Climate Feedback

Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from The Great Beyond

International delegates to the Montreal Protocol wrapped up their meeting in Port Ghalib, Egypt, over the weekend without taking formal action to curb hydrofluorocarbons, modern refrigerants that are also poised to become a major contributor to global warming.

Some 41 countries joined in a declaration in support of regulating HFCs as greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol, according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and the Environmental Investigation Agency. This is in addition to support in North America and Europe as well as Micronesia and Mauritius, which have led the proposal.

Ozone-friendly HFCs represent the culmination of the Montreal Protocol's original mission; regulating them as greenhouse gases would require an amendment expanding the protocol's regulatory umbrella. In Egypt, Montreal delegates called on a technical committee to analyze alternatives to the chemicals in advance of a potential decision next year. For background, see our previous coverage here and here.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 09, 2009
Categories: In the News, Jeff Tollefson, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), has denied claims that it prevents researchers from publishing work on politically-sensitive issues such as climate change, reports Nature News [subscription].

An ecological economist at the agency, Clive Spash, had a paper accepted for publication in the journal New Political Economy earlier this year, only to find out two weeks later that it had been withdrawn by a CSIRO official because it had not yet been through an internal approval process.

In the article, Spash reportedly criticized carbon trading schemes for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, commenting that they are ineffective even if politically popular.

CSIRO staff are prevented from commenting on matters of policy. The agency has a process in place to ensure that staff only communicate on the results of their research, but Spash argues that such a policy presents real difficulties for academics working in socio-economics. As Nature News reports:

“There's a real issue here about people working in the socio-economic area," [Spash] told one reporter. "It's not at all clear to me how these people are supposed to work and do their job while trying to meet these general guidance principles that have been interpreted at present to say that we're not allowed to comment on any government policy at any level of government, anywhere in the world."

Spash apparently submitted the paper before an internal decision was made, having become frustrated with the slowness of the process and with wrangling over specific wording.

A CSIRO employee told Nature News last Friday that the incident stemmed more from management styles and conservative interpretation of the rules, rather than from any political pressure.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 09, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

Prospects for the U.S. congressional climate bill appear grim, writes Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:

“With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.”

David Roberts at Grist offers a similar prognosis for a bill he says that is already “far weaker than what’s needed.” Because of America’s institutional “political dysfunction,” Roberts predicts:

“There’s every chance it will a) get weaker still and b) fail to pass in the end.”

Amidst this backdrop, cap-and-trade, which is the basis for the congressional climate legislation, is getting raked over the coals again. Two attorneys for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which they asserted:

“The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more.”

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs in the November/December issue of Scientific American takes a similarly dim view of “the cumbersome cap-and-trade system proposed by the House of Representatives. Too much is at stake, argues Sachs:

“We’ll need to spend trillions of dollars over time to save the planet from climate change. All the more reason not to let lobbyists make a financial game out of this deadly serious effort.”

Did American politicians thus bet on the wrong horse, muses Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol? He suggests it might be wise to set aside the conventional wisdom about carbon taxes being “a political dead-end.” Johnson lays out how environmentalists can find common ground with deficit hawks on a climate bill centered on a carbon tax.

Whatever policy instrument eventually gets put in place to reduce carbon emissions, it may still be too late to save the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As The Times of London reports:

“The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.”

Continue reading "Countdown to Copenhagen " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 03, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hopes that the UN conference in Copenhagen will result in an ambitious climate treaty have faded, with UN climate chief Yvo de Boer now conceding that reaching a legally binding agreement will be impossible this year.

If December’s summit fails to deliver a strong accord, there will be some obvious culprits: the global recession, which has made nations reluctant to commit cash to the problem, and the US Senate, where horn-locking among lawmakers has delayed the passage of domestic legislation.

But even without these bumps in the road, some say the challenge set for negotiators in Copenhagen may simply have been too great from outset. In a feature out today on Nature Reports Climate Change (free access), Mason Inman looks at the UN summit from the perspective of researchers who study cooperation, some of whom argue that trying to get an effective multi-faceted treaty agreed between 192 nations is a waste of time. Many behavioural economists say — and common sense dictates — that a strong agreement would be more easily negotiated between fewer parties.

The legitimacy of this claim is perhaps evidenced by the recent bilateral talks between two of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, China and India, who last week signed a five-year pact to present a united front at international climate negotiations. Now, the US is now seeking to broker similar agreements, and according to some reports, US climate envoy Todd Stern says that such bilateral deals — with Russia and Brazil also — could be the building blocks for an international agreement in December.

From the perspective of political haggling, this makes sense. Cooperation in Copenhagen will only be achieved if those responsible for the majority of emissions can agree on how to apportion responsibility for climate change fairly, as well as on the incentives and deterrents that will ensure compliance, rather than encourage free-riding.

And according to those who study cooperation, it’s all about the carrots and sticks. Writes Inman:

Suppose there’s a country — call it Slackistan — that is emitting loads of carbon dioxide, and doesn’t want to cut back. If Slackistan can somehow convince all the other countries to take action, but do nothing itself, it gets all of the benefits of a cooler climate with none of effort. In game theory lingo, that’s called free riding.

An effective global deal on climate change has to, therefore, use carrots or sticks to nudge countries away from the default strategy — that of Slackistan — and towards cooperation. Figuring out how to create these incentives is the key, many game theorists say, to breaking the current stalemate and to keeping a strong agreement running for many decades.

Continue reading "Climate games: small pacts are no big deal" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 29, 2009
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Reaching a climate deal in Copenhagen will depend on rich nations’ proactive commitment to making mandatory emission cuts at home, prominent experts from India and China reiterate in a couple of opinion pieces in Nature [subscription] today. And it will require exceptional diplomatic skill, adds a veteran climate negotiator.

While accepting the United Nation’s principle of ‘common but differentiated’ responsibility, India cannot yet agree to mandatory domestic emissions limits, says Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. At the most, India might offer “at an appropriate stage of the negotiations” the country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change as part of a global package of commitments.

In return for voluntary domestic action, India will expect from the developed world technical and financial aid for switching to low-carbon technologies and adapting to anticipated climate change, Pachauri explains. “India feels strongly that on the basis of historical responsibility and consideration of equity, developed countries should provide financial support for adaptation in developing countries,” he says.

Jiahua Pan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies in Beijing follows a similar line of thought in outlining China’s position. The G8’s intention to halve global emissions by 2050, with 80% cuts by the developed and 20% by the developing world, translates into lasting inequity, he argues. A fair deal, says Pan, would require wealthier countries, which currently emit greenhouse gases at almost five times the per capita rate of developing nations and economies in transition, to cut their emissions by at least 40 % by 2020.

“The developing nations will have every reason to follow suit if the rich nations demonstrate leadership,” he says.

A successful deal at Copenhagen will furthermore depend on financial resources for adaptation measures in poorer countries, including technology transfer, he says. He points out that China already invests more heavily in low-carbon energy than most rich nations. But he cautions that the shift to carbon-free energy sources comes with competitive disadvantages. Fears that a premature shift will slow economic development are virulent throughout the developing world, he says.

“Developed countries are concerned with immediate negative economic effects, whereas the developing countries are worried about their future well-being if they sign up to a legally binding, but unrealistic, target.”

In a third piece, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentine diplomat who led the negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, argues that success in Copenhagen will critically depend on the skills of the lead negotiator.

Estrada-Oyuela recounts the delicate international diplomacy, seasoned with episodes of near-failure and last-minute breakthroughs, which brought about the all-too modest Kyoto treaty. Inexperience on the part of the Danish minister of energy and climate, Connie Hedergaard, who will officially preside over the Copenhagen talks, could prove a stumbling block on the road to a more ambitious successor agreement, he warns.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 22, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Opinion, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Quirin Schiermeier

The European Union’s environment ministers have reportedly agreed on a negotiation mandate for Sweden for the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. Sweden currently holds the EU presidency, which rotates every six months. (German).

The EU has previously said it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 % by 2020. At a speech to the European Parliament, Andreas Carlgren, the Swedish environment minister, yesterday reiterated that the EU will agree to 30 % cuts only if other parties make sufficient commitments in Copenhagen.

“We see the 30 per cent target as a lever to convince other parties to join us in being more ambitious. By 2050 emissions should have dropped by at least 80 per cent,” he said.

At today’s talks in Luxembourg, environment ministers of the 27 EU member states also called for the Copenhagen climate talks in December to set targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from ships and airplanes. By 2020, global emissions from aviation should be cut by 10 %, and emissions from shipping by 20 %, compared with 2005 levels, the group said according to news reports.

Meanwhile, at a meeting yesterday of EU finance ministers, Poland and other eastern EU member countries blocked a decision on climate adaptation aid for developing countries. The group is concerned that their national contribution to the planned adaptation fund will overburden their economies.

Andreas Borg, the Swedish finance minister, complained about “a lack of commitment by certain member states”.

The EU’s heads of states will now attempt to resolve the issue at a council meeting next week in Brussels, when the EU’s negotiation position for Copenhagen is to be rubber-stamped.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 21, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, In the News, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Getting a climate deal agreed in December will require an ‘uphill battle’ said UK energy and climate change Secretary Ed Miliband in London yesterday, despite incremental progress from the world's largest economies on agreeing the way forward.

Miliband addressed the press following a two-day meeting of the Major Economies Forum, a US-inspired initiative that includes 17 of the world's developing and emerging economies. The meeting aimed to address some of the key obstacles to securing a global treaty and involved six guest nations, including some of the world’s poorest such as Ethiopia.

Although the forum is not part of the formal UN negotiation process, its members collectively account for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so any shift in their positions will significantly affect prospects for reaching an agreement in Copenhagen.

I attended the press conference and reported the story for Nature News [subscription]. It’s interesting, as Andy Revkin points out over on Dot Earth, that the final communiqué from the meeting was seen by some observers as empty rhetoric but by others as containing substantial signs of progress.

