Showing posts with label doha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doha. Show all posts
Monday, 10 December 2012
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Climate Compensation Row at Doha.
The solution of climate change compensation, and the like for the developing world is probably quite simple. The US could create its own money electronically to deal with it. In other words, Green Quantitative Easing, or rather Facilitation Finance in Transfinancial Economics.
RS
December 2012 Last updated at 14:51
Protesters hit out at the "hot air" surplus some nations want to carry over into the next Kyoto Protocol commitment period
Frustration at slow progress of the UN climate talks bubbled over when a spokesman for small island states (AOSIS) rounded on rich nations.
US representative Jonathan Pershing had been discussing plans to compensate poor nations for losses due to damage from climate change.But AOSIS spokesman Ronald Jumeau condemned wealthy countries for their lack of urgency.
The UN talks are into their second week in the Qatari capital.
Mr Jumeau said that there would be no need for talk about compensation if the rich had cut their emissions in previous meetings.
"The Doha caravan seems to be lost in the sand," he told a joint news conference. "As far as ambition is concerned, we are lost.
"We're past the mitigation (emissions cuts) and adaptation eras. We're now right into the era of loss and damage. What's next after that? Destruction? Disappearance of some of our islands?
"We're already into the era of re-location. But after loss and damage there will be mass re-locations if we continue with this loss of ambition."
The issue of compensation for climate losses looks set to become a major focus for negotiations at the conference.
The task of the meeting is to wind up negotiations under talks associated with the existing Kyoto Protocol on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, and move towards a new treaty in 2015 binding all nations, rich and poor in tackling climate change.
Developing countries are attempting to bolt down as many commitments as possible and they sense that there may be some movement on a new mechanism for loss and damage.
The idea is being backed in a petition to governments by 44 NGOs representing millions of people concerned about the impacts of climate change. It has been led by Care.
"The first and foremost response must be to immediately and dramatically cut emissions and help vulnerable countries and ecosystems adapt to new climate realities, " it says. "Governments must now also recognize that we are in a "third era" and redress the permanent loss and damage from climate impacts.
"Given historic inaction by developed countries we are heading for the biggest social injustice of our time."
They urge governments to establish a formal mechanism for loss and damage (the word "compensation" is being avoided; some nations, including the US won't countenance it because of the implication of guilt). They also want the UN to monitor and assess losses, and to find new approaches for addressing loss and damage, particularly for slow-onset events like, say, sea level rise.
Nick Mabey from the think-tank E3G told BBC News it was useful that the issue of long-term risk might become embedded in the negotiations. There were costs, he said, to avoiding action to cut emissions:
"The debate on loss and damage brings an important new dimension to the climate negotiations. The costs of failing to reduce climate risk must be internalised in the negotiations or agreement will be reached merely by lowering ambition for mitigation ."
"With a truly global agreement now possible in 2015, countries must now decide how much climate risk they are willing to take and what they are willing to do to reduce their exposure."
Mr Jumeau, from the Seychelles, went out of his way to praise the UK for its leadership on climate change, especially for its re-stated pledges of increased finance to help poor nations get clean energy - £1.8bn by 2015.
Germany followed by promising to increase its contributions further.
A spokesman for the UK delegation told BBC News: "The UK is still taking part in important negotiations around loss and damage. So far, we have indentified a number of areas where parties agree and we are working hard to find common agreement on the way forward."
Back in the UK, the Chancellor George Osborne was facing complaints from some Conservatives that money was going on climate finance when budgets were being cut for services in Britain.
His gas strategy, published alongside the Autumn Statement, confirms that he wants to review and maybe scrap the UK's unilateral targets on reducing emissions
Friday, 7 December 2012
How can anything rival the threat of climate change?
Updated
In order to tackle the looming catastrophe of climate change, we must first change the way information flows. Social media can help, writes Jonathan Green.
It could be that we don't quite have the mechanism to deal with this yet, the whole end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it thing. The vocabulary and processes that currently carry our public debate seem unequal to the task of leading what seems to be a discussion we need to have.Take this ABC evening news bulletin from Monday. Some context first: the latest dispatch from the midpoint of the climate talks in Doha was far from good. The gathering heard gloomy predictions: temperature rises of between four and six degrees by the end of the century, a glimpse of a coming and quite probably unstoppable calamity. The picture was little short of apocalyptic.
So, to the news.
