Cash Is King, Even at Copenhagen
15 Dec, 2009 04:39 pm
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Reduce text sizeAlthough apparently brief, the suspension of the Copenhagen climate conference after a walkout by the Group of 77 developing countries confirms that the talks are as much about money as about healing the world's climate. It's not just that the G77 wants the Kyoto limits on the emissions of developed countries enforced, while leaving their own emissions uncapped; it also wants the developed world to kick in sizable sums--much bigger than the 2.4 billion Euros per year offered by the EU--to cover the improvements in energy efficiency and renewable energy that would enable them to tackle the growth of their own emissions. There's a solid argument there, though it is not the guilt-based logic of "carbon debt" that I explored a few weeks ago.
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There has to be a better way. As Dr. Muller notes, "A dollar spent in China can reduce CO2 much more than a dollar spent in the US." Yet US voters won't countenance providing that dollar out of guilt, nor will they acquiesce to a scheme that makes China and other developing countries more competitive at their expense. Paradoxically, even domestic measures such as European feed-in tariffs and the proposed federal Renewable Electricity Standard embedded in the Waxman-Markey climate bill could create such an outcome, if Chinese and Indian green technology firms come to dominate developed country green energy markets. There are already indications of this happening in the German solar market.
Instead of the technology transfer we've been talking about for more than a decade, what may be needed is a new mechanism that actually creates markets in the developing world for clean energy hardware and know-how produced in the developed world, so that these projects create jobs and wealth in the US and EU, rather than threatening them. I'm not sure precisely what form such a deal might take, but at a minimum it should incorporate both open access to developing country markets and uniform legal protection for the physical and intellectual property of the developed-country companies making these investments.
The best thing that could come out of today's disruption at Copenhagen would be the cancellation of the big heads-of-state photo-ops planned for the final days of the conference and a determination to put the delegates back to work crafting a new agreement that creates the right recipe for focusing the lion's share of climate investments on the rapidly growing emissions of the third world, rather than on the shrinking emissions of the EU and the plateaued GHG output of the US. That would be something worthy of bringing the world's leaders together to sign.
Originally published on Energy Outlook
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In spite of the recent weeks of roller coaster-like expectations for a positive outcome from the COP15 climate conference that got underway Monday, the sense of urgency is keenly felt here at the Bella Center, home of the climate negotiations and exhibitions for dozens of NGO's and observer organizations.
Forget 80% by 2050 and 17% by 2020. Time to stop fixating on 450 ppm vs 350 ppm. As UN climate talks kick off today in Copenhagen, Denmark, there's only one number really worth the world's attention: $10.5 trillion. That's the additional investment required between now and 2030 to put the world's energy system on a lower-carbon path, according to the world energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency.
I'll discuss the willingness of developing countries to undertake significant emissions reductions on their own that tangibly reduce the growth of their emissions in the near-term (e.g., to 2020) and lay the foundation for even deeper cuts in the medium-term.
Have you heard that we're getting new neighbors? Demographers expect that the number of people living on earth - now about 6.8 billion - will grow to between 8 and 11 billion by 2050. Whether population tops out at the high or the low end of those projections will have a huge impact on climate change. So population control is again claiming a place on the environmental agenda.
Last Thursday, an editorial in the Wall St. Journal referred to a paper in the latest issue of Science entitled, "Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error", which concludes that the manner in which the greenhouse gas impacts of biofuels are currently assessed fails to account for significant emissions that occur outside the envelope normally drawn around an ethanol or biodiesel plant and the farms that supply it with feedstock. And if that omission weren't glaring enough, I ran across another instance in which regulators appear to be turning a blind eye to the full impact of another popular option for addressing climate change, electric vehicles.
The two-week global warming negotiations in Bangkok, Thailand are just wrapping up. There are five key elements to the Copenhagen Agreement.
Even "moderate" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions may be sufficient to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, says new MIT study. But only if those moderate cuts start now, not in 2020, where many emissions targets take initial aim. Without swift action, even more aggressive cuts may not be enough to stop extreme climate disruption.
I feel like an idiot for not seeing this one coming from either China or India. It's so painfully obvious, in hindsight, that I have to wonder how anyone who follows energy and environmental issues closely could have failed to predict it. What am I babbling about? China is now saying that the endlessly discussed target of keeping global warming below 2°C is not such a big deal.
Yvo de Boer closes Bonn talks with stark warning that the current pace of the Copenhagen negotiations remains far too slow.
A recent survey found that there was a significant interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but that investment decisions were made without close attention in the emissions trading scheme market. Rather, investment decisions were guided by expectations about the long term development of overall energy costs.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported late last week that research by Australian National University scientist Andrew Macintosh indicates that, based on most industrialized nations' stated mid-term commitments, limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius simply "won't work."
Researchers working on a joint World Agroforestry Centre-United Nations Environment Programme project suggest that integrating agroforestry in farming systems on a massive scale would create a vital reservoir for carbon storage. No less than a billion hectares of developing country farmland is suitable for conversion to carbon agroforestry projects, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates.
An important recent paper looked at the links between economic prosperity and carbon footprint.[1] It compared the average emissions per head in 73 different countries at all different stages in development. Unsurprisingly, it showed that richer countries have much higher greenhouse gas outputs. The interesting and somewhat depressing finding is that a country with 10% higher GDP per head than another will generally have emissions about 8% higher. The correlation is strong - very few countries diverge much from the norm for their level of income.
Proposals to reduce global warming through giant engineering projects or so-called geoengineering abound. Almost all are in the idea stage. But even if they were ready to deploy today, they would be dangerous for the planet, counterproductive for our energy future and unfair to the public.
Yesterday the International Energy Agency (IEA) released their much anticipated (and previously leaked) World Energy Outlook 2008.
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