Miliband certainly gave the impression that the meeting was successful, saying “there was a sense that substantial progress had been made”. That was reflected to some extent in the press coverage.

But Miliband was scant on the details of what exact progress had been made. He highlighted three areas where agreement had been reached: the need to substantially increase funding for adaptation and mitigation in the developing world (but he didn’t say by how much or by when), how that money will be transferred (this presumably relates to the decision that the UN, rather than the World Bank, will administer the fund) and the need for an international deal to reflect current commitments by both rich and poor nations (an issue that’s important to the US; Stern said there won’t be an agreement without this).

A cursory look at the communiqué suggests that progress by the MEF this week was incremental, and perhaps even insignificant, given the larger issues on the table. The address by US climate change envoy Todd Stern last night suggested that getting a deal that involves the US will be tricky.

I’ve elaborated on this in the full story, but in short, the US is unlikely to sign up to targets if the Waxman-Markey bill hasn’t passed through the Senate by December. And if it has passed, the issue of the legal framework of the treaty will be contentious: many developing nations want a Kyoto-style protocol, whereas the US isn’t keen on such an agreement, instead favouring one that commits both developed and developing nations to mid-term targets for 2020.

Speaking yesterday in London, Stern said that the US is “historically the biggest emitter, but the capacity of the world to get where we need to go [will] be more determined by what happens in China and other major developing nations in the future. It has to involve the major developing economies – that’s the only way it’s going to work”.

Olive Heffernan

Image: PurestockX

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 20, 2009
Categories: In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 2006, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggested that we might need to start deliberately engineering the climate if no progress could be made on curbing our emissions. Since then, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have continued to rise. So it’s perhaps no surprise that what once seemed like a outlandish idea has recently become a subject of serious scientific endeavour.

Injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere has been one of the various proposed ‘geoengineering’ schemes; others include fertilizing the ocean with iron and stimulating cloud formation.

A new study [subscription] led by Alan Robock at Rutgers University in New Jersey now looks at the prospects for stratospheric ‘geoengineering’ in terms of its benefits, costs and risks. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they highlight the pros of injecting a sulphate gas into the stratosphere in the face of a climate catastrophe: it would cool temperatures, stop the melting of sea and land-based ice, slow sea level rise and increase the planet’s ability to sequester greenhouse gas.

But if the public sees geoengineering as a low-cost and easy ‘solution’ to climate change, then it could erode backing for mitigation, say the researchers, who weight the benefits against the associated risks and costs. Among the dangers of such a scheme is the risk of substantial ozone depletion, including delayed the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, they say. Other risks include regional drought, ocean acidification, a reduction in sunlight and the end of blue skies. The cost would ultimately depend on how the gas was deployed. Robock and colleagues say that using existing US military planes would be the cheapest option, at roughly several billion dollars per year. Lofting the gas using artillery shells or balloons would be more expensive. Other options, such as pumping the gas through a tall tower or lifting it into the stratosphere using a space elevator, may be possible in the future, say the scientists, but their cost cannot be evaluated just yet.

The dangers, rather than the cost, will ultimately limit the potential of geoengineering as a solution to climate change, conclude Robock’s team.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 08, 2009
Categories: Geoengineering, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At the UN climate conference in Copenhagen this December, talk will turn to scientific, political and economic issues with a global reach and a long history — not easy to pick up from the daily news. We asked select experts on climate change what books we should be reading ahead of the big event.

Here's a peek at some well-informed desks, bookshelves and bedside tables. Read the full roundup here - and join in our pre-Copenhagen book club by commenting below.

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And Al Gore's new book delivers, says Joe Romm, the voice of Climate Progress at the Centre for American Progress. Gore's Our Choice collects the most effective climate change solutions that policymakers could put in place now.

Tony Juniper, the campaigner and onetime director of Friends of the Earth, picks out Mark Lynas's Six Degrees (also a favorite of the Royal Society). The book vividly paints the changes expected as the world warms - revealing the practical implications of compromises we could see at Copenhagen.

A lively new book by an ex-oilman and geologist tells some of the insider history behind the UN talks - an eyewitness account of shifting views on climate change within the oil industry. Lord Ron Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell, says Brian Lovell's Challenged by Carbon is an instant tonic for 'climate change fatigue'.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado science-policy expert, argues that climate negotiators are failing to learn from history. He recommends the 1998 book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which recites a litany of failed attempts at centralized planning.

Oliver Tickell's climate policy proposal Kyoto2 is just the thing a truly intelligent species would come up with, according to Mark Lynas, environmentalist and Six Degrees author. But it's nothing like what's on the table for December.

Can we 'solve the climate crisis'? In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia asserts that "climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'" but rather is an idea whose shape can differ completely depending on one's political and cultural biases. New York Times reporter and Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin recommends the book and sketches out its implications for Copenhagen.

In turn, Mike Hulme points to a book that looks beyond the usual dichotomy of climate change 'believers' and 'sceptics' to find a more fundamental split in thinking. John Foster's The Sustainability Mirage explores some crucial social and psychological realities of climate change that you won't be hearing much about during the conference.

Another good read when you want to lift your head from the trenches, the new book Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand takes an overview of environmental issues in the twenty-first century. Former Nature editor (and sun-eater) Oliver Morton dubs it a lucid big picture put together with experience, wisdom and optimism.

Could you call yourself ready for Copenhagen without taking a look at the IPCC report? Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says their 2007 Synthesis Report - a sum-up of the masses of policy-relevant research reviewed by the three working groups - has perhaps been the panel's most effective report thus far in creating awareness across every section of society.

Here are the book reviews in full. What do you think - are these the right reads to get ready for the conference? What others should be on the list?

Anna Barnett

Image: © iStockphoto / Pertunisas

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 02, 2009
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Oxford economist Dieter Helm co-edits an upcoming book, The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, that he says takes "a colder and harder look at the challenge". In a Q&A on Nature Reports Climate Change this week, Helm gives his take on a long-term strategy for reducing emissions. Here's an excerpt:

Where, in your view, has policy gone wrong?

Let's remember what lies behind Copenhagen. The Kyoto Protocol measures countries' production of carbon, not consumption. It's no accident the Europeans like Kyoto. It's a set of measures which, as they de-industrialize and production moves to countries like China, makes them look good. But the carbon consumption record of Europe, once you take those imports back, is pretty awful. That's why Kyoto looks like a success, and yet it hasn't caused even a blip in the emissions path.

Do we also need to re-think climate economics?

What we have learnt is that politicians tend to choose the most expensive options first. Faced with climate change, what's our solution? In Europe, it's to devote most of our energies to a rapid build-out of wind power. This is the sort of thing that makes nuclear power look cheap. Climate change is about the massive increase of coal burning internationally, especially the growth of China and India fuelled by coal-based energy — and America too, where the Obama plans are also small relative to the problem.

What exactly will windmills across Europe do to address that overwhelmingly dominant effect? Of course they'll play some role, but it'll probably take a couple of weeks for China to add sufficient new coal power stations to cancel out any renewables effort in Britain. It's time to grow up. It's time to realize that coal is where the core of the problem lies, and to think cleverly about solutions towards that.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 07, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Economics, In the News, Mitigation, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The G8 meeting last week – the last get-together of the leaders of the world’s major industrialized nations before the United Nations climate summit in December - was loaded with expectations as to what Obama & Co might give climate negotiators to take with them to Copenhagen.

The answer, in a nutshell, is two degrees.

Is that enough? The Nature news story here has the context and offers two opposite expert views.

“The G8 announcement is depressing,” says economist Gwyn Prins, a co-author of the pointed anti-Kyoto polemic ‘How to get climate policy back on course’ (pdf file), whom I interviewed last week for the article.

“Politicians are mistaking making statements for actually doing something. We really need to try something different,” he says. He believes the prospect is “vanishingly small” for developed and developing nations to agree on a meaningful deal in Copenhagen.

Others are not so pessimistic. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the German PIK and something of an elder statesman of science-led global change diplomacy, is actually quite enthusiastic about the G8’s two degrees target, which he believes will breathe new life into international climate politics.

“Now we can calculate precisely how much greenhouse gas we can still afford to emit if we don’t want to exceed a given probability of getting into dangerous territory,” he says.

Continue reading "What the G8 target means" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on July 15, 2009
Categories: Categories, Climate Policy, GHG emissions, Major Economies Meeting, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond

An international crew of academics this week boldly declared that the world is headed down the wrong track in trying to put a lid on global greenhouse gas emissions. But with global leaders pressing the issue in Italy this week, it's not clear that anybody is listening.

The team includes Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who made a splash with their 2007 indictment of the Kyoto Protocol, dubbed The Wrong Trousers (Nature also published a summary of the article). Their latest paper, which includes additional authors, including Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado in Boulder, maintains a hard line and advocates policies that directly promote energy efficiency and decarbonization in place of a messy global carbon market that might or might not do the work it is intended to do. The researchers see a model in Japan, long a leader on energy efficiency thanks in part to a dearth of domestic resources.

Although the BBC posted a story and the New York Times' Andrew Revkin included a blurb in his blog, the paper hasn't garnered much traction. To be sure, Japan has lessons to teach the world, and carbon markets are unlikely to solve all of the world's problems. But like it or not, given the amount of time and political capital that has been invested in the current negotiations, there's little appetite for radical new ideas.

This perspective was nicely summed up in the BBC's coverage by Tom Burke of Imperial College. He acknowledged that many of the authors' criticisms are valid but suggested that "nothing could be more harmful" than the solution they propose, which is to reverse course.

So far, however, that doesn't appear to be a danger. On Wednesday, G8 leaders backed the establishment of a global carbon market as part of a commitment to curb their emissions by some 80 percent by 2050. They also signed on to a goal, long held by the European Union, to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The question facing the Major Economies Forum, to be convened Thursday by US president Barack Obama, is whether major developing countries such as China and India will agree to the 2-degree goal and commit themselves to halving global emissions by 2050 in order to make it happen.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 09, 2009
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It’s Wednesday in Lindau and I’ve spent a chunk of the past 24 hours recording sections of the film about climate change that we’re making here.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Mario Molina and Sherry Rowland about their work on ozone and their views on science informing policy. We were joined by three young, enthusiastic scientists who are working on various aspects of climate research – solar technology, biofuels and ocean health – and are here at Lindau to interact with the laureates.

