Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
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)
from The Great Debate:
Cost of cap-and-trade for U.S. households
-- John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own --
How much are U.S. households prepared to pay to avert the threat of climate change? According to the latest polling data published by the Washington Post, the answer is not very much, probably not much more than $25 per month or $300 per year.
Most respondents (65 percent) believe the federal government should regulate greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories, including those who believe this strongly (50 percent) or somewhat (15 percent). Only a minority think the government should not regulate them (29 percent).
While the margin favoring regulation has narrowed since the middle of the year (when it was 75 percent to 22 percent), probably in response to a vigorous opposition campaign, there is still a clear majority in favor of taking some action on climate change.
The problem is that, when respondents are confronted with a range of cost estimates, support starts to fall away rapidly.
When asked if they would be prepared to pay for a scheme that cut emissions significantly but raised monthly energy bills by $10, the 65-29 percent margin in favor of regulation shrank to just 60-37 percent. If the cost was $25 per month, the margin was just 55-42 percent.
The poll did not ask respondents about higher charges beyond $300 per year. But if support continues to fall away at this rate, survey respondents would probably not be prepared to pay more than $400 a year in total.
Cap & trade is a scam. It has not worked well in previous formulations, since polluters can just move around their pollution credits and evade making significant changes. It will also become a new market, and boon for Wall St, however the profits will be rolled into price increases for the average consumer. The average person will likely shoulder a disproportionate burden. Simultaneously, adherence to cap & trade in developing countries will be difficult and far from transparent. Its basically an excuse for a big payday.
To be honest, the whole concept of climate change is wearing thin. We have to redirect our focus from CO2 emissions, to more dangerous, and proven, pollutants that go unregulated. We must also stop looking at climate change/ pollution as a global issue, we must start looking at it from a regional or local perspective. Cities, industrial centers, and transportation hubs are the main culprits, so why regulate pristine areas?
When we stop looking at this as “climate change” and “apocalyptic”, and start looking at it as addressing regional pollution, there would be much more support and progress. While the US is not innocent, we are far less of a polluter than China/SE Asia, with their permanent brown cloud. Climate change legislation would do little to stop particulate emissions, toxic chemical releases, and heavy metal and radioactive contamination. These are far more dangerous than one of the most common gases in our atmosphere.
Packed train beats cheap plane to Copenhagen
Imagine standing packed inside a commuter train with a thousand other people, some in dire need of a shower, some apparently having eaten garlic for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Imagine your fingertips clinging to a metal overhead rack as you struggle to stay upright on turns and bumps in the track. And then imagine doing that for hours on end.
That’s what the train trip from Berlin to Copenhagen today was like as some 45,000 demonstrators converged on the Danish capital for Saturday’s march. But the journey was still a lot of fun — and we saw a myriad of wind turbines in both northern Germany and southwestern Denmark turning in the breeze, and thousands more roof-top photovoltaic systems extracting what little daylight they could out of the mid-December sky.
Fortunately, most of the people headed to the demonstration were in a fabulous mood. And there was even a happy ending to the ride — for the last two hours of the trip, in Denmark, an extra four carriages were added so just about everyone ended up getting a seat for the final third of the ride from Berlin, via Hamburg and a short ferry-hop.
Before that, the train was so full of German, Italian, French and Dutch demonstrators that the conductor didn’t bother to check for tickets, and the border guards gave up before they even started. “Forget it Heinrich,” one German border guard said to his colleague. “It’s too full. Just stay where you are.” They got off at the next stop without checking anyone’s passport.
Some of the lucky few who did had a seat reservation seemed very unhappy indeed as they struggled through the packed aisle to get to their seat and invariably had to shoo someone, often in a woolly sweater, away from the seat they had paid a few euros extra for. But, as ridiculously packed as the train was, no one lost their temper. “We all just need to stay calm here,” said one bearded protester in a soothing voice. “We’re all in the same boat.”
Taking a plane would have been a lot easier and faster — and could have cost less than the 150 euros ($220) the train cost, had I booked early enough. I had thought long and hard about flying instead of taking the train.
But the one-hour plane trip would have produced three times as much CO2 — 102 kg, compared to 34 kg for the six-hour train ride. It seems odd to have a system where the plane costs the same or even less than a train. It’s hard to imagine how answers to climate change will be found as long as plane journeys cost less than train rides.
from The Great Debate UK:
Government intervention key to low-carbon economy
Scientists argue that rich nations must make drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. The way energy is used, priced and created would have to change in order to institute these cuts.
Ahead of elections in Britain, which must be held before June 2010, Dave Timms of Friends of the Earth shared his thoughts with Reuters on what the group thinks the next government needs to do in order to build a low-carbon economy.
Can farms and forests mix?
Forests and farms don’t mix, according to conventional wisdom.
Farmers are often portrayed as the villains, slashing and burning trees to clear land for crops and wrecking forests from the Amazon to Indonesia (…not to mention Europe, where people cleared most forests thousands of years ago).
But a report today by the World Agroforestry Centre indicates that farms aren’t such enemies of trees as usually thought - it says tree canopies cover at least 10 percent of almost half the world’s farmland. That is a gigantic area the size of China, or Canada. (For a story, click here).
Ten percent doesn’t sound much but one common definition of a “forest” by the U.N.s’ Food and Agriculture Organisation is an area where tree canopies cover at least 10 percent. It excludes farmland or urban areas (– otherwise your local supermarket car park might qualify if it’s got a few trees dotted around the tarmac).
Farmers sometimes keep trees as a backup if their main crops fail — with their deeper roots, trees producing fruit or nuts, for instance, can withstand droughts or floods better than many crops. Farmers also keep trees for uses such as a source of building materials, medicines or shade.
So trees are more common on farms than thought — and a home to a wider variety of insects or animals than a swathe of grassland, maize or wheat. They may also be a bigger store of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than expected, with a role in limiting global warming.
So have farmers got too bad a rap for deforestation?
in china and almost all east asian countries are farms and forests mixed. since more than 50% of the population from asia are still living in the village, so, the environmental problem are not that heavy.
