He started late, made them laugh for the first 5 minutes then gently kicked out the media.

“I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next president of America,” he said. Everyone laughed.

“Now I’m a recovering politician”.

On a speaking tour that touched down for a $500-a-plate dinner in Toronto Tuesday evening, the former U.S. vice president and co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC  told a near-full banquet room of 1,300 members from the “mostly telecoms” business community about his perspective on the green, clean economy.

Problem was not much of it got out during his opening remarks, other than much praise for event sponsor Allstream and that Gore is a big fan of companies that challenge the old way of thinking in times of uncertainty.

“Now I know that we are meeting at a time when many business leaders in particular are focused on what the physical changes on our planet and in our ecosphere mean for the former plan for business and the changes that are under way are completely unprecedented, incredibly significant. And I personally am very impressed with the leadership that many (Canadian) businesses have been providing.”

He also took a few jabs at award-winning scientist, author and journalist David Suzuki, who shared a table with Gore at the event and whose foundation I was told would be receiving a donation of $100,000 from the night’s ticket sales.

“I have to admit it’s always so, I don’t know what the word is, not upsetting but (Suzuki) looks so much younger than me. Many people are just amazed for someone who is almost 100 years old, it’s absolutely astonishing.”

In his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, published earlier this month, Gore calls for a collective will to solve climate issues because the tools are already available.

Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense that Gore is calling for collective will to solve the climate quagmire — his resume is chock-full of shared titles that echo the sentiment of collective brainpower. He was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, (a firm devoted to sustainable investing), a member of the board of directors of Apple Inc., and co-founder and chair of Current TV, a television network for young people based on viewer-created content. (Incidentally, Citizen TV just last week announced it is cutting 80 jobs, but even that doesn’t make him someone who tends to “go it alone”.)

In the script of his speech which he was to deliver after the dozen or so journalists were escorted out of the ballroom, Gore argues “Physical changes in our planet will influence global business and require new corporate strategies that take into account the broader environmental, social and political issues involved in shaping the clean economy of the future.”

What do you think of Al Gore’s message that businesses need to adapt to a changing environment?

(Picture: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore makes a point during a roundtable discussion at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, Nevada August 10, 2009. REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus)

A three-week tour from the Colorado Rockies to the Arctic Ocean, the tropics, Antarctica and then back again to the Arctic again can give a new perspective of the world.

“You get a feeling of how small the earth is,” said Pavel Romashkin, project manager for a scientific mission that just completed such a trek. “All of us are on a really small place, this little planet of ours.”

The HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observation mission, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, takes researchers aboard a highly modified Gulfstream jet to measure carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other gases in the atmosphere at nearly all the earth’s latitudes.

Romashkin, a scientist with the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, was joined by researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a handful of universities and academic institutions.

The goal is not to prove or disprove that global warming is occurring, but simply to gather information about what is really in the air 1,000 to more than 40,000 feet above the earth’s surface, Romashkin said.

 ”This is where the emissions are coming up, this is how far they’re going up, this is where they’re staying in the air,” he said. “All we can do is collect facts about what is in the atmosphere. This is a fact of life.”

The gathered real-world data can be used to check the accuracy of weather and climate models, he said. Ultimately, such data could be used to ensure the accuracy of carbon-trading or carbon-capping systems, if any are enacted.

Among the early observations from the journey, according to Romashkin:

* Pollution over the Southern Hemisphere appears to be much greater than atmospheric models predict. Models appear to underestimate the extent of transport from the Northern Hemisphere.

* A band of pollutants gave the atmosphere over the Arctic a yellowish cast somewhat like the legendary haze hanging over cities like Los Angeles, according to the scientists. That pollution, seen in early November, was directly attributable to industrial and urban emissions coming from Asia and transported north by atmospheric currents.

* Layers of gases and pollutants are often clearly separated from each other, with dirty bands quite distinct from the clear air. The plane could be flying through a band of thickly polluted air drifting from Asia, then increase a bit in altitude and be in fresh, clean air, Romashkin said.

