The Great Debate UK
Mexico legislation underlines transformation in global warming debate
–Rt Hon John Gummer, Lord Deben, is President of Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE) and former UK Secretary of State for the Environment, and Rt Hon John Prescott, Lord Prescott, is a Member of GLOBE, and former UK Deputy Prime Minister and Europe’s Lead Negotiator at Kyoto. The opinions expressed are their own.–
Below the global radar-screen, the Mexican Parliament gave final passage on April 19 to the General Law on Climate Change, a landmark piece of national environmental legislation. This is a truly significant move and comes at a time when the country has also just approved a far-reaching REDD+ law that will set a benchmark for international best practice on tacking deforestation and forest degradation.
Passage of Mexico’s far-reaching climate law (which was supported, significantly, on a cross-party basis) highlights the remarkable progress on climate change now being made globally. A critical mass of strategically significant – often emerging – economies have made landmark climate and energy-related legislation over the last year. These countries, including China, are advancing laws at a pace that contrasts sharply with the UN-brokered climate change talks that formally convene again in Qatar in late November.
This trend comes at a time of pivotal change in international relations with continuing economic downturn in the West being counterpoised with the increasingly rapid shift of power to emerging economies. Mirroring this structural shift is a fundamental repositioning of the centre of gravity of the global climate change debate towards domestic climate change legislation. This is nothing less than game changing.
As a recent study, by Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE) and the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, documents:
- China is developing comprehensive climate change legislation and has included carbon targets in its latest Five Year Plan.
- South Africa’s government has released its climate change white paper, including a raft of measures such as renewable energy targets and a carbon tax.
Imperceptibly, the tide of debate is turning on climate change
By John Prescott, John Gummer and Michael Jay. The opinions expressed are their own.
The forthcoming Durban conference comes at a major crossroads in international relations, with continuing economic malaise in the West being counterpoised with the increasingly rapid shift of power to emerging economies. Mirroring this structural change is a fundamental shift in the centre of gravity of the global climate change debate that few have yet to recognise.
While the outlook for Durban is highly uncertain, a critical mass of countries are currently advancing landmark domestic climate change legislation at a pace that contrasts sharply with the UN-brokered talks. This trend, which is being largely driven by emerging economies, is nothing less than game changing.
In the last six months alone, as a forthcoming study, by Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE) and the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, documents:
• China is developing comprehensive climate change legislation and has included carbon targets in its latest Five Year Plan. • South Africa’s government has released its climate change white paper, including a raft of measures such as renewable energy targets and a carbon tax. • In Mexico, all political parties in parliament recently agreed to come together to back a comprehensive climate change law. • South Korea is in the process of passing legislation for an emissions trading scheme which would be binding by 2015 and covers those facilities producing more than 25,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. • The Australian government’s carbon tax bill will become law in 2012. • Germany has outlined a radical new energy plan in response to the Fukushima disaster, including a massive increase in renewable energy investment.
Adoption of such landmark initiatives is — with a few notable exceptions (Australia being prominent) — largely bipartisan. One key reason for this encouraging move towards bipartisanship is that many legislators increasingly recognise the positive co-benefits of climate change legislation which range from energy efficiency and increased energy security to the reduction of air pollution.
This, in turn, symbolises a crucial shift which is a key part of the wider change. Previously, the political debate on climate change has been largely framed around the narrative of sharing a global burden — with governments, naturally, trying to minimise their share.
If there is any “bipartisanship” involved, it is likely because some of the subsidies to the “green” companies are being used to bribe both parties. When Congress starts passing laws that force consumers to buy overpriced products either in healthcare or energy there is an enormous amount of money involved and lots of graft in the form of campaign donations. The public in Europe has started to wise up to this scam because of the enormous expense and tiny gains involved. The public in the US is trying to rid itself of “the best government money can buy” to save the country from ruin. If it succeeds, the green companies are going to have to provide practical solutions or follow the solar cell companies into bankruptcy.
from Global News Journal:
Hope and Fear at the World Bank
It was early March and Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commissioner of International Cooperation Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, was traveling in Asia. Her plan was to attend a 7.5 magnitude earthquake simulation that would hit Indonesia and generate a tsunami. A few things, however, changed in her itinerary: The destination turned out to be Japan, the earthquake was 9.0 and it not only generated a huge tsunami, but also a nuclear catastrophe. Plus, it was real.
