Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Climate change: no real energy for global action
Martin Wolf, The Australian
WHAT is the chance of effective action to curb climate change? “Not much” is the answer. This is not because the costs of action would be prohibitive, at least according to the report on climate change by Nicholas Stern published last week. It is because the obstacles to achieving the necessary global co-operation are so steep. Sceptics worry that costly action is likely. But believers in climate change have far better reason to be worried.
The report by Sir Nicholas called for efforts to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 450-550 parts per million by 2050. By then, global emissions would have to be at least 25 per cent below current levels, even though the world economy may be between three and four times bigger.
Yet, according to the report, stabilising concentrations at 550ppm might cost only about 1per cent of gross domestic product, with a range between minus-1 per cent (a benefit) and plus-3.5 per cent (a cost). Thus, the report says comfortingly, we can tackle climate change at minimal cost to living standards. So why, given the growing consensus on the threat, is it so hard to forestall it? It is because this is an extraordinarily difficult challenge for humans to deal with.
Emissions of greenhouse gases are the purest example of a negative public-good; nobody can have less of them because someone else has more; and nobody can be excluded from their malign consequences or the efforts of others to ameliorate them.
Resolving climate change requires solving a collective-action problem of enormous proportions: perhaps only managing the seas is as difficult. Resolving this problem also requires some way of dealing with free-riders. Yet, what seems free-riding to others is seen by the actors themselves as a legitimate exercise of sovereignty.
In resolving the challenge, policy-makers also have to settle a series of intractable distributional questions: between the countries that emitted most in the past and those who will emit more in future; between relatively invulnerable rich countries and the most vulnerable poor ones; and between those who are alive today and their descendants.
The time-periods involved make action even harder. Every year of delay raises the stock of greenhouse gases by about 2.5ppm. These gases will stay up for centuries.
(9 Nov 2006)
Peak CO2 needed by 2010-2013
James Randerson, The Guardian
The world has less than a decade to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas emissions if dangerous climate change is to be avoided, according to a report from a thinktank that goes further than the landmark Stern review last week.
Lord Stern’s report said that unless greenhouse emissions were tackled the world faced an economic downturn on a par with the great depression.
Yesterday’s report from the Institute of Public Policy Research suggests Lord Stern’s analysis was too conservative and governments need to move further and faster. To minimise the risk of a 2C rise – seen as the threshold for dangerous climate change – the authors say global carbon dioxide emissions would need to peak between 2010 and 2013.
(9 Nov 2006)
Original headline: Only a decade left to avoid climate change, says thinktank
Annan: As Climate Changes, Can We?
Kofi A. Annan, Washington Times via UN
If there was any remaining doubt about the urgent need to combat climate change, two reports issued last week should make the world sit up and take notice. First, according to the latest data submitted to the United Nations, the greenhouse-gas emissions of the major industrialized countries continue to increase. Second, a study by the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern of the United Kingdom, called climate change “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”, with the potential to shrink the global economy by 20 percent and to cause economic and social disruption on a par with the two World Wars and Great Depression.
(8 Nov 2006)
A UN conference on climate change is currently under way in Nairobi.
Nairobi climate talks split on CDM carbon burial
Reuters
U.N. climate talks were split on Thursday over whether to permit burial of heat-trapping gases in developing nations under the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol.
“I can’t predict whether it’s going to be possible for this (meeting) to reach agreement on that issue given the very wide divergence of views,” Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat, told a news conference.
(9 Nov 2006)