The pole-to-pole journey concluded last Sunday with a trip from Anchorage back to the aircraft’s base in Broomfield, Colorado. It was the second of five planned over a span of about three years. The first three-week pole-to-pole trek was last January, and the next one is planned for this coming March and April.

The plan is to conduct flights during varying seasons of the year, Romashkin said.
As a government-funded National Science Foundation project, the mission makes all its data available to the public.

There will be a record number of side events at the United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen next month, but one woman’s one-woman show could give the delegates, most of whom will be men, the incentive they really need to agree a new global warming treaty.

In “The Boycott“, Kathryn Blume plays Lyssa, First Lady of the United States and climate crusader.  Loosely borrowing from a play from ancient Greece, Lyssa launches a nationwide sex strike to fight global warming. As the play unfolds, Lyssa is forced to take on her indifferent husband, a hostile press and a romantic rival who’s not only in bed with the President, but with the oil industry as well.

Blume is co-founder of the Lysistrata Project, named after the Aristophanean comedy on which The Boycott is based.  Originally performed in ancient Athens in 411 BC, Lysistrata tells the tale of one woman’s attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing all women to withhold bedroom privileges from their husbands.

“I’m an obscure solo performer from Vermont … And I’m in a chronic, weepy panic over the fact that serious climate change is happening now and while the whole point of this piece is to help save the world, I’m afraid it’s already too late,” Blume writes on her website.

Blume will perform her play in Copenhagen at 8pm on Thursday, Dec. 10 at Klimaforum09, a parallel “people’s” climate change summit featuring live debate, art, music and film.

More than 20,000 people will congregate in the Danish capital between Dec. 7-18 as government officials from nearly 200 countries try negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.

- John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

As hopes for reaching a binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen summit die, climate negotiators could learn useful lessons on how to structure the negotiations from the multiple rounds of trade talks within the GATT/WTO framework.

Climate negotiations are about limiting carbon dioxide emissions, but the negotiators are also hammering out a complex economic instrument that will define the distribution of production, energy use and income in the next few decades. It is the agreement’s profound economic effects that are making it so hard to reach a final deal.

While the stalled negotiations on the Doha Round might make it seem likely an unlikely role model, the GATT/WTO process has successfully created a legal framework for liberalising world trade through eight successive rounds of increasingly complex negotiations, as well as a dispute settlement system accepted by all major countries.

In the process, negotiators have already had to resolve many of the difficult issues bedevilling attempts to reach an emissions deal:

* How to obtain treaty commitments from a huge range of countries at different stages of economic development.

* How to handle negotiations with the United States, given the peculiar nature of that country’s constitutional arrangements.

* How to ensure countries live up to their commitments and resolve subsequent disputes about treaty implementation.

Climate negotiators could usefully apply many of these lessons to their own agreement. As Copenhagen falters, they may need to rethink the “road map” for talks to improve the chance of bringing them to a successful conclusion.

FRAMEWORK AND DETAILED SCHEDULES

The 1947 General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) established a legal framework and general principles for trade liberalisation. But detailed tariff reductions as well as commitments on subsidies, dumping and technical barriers were left to a later series of trade rounds. These commitments were then turned into schedules of concessions for each member country and incorporated by reference into the central treaty.

Negotiations started with a series of limited tariff reductions that were gradually made more ambitious. Part IV of the GATT, added in 1966, guaranteed developing countries “special and differential treatment” to encourage them to become involved in the tariff-reduction process and make their own binding commitments.

For each round, political leaders set broad objectives at the outset, but the detailed exchange of “concessions” was handled by lower-level officials in a Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC).

Something similar is needed for the climate talks. President Barack Obama has already backed a “two-step” process. Political leaders would aim for an “operational agreement” at next month’s summit while leaving a legally binding agreement until 2010 or later. [ID:nSP280582] The aim is to ensure agreement on the big issues is not held hostage to myriad disputes over the details.