“Usually our fears are bigger than reality. In this case our reality was worse than our fears,” Georgieva said recently at a World Bank panel on the climate, food and financial crises the world is facing today and the way they all intertwine. Georgieva’s strong Slavic optimism brightened the gloomy panel, but the data she threw in didn’t back up her positive view:
Hold on for a second. How can these disasters have such a devastating impact on us when cutting-edge technology, extensive knowledge and interconnectedness are here to help us mitigate them?
This question left the representatives of Uganda – who followed the event via webcast -- puzzled. So they raised the simplest but toughest question for the panel:
“We seem to know the problem and we also seem to know the answer. The question is then: Why are we not responding?”
No one on the panel disagreed with World Bank’s managing director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iewala, who wasn’t shy to name those she blamed and to evoke “the fear of God” in them:
from Environment Forum:
Is Earth due for a mass extinction?
It has all the signs of a sick good-news/bad-news tale. The bad news is that Earth may be ripe for a mass extinction, where 75 percent or more of the life on the planet vanishes forever.
The good news is it's unlikely to happen for at least three more centuries.
Scientists writing in the journal Nature warn that we could be on the brink of a mass extinction, the kind of species loss that has happened just five times in the last 540 million years.
"If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm," Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley said in a statement about the study he co-wrote.
Are humans to blame? Possibly.
"A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities," said H. Richard Lane of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research.
If the species that are now considered critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in three to 22 centuries, Barnosky said.
Mass extinction events unfold over tens of thousands of years. Increases in CO2, methane and other hot house gases go part and parcel with mass extinctions. The largest life forms die off first as they cannot withstand the increase in temperatures. Fossil and geologic evidence support these conclusions through every extinction event. The end of the last ice age brought with it the loss of Mammoths, Mastodons, Dire wolves, Smilodon…etc. All the largest genus of their species.
Every major ocean fishery is decline by any where from 40 to better than 80%. Curiously it is not caused simply or in large part by over fishing. Sustained ocean temperatures of 79 degrees Fahrenheit or higher kills coral, the soil of the ocean forest. It has been estimated close to half of all coral reefs have been lost to date.
One can only wonder if we have mental midgets running government or just garden variety sociopaths.
from Environment Forum:
“The Harry Potter theory of climate”
Climate doesn't change by magic.
Just ask Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. On a conference call with other scientists and reporters, Serreze and others linked climate change to the last two harsh winters over much of the United States and Europe. And they squarely blamed human-caused greenhouse gas emissions for the rise in world temperatures that got the process going.
"Climate doesn't change all by itself," Serreze said. "It's not like the Harry Potter theory of climate, where he flicks his magic wand and the climate suddenly changes. Climate only changes for a reason."
He crossed off other possible drivers for climate change one by one.
"Could it be that the Sun is shining more brightly than it was? No, that doesn't work. We've been monitoring energy coming from the Sun and apart from the 11-year sunspot cycle, there's not much happening.
"Is it that the warming is coming from the oceans -- the oceans are releasing heat into the atmosphere? ... Well, if that were the case, we'd have to observe that the oceans are cooling ... but oceans are not cooling, the oceans are warming like the atmosphere.
"We might be able to argue that it's something we don't understand, something like a cosmic ray flux modulated by the Sun ... That's pretty much of a cop-out, OK? Because you're not really making an explanation, you're making a supposition."
