Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
A clear and fair incentive to pollute less
Connie Hedegaard is EU Commissioner for Climate Action. Any opinions expressed are her own.
This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a rather unusual bill directly addressed to Europe.
Through the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act H.R. 2594, America’s legislators want to tell American airlines not to respect an EU law.
This seems to me a rather unorthodox course of action, but here in the EU we are confident that in the end the United States will respect our legislation, just as the EU respects U.S. legislation and U.S. lawmakers’ authority in U.S. airports.
After all, there is nothing new or unusual in requiring airlines to meet certain rules which, given the global nature of the industry, have international ramifications.
As Congressmen who opposed the House bill pointed out, the United States itself requires international airlines to comply with a wide range of U.S. laws when it comes to passenger, baggage and cargo security in order to do business in the U.S. Other laws also require overseas ports to put in place certain security measures before cargo can be sent to the U.S.
If the U.S. wants to handle emissions from aviation differently, that is fine; our legislation clearly envisages that if a country outside the EU takes ‘equivalent measures’ to address aviation emissions then all incoming flights from that country can be exempted from the EU system.
The World Bank’s $6 billion man on climate change
As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming.
“More funds flow through us to help adaptation and mitigation than anyone else,” Steer said in a conversation at the bank’s Washington headquarters. Named to the newly created position in June, Steer said one of his priorities is to marshall more than $6 billion in the organization’s Climate Investment Funds to move from smaller pilot projects to large-scale efforts.
While the World Bank is not a party to global climate talks set for Cancun, Mexico, later this year, it is deeply engaged in this issue, Steer said. Acknowledging that an international agreement on climate change is a long shot this year, he said there are still opportunities to make changes to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.
“We do see there are opportunities,” Steer said. “The mistake would be if it’s sort of all or nothing.” The bank is strongly supporting action to limit deforestation, offer quick financing to start climate projects and reform carbon markets to extend them to countries that have been left out so far.
Even though the World Bank won’t be at the negotiating table in Cancun, its members will be there, and 80 percent of them want the bank to focus on climate change, Steer said. It’s all part of a what he sees as a fundamental shift in the international attitude toward dealing with this problem.
“There is a new revolution that’s going on now,” he said . “It’s not only driven by personal commitment, like it would have been 15 years ago … Now it’s driven by just the sheer logic … If you care about long-term poverty reduction, you simply cannot avoid this issue.”
Photo credits: REUTERS/Supri Supri (Andrew Steer (right) then the World Bank’s Indonesia country director, with World Health Organization’s Georg Peterson at a news conference in Jakarta, August 24, 2006)
Better Than A Rainforest? Air Capture Climate Technology Gets A Closer Look
It sounds almost too good to be true: new technology that would be better than carbon neutral — it would be carbon negative, taking more climate-warming carbon dioxide out of the air than factories and vehicles put in. It’s called air capture technology, and Reuters took a look at some promising versions of it on October 1.
This technology is expected to help some of the world’s poorest countries capitalize on any global carbon market, which would put a price on carbon emissions and let rich companies that spew lots of carbon buy carbon credits from poor companies and countries that emit less. The least developed countries emit very little carbon now. But the way the carbon market is set up under the Kyoto Protocol, this puts them at a disadvantage. If you don’t emit a lot it’s tough to get access to financing and clean technology under the current rules.
Most of these less-developed countries are going to be on the front lines of climate change, if they’re not there already. The predicted ravages of a changing climate, including droughts, floods and wildfires, would hurt them worst and first. The idea is that they need to develop, to give themselves a cushion against these disasters. To develop, they need energy. And usually, getting energy has meant spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to the climate change that caused the problem in the first place.
What air capture technology could do, some of its proponents say, is let the poorest, least industrialized countries build renewable power plants fueled by sun and wind and use the heat left over from this emissions-free power generation to fuel the air capture technology. A small rules change would let them sell these super-carbon-credits in the global carbon market, giving them access to financing and clean technology, while at the same time they’re cleaning the air. It’s a win-win, air capture’s supporters say.
Sort of, says Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lead author of the forest mitigation chapter in the 2007 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Plants perfected taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere millions of years ago,” Frumhoff says. “It’s called photosynthesis and they do it incredibly efficiently and cost-effectively. There are plenty of things we can do today, particularly restoring the world’s forests as part of the climate solution.”
Frumhoff notes that many developing countries are already poised to get into the carbon market through the U.N. REDD program, which stands for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries” and aims not just to keep forests standing but to plant new ones.
REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, not “in Developing countries.” The author should have done a careful fact check before publishing the post. It made me think that this post is not credible because the author does not know much about the REDD scheme to begin with…
I hardly use any carbon, I travel most places by bicycle, now why should i be taxed for flying once a year when the rest of the year i use hardly any carbon?