It might make sense to separate an agreement on the broad framework (including establishment and review of targets, trading emissions allowances, technology transfer, funding, and dispute settlement) from the details (including specific reduction targets and how much developed countries pay their developing counterparts to help mitigate the costs of technology upgrades).

It might also make sense to agree fairly easy reductions in the first round, then hold further negotiations in coming years to make targets more ambitious, using salami-slicing tactics rather than a big-bang approach. This would also allow developing countries to adopt modest emissions cuts in round one, with the aim of toughening them further in subsequent talks.

But for a two-step process to work, political leaders must give clear instructions to lower-level officials responsible for detailed negotiations (including clear scope for eventual concessions). If not agreement will become bogged down over relatively small differences in percentage reductions, as the Doha Round has become stalled over farm subsidies and tariff cuts for developing countries.

THE PROBLEM OF SENATE RATIFICATION

Trade negotiators are already used to the idea that an agreement is subject to a “double lock.” Deals require approval at international level and by the U.S. Congress (either by a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate if the deal is presented as a treaty, or a simple majority in both houses if the deal is presented as ordinary legislation).

The existence of this double lock confers an advantage on the United States since other countries have to negotiate twice — once with the administration and then again with Congress. Having given one set of concessions to the president’s officials to secure a deal, other countries may have to make even more concessions to get the deal approved by U.S. legislators.

To encourage countries to make meaningful concessions without fear the final deal will be re-opened, U.S. presidents have often been required to obtain “fast-track” negotiating authority binding Congress to a straight up-or-down vote within a set time on the results of a trade round.

Negotiations are usually structured as a “single undertaking” in which every commitment or concession is part of a whole and indivisible package and cannot be agreed separately: “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

In terms of sequencing, trade negotiators have usually sought to reach an international agreement first and then presented the deal for congressional approval.

Until now, the climate negotiations have been using the opposite approach. The Obama administration has sought to obtain an ambitious climate bill including cap-and-trade from Congress (HR 2454, S 1733) and then use this to persuade developing countries such as China to offer significant emissions reductions at the international level.

But experience with trade negotiations suggests that an international deal precedes U.S. action, and does not come after it. It is unlikely Congress will agree to stringent targets without some assurance other countries will follow suit, including large future emitters such as China and India. So the international track may need to move first, or at least in parallel.

The Obama administration needs to harvest a number of provisional commitments from its international partners to have any hope of getting a climate bill through the Senate. If it is structured as a single undertaking, the various parties would offer tentative commitments. Once a deal is done, it would be taken back to the Senate to be incorporated into U.S. law.

The only question is whether the president would need to obtain some sort of fast-track authority. This is probably not necessary as long as the president’s Democratic Party controls both houses of Congress with comfortable majorities.

But it does set a deadline for a deal. Negotiators would need to reach agreement by next summer, well ahead of the 2010 mid-term elections, unless the Democratic Party appears on course to retain comfortable majorities, in which case negotiations could take longer and still reach a successful conclusion.

DISPUTES, NULLIFICATION, IMPAIRMENT

U.S. lawmakers are already suspicious that other countries will not adopt meaningful targets or will cheat on those they do agree. So any climate deal will need a mechanism for settling disputes. If not, countries are likely to retaliate unilaterally against partners they believe are not living up to their commitments, which could unravel the whole system.

From the beginning, GATT Article XXIII allowed a country to request formal consultations with another treaty member if it believed expected benefits under the agreement were being “nullified or impaired,” and this has been worked up into an increasingly formal and effective dispute settlement system.

If emission targets and aid packages are structured as part of a mutual exchange of concessions among treaty signatories, so one country’s targets are conditioned on other countries meeting their own, the climate treaty will need a similar dispute mechanism.

Rather than attempt to create one from scratch, it would probably be better to use the WTO system as a template and modify it to take account of the climate accord’s unique characteristics.

That’s what Nissan President and CEO Carlos Ghosn asked reporters in Los Angeles while presenting the Leaf, a pure electric car to be made for the masses and launched in late 2010. 