Molina and Rowland have a lot to say on the issues of ozone and policy, of course. When they called for a worldwide ban on CFCs, following their discovery that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, they were, in many respects, pioneers. But though their efforts ultimately led to the phasing out of CFCs, their results – and outspoken views – were initially greeted with caution from the scientific community. I asked them what the young scientists working on climate change can learn from their experience.

Rowland was adamant that young scientists should not be afraid to speak up on the implications of their research. I queried them on how far researchers should go in speaking up. Would they, for example, now call for a worldwide ban on the use of coal, given that coal is such a significant contributor to the problem of climate change? They both responded that a worldwide ban would be appropriate, if carbon capture and storage (CCS) was available. Molina added that we should be cautious of building new power plants that will tie us into using coal for the next 30-50 years, unless we have developed CCS technology.

I met the young researchers – Brandy and Brian from the US, and Faroha from Pakistan – again this morning at 730am to catch up on their experiences at Lindau so far. They all got a lot out the session with Rowland and Molina, who were both thoroughly engaging. Of course, I can tell you all of this on the blog, but it will be much more convincing to see the film once it is on nature.com. Out of an hour of filming, I’m guessing that five minutes, at most, of yesterday’s session will make it into the final cut.

After hearing talks on sustainability and energy from Harry Kroto and Walter Kohn, this afternoon, I recorded some of the narrative links for the film. The face-to-camera pieces are by far the trickiest!

The next piece will be recorded Friday as we make our way by boat to Mainau island – home of Countess Bettina Bernadotte – where a panel on climate change is being convened. I’ll be back with an update from that on Friday.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 01, 2009
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Although billions of dollars have been set aside for climate change projects to benefit developing countries, they have "not taken off in Africa in any significant way", says Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and also the least likely to be able to afford the costs of adapting to it.

Out of the 1643 “clean development” projects registered with the UNFCCC, only 30 (less than 2 percent) are within Africa. In comparison, 72 percent of projects are in Asia and the Pacific and 26 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 80 percent of the projects in Africa are in Northern Africa and South Africa. The needs of African nations are often side-stepped in international negotiations because their voices are drowned out by the developing nation powerhouses: China, India and Brazil.

The only way African nations can get their voice heard is by working together. But that’s not easy. Africa is politically, economically, environmentally and culturally very diverse. The biggest division is probably South Africa, which is basically a developed nation in a developing continent. But the Arab countries in northern Africa also tend to align themselves with the Middle East; Oil-rich countries, such as Nigeria and Angola, are part of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and share their interests; and Sub-Saharan Africa is further divided into English-, French- and Portuguese-language regions.

To improve Africa’s climate game-plan, more than 300 negotiators, ministers, experts and organizations related to Africa converged in Nairobi last week at the third African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. On 29 May, ministers announced they had forged a “shared vision,” asking industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and for more financial and technical support to help Africa cope with climate change. Beyond that, the 'Nairobi Declaration' contains few specifics.

And it's unclear whether the vague political statement will give Africa a stronger voice this week in Bonn, or during the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December this year. "It was difficult to agree on how much to ask for," says Sputnik Ratau, a spokesman for Buyelwa Sonjica, South Africa's minister of water and the environment, who chaired the ministerial meetings. "Different countries have different needs."

"Saying Africa is vulnerable and needs a lot of money is easy," adds Saleemul Huq, who works with developing-country negotiators through the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. "But coming up with more nuanced negotiating texts is not that easy."

A longer version of this story is available to subscribers on Nature News.

Anjali Nayar is an intern reporter on Nature News.

Image: Punchstock/Digital Vision

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 04, 2009
Categories: Anjali Nayar, Climate Policy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest round of UN talks on climate change kicked off Monday in Bonn, where delegates will spend the next two weeks pouring over a draft negotiating text that contains various proposals for a new global climate deal.

The 53-page document has been “basically welcomed as a good starting point for the negotiations”, and delegates are thus far infused with cautious optimism that the process could pick up speed now the US is playing a proactive role under Obama’s leadership.

But on one of the key issues – how much industrialized nations should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the short-term – nations remain at an impasse. To agree a global deal in Copenhagen in December, it must be clear what reductions industrialised nations are aiming for by 2020, says UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, who is leading the negotiations.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), developed countries would need to slash their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 to constrain global warming to 2ºC. If temperatures rise more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, dangerous climate impacts are highly probable.

Speaking in London last week, leading scientists – including 20 Nobel prize winners – reiterated that message, adding that to get on the right pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions must also peak by 2015 at the latest.

With the exception of Japan, whose position is expected in the coming weeks, almost all industrialized nations have now roughly stated where they stand on reducing their emissions by 2020. Germany has pledged reductions of 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and the European Union as a whole will decrease its emissions by 30% of 1990 levels by 2020 if other nations agree to binding targets.

But the current level of US commitment falls far short of the near-term targets needed by developed nations. Under proposed legislation, the US will decrease its emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which is equivalent to bringing them back down to 1990 levels by 2020. In the meantime, emerging economies such as India and China are calling for all rich countries to sign up to the same level of commitment as Germany.

Speaking at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureates Symposium in London last week, US energy secretary and Nobel laureate Steven Chu implied that the US may, however, go further in its commitment to tackle climate change in Copenhagen. “I hope we can deliver more than we've promised," said Chu. "I have always liked to over-deliver on promises."

Whether emerging economies – especially China, now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – should also take on targets is another bone of contention. I asked Chu in London last week about the need for China to commit to specific targets. He said that "to declare Copenhagen a failure if countries don't sign to binding targets is not helpful at all. The success of Copenhagen will be determined by what countries do after."

But according to Alistair Doyle reporting for Reuters, Washington clearly wants to see a greater effort overall from China. In a defensive response, China’s climate ambassador has said that rich nations should focus on keeping pledges to curb greenhouse gases rather than place new demands on the poor.

Collectively, the proposals currently on the table for emissions reductions just don’t amount to the required reductions, as Peter Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor points out. With just six weeks of full time negotiations left, something needs to give if an effective global deal based on targets is to be agreed in Copenhagen.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 03, 2009
Categories: Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Commercial ships steaming through international waters are pumping out increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that are out of the reach of the Kyoto Protocol and national regulatory schemes. A new report from the UK parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee warns it could take years to bring these emissions under control.

The UN’s International Maritime Organisation - tasked under Kyoto with figuring out how to regulate emissions from shipping - has failed to move fast enough, says the report. An IMO meeting on the issue held in October 2008 did not get as far as formulating a proposal that could be part of the negotiating text for a new global climate deal, now under discussion in Bonn.

Not that it’s a simple problem to solve. To deal with gases released on international routes, either various countries must divide responsibility, or else the gases have to go into a separate “international” basket that’s regulated on its own somehow. Both are thorny approaches. Nevertheless, says the committee:

There can be no excuse for the lack of progress within the International Maritime Organisation since the Kyoto protocol was signed. That the IMO has yet to reach agreement even over the type of emissions control regime to take forward, let alone decide any details, suggests it is not fit for purpose in this vital area.

Continue reading "Shipping emissions up in the air" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 02, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, Climate Policy, In the News, Mitigation, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The concept of active human efforts to artificially limit or reverse climate change has been around for some years. Collectively called geoengineering, many such plans, some more fanciful than others, have been proposed by the scientific community, and several were discussed during the final days of the AGU Joint Assembly in Toronto.

One plan, described by Alan Robock of Rutgers University, New Jersey, US, would involve continuously placing fine particles of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere, to block sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface. This, proponents say, would be benign, simply mimicking the effect of large volcanic eruptions, and simulations confirm that northern hemisphere or even global cooling would follow.

Although there is currently no way to do it, the problem is not the technology, Robock said in an interview, amplifying on his oral presentation at the meeting. The technology to inject SO2 particles into the stratosphere might not be that difficult; high altitude military planes could be adapted to do it, he suggested, although there are questions about their ability to deliver particles of the appropriate size. Regardless, the ancillary effects of the experiment could be devastating, he said, by reducing the amount of precipitation associated with the summer monsoon in Asia and Africa, thereby threatening the food supply for billions of people.

A secondary proposal that Robock described in his presentation would provide the SO2 seeding only in the Arctic. The problem is, he said, that winds blow the particles southward, with comparable effects on the monsoons, according to simulations, so there would be no advantage to year-round Arctic-only seeding.

Continue reading "AGU 2009 Joint Assembly: Solutions, and sayonara " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 28, 2009
Categories: AGU 2009 Joint Assembly, Harvey Leifert, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After months of saying that recession wouldn’t stop climate policy plans in Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced yesterday that the country’s cap-and-trade program is in fact going to be delayed a year and will not roll out until July 2011.

As Roberta Kwok wrote in Nature last month, Rudd’s Labour party government had called for a 5% emissions cut from 2000 levels by 2020 - to be raised to 15% if an ambitious global climate deal is reached in Copenhagen - but the proposed legislation was under fire from both the right and left. The Financial Times notes that Greens in the Australian Senate had demanded a 40% cut with a global deal, while conservative opposition parties wanted the plan delayed to cushion the impact on businesses. Rudd met the Greens halfway, raising the conditional 15% target to 25%. Industry got extra soothing with a new tweak: fixed carbon prices for the first year (The Age has details).

Rudd, who had called any delay in cap-and-trade “reckless and irresponsible”, now says "I believe (this) is the most sensible, rational, balanced response to a fundamental change in economic circumstances."

