In The Field

Poznan: Perusing the news…

I’m not sure how many stories Google News would have picked up searching for “Poznan” on a random day in, say, 2005. A city of some 561,000 people, Poznan has been around for about a millennium and claims to be the cradle of Polish civilization. The city apparently has a long history of trade fairs, and its conference center is the largest in Poland. But still. Google tells me it has found some 1,600 stories in the last 24 hours, and spurious though that number may be, my guess is that the media spotlight is certainly brighter than usual.

Anyway, I’ve sifted through some of them and picked out a few that caught my eye:


Bloomberg is reporting that delegates from India and China are unimpressed with US President-Elect’s call for a domestic cap-and-trade system that would reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The story compares Obama’s proposal to a European Union goal of reducing emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. It’s a stark contrast, and one that gets to the heart of a very old debate: What year do we use as the baseline for measuring commitments?

Interestingly enough, if you take those same commitments and push the baseline forward to the present, the numbers converge. Both the US and Europe are proposing a 15 percent reduction from 2005 levels, according to folks at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. That’s because the US economy has grown much faster than Europe’s since 1990. It’s also another reason why the Kyoto Protocol didn’t fly in the US: Meeting those objectives would be much more difficult for the US.

Predictably, the US prefers using a more recent baseline, while Europe has historically stuck with 1990. Both sides have a point. Going with the 2005 baseline basically lets the United States off the hook for the past 15 years of emissions. On the other hand, going with a 1990 baseline allows the EU to capitalize on historical happenstance.

Meanwhile, the once-unified European Union continues to face difficulties in agreeing on the aforementioned proposal (Agence France-Press). With countries proposing their own protections for one industry or another due to their local circumstances, the EU is starting to look a bit like the US, where such regional disputes are the norm.

The website earthtimes.org reports that the Alliance of Small Island States has blasted as too timid the EU’s goal of limiting average global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius. Island nations have the most to lose (everything) and are pushing for a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

And lastly, Reuters reports that Brazil is holding the line on its stand against proposals to integrate deforestation into carbon markets. While many other tropical nations are eager to go the market route, which would allow companies in developed nations to offset their emissions by paying for forest conservation, Brazil argues it would be easier and faster to create some kind of an international deforestation fund that could help pay for conservation and enforcement programs. It has gone so far as to propose its own fund and is currently seeking donors.

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