The hatchback to be manufactured in Tennessee starting in late 2012 is no nerdy eco-friendly car, that’s for sure. And the prototype certainly was fun to drive. Nissan set up a test course in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and even this cautious driver couldn’t help but race down the straightaway. No emissions, no tailpipe, no noise — but lots of speed, right away.

Ghosn says the Leaf goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds, although it felt much faster than that. “This is not a golf cart,” he reminded us several times.

But he is nevertheless keen on a slow U.S. rollout because he wants to get the battery technology and consumer experience right. In the first two years, just 10,000 to 20,000 Leafs manufactured in Japan will make their way to the United States and the first will go to around 15 high-potential cities, from Seattle, down to the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego, and over to North Carolina.

Los Angeles is likely to be an early market too and sources say Nissan is negotiating partnerships for the second largest U.S. city,  where we spend way too much time in our cars. The Leaf can go 100 miles or 160 kms on a single eight-hour charge — enough for most L.A. commutes. And in a place where tailpipe emissions account for 40 percent of greenhouse gases (versus 30 percent for the nation), a Leaf fleet could make a difference in Los Angeles.

So, what do you think? Don’t you find this car sexy?

Photo credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (Nissan’s Ghosn stands in front of the all-electric Leaf)

Adam Werbach poses at the University Club of Toronto, November 11, 2009. REUTERS/Jillian Kitchener

Green is good and blue is better.

Keeping a business sustainable - or blue – goes beyond philanthropic nods to the environment. It needs to be a core business goal, says Adam Werbach, creator of Wal-Mart’s sustainability program and chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability wing of the marketing and consultancy company.

Blue innovation embraces the social, cultural, and economic aspects of business along with green issues like protecting our last wild places and reducing carbon emissions.

“Sustainability is about long-term profitability. It doesn’t mean just the environment,” Werbach told a room of 100 business professionals in Toronto on Wednesday, pointing to the four-part breakdown of sustainability built on social, economic, cultural and environmental trends in addition to an integral value of transparency.

“The idea is to think a little bit broader. Of course we need to protect the environment, but there are so many other things to connect to it,” Werbach said, exploring a theme in his new book Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto.

“This is an extraordinary business opportunity that’s been left to the environmentalists and we need to steal it back and make it the business opportunity to grow companies that are going to be the companies of the future.”

Victoria Kamsler, chief ethics officer and research director at Greenfiniti Consulting and Investment in Toronto and former professor of environmental ethics at Princeton University, said Werbach was on to something with his ideas about internal changes in business culture having to do with transparency and engagement, and motivating employees to engage in purposes that align with their own values and ideals larger than themselves.

“All across the board major corporations are implementing “North Star” goals and changing the course of business and we find that this goes straight to the bottom line. Not only will they keep their employees happier but they get better work and it’s actually a really effective way to help their bottom line.”

Part of Werbach’s strategy with Wal-Mart was to invite personal sustainability projects (PSPs) from staff members. One of the outcomes of that program now saves the company $1 million in expenses yearly by replacing soda pop machine backlights with LEDs.

But the real challenge is to motivate people to consume less, says Robert Logan, chief scientist of the Strategic Innovation lab at the Ontario College of Art & Design.

“The soda pop machines with LEDS is nonsense. We should get rid of the whole damn machine and just have a water dispenser.”

It’s a movement that needs to involve all levels of a corporation, Werbach told the audience at the Corporate Catalyst event.

What do you think? Is it a company’s responsibility to respond to demand for more sustainable renewable practices and products? Should we do away with soda refrigerators altogether in the office?

The headline in the Gulf News English language daily reads 'UAE tops world on per capita carbon footprint'.

For a place so reliably bathed in sunlight, the Dubai property explosion seems to have generated enough construction noise to drown out the environmental debate raging elsewhere in the world.

For the first-time visitor, the scale of the global construction superlatives - The Palm, made from reclaimed land jutting out defiantly into the Gulf, the skyscrapers built in a region where there is no shortage of space - is staggering.