Halfway around the world, British Columbia may also be about to take a U-turn on a climate policy milestone. Nicola Jones reports in Nature today that the province has been uneasily bearing the burden of North America’s first carbon tax. The BC Liberal Party started the tax in July, but their challengers in an upcoming election on 12 May are against it. Jones writes:

Continue reading "Hard times for climate plans in Australia and Canada " »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 05, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

China’s forests, shrublands and soils have absorbed a third or so of China’s fossil fuel emissions from 1980 to 2000. Sequestering up to 260 million tonnes of carbon per year, the Chinese land sink is more than twice as large than that of geographic Europe, and comparable in size to that of the United States.

There has been quite some controversy over the total size of the Northern Hemisphere’s terrestrial carbon sink, so this first comprehensive estimate, published in Nature today, is filling a real gap. Given China’s 1.2 billion population and rapidly growing economy, knowledge of how much of its emissions are actually staying in the atmosphere is pretty valuable information. Globally, around 40% of annual emissions stay in the atmosphere; the rest is sequestered by plants, soils and oceans.

The Chinese data come at a time of growing speculation and guesswork over the People's Republic’s future climate and energy policies. Needless to say, the study is of no small relevance with a view to upcoming climate negotiations. The very fact that China’s land carbon sink is large is good news. But the results will also strengthen the Chinese government’s negotiation position at the United Nations climate summit in December in Copenhagen.

Continue reading "EGU: China's carbon sink - it's large" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Policy, Earth science, Mitigation, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Leaders of the world’s 20 richest nations “missed an opportunity” to kick start the green economy in their efforts to arrest the global financial downturn at a summit in London yesterday.

Science and green leaders expressed “disappointment” at the G20 summit’s failure to include a commitment to spend a proportion of the agreed $1.1 trillion financial injection to resuscitate the global economy on a low carbon stimulus package.

The meeting’s final agreed statement on actions to take forward leaves mention of climate change and low carbon technologies to the final paragraphs. It says, “We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative and resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure.”

The statement adds that world leaders “reaffirm” commitments to address climate change and to reach a deal at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

Responding to the outcome, Martin Parry, past co-chair of the IPCC’s working group II on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, told Nature, “The statement on climate change looks like an afterthought and appears to restate commitments that have already been made.”

David King, chief scientific advisor to the UK government from 2000 – 2007 and a vocal campaigner on the need to tackle climate change, told Nature that world leaders had “missed an opportunity” to integrate the recovery of the world economy with the future sustainability of the global financial system.

Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, an independent research organisation based in London, UK, told Nature, “There was very little recognition of the real crunch issues of climate and natural resources. It could be really damaging to restart the global economy on the same line as we left it.”

World leaders agreed to a further G20 meeting later this year, to review progress made on goals set at the London summit. Read the full story on Nature News [subscription].

Natasha Gilbert

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 03, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Economics, G20 London Summit, 2009, Natasha Gilbert, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jane Lubchenco, a marine tidal ecologist at Oregon State University, is on the job this week as the new head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She replaces Vice-Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, who led NOAA until last October, and becomes the first woman to head up the agency, which is a sprawling beast charged with everything from managing US fisheries to running the country's operational earth-monitoring satellite programme.

On her first business day on the job after being sworn in (by the highest-ranking official at the Department of Commerce who was available; she's undoubtedly hoping for Vice-President Joe Biden for the ceremonial swearing-in that comes later), Lubchenco granted me and Eli Kintisch, a reporter for Science, 30 minutes of her time. I've posted up an edited version of that conversation here. What might not come through to the casual reader is just how well-versed Lubchenco is in the world of policy. She's never run a major agency or facility or group before, but she has plenty of experience in communicating with the public and, perhaps more importantly in her new job, with Congress.

As my colleague Rex Dalton reports in a story in the upcoming issue of Nature, she created the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, perhaps the most respected programme in the world to train environmental scientists to communicate with policymakers. I've spoken to Lubchenco casually before on science topics, but in our talk this week it became clear just how practiced she is at dealing with the short attention spans of not just journalists, but also policymakers. She speaks clearly and in practiced sentences, sometimes coming off as stiff but more often as thoughtful. She uses small words, short sentences, and stays on topic throughout her answers. And perhaps most significantly, she knows when to say she doesn't know something.

A science-policy friend of mine says that Lubchenco stands out because she knows more than she thinks she does, whereas the opposite is usually the case with people who ascend to high levels of government. It'll be interesting to see where she takes the agency and how she fares in the dog-eat-dog world of Washington.

Posted by Alex Witze on March 24, 2009
Categories: Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I noted that the new bosses in Washington DC, in their swift stride towards distinctly post-Bush environmental policies, had yet to touch the outgoing administration’s 11th-hour battle against applying the Clear Air Act to greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

They didn’t maintain the suspense very long.

Yesterday the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, said the EPA would put up for review a December memo on the issue from ex-EPA admin Stephen Johnson - and that the agency is set to announce new thinking on this type of regulation.

Continue reading "Greenhouse gases up for a rethink at the EPA" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 18, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Signs of our interesting times: airlines and oil companies are apparently now queuing up to have their greenhouse gas emissions regulated.

A communiqué to the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen has been signed by three European airlines and an Asian one - British Airways, Air France/KLM, Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific - along with the European airport operator BAA. Calling themselves the Aviation Global Deal Group, they say they recognize “the need to find a global solution to our emissions that meets environmental and developmental needs whilst ensuring a level playing field in our markets.” Namely, they want carbon dioxide emissions from aviation to be regulated with a sectoral approach that applies to their overseas competitors.

As things stand, the EU’s emissions trading scheme is due include plane exhaust starting in 2012, which should make it more expensive to fly through Europe. For long-haul flights from Asia by carriers like Cathay Pacific, the EU will count total emissions rather than just gases released in European airspace, Reuters notes.

Across the pond, the New York Times reports that oil companies are in much the same mood, aiming to shape low-carbon policies they see as inevitable under Obama.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 12, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The LA Times reports that two US federal agencies in the business of financing international fossil fuel projects like oil refineries and power plants have agreed to start scrutinizing the carbon output of these big emitters.

Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Coporation - finance agencies that help drive US exports and aid development overseas - had been fighting a seven-year lawsuit by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and four US cities. The plaintiffs argued that carbon dioxide emissions from projects funded by the two organizations are hurting these cities economically: “global warming, the suit argued, influences Santa Monica's water supply, the sea level near Oakland's airport and the snow on Rocky Mountain ski slopes” near Boulder, Colorado, according to the LAT story. They said these impacts should have been assessed ahead of time under the National Environmental Policy Act, the seminal US environmental law.

The agencies settled the suit Friday, a few weeks into Obama’s tenure - no coincidence, suggests Bill Hewitt over on his blog. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” agrees Salon’s Andrew Leonard, pointing out that last week the Obama EPA started its own lawsuit over a coal power plant upgrade in Kansas that allegedly failed to add in required pollution controls. The finance agencies’ settlement is intriguing because the battle they're conceding is reminiscent of others that Bush’s people fought tooth and nail until their very last days. Earlier in this suit over fossil fuel funding, says the LAT, the Bush administration argued that "alleged impacts of global climate change are too remote and speculative" to be part of project reviews. We heard essentially the same rationale in December when they pre-empted the possibility of using impacts on endangered species as the basis for limiting emissions. A parallel struggle over regulating power plant carbon footprints under the Clean Air Act (see this post and subsequent developments) has yet to be addressed by the Obama team.

The settlement has the agencies committing $250 million each to renewable energy projects, reports the LAT. Friends of the Earth announced that the EIB has promised to take emissions into account when evaluating new ventures and to develop a carbon policy, while OPIC will aim to reduce its projects’ greenhouse gas emissions 20% over the next ten years. That could add up: an earlier LA Times investigation (h/t DeSmogBlog), based on data from Friends of the Earth, counted up at least 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from just a subset of the projects the two funded in 1993-2006.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 10, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I may need to start a file for ‘ocean impacts we hadn’t thought of’. First there was the projection that the seas will get noisier as a result of ocean acidification, which whale conservation groups were running with at a UN conference in December. Now researchers report in PNAS that ocean acidification may make fish larvae lose the sense of smell they use to find a home.

Most coastal marine species are swept out to sea during their larval stage and have to find their way to a habitat they can settle down in. Orange clownfish - yes, that’s the famously lost fish from Finding Nemo - must get back to reefs, often ending up in the same ones where they hatched. Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson of James Cook University in Australia have been studying olfactory cues the clownfish may follow.

But they and their colleagues report that clownfish larvae reared in aquariums at pHs of 7.8 and 7.6 don’t respond to smell tests the same way as control fish. These pHs are low compared to the 8.15 the fish live with today, but a business-as-usual rise in carbon dioxide emissions could take the ocean to 7.8 by 2100 and 7.6 in the following century.

Larvae reared at pH 7.8 favour the pungent smell of a swamp tree that clownfish normally avoid. They also fail to discriminate between the smells of their parents and other adults, suggesting that acid-addled Nemos might end up inbreeding more often. The pH-7.6-reared fish don’t swim toward any of the tested scents, suggesting they've stopped smelling altogether.

It’s not just clownfish that smell their way home. If acid damages fish's olfactory capabilities the researchers say, many other coastal marine species could be affected.

One question the paper doesn’t take up is whether an ocean pH of 7.6 would leave any reefs for clownfish to come back to. The danger to reefs, and other better-known impacts of acidification, have meanwhile been highlighted in a declaration by 155 ocean scientists from 26 countries - and they want action.

Continue reading "Ocean acidification disorients fish, riles up scientists" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 03, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology, In the News, Ocean science, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK will get an intriguing new climate research centre next week, with the launch of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds. In a Q&A for Nature Reports Climate Change, I've interviewed Andrew Gouldson, who will co-direct the centre with Judith Rees under chairman Lord Nicholas Stern - and who envisions a strong focus on regional impacts of climate change.

