Anyone following prospects for the Copenhagen climate change conference recently can be forgiven for feeling mightily confused.
On Sunday, President Obama confirmed what others had said before - that Copenhagen would not produce a fully elaborated legally binding treaty, in the mould of the Kyoto protocol or its parent, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
When is a treaty not a treaty? When it is a political agreement.
The question of whether the climate change conference in Copenhagen this December will produce a new global treaty on greenhouse gas emissions has been vexing the minds of negotiators and observers at the United Nations climate change talks in Barcelona this week - the last formal negotiating session before Copenhagen.
Photo: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images
Since 2007, when countries set out a roadmap to a new agreement, the official line has been that a new treaty needed to be signed in December in order to give countries time to ratify it before 2012, when the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol expire.
But the UN and the EU have begun scaling back expectations that this can be achieved in the next six weeks.
Instead, they say the December conference must produce a “political deal”, that would have to be turned into a legal document in the subsequent months. The EU and the UN say it would probably take about six months; one senior negotiator, however, said it could take a year.
So, is this a big problem? It depends who you ask. Continue reading "Copenhagen delays: Failure to sign a treaty might not be so disastrous"
Some people may be confused as to the positions of developing countries in the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. That is not surprising, as they are confusing. Here are some pointers, and some myths busted.
Q. India and China keep saying they will not take on binding targets to cut their emissions or caps on their emissions. This scuppers a deal, right?
A. Wrong. For a start, India and China are not being asked to take on binding targets to cut their emissions. They are, along with other developing countries, being asked to take on “nationally appropriate mitigation actions”, or NAMAs. (Mitigation, in the climate change context, always means cutting or curbing emissions. It never refers to adjusting to the effects of climate change - that is called adaptation.) Continue reading "The Copenhagen positioning of China and India - not always what it seems"
On Energy Source:
UK’s Ofgem says £200bn in new investment needed (FT)
Reactions to Ofgem report come flooding in (FT)
Bangkok climate change talks produce little progress (FT)
Obama adminstration nudges Congress on cap-and-trade (FT)
Elsewhere:
Oil falls on hint of tightening monetary policy (Bloomberg)
Hydrogen fuel cells or electric cars? (Bloomberg)
15m EU buildings should be renovated to save energy (Reuters)
It was almost the last United Nations negotiating session before December’s crunch conference in Copenhagen, but the Bangkok session, which began on September 28 and ended on October 9, finished with a whimper rather than a breakthrough.
There was still no agreement on the key issues of how far developed countries will pledge to cut emissions in the medium term, and how they will provide financial help to poor countries, which need assistance both to cut emissions and cope with the effects of climate change.
There was some progress on some technical issues, such as how the global warming potential of new greenhouse gases would be calculated. And some of the 200 pages of negotiating text has been slimmed down.
But the pace of negotiations is still far too slow to ensure a new deal can be signed at Copenhagen in December, delegates said.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the official charged with bringing this year’s talks to a successful conclusion, looked on the bright side as he summed up: “A will has emerged in Bangkok to build the architecture to rapidly
implement climate action.”
But he urged the world to step up the pace of discussions when he added: “Significant differences remain. In December, citizens everywhere in the world will have a right to know exactly what their governments will do to prevent dangerous climate change. It is time now to step back from self
interest and let the common interest prevail.”
Stopping the lights going out in the UK will take £200bn of new investment in the energy sector, the power regulator Ofgem has calculated.
This could lead to rises in energy bills of 60 per cent for consumers.
Continue reading "Ofgem: £200bn of energy investment needed"
China’s recent pronouncements on climate change, and evidence that the country is on track to make an impressive dent in its emissions, have earned the country plaudits from around the world.
China’s contribution is now seen as a positive sign for the Copenhagen talks, surprising many in the US who were used to think of China as a dirty economy.
The Energy Source’s Fiona Harvey took part in a talk on the subject today on US National Public Radio. You can hear it here.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/09/green-china-and-the-clean-tech-race
Climate change is happening faster than was expected, and it is happening all over the world - in rich as well as poor countries.
That was the message from the third World Climate Conference, held in Geneva last week, according to Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The conference, focusing on global warming science and climate prediction, was hosted by the World Meteorological Organisation. Continue reading "Developed countries are not immune to climate change, warns NOAA chief"
We now have the results of the study by the Copenhagen Consensus - a group of economists brought together by Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Sceptical Environmentalist - showing which options for averting dangerous climate change they judge to offer the best value for money. Five economists - Finn Kydland, Thomas C. Schelling, Vernon L. Smith, Nancy L. Stokey, and Jagdish Bhagwati (the first three are Nobel laureates) decided the rankings.
Here are they are in full:
‘Very Good’
1. Marine Cloud Whitening Research - methods for increasing the reflectivity of clouds, for instance by spraying seawater into the air. Whiter clouds would mean more of the sun’s rays reflected back into space, but some scientists fear it could cause unintended consequences such as a lack of rainfall in regions such as the Amazon.
2. Energy R&D - we need much more research into new forms of energy, the group concluded.
3. Stratospheric Aerosol Insertion Research - shooting particles such as sulphates into the highest reaches of the atmosphere. This would mimic the actions of volcanoes, which are known to cool the climate as the particles they send into the atmosphere reflect sunlight away from earth. But would it also cause acid rain? Or changes to rainfall patterns?
4. Carbon Storage Research - the science of capturing and storing carbon dioxide is still in its infancy. Continue reading "Thumbs up to geo engineering, thumbs down to carbon taxes from Lomborg group"
It was an extraordinary thing for the British Wind Energy Association to say.
In a briefing note sent to journalists late on Friday, the BWEA admitted that there was no business case for building a new manufacturing plant for onshore wind turbines in the UK. Nor was there a business case for Vestas to keep its wind turbine manufacturing plant open.
This is a blow to the UK government’s low-carbon industrial strategy, which relies on attracting wind manufacturing jobs to the UK, as well as jobs in wind farm installation and maintenance.
Onshore wind is a limited market in the UK because of the huge difficulty of gaining planning permission for wind farms.
The BWEA argues that in order for a turbine maker to set up a factory in the UK, or for Vestas to convert its factory from making blades for the US to making blades for the UK, the company would need to be confident of having about 1GW of new orders per year. There is no chance of that happening, given that the cost of doing so would make the company’s products uncompetitive compared with rival products from Denmark, Germany and Spain, where most of the turbines installed in the UK come from. Continue reading "Wind turbine manufacturing in the UK - and beyond"
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