Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
“Post 2012″ strikes fear in carbon market players
No pun intended but for the world’s carbon community, times are looking a little black.
The global financial crisis, or GFC as it is being called this week during Australia’s largest ever carbon market gathering, is deeply troubling many participants. But a larger, more worrying issue remains “post 2012″.
This is when the Clean Development Mechanism under the current phase of the U.N. Kyoto Protocol runs out, along with the hundreds of CDM projects already approved and the 3,000 still awaiting approval by a U.N. board.
U.N. talks at the end of next year aim to agree on a broader replacement for Kyoto from 2013 and market players are hoping those talks don’t fail. Already there are fears that some rich nations will use the financial crisis as an excuse to say now is not the time to be negotiating tougher emissions curbs that might hurt industry and cost jobs.
“The volume of primary CDM activity is declining. Every month virtually this year, the number of new CDM transactions has been in decline. And that’s because the 2012 deadline is approaching and we’re running out of runway,” said Paul Bodnar, Manager of Carbon Markets at London-based Climate Change Capital.
In China, the largest source of Kyoto offsets called CERs, the number of projects there are in decline, just as they are elsewhere, said Alex Wyatt, director of Emissions Zero, which helps Chinese entities to become carbon neutral.
“If you wanted to put it on a scale, the financial crisis and the post-2012 uncertainty, many times more significant is the post-2012 uncertainty. If you know what’s going on past 2012 you can invest with a much longer-term horizon,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland state.
A sting in the whale tale?
Ask many Japanese about whaling and they explain it’s part of their culture. After all, Japan is surrounded by the ocean and whaling and fishing have been part of Japan for many centuries.
During a recent visit to Japan, several Japanese friends and colleagues were puzzled, indeed annoyed, by Western media coverage of Japan’s scientific whaling in Antarctic waters earlier this year and thought the stories were hostile and uninformed.
To them, stopping whaling would be akin to Australians being forced to stop summer barbecues, Inuits from hunting seals, or Germans from drinking beer during Oktoberfest.
But to many Westerners, the images of whales being harpooned under the guise of science means the practice should be stopped, particularly since some of the meat ends up for sale in special whale meat shops and restaurants in Japan.
What do you think? Are anti-whaling nations such as Australia being hypocritical when thousands of iconic kangaroos are culled each year, as some in Japan point out?
Will,
The Japanese believe as a result of their government funded research that neither the Humpback whales or Fin whales are endangered anymore (these species have both been protected since the 1960′s and 1970′s respectively). They would not be hunting them again now if they thought there was a serious risk that hunting them could drive them to extinction. If Australia doesn’t like it it should start funding it’s own research programmes, and prove that the numbers are lower than what the Japanese think they are. Japan is not North Korea, and just screaming out “liar” isn’t going to convince them that Australia has a rational opposition to whaling.
Whales being wild animals is no rational justification for their complete protection, tuna and other fish are also wild, so too are kangaroos, but Australia accepts that slaughtering them for food (and subsequent export) is alright.
What matters is sustainability. This goes for farmed animals too – you can’t suddenly breed new cows and pigs if you already slaughtered your entire stock last season. Wild animals breed naturally without human interference, so we have to ensure that the number we take does not exceed the natural capacity of such stocks of animals to replenish themselves.
As for Migaloo, it’s just a white humpback whale, not his own species. If Australians have given him a special “status” for being a white humpback instead of a black one, that’s something for Australians to rationally justify to themselves. The fact is that he’s just a humpback, and the chances are like that like the rest of the members of his species, he’ll die of natural causes.
This just goes to show that GREED is a more potent motivator than GREEN. Who would have thought one little letter would make people switch the mantra from “save the world, make a little money on the side” to “make money, save a little of the world on the side.”
All in all the crisis of ocean change with the death sentence given the Southern Ocean last week of 2030 all this fuss about climate change and its muzzled and muffed mechanism becomes rather moot. If we, meaning the world does not begin ocean eco-restoration and accomplish a substantial measure of it by 2030 we will witness and be part of the greatest mass extinction in history. The oceans will reboot the planetary ecosystem back to the bacterial sea from whence green plants and animal life evolved some 600 million years ago.
The tools to replenish and restore the planktos of the ocean and in doing so they will convert 4-5 billion tonnes of CO2 each year into ocean life as opposed to ocean death is well in hand following 20 years and a quarter of a billion dollars in research… The cost to achieve this goal would be a few billion dollars per year and therein lies the problem that started this comment… Immediately available, inexpensive solutions to saving the world only allow a LITTLE money to be made on the side. Read more at http://www.planktos-science.com