CCCEP's experts will be closely in touch with policymakers and other local stakeholders, Gouldson says, in a way that "builds both their capacity and ours — ours to do good research, and theirs to use that research to take better decisions on climate change." One of the stakeholders, and a funder of one of the five research streams at the new centre, is the insurance company Munich Re. As I wrote last month, another new project that aims for the cutting edge of policy-relevant research is a hurricane model projection that Greg Holland is now wrapping up at NCAR - also partly insurance industry-funded. Could these academic-public-private three-ways be the way forward? Let us know in the comments.

I thought the most interesting part of the interview was what Gouldson had to say on the new UK Climate Change Act, which imposes a legally binding requirement to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Here's an extract:

AG: At the national level, I think Britain's been very proactive indeed. The government has been quite brave signing up to this medium- to long-term target which is really quite ambitious. But I don't think there's a public understanding, or possibly even a public acceptance, of what a low-carbon economy might look like — one which is 60, 70, 80 per cent decarbonized.

AB: Does that make it less likely that the policy will actually come through with results?

AG: In the next 10 to 15 years, not necessarily, because there are lots of mitigation options that are relatively affordable and technologically viable. I think the question is what happens in the phase after that. Is there a political appetite to do some really quite painful things which would involve some powerful people or parties losing out? I think there's a need now, in the next few years, to build some sort of broad consensus on the need to shift towards a low-carbon economy.

Read the full interview here.

Anna Barnett

Image: Andrew Gouldson, photographed by Stevie Kilgour at the University of Leeds.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Economics, Politics, Regional climate, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Monday was George W. Bush's last press conference as president, and the administration seized the day to release new security directives on US interests in the Arctic - where disappearing sea ice has the five bordering countries on edge about who will get their hands on assets set to be freed up.

Reuters reports that the new US policy contradicts Russian claims to seabed rich in oil and gas. Canadian press like the National Post are focused on the Northwest Passage: the US has asserted its right to sail the newly navigable waterway, which the White House calls an international strait but Canada says it owns.

The directives even look toward opportunities for terrorism in a warmer Arctic, says a press release reprinted at Dot Earth (alongside links and details on the new docs). The release is clear about the new reality up north:

Fourteen years have passed since the last review of federal Arctic policy. Our understanding of climate change in the Arctic has caused all Arctic nations to reassess their policies in the Arctic. In addition, with the increase in summer melting of Arctic sea ice, human activity is increasing. This raises new questions about the potential expansion of fisheries, pollution, energy exploration and development, and the nature of sustainable economic development in the region.

"When it comes to energy, the notion isn't a race to the Arctic to put our flags down," a National Security Council spokesman told Reuters - in a seeming jibe at Russia's flag-planting expedition at the underwater North Pole. "Our approach is going to be dealing with our fellow Arctic nations in finding ways to access and develop, when it comes to energy specifically, that takes into account conservation and the environment."

Continue reading "US stakes claims in melting Arctic" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 15, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stimulating algal growth by adding iron to nutrient-poor ocean regions is one of several geo-engineering methods that could possibly mitigate greenhouse warming. But given widespread worries about possibly harmful side-effects on marine life, large-scale ocean ‘fertilization’ is currently not considered advisable.

Predictably, environmental groups have therefore jumped on an iron fertilization experiment which an international team of oceanographers is set to conduct over the next two months in the Southern Ocean near the island of South Georgia. Critics claim that LOHAFEX violates the moratorium on ocean fertilization activities which the United Nations had agreed upon last year. The Nature news story here has more details.

The somewhat ambivalent wording of the legally binding UN Convention on Biological Diversity adds to the controversy. ‘Small-scale’ scientific experiments in ‘coastal waters’ are exempted from the moratorium, it reads. But ‘small-scale’ is a relative term, and where exactly coastal waters give way to the open ocean remains also undefined.

Picture: The Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)

The team on board the German ‘Polarstern’, who plan to spread 20 tonnes of iron sulphate over less than 20 by 20 kilometres-large patch of ocean surface in the Scotia Sea, hope that the study will provide new insight into how ocean ecosystems respond to fertilization – the very data, hence, that are needed to assess whether or not larger-scale future activities might be justified. But opponents counter that such doing already qualifies as an activity banned by UN law. Pressure groups have launched a signature campaign aimed at stopping the Polarstern crew, which will reach its destination by the end of the week, from dumping its load.

A number of companies, such as the now defunct Planktos Inc., had in the past hoped to commercialize ocean fertilization for the carbon credit market. Scientists and institutes participating in LOHAFEX stress that the experiment has no commercial background whatsoever.

UPDATE:
The Indo-German ocean fertilization experiment, LOHAFEX, has been suspended. The German science ministry, in response to environmental concerns, has asked the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven that an additional independent assessment be conducted before the planned activities can commence.

Meanwhile, the Polarstern, scheduled to reach the planned study region in the Scotia Sea by the end of the week, will continue its journey as planned. On arrival, the 48 scientists on board will start doing preparatory work, but the team will have to await permission from the ministry before they can dump any nutrients into the ocean. AWI has today commissioned two undisclosed institutions to carry out the required extra assessment. It hopes the reports will be delivered within ten days.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 14, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Business, Carbon markets, In the News, Mitigation, Ocean science, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Research, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

US President-elect Barack Obama has selected two key advocates for action on climate change to serve in his administration.

The appointments of physicist John Holdren of Harvard University as White House science advisor and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University as the first female head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expected to be announced tomorrow, according to Juliet Eilperin and Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post.

Following from the appointment last week of Steven Chu of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as Energy Secretary, the selections bring high hopes for strong national action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Over on Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has the lowdown on the appointees, both of whom have received MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants.

Lubchenco has been a leading voice on marine conservation issues in recent decades. Holdren has been consistent in calling for tough action on climate change but has had a bugbear with the term itself, which he believes is a misnomer. Instead he would rather ‘global climate disruption’; I wonder if we’ll hear more of that in the future?

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 19, 2008
Categories: Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After eleven months of legislative work, the European Parliament gave its backing today to the European Union’s (EU) climate change package which aims to ensure that the EU will achieve its self-set climate targets by 2020: a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels, a 20% improvement in energy efficiency, and a 20% share for renewables in the EU energy mix.

EU heads of states, who had hammered out the agreement last week, called the legislation "historic". But critics say the reduction targets are less ambitious than they appear, basically a bluff. What bothers environmentalist most are the many far-reaching concessions to power plants and other emission-intensive industries participating in the EU’s mandatory emissions trading system.

More about this is in my story over on Nature News.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on December 17, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, GHG emissions, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest UN negotiations on a global climate deal taking place in Poznan, Poland are failing to make fast enough progress to secure a treaty by next December in Copenhagen, according to various media reports.

Reuters reported yesterday that even the eternally buoyant UN climate chief Yvo de Boer believes that it will only be possible to nail "the key political issues" by this deadline. But he still maintains that an overarching treaty must be signed with specific greenhouse gas reduction targets for developed nations, writes Jeff Tollefson on In the Field.

Over on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, says it’s time to press the panic button. He points out that the UN negotiations are acting as though the 2007 IPCC report still reflects the latest science, when in fact we’ve had three years of peer-reviewed research since – and a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change.

His advice for Senator John Kerry, who is reportedly acting as incoming US President Barack Obama’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Poznan:

Suggest on behalf of the US Senate that the IPCC should be reconvened as early as possible in 2009 to undertake an emergency review of all the science that has emerged since 2005. It should be asked to report to the UN by the end of June, giving just enough time to inform the debate about appropriate policy responses before the Copenhagen conference in November.

In the meantime, Obama has met with Al Gore to discuss the state of the climate and has promised to treat climate change as a matter of urgency and national security.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 10, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest round of UN climate talks kicked off in Poznan, Poland yesterday. Jeff Tollefson has a nice round-up over on The Great Beyond of how the first day of the conference went down - unsurprisingly, with world leaders calling for immediate action. [Update: All Poznan-related posts from Jeff T, who will be at the talks next week, can be found here].

As I mentioned here last week, it’s generally accepted that the current negotiations will not address the really crucial issues of a post-Kyoto climate deal, namely how far to reduce emissions and how to do so equitably. So much as for fighting the urge to postpone everything until Copenhagen.

But what can be expected to emerge from Poznan is greater clarity on how various players will position themselves for next year's endgame, a point that I elaborate on in my latest editorial on Nature Reports Climate Change.

Continue reading "Pole positions" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 02, 2008
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s well accepted that the upcoming climate talks in Poznan will not be the time or place for agreeing the architecture of a new deal on climate change. An idea that is less well received, but one that is gaining traction, is that the same could be true of the negotiations in Copenhagen a year from now.

While the election of Barack Obama as US president brings renewed energy and hope to the UN process, President Bush will be holding court when environment ministers from some 192 nations meet next week in Poznan. And with Harlan Watson in place as the US chief climate negotiator, any serious shifts in the US position will be on hold until January. In addition, some are speculating that even the modest ambitions of the talks — to settle how to finance emissions cuts and aid adaptation in developing countries — are likely to be eclipsed by the world's financial woes.

But of far graver concern are the growing reports that the US won’t be ready to sign a global deal on climate change in Copenhagen either, given the time needed to enact domestic climate legislation.

As far back as October, Elliot Diringer, Director of International Strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, wrote the following in an op-ed for the Transatlantic Climate Policy Group:

Any near-term action may come in the form of energy legislation that, while helping to reduce U.S. emissions, will not achieve the levels of reduction envisioned under a cap-and-trade scenario. Enactment of a comprehensive climate package, including cap-and-trade, is unlikely in 2009. It may come at the earliest in 2010.

The world can ill afford a replay of Kyoto, with Europe demanding more than can be delivered and the United States ultimately walking away. We need realism, not brinksmanship. Instead of a full and final deal in Copenhagen, we must aim for what is in fact feasible, and set expectations now so that it is received as a success. The risks and consequences of failure are otherwise far too great.

Just last week Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, reflected this sentiment, saying that the financial crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a federal cap-and-trade system would likely preclude action in 2009.

