by Dr. Hermann E. Ott

FACET Commentary No. 27 – February 2011

Since the Copenhagen conference, climate negotiations have stalled. Immediately following Copenhagen many believed that the conference in Cancún would finally bring a legally binding global agreement, but soon afterwards hopes were pinned on the conference in South Africa 2011 or the “Rio +20” conference in 2012 to bring forth a final agreement… [READ FULL TEXT]

 The European Environment Agency (EEA) yesterday released its greenhouse gas inventory for 2008, showing a two-percent fall from 2007 levels across EU-27 countries and an 11.3-percent reduction from 1990 levels. The new data also show that the EU-15 (the 15 only EU members in 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated) have reduced emissions by 6.9 percent since 1990, putting those countries on track to meet their Kyoto Protocol commitment of reducing 2008-2012 emissions by an average of 8-percent below 1990 levels. The European Commission points out that the EU-15 emission reduction—a 1.9-percent drop from 2007 to 2008—came as the region’s economy grew 0.6 percent, suggesting that economic growth and emissions cuts can be compatible.

Just last month, the European Commission had announced that emissions covered under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) fell even more rapidly: verified emissions from covered installations were 11.6-percent lower last year than in 2008. EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard cautioned that these reductions are largely due to the economic crisis, as opposed to ambitious actions by covered industry. The crisis has also weakened price signals in the trading scheme and slowed business investment in emissions-reducing innovations.

Earlier this year, the European Commission began arguing that the Union should commit to deeper cuts than a 20-percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020, calling instead for a 30-percent decrease. It released figures showing that, largely due to the economic crisis, the annual costs for cutting emissions will be lower than originally estimated by 2020. In 2008, the EU estimated that €70 billion per year would be necessary to meet the 20-percent target, but this cost estimate has now fallen to just €48 billion. For a 30-percent target during the same timeframe, the new projected annual cost is €81 billion—only €11 billion more than what EU countries have already accepted under the 20-percent target.

[Please read the rest of the blog on ReVolt]

Photo courtesy USFWS

The Canadian government didn’t win many fans at December’s Copenhagen climate summit. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration staunchly opposed further emissions restrictions on his country, despite Canada’s failure to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitment of cutting fossil fuel emissions 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008–12. Instead, domestic emissions escalated further.

Canada’s new target of reducing emissions 3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 51–63 percent by 2050 is insufficient to prevent climate change from permanently altering the country’s northern backyard. Last week, the Arctic Council announced in its Arctic Species Trend Index, which the Canadian government funded, that High Arctic vertebrate species declined 26 percent between 1970 and 2004. Populations in more southern and marine Arctic ecosystems have experienced less dramatic changes, but climate change is clearly threatening the survival of polar wildlife, including in Canada. Arctic species are expected to be displaced as more southerly species encroach into warmer northern habitats, and polar ice melt threatens to further shrink Arctic habitats.

Harper’s administration seems increasingly uncommitted to supporting climate science. Its 2010 budget withholds funds to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, a move that may reduce university-based climate science research by half, according to Climate Action Network (CAN) Canada. Government climate experts have been discouraged from speaking directly with the news media. And perhaps most disturbing, Harper has appointed three climate change skeptics to the boards of two key granting agencies for university-based research: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

In a new CAN-Canada report that summarizes the Harper government’s approach to climate science, the authors write: “Overall, it is difficult not to arrive at the conclusion that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper sees climate change only as a political problem, not a real-world threat. And in order to reduce its political problem, the government seems quite willing to undermine scientific research and those who undertake it, in federal departments and Canadian universities.”

Later this month, the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center will announce its annual study of polar sea-ice extent, which will likely provide more troubling news about climate change’s effect on the Arctic. Let’s hope Mr. Harper takes notice. His government cannot neglect its responsibility to raise awareness about climate-related changes under way in the Arctic, and it must take action to lower emissions.

Ben Block is a staff journalist at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC. Click here to read “Wildlife Declines Observed Across Arctic Region” in Worldwatch’s Eye on Earth news service.