Item one:
The chance of a pre-Christmas interest rate cut firmed today.Item two:
Customers angry about their rising bills confronted Melbourne's water retailers at a public forum in the city this afternoon.And item three,
Climate scientists say they're shocked and astonished by the latest data about global greenhouse gas emissions. They've hit an unprecedented high ... And China is responsible for most of the new growth in emissions. Scientists now warn the future's looking far more dangerous.It is here, in the sobering report that follows, that we learn a little more about the seemingly inexorable ecological forces combining to transform our planet within the next two lifetimes. Stock images: ice, steam, cooling towers. We then move smartly to item four:
Victorian health officials are analysing samples from a Bundoora cooling tower... As they investigate three cases of legionnaires' disease...How do we invest scientifically substantiated reports of the impending end of the world with the significance something so, ah, earth shattering, might merit? How do we delineate the routine clutter of the day from the latest urgings that we face, and should heed, a universal and existential threat?
Inserting climate change into the routine news mix is an interesting exercise. There is no doubt that within the media and political culture of this country (and others), climate change is seen as just another point of political contest.
So, while the World Bank, for example, can say this:
The projected impacts on water availability, ecosystems, agriculture, and human health could lead to large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems. The full scope of damages in a 4°C world has not been assessed to date.The likes of Andrew Bolt can say this:
It is grotesque, how Labor's scare-mongering has so terrified so many people. Consider the following facts: the world hasn't warmed in 16 years, the carbon tax would make at very most about 0.0038 degrees difference in a century, and modest warming could even leave us better off. Consider also man's astonishing ability to adapt, and the rapid progress in wealth, health and technology.Here, as with so many issues, the media coverage focuses on the conflict, no matter how spuriously based, rather than on the substance of the issue. Inserting something of true gravity into the everyday news has the interesting effect of exposing the thin superficiality of all the other elements, the Punch and Judy show of modern news and politics.
If newsmakers were to take seriously our slow descent into the threatening unknown of a four degrees warmer world then they would probably give the issue the sort of dominating and enduringly obsessive play we haven't seen the popular press throw around an issue since World War II.
Think about it. If you for a moment took seriously the proposition that we are entering a period that will see "adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems" – what a deliciously loaded snippet that is - then you would be hard pressed to justify inserting that story somewhere between the possibility of an interest rate cut and the sad but comparatively trivial discovery of three people with flu like symptoms in Melbourne's northern suburbs.
How can anything rival climate for significance?
The problem is of course one of both the scale of the threat and its contemporary invisibility. We are talking about a trend, a prospect, a probability. One that is boggling. Barely conceivable. That both admits idiotic and ideologically motivated "doubt" (see A Bolt above) and subtly invalidates the issue in the eyes of a news media that favours the instantaneous, graphic and loud.
If the consequences predicted for 2100 were happening now, well ... then we'd have a story.
It could be that the discussion of climate change and the pursuit of its solutions will be one of the first and most significant beneficiaries from the reframing of public debate in a world suddenly connected and thus freed from the constraints placed by rigidly hierarchical and corporatised media.
The possibilities demonstrated by the likes of the Arab spring go beyond using Facebook to draw like-minded crowds to a tear-gassing. The next step will be the global short-circuiting of information flow: instantaneous connections that can pass information unfiltered without categorisations and obstructions, without the external discipline of a news judgment that suits a particular platform or outlet over the needs of both audience and issue.
Resolving climate change will test most of our dominant paradigms.
Here's a glimpse of the enormity of the challenge, neatly described by Nick Feik in yesterday's Fairfax press.
Consider this: of all the coal, gas and oil fields that the world's corporations and nations have already quantified and have the legal right to exploit, 80 per cent now needs to stay in the ground if temperature rises are to be kept within 2 degrees.Let the implications of that settle ... the denial of market forces, the total reframing of energy sources and economics it implies.
Much is going to have to change, and much of it in ways that may force diminishments of aspects of our lives that for the moment we prize. The alternative appears to be calamity, unless we first change the flow of information... then we might witness the possibilities unlocked by a population suddenly able to choose its own hierarchy of issues and ideas.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article attributed a quote by Nick Feik to Chris Feik. The Drum regrets the error.
Jonathan Green presents Sunday Profile on Radio National and is a former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
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* Many leave Doha conference in despair
By Barbara Lewis and Alister Doyle
DOHA, Dec 9 (Reuters) - At the end of another lavishly-funded U.N. conference that yielded no progress on curbing greenhouse emissions, many of those most concerned about climate change are close to despair.
As thousands of delegates checked out of their air-conditioned hotel rooms in Doha to board their jets for home, some asked whether the U.N. system even made matters worse by providing cover for leaders to take no meaningful action.
Supporters say the U.N. process is still the only framework for global action. The United Nations also plays an essential role as the "central bank" for carbon trading schemes, such as the one set up by the European Union.
But unless rich and poor countries can inject urgency into their negotiations, they are heading for a diplomatic fiasco in 2015 - their next deadline for a new global deal.