The amount of environmentally 'sinfull' concrete poured over the last decade is ncalculable. Billboards lauding the benefits of solar power look like a bit of an after thought.

Climate change was just beginning to take hold as an issue for property developers when the economic downturn struck and put paid to nascent environmental ambitions.  "Green is not cheap," says Markus Giebel, chief executive of Dubai property group Deyaar Development. "Dubai was on the right track, but there's no money now. People are thinking about survival."

Natural gas is regarded as a relatively clean source of energy but there is mounting evidence that it has a dirty side.

My colleague Jon Hurdle has reported on Wyoming water woes that have been linked to the booming gas industry. You can see his stories here and here.

In August U.S. government scientists reported that they had for the first time found chemical contaminants in drinking water wells near natural gas drilling operations, fueling concern that a gas-extraction technique is endangering the health of people who live close to drilling rigs.

The Environmental Protection Agency found chemicals that researchers say may cause illnesses including cancer, kidney failure, anemia and fertility problems in water from 11 of 39 wells tested around the Wyoming town of Pavillion in March and May this year.

On Monday, I reported that high concentrations of harmful compounds have been found in the air in a north Texas town that is in the heart of the region’s gas industry, according to a report released by an environmental consultancy.

The study by Wolf Eagle Environmental Engineers and Consultants found high concentrations of carcinogenic and neurotoxin compounds in the atmosphere at seven locations around the rural town of DISH, which is about 50 miles northwest of Dallas.

Carcinogens are linked to cancers while neurotoxins are toxins that act on nerve cells.

The report said the levels of several of the substances exceeded those that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) uses as benchmarks or triggers that could prompt it to investigate or take action. This does not mean that these levels are an immediate hazard but the town’s mayor Calvin Tillman told me that he would like to see the several compressor stations in the area shut down until people are reassured that they are not emitting toxins.

DISH is on the Barnett Shale, a large geological formation in north Texas that contains vast amounts of natural gas.

What do you think? Is natural gas a viable option in the quest for an energy source cleaner than coal, which emits about twice as much carbon dioxide? Or must the industry first clean up its own act?

(Photo: A worker at EnCana’s Frenchie Draw gas-drilling rig in central Wyoming guides sections of steel pipe into an 11,000-foot well on September 19, 2009. REUTERS/Jon Hurdle)

Apple, which made news in environmental circles recently with its new approach to environmental accounting, took another high-profile action on climate change Monday when it resigned its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group's environmental policies.

Apple became just the latest defection from the business lobbying group. And given that Apple's every move generates buckets of publicity, the action may serve to thrust the climate change issue into greater focus for the buying public.

Last month three big power utilities -- Exelon Corp, PG&E Corp and PNM Resources Inc -- said they were leaving the Chamber over its stance on global warming legislation. Nike last week resigned from the board of the Chamber, which has pushed for public hearings to challenge the scientific evidence of manmade climate change.

Apple made its resignation in a letter to Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue:

"As a company, we are working hard to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions ... We have undertaken this unilaterally and without government mandate, because we believe it is the right thing to do. For those companies who cannot or will not do the same, Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort."

"We would prefer that the Chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis. However, because the Chamber's position differs so sharply with Apple's, we have decided to resign our membership effective immediately."

The iPhone and Mac maker last month unveiled a new method for assessing its environmental impact. It now calculates what it calls its entire carbon footprint-–from design to production to the emissions generated by those who use it products.

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.

Still, he doesn’t reject air capture out of hand. “All good ideas need to be on the table … The innovation they’re demonstrating (with air capture technology) is terrific but they must not be seen as an alternative to cost-effective reductions available today.”

What do you think? Is air capture a distraction from forestation projects that will help developing countries, or a possible major leap forward in reducing climate-warming emissions? Is this an either/or situation? Do we need both? Let us know.

Photo credit:  REUTERS/Guillermo Granja (Ecuadorean rainforest of Kapawi, October 20, 2008)