The Harry Potter theory of global warming might be said to be the whole explanation behind the alarmist position on climate change: “The temperature has gotten 1.4 degrees F warmer in the last century, and we can’t find another explanation, so it must be CO2.”
This is clearly a good reason to shut down the over 50% of the globe’s electrical generating capacity that runs on coal. If a few hundred million people die from lack of clean water, heating and cooling, water pumps, and so on, their contributions to CO2 will help also.
Of course, the plan isn’t really to shut them down. The plan is to tax and regulate production of CO2 and use the money for social engineering, redistribution to third world countries, etc.
from Environment Forum:
Pure water from solar power; will it catch on?
Remote villages in developing countries might benefit from these twin 40-ft long containers (left) -- a water purification system driven by solar power -- as a substitute for noisy diesel-powered generators, trucks bringing in water or people spending hours every day walking to fetch water.
That's the hope of the makers, environmental technology group SwissINSO Holding Inc. The small company has recently won its first contracts to supply the systems to Algeria and Malaysia and is aiming to sell 42 units of what it calls the world's "first high-volume, 100 percent-solar turnkey water purification system" in 2011.
The system, an interesting-sounding technology in a world where more than a billion people lack access to fresh water, could also have extra uses from disaster relief to construction sites or to helping armies stay healthy in remote regions.
Chief Executive Yves Ducommun (below right) says that the machines, housed in the two containers, can pump 100,000 litres of drinking water per day for 20 years at a price of less than $0.03 per litre, including running costs. The system costs between $800,000 and $1.2 million up front, depending on factors such as how many solar panels are needed to drive the purification, which filters out dirt and toxins, or salt from seawater, through a membrane.
That is a lot of money for a village in sub-Saharan Africa -- but water is often a huge cost over 20 years and governments or aid agencies might be interested: the makers reckon it supplies enough water for about 5,000 people. Freeing people from walking miles to collect water allows them to do other things, like work or study.
"It's a cost, but if you think of the cost of carrying water by tanker or truck to remote places, or a unit powered by diesel you are in a better position with our system," Ducommun told me. And climate change may make water supplies less predictable in coming decades with effects such as floods, heatwaves, drought and desertification.
It's a bit like long-life lightbulbs: the up-front costs are higher but they last far longer: but it's hard to convince people with the counter-intuitive idea of saving money by spending more now. Investors have not flocked to the idea -- the rarely traded shares fell after a major investor pulled out last year, Ducommun said. They last traded at $0.42 against a high of $1.75 in early 2010, giving the company a market capitalisation of about $30 million.
from Reuters Investigates:
WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, GreenLeaks and more leaks
A Reuters exclusive details the emergence of two anti-corporate, WikiLeaks-style websites in Europe, both called GreenLeaks. The sites promise to leak confidential documents regarding environmental abuses by a host of industries.
The report by Mark Hosenball also reveals the rise of other possible WikiLeaks copycats that would focus on specialized topics or regions -- from Russia and the European Union bureaucracy to international trade, the pharmaceutical industry and the Balkans.
The two rival GreenLeaks sites were set up by Mads Bjerg (left) in Copenhagen (greenleaks.org) and Scott Millwood (below) in Berlin (greenleaks.com) -- and neither is happy about the competition.
Over lunch in a Berlin sushi bar, Millwood told Reuters his group acquired the domain name GreenLeaks in 36 countries where it also has registered GreenLeaks internet addresses under the ".com" and ".biz" designators. Millwood said he also has applied to the European Union to register "GreenLeaks" as a trademark, but recently learned that Bjerg's Denmark-based group had made a similar move within days of Millwood making his own application.
Millwood acknowledged that there was "one inactive domain name that we don't own" -- Bjerg's URL, "GreenLeaks.org." By the same token he said, one of the URLs Millwood says he registered himself is "GreenLeaks.dk" -- a domain name specifically related to Denmark. Millwood acknowledged the rivalry between the two groups could escalate into a "legal dispute."