"Much much more is needed if we are to save this process from being simply a process for the sake of process, a process that simply provides for talk and no action, a process that locks in the death of our nations, our people, and our children," said Kieren Keke, foreign minister of Nauru, who fears his Pacific island state could become uninhabitable.
The conference held in Qatar - the country that produces the largest per-capita volume of greenhouse gases in the world - agreed to extend the emissions-limiting Kyoto Protocol, which would have run out within weeks.
But Canada, Russia and Japan - where the protocol was signed 15 years ago - all abandoned the agreement. The United States never ratified it in the first place, and it excludes developing countries where emissions are growing most quickly.
Delegates flew home from Doha without securing a single new pledge to cut pollution from a major emitter.
So far, U.N. climate talks have missed just about every deadline. The rich nations of the world promised two decades ago to halt their rise in greenhouse gases. They failed. Next, they promised a sequel to Kyoto by 2009. They failed again.
Now they have a 2015 deadline to get a new global, binding deal in place, to enter into force after the extension of Kyoto expires in 2020. For the first time, it would apply to rich and poor countries alike. But with the world's nations divided over who must pay the cost, the task of reaching accord seems beyond the capabilities of the vast corps of international delegates.
Meanwhile, the world's weather is only getting more unstable. As the Doha talks dragged on, Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines left nearly 1,000 people dead or missing.
Hurricane Sandy last month was a reminder that even rich countries are not safe from extreme weather, which scientists say will become ever more common as the world heats up.
PROGRESS AT GROUND LEVEL
A series of reports released during the Doha talks said the world faced the prospect of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2F) of warming, rather than the 2 degree (3.6F) limit that nations adopted in 2010 as a maximum to avoid dangerous changes.
According to the World Bank, that would mean food and water shortages, habitats wiped out, coastal communities wrecked by rising seas, deserts spreading, and droughts both more frequent and severe. Most impact would be borne by the world's poorest.
"The alarm bells are going off all over the place," Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. "We are in a crisis and treating it like a process where we can dither away for ever."
Action at ground level has had a positive impact, even as the U.N. dithers. Investment in carbon-free renewable energy hit a record $260 billion in 2011.
In the United States, the discovery of techniques to produce natural gas from shale has cut the cost of gas, which has reduced emissions from the world's biggest polluter by replacing coal, a bigger carbon emitter, for power generation.
But although U.S. emissions - nearly a quarter of the world's total - have fallen, for the world as a whole this year they are expected to rise by 2.6 percent, up by 58 percent since 1990. Emerging economies led by China and India account for most of the growth.
Although frustrated by days and nights of haggling, ministers still back the United Nations as part of the solution.
"It's clear to me that this process is the only global framework we have and since this is a global problem, it has to be addressed globally," Denmark's Energy Minister Martin Lidegaard told Reuters.
"But obviously, this can't stand alone. Nations can't continue to hide behind the process. There's a direct link between what we deliver at home and here. We desperately need to combine action by regions, municipalities, citizens with this global approach. That is becoming more and more evident."
Negotiators say ultimately politicians - distracted by other events - need to become engaged.
"It (the environment) is no longer on the front page with the political and financial crisis. That is the reason why heads of state have to turn to this," the European Union's chief negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said.
CONVERTS
The conference is an easy target for cynics - not least because it was held in Qatar, a desert kingdom that exports carbon-producing fossil fuel and uses the proceeds to fund a lavish lifestyle for many of its 2.5 million people.
A country that burns fuel to desalinate water and build golf courses in the desert seems like an odd place to talk about curtailing consumption. But supporters say bringing producers like Qatar into the consensus for change is a step forward.
Business leaders are also getting involved.
"A lot of CEOs from the region have turned up. A lot of them are talking about sustainability and resource efficiency. That's no longer a dirty word," said Russel Mills, global director for energy and climate policy at Dow Chemical Co.
Dow, like many other big industrial firms, keeps a close eye on U.N. carbon policy because of the United Nations' role as "a kind of central bank" for pollution allowances.
The most developed carbon trading scheme is the European Union's, which has lurched from crisis to crisis. The value of EU Emissions Trading Scheme permits sank to a record low this month under the burden of surplus allowances during a recession.
But other jurisdictions such as Australia, California, South Korea and even China believe they can learn from Europe's mistakes and are developing their own emissions trading. Such schemes could be the planet's best hope of survival, and the United Nations is likely to play a role.
"Economy-wide carbon pricing, whether carbon taxes or cap and trade, is the only approach that can conceivably achieve the targets scientists advocate," Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard in the United States, said.
"Also, it will be most the cost-effective and therefore in the long run the most politically-viable approach."
Still, even with the best of intentions, U.N. diplomats are unlikely ever to deliver change at the pace scientists seek.
"Science is demanding immediate and drastic action," Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. "Policy, economics and financing cannot move in drastic fashion