from CO2 doubling rather than 3C.
Would seem this is a long-term period study, though the article doesn’t state (directly) whether this includes long-term feedbacks, Hensen suggests those mean more warning, not less, than we worry about.
With all the wild cards of the huge potential positive feedback particularly in the arctic there’s plenty to worry about, but am I missing other valid criticisms of that paper (or reasons to be more accepting of its conclusions)?
Please chime in.
Irritatingly they end with an absurdly confident quote about “ruling out” higher temp rises this century by another scientist not involved i this study: “[the study has] shown is that those very high values [of temp increase from co2 doubling] are ruled out” That’s his words, “ruled out”
Even if I believe that, what about what we’re doing to promosing higher methane in atmosphere, and other reasons to not “not worry”? But I’m not buying “ruled out” sounds way too strong to say based on one study.
The lower sensitivity they arrive at is still within the ranges of the IPCC reports. And they say nothing about possible emissions / concentration outcomes.
So ‘ruling out’ anything seems a bit premature – because sensitivity is *per doubling*. If the world’s lunatics march blindly ahead burning everything they can dig up, we’ll race through the first doubling and be well on our way to the second round.
At which point all bets are off, on sea level rise for starters. Don’t want to think about the others.
It’s just more disinformation, like tons of the dung dumped before. The Rightwing MSM, and John Howard’s ABC will do their propaganda duty, as ever, and push it for all its worth, like loyal dung beetles.
James Annan’s looked at the Schmittner paper.
Schmittner on sensitivity
More on Schmittner
The very notion that a poor economic outlook could be used as an excuse for inaction on climate change is not only lunacy, it is also intellectual trickery. It equates the intrinsic values of money and climate change but money has no intrinsic value – it is a human construct which has been elevated above the value of those things it is supposed to represent.
But don’t expect those who print money to bail out their mates in the big banks (and thereby change its value) to acknowledge that fact, ME
Hey China, it works both ways. If economic contraction isn’t an excuse to not cut CO2 then economic growth isn’t an excuse either.
China now has a PER-CAPITA footprint of 6.2 tonnes per person. That is higher than France (5.6), Sweden (5.1) and Switzerland (5.0) for example.
It is already 30% above the world average of 4.8 and a whopping 250% of what the world average needs to get to by 2050.
So when exactly is China going to agree to cut their PER-CAPITA footprint? Oh, that’s right, they can’t because economic growth is more important to them.
China has totally run out of moral authority on climate.
Barry, a lot of China’s excess of emissions and the West’s apparent recent comparative reductions are simply due to Western production being transferred to China. If you ascribed the emissions to those countries were the product is consumed, rather than the producer countries, the picture would change. China is still a country where many are poor, and the per capital level of emissions created by Chinese consumption is still a good deal less than in the West, and for the poor it is radically less (as for the poor in the West).
I agree with Barry on this point. China is trying to transform itself into the world’s largest and most powerful economy as quickly as possible, while claiming they’re too poor to control their emissions. That’s every bit as hypocritical as anything the US, the EU, et al. do.
And as for the argument that it’s production in China of goods for consumption in the West that’s pushing up their emissions — OK, let us count that, and let us also then give the US and other importing countries in the West control over how those goods are produced. If China, in the interest of being economically competitive, is building filthy coal plants at a record clip (because they’re the cheapest way to turn fossil fuels into moving electrons), then the resulting high carbon intensity is their fault, regardless of where the goods are consumed.
We can yell at each other over such things to the point of exhaustion, and I suspect that behind the scenes at various COP meetings that’s exactly what has and will continue to happen. But the bottom line is that as long as countries like the US, China, and India play by their own rules and put short-term economics ahead of addressing our shared sustainability crises, we’re in very deep trouble and the situation will only get worse.
Humanity is passing through a very difficult adolescence into young adulthood. Whether we can find the maturity and the enlightened self-interest to survive the transition remains to be seen.
Exactly.
As Ken Caldiera point out in his recent PNAS paper “The supply chain of CO2 emissions”, people benefit at every point in the fossil fuel supply chain by not paying for the carbon pollution.
Without carbon pricing covering the costs of using our atmosphere as a dumping ground:
1) the coal companies in Australia profit by selling an energy source cheaper than its real cost.