Continue reading "Will the US be ready in Copenhagen? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 28, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a line around the block to give advice to Barack Obama, the latest offering being a 400-page environmental policy paper backed by 29 NGOs (hat tip to Climate Progress). Amid the many recommendations, a proposed bureaucratic shake-up of US Earth science has also resurfaced.

The idea is to combine research programs at NOAA and the USGS into a new, streamlined Earth Systems Science Agency, or ESSA. Published as a Policy Forum in Science this past July (subscription required; also see NRCC story and blog), it is now very much dwarfed by buzz about a possible National Energy Council complete with a czar to be crowned. But ESSA hasn’t fallen entirely off the radar of influential democrats - more on this below. And there’s just been an interesting dialogue over at Prometheus on whether the NOAA-USGS merger makes sense.

Continue reading "Attn Obama: Earth science agency merger" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 27, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Earth science, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shortly after finishing up this week’s Nature story (subscription required) on the upcoming climate talks in Poland, I finally secured an interview with US Ambassador Harlan Watson, the United States' chief climate negotiator.

Continue reading "Looking forward to Poznan, and beyond" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on November 26, 2008
Categories: In the News, Jeff Tollefson, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama's Environmental Protection Agency may not have a director yet, but it already has its hands full. In the final year of the Bush administration, the EPA has simply procrastinated on greenhouse gas control: the Supreme Court in 2007 ordered the agency to assess the dangerous impacts of emissions under the Clean Air Act, or else justify its lack of action, but the result was a hopelessly conflicted report with a comment period that outlasts the presidential turnover. Now adding pressure to sort this out, pronto, are an EPA decision on coal plants last week and the threat of a new lawsuit over ocean acidification.

On Thursday the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board rejected the permit for Utah’s new Bonanza Coal Power Plant - a ruling that could halt as many as 100 other coal plants on the EPA docket until the agency can decide how to regulate their carbon dioxide output. For details, see the thorough coverage on Wired Science and Climate Progress. AP summarizes:

The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.

The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide. This is "an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting process," the panel said.

The Sierra Club conservation group filed the Bonanza appeal and argued it on the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. Their victory wasn't absolute, explains Alexis Madrigal on Wired Science:

The Board did not actually side with the Sierra Club's interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but in deciding to send the decision back to the EPA with the instruction to come up with a nationwide plan for regulating greenhouse gases, the Sierra Club effectively stopped new coal plants in their tracks.

"It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next," Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder told the AP. "And that will be decided by the next administration."

Meanwhile, the Center for Biological Diversity has appeared to the EPA as the Ghost of Lawsuits Yet to Come. Skipping the Clean Air Act (and other federal laws cited in past cases against carbon, as noted by Dot Earth), the CBD say they will invoke the Clean Water Act in defense of acidifying oceans. The group petitioned last year for an update in the EPA's pH standards, which haven't been revised since 1976 - a problem flagged in a July 2007 Science commentary (subscription required).

Their followup is a notice of intent to sue. A win in court could open yet another door to EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions - something the CBD is going after explicitly in separate, state-level petitions.

Continue reading "Bonanza of carbon cases at the EPA" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 17, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that Barack Obama has been elected, Washington DC is involved of its two favourite activities: scrambling for the hard-to-get tickets to the 20 January inauguration, and speculating wildly on who might get positions of power in the new administration.

Nature has some of its own speculation available in a news story in this week’s issue. Even with many competing priorities, energy policy looks likely to be of interest early under President Obama.

Continue reading "Energy under President Obama" »

Posted by Alex Witze on November 12, 2008
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Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode.

The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet.

Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared in Europe toward global cooperation on climate change following Obama’s appointment as President-elect. Earlier today, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, welcomed a new start for transatlantic relations on issues including climate change and invited Mr. Obama to address the European Parliament next spring. That would be the first time a U.S. president has spoken at the European Parliament since Ronald Reagan’s address in Strasbourg in 1985, writes Kanter.

Back on the home front, corporate carbon giants are less happy about the potential impacts of an Obama administration. CNNmoney says that companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp are concerned that policies such as windfall profits tax and market intervention will target the fossil fuel industry unfairly. Some southern utility companies, such as Duke Energy Corp have lobbied against a federal renewable portfolio standard, though some encourage state mandates, writes Ian Talley.

Continue reading "Obama victory brings new hope for climate policy, dark days for fossil fuels " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 05, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Is the global financial crisis good or bad for green issues? The ongoing controversy over the European Union’s ambitious climate and energy package suggests the latter might be the case. But political and economical analysts seem to be increasingly confident that the current crisis might give rise to environmentally healthier policies and investment decisions.

The EU heads of state are still determined to finalise the package before the end of the year, but they expect tough negotiations with a group of reluctant countries led by Poland.

An editorial in this week’s Nature lays out the options and prospects for EU climate policies in light of the financial crisis:

“Striking the required bargains may require more time than the remaining two months under French presidency. But a well-weighed set of rules is far and away preferable to a rushed political compromise that would substantially water down the EU’s ambitious climate plan. (…) Meanwhile, the current economic turbulence cannot be allowed to serve as a pretext for lessening climate protection efforts.”

Meanwhile, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said in a statement that the EU plan “could also be a boon for the economy, generating millions of new jobs at a time when the world is suffering from the financial crisis.”

Any agreement will come too late for the international climate talks next month in Poznan, Poland (of all places). But a strong European commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 % would be a much-needed signal to the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen 2009, where nations hope to conclude on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Continue reading "From greed to green?" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 23, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, GHG emissions, Opinion, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The third and final debate in the US Presidential elections took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York last night. Moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS news, it took as its theme domestic policy.

As pointed out over on Gristmill, the debate yielded nothing new from either candidate on climate and energy issues, though it did serve to highlight the differences in the candidates’ positions as well those topics where they differ from their party positions.

John McCain set himself aside from the GOP is taking credit for "bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time", while Barack Obama noted that his support for clean coal technology “doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."

The discussion on climate and energy focused almost exclusively on energy independence, and on the timescale to eliminating foreign oil imports. Here’s the transcript of that part of the debate (taken from CNN politics):

Continue reading "Focus on energy independence in final debate " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 16, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.

A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.

In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.

But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.

Continue reading "Impacts research – the next frontier" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 15, 2008
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Parliament’s environment committee yesterday voted largely in favour of the ambitious European climate action plan (subscription) proposed in January.

The decision, although preliminary, allows the European Union (EU) to go into the upcoming next round of international climate negotiations with a common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across Europe by at least 20 % by 2020. The European commission, Council and Parliament must yet formally agree on details of the plan, but substantial changes are now considered unlikely.

Power plants in Europe will no longer receive free allowances for their greenhouse-gas emissions.TRAVELPIX/GETTY

Most hotly contested were the amendments to the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) which the European commission had proposed in January to strengthen the effectiveness of the scheme.

Introduced in 2005, the ETS is as yet the only mandatory emissions trading system in the world. Until now, power stations and other large European industries have benefitted from generous supply of free permits to release carbon dioxide. Much of the commission’s proposed reform was aimed to end the over-allocation of emission allowances.

The compromise now agreed upon in parliament doesn’t pull the teeth out of the original plan. As of 2013, power stations will not receive free emission allowances anymore. Instead, they will have to obtain 100% of allowances at auction.

Other energy-intensive industries, such as steel and cement facilities which, unlike the power sector, have to compete with suppliers outside the EU, will in a first phase merely have to obtain 15% (rather than 20 % as the commission had initially proposed) of emission allowances at auction. But the allocation of free allowances to manufacturing industries is to be gradually phased out by 2020.

The environment committee did make some concessions to industry, though. The threshold for facilities – currently around 10,000 - which participate in the ETS is to be raised from 10,000 to 25,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Continue reading "EU Parliament backs climate plan" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 08, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Energy, GHG emissions, In the News, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For some time, the received wisdom has been that a post-Bush administration will herald a new era in which the world can move boldly forward on climate change. But the present political - and financial - climate is calling that wisdom into question, as I've written in my latest editorial, and below.

Whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain wins the White House next month, the elected president will face a daunting list of challenges in making climate change a priority both on the home front and internationally. Yet there are several reasons to believe that reducing greenhouse gases may not be given the high priority it deserves.

Firstly, while both candidates made climate change a signature issue early on in their campaigns, McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee weakens the Republican message. Having publicly questioned the contribution of human activity to climate change and championed aggressive offshore drilling, Palin is positioning herself to the right of the existing administration on the issue, casting doubts on whether a McCain–Palin administration would carve out a new direction for the Republicans.

Secondly, and arguably of graver concern, is the escalating financial crisis, which is reverberating worldwide and, which teamed with rocketing fuel prices and insecure energy supplies, could push rising emissions far down the political agenda regardless of who is in office.

Indeed, both presidential candidates have already had to pull back from positions held early on in the election. As oil prices soared to over $140 a barrel earlier this year, McCain and Obama were forced to rethink their opposition to offshore oil drilling, though Obama has done so a lot more cautiously than his opponent.

Continue reading "A challenging political climate" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Mark Lynas, whose Six Degrees (Amazon UK | US) has been a great success, had a piece in the New Statesman last week about nuclear power. It was a pretty standard, pretty well executed I'm-a-green-who's-much-more-freaked-out-about-climate-than-about-nukes piece, much in the long travelled Lovelock vein, not that unlike some things George Monbiot has recently been writing. As such it obviously got up the noses of some greens. I thought it was pretty sensible, myself; but there's a depressing kicker.

Continue reading "The difficulties of going pro-nuclear" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 26, 2008
Categories: Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Commuting in this morning on the boat, I was struck by a Guardian article on a new McKinsey report (pdf) about carbon capture and storage:

The study shows that such plants could be economically viable by 2030 at the latest. But it would require substantial public subsidies to get 10-12 plants running by the EU target date of 2015...McKinsey said that, with coal still likely to make up 60% of EU power generation by 2030, CCS could be a vital solution to ensuring security of energy supply and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could reduce emissions by 400m tonnes a year by 2030, or a fifth of planned European savings. The consultants' report, published yesterday, showed that with an aggressive commercial push from the middle of the next decade, CCS costs could come down from as much as €90 for a tonne of CO2 initially, to about €30-45 in 2030 - or in line with expected carbon prices then.

