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India leads demands for £120bn climate change fund paid for by the West
Dean Nelson, the Telegraph
In a proposal that appears to have astonished Western officials, the Indian government suggested that the price of co-operation would be for industrialised countries to pay at least 0.5 per cent of their GDP to help developing nations invest in cleaner renewable sources of energy and reduce their carbon emissions.
While the size of the demand was dismissed by US officials as unrealistic, Gordon Brown has proposed industrialised countries contribute to a £60 billion fund to help the developing world play its role and said Britain would pay “its fair share”.
…The Indian prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, accused the West of causing global warming on the eve of the G8 summit earlier this month. “What we are witnessing today is the consequence of over two centuries of industrial activity and high consumption lifestyles in the developed world. They have to bear this historical responsibility,” he said.
He believes that added responsibility must be met with cash and a more liberal approach to technology transfers to help the developing world limit its emissions.
(28 May 2009)
How Corporate Money Corrupted the Climate Bill
Andy Rowell, Oil Change
One of the issues that Oil Change has tried to highlight is how oil money corrupts and corrodes politics. Big Oil has always had hordes of cash to spend to influence legislation on energy and climate. Big Oil always expects to get its way as its pockets are deeper than its opponents. For years it has outspent its opponents, watering down legislation.
And despite the greenwashing that the industry now takes climate change seriously, it continues to act in its own interest, rather than the public interest.
On June 26, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed what was known as the Waxman and Markey Bill, by a vote of 219 to 212. The final version of the Bill that passed the House Floor differed substantially from the version that was originally introduced by the two politicians. The Bill had been so watered down that many environmental groups oppose it in its current form.
Now a new analysis by MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database which shows the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes, shows just how much influence companies had on the legislation. It was not just supporters of Big Oil, but timber, nuclear and agricultural companies too.
(15 July 2009)
NOAA’s New Chief On Restoring Science To U.S. Climate Policy 
Elizabeth Kolbert, Yale 360
Last December, when President-elect Obama named Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the reaction among climate scientists was an almost audible sigh of relief. Much of what is known about the climate comes from research supported, either directly or indirectly, by NOAA. But the agency, tucked inside the Commerce Department, has long suffered from status problems, and during the Bush administration, NOAA staffers frequently complained that their findings were being ignored, or, worse still, suppressed. The appointment of Lubchenco — a marine biologist from Oregon State University — seemed to signal that the new administration planned, finally, to take NOAA’s work seriously.
Jane Lubchenco Lubchenco is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a MacArthur “genius” award-winner, and founder of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains environmental scientists to be more effective communicators. Indeed, last month the administration released a report, produced under NOAA’s leadership, detailing the effects that global warming is already having on the U.S. and the impacts it is likely to have in the future.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Lubchenco spoke about the science of climate change, the complexities of communicating it to policy makers, and what she referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin,” ocean acidification.
Listen to the full interview (44 min.)
(9 July 2009)