FACET Commentary No. 24 – January 2010

It has only been a few years since the Europeans – suffering under what they felt to be the yoke of George Bush – longed for a multipolar world. No one expressed this sentiment more eloquently than former French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin. He envisioned a world in which the “international community” would direct all of its energy into building “a new world order.” Better than the unipolar order, this “world of cooperation” would help “every nation to mobilize” in the shared interests of all. At the most recent UN Climate Conference, the nature of this new world order became apparent. [READ FULL TEXT]

FACET Commentary No. 23 – December 2009

President Obama’s speech in Copenhagen last Friday included a line that few who had spent the past two weeks listening to bickering negotiators would disagree with: “While the reality of climate change is not in doubt, I have to be honest, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance.” Also hanging in the balance is the habitability of the planet. The Copenhagen conference did not come close to setting the world on a path to stabilizing the climate (…) While it is tempting to respond to the near collapse in Copenhagen with a combination of anger and despair, neither will lead to the result that we and others believe is urgently needed: the transition to a low‐carbon economy in the decades immediately ahead. [READ FULL TEXT]

FACET Commentary No. 22 – October 2009

A recent poll by the popular German youth magazine Bravo (2009) brought to light: Our young people are not politically apathetic. In fact, the opposite is true: They show that they have a much better feeling for the urgency of issues than some wise experts. In a representative poll of more than 1,000 children and teenagers, 89 percent of respondents stated that climate change and environmental pollution pose the most important threat – more important than the financial crisis, violence at school, or terrorism. For today’s youth, the environment is priority number one on the political agenda. [READ FULL TEXT ON  COMMENTARIES PAGE]

FACET Commentary No. 21 – September 2009

The 15th Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in less than three months, in mid‐December in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the terms of the Kyoto Protocol set to expire in 2012, the international community declared the 2009 negotiations as the target date for concluding the successor agreement for the 2013 period and beyond. International expectations are high that President Obama will be able to play more of a leadership role on climate than either of his two predecessors. In the lead up to Copenhagen, there have been and will to continue to be a series of bilateral, mini‐lateral, and large multilateral meetings to deal with climate change. Various officials from the Obama administration, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, have made numerous trips to China for important bilateral meetings in the hopes of securing a breakthrough before Copenhagen. [MORE]

FACET Commentary No. 20 – September 2009

In just three years, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has mobilized around 5,000 projects of which over 1,500 have been formally registered with the CDM Executive Board (EB), the regulatory body overseeing its rules. More than 2.7 billion Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guidelines are expected to be generated by these projects and over 9 billion Euros have been budgeted for CER acquisition. So far, the CDM has been a pure offset mechanism, where one ton CO2 equivalent reduction from a CDM project in a developing country (as enlisted in Annex A of the Kyoto Protocol) allows to increase emissions in an industrialized country (Annex B) by the same amount of one t. Theoretically, this is no problem as long as the reduction from the CDM project is real and as long as incentives for introduction of emission reduction policies in developing countries are not distorted. [READ MORE]

FACET Commentary No. 19 – August 2009

The European Commission is strongly advocating the establishment of a global emissions trading market through bilateral links between industry emission trading schemes. In January 2009, the Commission unveiled its visions of setting up an OECD-wide carbon market by 2015 latest, and to establish and integrate into this alliance trading systems in major emerging economies, no later than by 2020. What are the Commission’s motives to push for such an ambitious set-up of a global carbon market? In theory, linking carbon markets promises higher liquidity and a larger number of abatement options, thereby increasing economic efficiency. The Commission thus has the vision of a broad, globally linked carbon market as a key instrument in order to achieve the deep cuts in greenhouse gases needed to reach the EU objective of limiting global warming to a 2 degree temperature increase. [MORE]

FACET Commentary No. 16 – July 2009

In December 2007, the 13th conference of the parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Bali Road Map, initiating a two-track negotiation process towards a comprehensive post-2012 climate agreement. Besides providing the necessary institutional framework for the discussions on the future shape of the climate regime, one of its major achievements was to clearly indicate COP-15 (which will take place in December 2009 in Copenhagen) as a deadline by when negotiations had to be finalized. 545 days and numerous meetings later, the outcomes of the most recent round of negotiations, held between 1 and 12 June 2009 in Bonn (and referred to as Bonn-2), strongly suggest that negotiators have begun to come under serious pressure to meet this deadline. [MORE]