But of course we can't; not now. Spending $700 billion + on bailing out banks is going to make the US, at least, less able to spend comparatively small amounts on other things. As my old boss Bill Emmott but it, also in the Guardian:

The true impact of this expansion of public spending lies in politics, and in what this rescue will now make more difficult or perhaps impossible: the expansion of other areas of public spending, such as healthcare or public programmes for alternative energy. If Barack Obama is elected president in November, he will find his fiscal hands tied a lot tighter than he may have hoped, even with a Democratic Congress alongside him - unless, of course, he wants to raise taxes.

Continue reading "Damn, a trillion dollars would have come in handy" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 24, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from The Great Beyond

Criminal damage in the name of climate change is not a criminal offence, according to a shock ruling from a British court.

A jury yesterday acquitted six Greenpeace activists who claimed that the threat of global warming was a ‘lawful excuse’ for the damage they caused while protesting at a coal power plant (see this blog post for background).

Climate change scientist James Hansen had previously backed the six: he released a statement declaring “We will need our Mercedes-driving lawyer friends to tell us if the verdict has greater significance -- but the jurors were common people, not politicians.

“The main point, that the government, the utility, and the fossil fuel industry, were aware of the facts [of climate change] but continued to ignore them are more generally valid worldwide. It raises the question of whether the right people are on trial.”

Eco-warriors’ UK paper of choice The Independent says the verdict “will have shocked ministers and energy companies”. In the Guardian, veteran environment correspondent Jon Videl says it will “embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies”.

Continue reading "Shock climate change verdict acquits Hansen’s heroes " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 11, 2008
Categories: Daniel Cressey, Features, In the News, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 08, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Protests at the climate camp in Kingsnorth, Kent, the site of a proposed new coal fired power plant, reached a climax this weekend, as reported by various news sources. Demonstrators, who promised to reach the site by air, land and sea, reached about 3,000 in number during the course of the week, but – met by some 1,500 police officers - failed to halt business at the site’s existing plant.

There was an excellent article in Saturday’s Guardian on how the outcome of Kingnorth will have implications for similar plants under development worldwide. In total, approx 100 similar plants are in the planning stage – more than half of these are in China, with the others split between the UK, Germany and the US – and governments are watching closely to see what decision is taken in the UK.

The main question is whether the UK government, which has argued for tough international regulations on climate change, will allow the power plant to go ahead without carbon capture and storage (CCS). UK energy minister Malcolm Wicks argues that new coal fired power plants such as the one being proposed in Kent are needed to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS technology, which remains unproven. This may be true, but if demonstrating CCS really is the priority, then why is it that there is no obligation for the owners of Kingsnorth to use CCS, should it be proven?

Continue reading "Debate on coal heats up as climate protests reach climax" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 10, 2008
Categories: Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is one contestant in a ‘climate war game’ taking place this week in Washington, where four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States are negotiating a new deal on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions.

As Daniel Cressey reported yesterday on The Great Beyond blog:

"Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. ... Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon." “It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try,” says Tollefson.

If yesterday's roleplay scenario is anything to go by, it seems the EU and US may completely swap stances on climate policy by 2015! For an explanation of just how that might happen, check out Jeff's progress over on Nature's conference blog.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 29, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Notes from the Field, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In case anyone doubted the Bush administration’s resolve on climate policy during these last lame-duck months, they’ve just used the thump of a 500-page EPA report hitting the bin to hammer it home.

Continue reading "EPA trashes its own report" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on July 14, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Toyako, Japan

The climate vision put forward by G8 leaders here in Toyako, Japan yesterday has recieved widespread criticism for failing to make clear its commitment to cutting greenhouse gases.

Developing nations, led by China and India, rejected the deal outright ahead of today's major economies meeting where they met with G8 nations to discuss targets for greenhouse gases and the respective efforts that would be required of rich and poor nations, as well as emerging economies.

Despite the inclusion of a goal for 50% cuts by 2050 in the G8 declaration, it's not at all clear what this alledged target means. If, as suggested by Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, they are intending to cut emissions by 50% of current levels, then that's not nearly as ambitious as cuts based on a 1990 baseline.

The statement, which seems purposefully vague, also fails to clarify which nations would have to make the deepest cuts in emissions to reach this global target of 50% and whether the target would be legally binding. Responding to the offer, Mexico, Brazil, India, China and South Africa said yesterday that G8 nations should slash their emissions by 80% by 2050 and set firm nearer term targets if they are to agree on a global deal.

As a result, US President Bush's meeting of major economies made no progress beyond their meeting held June in Seoul.

I've reported the full story for Nature News and will provide a link here once it's online. All for now...it's getting really late here...

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 09, 2008
Categories: Features, G8 Summit 2008, In the News, Major Economies Meeting, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Toyako, Japan –

At about 4pm today, just over half way into the the latest gathering of the G8 Summit, leaders released a draft communiqué on climate change.

In the run up to the Summit, it looked as though the more immediate problems of oil prices and global food shortages would bump climate change off the G8 agenda. But with climate change having taken centre stage at the talks, the mood has been reasonably hopeful that a statement due for release today would go somewhat beyond the agreement made by the same clique of rich nations last year in Heiligendamm, Germany.

Yet the proposal seems to simultaneously take a step forward and backward, which perhaps would explain the wide variety of media reports, some calling it a success, others highlighting its flaws and others perhaps undecided – see this report from the BBC, which appears to have been republished (Google link reads: G8 agrees tough action on climate, but header reads: G8 aims to halve greenhouse gases).

I’ve reported the full story for Nature, but in brief, the down side is that the document seems to actually take a step back from last year’s declaration by the G8 to ‘seriously consider’ cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% of 1990 levels by 2050. This agreement, which unlike its predecessor includes the US, commits to a vision of halving emissions by 2050, but doesn’t specify a baseline year. When questioned on the baseline year, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda said earlier today that it was 2005, rather than the UN framework year of 1990.

And despite international pressure to set specific, clear nearer-term targets for reducing emissions, the statement merely recognizes ‘aspirational’ mid-term goals, with no mention of dates or the level of cuts needed. Given that seven of the G8 nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by 25-40% of 1990 levels by 2020 in Bali last December, its seems that they’ve had to make a large concession to appease the US in this forum.

On the plus side, though, the US has agreed to the declaration, which is a small step forward from last year. And the document does recognize the need for mid-term targets, even if it hasn’t been specific on what those should be or what ‘mid-term’ means.

Tomorrow, the statement will be rolled out as the basis of discussions with eight other ‘big polluting’ major economies, who will join the G8 for the major economies meeting. Opinion here is divided on whether the draft communiqué goes far enough to meet their expectations of the big eight.

Olive Heffernan

Image: G8 leaders at working lunch on climate change. Image courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 08, 2008
Categories: Features, G8 Summit 2008, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The next US president should merge two huge government research agencies to bring forth a new independent and comprehensive Earth science body - that’s the idea put forth in a commentary by former agency heads in Science yesterday (subscription required). They call for NOAA and the USGS become a single Earth Systems Science Agency, ESSA.

That merger would ring a few nostalgic bells, since NOAA was once also called ESSA (for Environmental Science Services Administration). And it would bureaucratically marry the atmospheric and ocean research at NOAA to the terrestrial, freshwater and biological studies at the USGS. To face the daunting agenda of “climate change, sea-level rise, altered weather patterns, declines in freshwater availability and quality, and loss of biodiversity,” the authors say, the US needs massive scientific support from an integrated, streamlined institution - one as seamless as the Earth system itself.

But would ESSA really produce better science? The proposal’s authors have tempting suggestions for changes under a new agency, not least upping the amount of money that would leave the building: grants to outside researchers total a few percent of current NOAA and USGS budgets, they told me, but they want the sum to be at least 25% at ESSA. They also call for Big Science modelling and monitoring programs, and even for research into breakthrough green tech, a la DARPA.

Such plans would have to be hashed out over and above the decision to put ESSA together, however. Meanwhile, trying to mesh the USGS and NOAA missions could have interesting effects. What would happen, for example, to NOAA's marine fisheries programs? NOAA is housed in the Department of Commerce, where commercial fishing interests are sometimes seen to clash with conservation. Mark Schaefer, former USGS director and the ESSA proposal’s lead author, said creating the hoped-for independent, nonregulatory agency might mean moving fisheries regulation to the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Department of the Interior, where protecting natural resources is key.

Continue reading "One earth, one US agency" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on July 04, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Earth science, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Next week, here on Climate Feedback, I'll be reporting directly from Hokkaido, Japan's nothernmost island, where leaders from rich nations and emerging economies will be meeting to discuss some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Gathering from July 7-9 will be the Group of Eight (G8) - an exclusive but informal bloc of nations, comprising the world's seven leading economies Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Russia. This year's summit will extend to an additional eight industrialised nations on the final day to facilitate US President George Bush’s Major Economies Meeting.

Climate Change is expected to top the agenda of both meetings. Pressure is on G8 delegates to go above and beyond the political breakthrough of the 2007 Summit in Heilegendamm, Germany, where leaders agreed to seriously consider slashing emissions by half of 1990 levels by 2050. And George Bush seems keen to leave some sort of a legacy on tackling climate change through this meeting of major economies (or just any sort of a legacy other than Iraq actually).

But are binding emissions a realistic expectation of the G8? Will oil prices and global food shortages bump global warming down the agenda? And what progress on climate change is likely under the current US administration? I've written a preview in this week's Nature on what's being hoped for, and expected, from what should be a very interesting round of talks.