The most closely watched rollout in the leak-hosting world was the launch on Thursday of OpenLeaks.org, a site whose principal creator, German transparency activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was once Julian Assange's closest collaborator on WikiLeaks.
from Environment Forum:
Cancun talks ignore intrusive aspect of climate change
One pesky aspect of climate change is that rising temperatures and stronger storms may increase invasions of non-native species to places that have no natural defenses against them.
The issue is mostly being ignored at the annual U.N. climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, California's Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura said.
Just a few miles away from the talks an island called Isla Mujeres has been fighting an infestation of cactus moth swept there during a hurricane, storms that are expected to get stronger as a result of climate change. The moth destroys prickly pears, and if it makes it to mainland --ferries full of tourists go to and fro Cancun to the island all day long -- it would could harm more than the price of prickly pear fruit for your margarita.
Mexico is afraid it could reach the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts and hurt the 76 types of pricklies there and the 38 found only in Mexico. Many insects eat only the cacti and in turn many desert birds and mammals depend on those insects.
Pricklies are also an important food source in Mexico -- you might have had them in a nopales soup or salad.
Another example is biting midges swept up in dust storms from North Africa that infect European sheep and cattle with blue tongue disease, a big headache for countries trying to sell livestock to other countries.
Another is the pine beetle creeping farther North in North America and killing vast swaths of tree stands as average winters are too mild to kill it off.
Why we should still be constructive about Cancun
Lord Professor Julian Hunt is Vice President of GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment), Visiting Professor at Delft University, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office. The opinions expressed are his own.
Ahead of the UN Summit in Cancun, legislators from across the world, ranging from United States Congressman Bart Gordon to Chinese Congressman Wang Guangtao, met in China earlier this month at the GLOBE Climate Change Symposium. While the prospects for a comprehensive deal being reached in Mexico have been widely talked down, much progress can still be made and there remains substantial room for optimism.
Last year’s disastrous Copenhagen conference showed the lack of willingness of major countries to establish any meaningful international agreement to deal with the causes and impacts of man made climate change. This might involve only the developed countries reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), as in the Kyoto Protocol, or could also involve other countries with major emissions.
Neither of these scenarios seems likely to be achieved at Cancun. Currently, it seems that the meeting might just result in a set of statements by countries about what they are doing individually and in various multilateral arrangements — a disappointing, lower key re-run of Copenhagen.
However, it needs to be remembered that text in a communique does not reduce emissions in itself — it is action on the ground. In this context, there are reasons to be optimistic about recent legislative activity in developing countries. For instance, the Chinese announced at the GLOBE symposium that they are beginning a feasibility study into a new comprehensive climate change law.
Moreover, if a comprehensive deal isn’t reached, the summit still represents a remarkable opportunity for countries to assess the future more realistically and then explain and collaborate on the practical policies that need to be introduced in coming years. Seen from this prism, Cancun offers a stepping stone to secure a truly sustainable global deal in 2011 or beyond.
Under current plans, many industrialising countries will continue to increase their emissions. This is despite the fact that in most of the major emitting countries, administrative and innovative market mechanisms are incentivising industry to use energy more efficiently:
Alas, one of the many wild cards in the deck (but also one of the more likely ones to turn up, based on what we now know) is runaway global warming due to release of the methane in the arctic permafrost of undersea clathrates. In which case all those pretty climate models will be off, indeed drastically off, but in the wrong direction …
from Reuters Investigates:
Weird weather and the Amazon
As scientists from around the world gather in Cancun for the latest U.N. conference on climate change, Stuart Grudgings reports from Caapiranga, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, for his special report "Weird weather leaves Amazon thirsty."
This year's drought in the Amazon was the kind of thing experts call a "once in a century" event. Unfortunately, it was the second one in five years.
It's not just Brazil that is feeling battered by extreme weather. As this graphic shows, extreme events have become far more commonplace in recent years.
To see the special report in multimedia PDF format, click here.