2) Chinese companies profit from buying that coal energy cheaper than its real costs so they can undercut the competition using more full-priced energy
3) The American consumer profits from buying a product cheaper than the equivalent one made with more full-priced energy.
All three nations benefit. China is just as much a part of the climate profiteering as Australia or USA in this example. Full accounting would split the carbon among the three parties. Some of the coal emissions in China should be applied to Australia and some to USA.
Caldiera’s paper has all the data on these flows for 2004.
For example, China had net CO2 exports (fuels + embodied in goods) of 17% of their emissions. Since they benefit from these exports in a big way, let’s assign half to them and half to the importing nations. That means net exports of 9% for China.
Take their 6.5 tCO2 per capita and subtract 9%. You get 5.9 tCO2 per capita. That is still way above the world average of 4.8 and heading in the wrong direction from the 2.4 average we need to hit by 2050.
China is profiting from exporting CO2 in exactly the same way the tar sands in Canada are profiting from exporting CO2.
The game afoot in the world right now is to export emissions to someone else and pretend you have no responsibility for any of it.
China is not a “white hat” on this issue, however the per capita figures are misleading, since they count where GEOGRAPHICALLY the co2 is emitted, which might have made sense except for off-shoring by UK and French and US etc companies moving their operations to China, or a key part of the manufacturing process…it is stuff WE in the WEST consume, and it’s produced FOR US (mostly)…
the calculations have been done in several studies, though I don’t have them at my fingertips, it moved the actual per capita in UK, EU, US, higher than the official figure, and in china to lower than the official figure…count what the people in the country actually use (plus/minus their own imports, and our own exports, yes, but the figures are still significantly distorted to _under_state_ our actual (average) per capita CO2 here in the ‘developed’ world.
If you look at historical per capita the developed world looks even worse…of course China should not follow in our footsteps, but we’re too busy making (very short term) profits here in the west to provide much of a model for China…
So we should clean up our own house..
But yes, China still needs to live on planet earth (or its people do) so moving faster away from coal (right now they want to cap it in 2015, their coal plant co2/year, I think a news item said) and also faster with wind, solar, etc
No I am not happy about their rate of building coal plants..the above stats about how misleading the official numbers are, does need to be kept in mind when we look at official ‘per capita co2′ numbers, though..
EDpeak, good points about including emissions embodied in products consumed. Nations like USA should have to be responsible for some of China’s emissions.
Two points though:
1) China profits handsomely by using lots of dirty coal to make products for export. They get to undercut producers in nations that aren’t so dirty. So China should have to “own” half the emissions embodied in the products they export. The other half should be “owned” by the importing nation.
2) As mentioned in a comment above, the data on China’s net CO2 exports is available in Caldiera’s “The supply chain of CO2 emissions” paper. That shows that a net of 17% of China’s emissions went into creating exports. So China should get to subtract half of that: 8.5% of their emissions. When you do that, they still have a per-capita footprint of 5.9 tCO2 per person. They have zoomed past the world average of 4.8 and are heading in the wrong direction from the global goal of 2.4 tCO2 per person by 2050.
So the question becomes, at what point does China need to commit to cutting their emissions? The atmosphere literally can handle China at 5.9 and soaring rapidly.
Yes the USA, EU, Russia, Canada and Australia ate most of the seed corn already. But at some point it isn’t OK for humanity if China decides to eat the rest.
Of course the past carbon hogs have to cut more than they are. But China has gone far past the point of not having to be engaged in a definite plan to cut back.
Excellent post. Climate change is a universal problem,why this dissent by some Nations?
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
As Reagan taught us, Americans are exceptional, and thus are excepted from all the rules that apply to the rest of the world.
Think of the earth as a bank; the US has been drawing on the deposits of the bank for nearly two centuries, and because we are exceptional, we Americans get to draw twice as much as anyone else.
China is out of line if it thinks having four times the US population justifies it drawing more from the bank than the US has. The US drawing twice as much as everyone else gives the US the right to draw twice as much forever. And with the bank in full overdraft and printing pollution debt like crazy, the rest of the world needs to stop withdrawing so the US can continue keeping on.
Look, Americans are exceptional and have historically polluted more than anyone else, and we have over the past to centuries polluted many many times more than everyone else. So, because we have an exceptional record on polluting, both polluting on a daily basis, polluting the most in total, we must not be expected to change, because we are exceptional. The rest of the world must stop polluting so the American Exceptionalism in polluting can be preserved.