Tune in here from next Monday to follow the events as they take place.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 02, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Major Economies Meeting, Notes from the Field, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Whether and how to put a price on carbon has been something of a hot topic this week, primarily due to the proposal of a landmark climate change bill to the US Senate that would "cap and trade" emissions of the greenhouse gas.

Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the climate change bill offered by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner died today in the Senate after Democrat leaders fell a dozen votes short of the 60 needed to defeat Republican obstruction.

Republicans opposed the global warming bill over fears of the economic costs of pricing the greenhouse gas, though Democrats argued there would be no cost to consumers, who would be aided with tax relief. The debate over "cap and trade" legislation is now expected to be postponed until next year, when there is a new president in the White House.

Both presidential nominees back mandatory greenhouse gas reductions and indicated they supported moving forward on discussing the bill offered to the Senate this week, but whether "cap and trade" is the the best way to price carbon remains contentious.

The issue is taken up this week on Nature Reports Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr who reviews Earth: The Sequel by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn of the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic tenet of the book is that a US carbon market with tradable credits would provide the profit incentive needed to energize potential innovators of low or no-carbon technology – thus meeting the world's escalating demand for green energy. But Pielke Jr argues:

By placing their attention on the need for innovative energy technologies, Krupp and Horn have focused on the one area where advocates for action on greenhouse gas reduction are in strong agreement. They have avoided engaging in the real debate over the policies necessary to decarbonize the growing global economy and, crucially, over whether and how to put a price on carbon dioxide.

You can read the full review here.

Meanwhile, over on Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has written about an alternative, though less popular, pricing approach known as “cap and dividend”. The scheme, being strongly endorsed by NASA climatologist James Hansen, is based on the principle of making the polluter pay without placing the burdening of rising costs on the consumer, the most commonly cited down-side of "cap and trade" (discussed by Pielke Jr in the above review).

Revkin explores two proposals for “cap and dividend”: one by Hansen that involves taxing fuels by their carbon content, and another by investment pioneer Peter Barnes that entails selling a steadily declining number of permits for emitting carbon dioxide. The latter would force polluters to eventually pay the full whack of their carbon consumption, and the revenue would be returned to citizens. You can read the full story here.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 06, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From claims that obese Westerners are devouring the world's produce to pleas that panicked developing nations stop hoarding it, recriminations were flying at a two-day UN conference focused on soaring international food prices this week - and The Guardian reports that anger ran highest over US policies aggressively promoting biofuels farming. Small wonder: the International Monetary Fund has estimated that the trend toward farms producing fuel instead of food is responsible for 20-30% of recent price spikes, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a US think tank, came up with 30%, and the clean-energy research firm New Energy Research offered a more conservative 8%. But US agriculture secretary Ed Schafer would own up to only 3%.

And while the food riots resulting from price rises are easy to see, the environmental benefits of biofuels are not. Report after report this year has warned that flight from fossil fuels to biofuels could see forests cleared and cropland diverted while both food costs and greenhouse emissions rise.

Ethanol fuel made from corn - big business in the US - has taken particularly heavy blame for food prices, as it uses up grain that could feed people and livestock, and fields that could be planted with other edible crops. Last year's US energy bill included a full-steam-ahead target to quintuple ethanol production in 15 years - a commitment that John McCain and 23 other Senate Republicans last month urged the EPA to ignore because of the food crisis. Across the pond, the EU is still trying to figure out how to insert sustainability caveats into its controversial plan to make 10% of all transport fuel renewable (i.e. plant-based) by 2020.

Aside from the ethanol acrimony, the UN meeting heard another strident message: Ban Ki-moon's call for 50% more agricultural production by 2030 to support a rising global population. To make this much food, the world may not be able to spare many fields for ethanol.

For more on what's driving food prices - including the possibility that we've lost some arable land to global warming and are set to lose more - Grist's breakdown and this International Food Policy Research Institute report are good places to start. And this recent Nature News story (subscription required) has a look over the biofuel industry's horizon.

Anna Barnett

Photo: Harvey Leifert

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 04, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, In the News, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The predicted effects of climate change can be counted on to shake up international relations, even far from the impoverished, politically wobbly regions where the most obvious conflicts loom. A case in point is the tranquil Arctic seabed, believed to hold a substantial fraction* of the world's undeveloped oil reserves - which, as the summer sea ice extent decreases year by year, is suddenly set to become accessible for extraction.

As such, the Arctic Ocean is a new source of friction among the five countries that claim portions of it as their sovereign territory: the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, the latter of which elicited clucking from some of the others in August when it sent a submersible to the sea bottom and planted a titanium national flag at the underwater North Pole. And more than the pole is up for grabs. In a great piece on the politics of Arctic climate change in Vanity Fair, Alex Shoumatoff writes:

Last summer, Canada’s Northwest Passage was nearly free of ice and completely navigable for a few weeks—for the first time since records have been kept. This fabled route to the Orient, which eluded Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, and was finally navigated by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1905, would reshape global trade, being thousands of miles shorter than most currently used shipping routes, though it won’t be clear long enough to be commercially viable for at least another 15 to 20 years. Canada has claimed the passage as its internal waterway since the early 1970s, but the U.S. maintains that it is an international strait, through which any vessel, including submerged submarines gathering intelligence, has the right of “transit passage.”

On Wednesday, the five Arctic-bordering nations met in the tiny town of Ilulissat, Greenland, with the intention of staving off inconvenient squabbles over the newly unfrozen oil and gas sources. The high-level delegates sent to handle the promise of a new oil rush agreed to proceed in an orderly fashion and allow the UN to decide who owns what (Reuters, New York Times, FT).

When the UN rules on territorial rights, it will be ruling on geoscience. At issue is how far the continental shelf under each nation extends into the ocean - the criterion for sovereignty under the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention (still not ratified by the US Senate, which will apparently have to overcome past reluctance in order to achieve the country's Arctic aims). Wednesday's declaration gives the claimants time to gather scientific evidence to present to a commission on continental shelves.

The agreement also avoids aiming for a treaty like the one concocted to settle wrangling over Antarctica in the 1950s. A 1991 addition to the Antarctic treaty forbids exploitation of mineral resources until 2048, which may be why the delegates in Ilulissat hastened to hand their disagreements over to the UN and emphasize that no special laws would be necessary up north. Environmental groups, excluded from the meeting, would naturally prefer a treaty that could offer strong protection for Arctic ecosystems already stressed by warming.

Anna Barnett

Photo: North Pole sign set up by the crew and scientists of the German research vessel Polarstern; Hannes Grobe

*Often said to be 25% - erroneously, according to Shoumatoff.

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 30, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, Energy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Canadians are set to slap the first price tag on their greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to some very different initiatives in the works.

Reuters reported Friday that the long-awaited Montreal Climate Exchange will open on May 30, buying and selling voluntary emissions reductions in the same fashion as the Chicago Climate Exchange, its US partner.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government had a few days earlier put out the details of its plan for mandatory emissions reductions, which had likewise been in the works for over a year (a good summary is here; registration required). They're proposing to cut absolute emissions 20% from 2006 levels by 2020 (for those scoring at home, 20% down from 2005 levels would be 0% below 1990 levels, compared to the standard-bearing EU's 20% cut from 1990 levels).

But absolute emissions isn't what they'll limit - they're talking about regulating emissions intensity, or the amount of emissions per unit of production, from 2010. That could make it tough to integrate into a global climate deal, since the EU caps absolute emissions and all three US presidential candidates want to do the same. Interestingly, the plan also mandates carbon capture and storage for oil sands, a carbon-intensive economic lynchpin of the country.

Besides the voluntary market, local measures could already be in play when and if these limits come down. British Columbia is leading the way with what is to be the first carbon tax implemented outside of Europe. Although the tax hasn't been looking very popular and faces the same too-much-is-never-enough criticism that the EU climate bill came in for, liberal leader Stephane Dion now says he'd like the national strategy to be a carbon tax - or something. Anything. "We can talk about what the best model for putting a price on carbon across Canada might be –– but the fact is we need to JUST DO IT. That is what this provincial government has done, and that is what a Liberal government will do," Dion said in a speech in Vancouver.

Conservatives, who will be defending their control in the next election, countered with praise for the Montreal market. And while other provinces remain skeptical of the carbon tax, B.C. and Manitoba are considering joining western US states in a new cap-and-trade system - so a regulatory patchwork looks likely. As in the US recently, though, the question is no longer whether the Canadian government should intervene to raise fossil fuel costs, but how.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 19, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, In the News, Mitigation, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year on Climate Feedback, Kevin Vranes wrote about some of the unintended consequences of climate policy – namely how the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism was increasing greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of HCF-23 in developing countries – as well as increasing ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.

Now, the drive to tackle climate change – and fast - has landed us back in the land of unintended consequences, though for a whole host of other reasons.

A few particularly noteworthy examples have come across my radar in the past couple of weeks.

First up, is the increasing demand from alternative energies on the world’s water supplies, a factor not helped by the complete lack of cohesion between energy, water and climate policy. A prime example, as reported by Brian Hoyle on Nature Reports Climate Change, is the extensive irrigation required for those waving fields of midwest grain that supply the ethanol for biofuels.

“At least 40 gallons [of water] go into every mile travelled by an ethanol-powered vehicle” according to Michael Webber of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas-Austin.

And gas-electric hybrid vehicles fare little better. “We need to move from our old way of thinking — miles per gallon — to gallons of water per mile," says Webber.

Not only do these golden fields of corn pose a threat to water supplies, the massive amounts of fertiliser used in growing them are increasing nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and worsening the existing ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf associated with fish kills. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , notes that this is in direct conflict with existing policy targets to reduce the oxygen-depleted area in the region.

And on an unrelated topic…the trail of unforeseen outcomes continues overseas…as highlighted last week in The Washington Post, which reported the toxic waste being left behind by solar energy companies in China, posing a severe threat to human health.

As much as climate policy is urgently needed, it seems it would be worth remembering that climate is not the only sustainability issue.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 14, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)