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Bush’s only big ally on warming shifts stand
Associated Press via MSNBC
SYDNEY, Australia – Australia’s leader said Tuesday he wants to consider an international carbon trading system to fight global warming, signaling a shift toward a part of the Kyoto agreement that he has steadfastly refused to ratify.
Prime Minister John Howard, who has recently made global warming part of the mainstream debate in Australia after years of playing down the issue, said he would be willing to consider the trading system to limit greenhouse gas emissions – if it does not harm key resource-dependent industries.
(14 Nov 2006)
Big Gav has more articles and commentary on the Shift by Australian PM Howard: Climate and Punishment. (Big Gav gets the prize for wittiest headlines.)
Australian drought: Goin’ Under
Schnews
A DROP OF STREWTH IN AN OCEAN OF BULLSHIT
Last weekend was the International Day of Action Against Climate Change, coinciding with the start of the latest UN Climate Talks in Nairobi from 6th-17th November. The buzzword at this summit is ‘adaptation’ – i.e. we’ve left it too late to stop climate change, so how do we adjust our markets to survive and prosper from the now inevitable changes? Also being discussed is what to do when the Kyoto agreement lapses (and the world ends, according to Mayan prophecy) in 2012.
The day drew marching crowds worldwide, while one country facing a nasty climate-changed future saw some of its biggest ever environmental rallies – Australia.
The 40,000 in Sydney, 40,000 in Melbourne, plus twenty six other population centres who protested could be having their ‘Katrina’ moment over the next few months as the country goes into its worst droughts for 1000 years – after the hottest year on record – and the reality of climate change becomes irrefutable, even to right-wing politicians.
(13 Nov 2006)
A good summary of the frightening prospects climate change poses for Australia, delivered in Schnews’ trademark style. And a link to my EDAP primer – thanks Schnews! -AF
Getting in the Way
Direct-action protesters in the U.K. are focusing on climate change
Mike Wendling, Grist
It’s half an hour or so after the end of Britain’s biggest-ever protest against climate change, and I’m still hanging out in Trafalgar Square.
A few groups of kids are milling around, and a couple of anarchists have set up a bicycle-powered disco. One or two old-timers are trying to get rid of their last remaining copies of the Socialist Worker. Most of the protesters have heeded the organizers’ advice to reuse or recycle their placards, but the local cleaning crews are quick on the job, cleaning up the rest of the rubbish to get the place ready for a typical London Saturday night. Everyone else is heading home, or to the pub.
My cell phone rings.
“Meet us near the top of the square,” says the voice on the other end of the line. “We’re wearing the tiger suits.”
So begins my foray into the world of radical opposition to climate change.
It’s been a big year for climate change in Britain — in several ways. The country’s three main political parties have more or less converged on the idea that something needs to be done urgently about global warming. Even the last holdout, the Conservative Party, has come over all green, going as far as to change their party logo from a torch to a tree.
The recent Stern Review, commissioned by the man likely to be the next prime minister, puts a pound amount on future upheaval along with a cost estimate for the change to a low-carbon economy. A system of mandatory individual carbon allowances — an idea outlined in Grist last year — is closer to becoming reality. And that big march to coincide with the Nairobi climate change conference? It drew 20,000 people.
Bubbling underneath all this highly visible mainstream progress, however, is a current of direct action — a hardened core of activists who have decided that it’s time to throw their bodies in front of the coming storm.
(13 Nov 2006)
Grist has another article today (nov 14) about demonstrations in the US: If global warming is an emergency, then let’s act like it.
French PM proposes taxing states that shun Kyoto
Reuters via AlertNet
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed on Monday introducing punitive taxes on imports from countries that refused to sign the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed at curbing global warming.
Kyoto binds 35 developing nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, but the world’s top two polluters, the United States and China have not signed the pact.
Some 189 countries are debating a united response to the threat of climate change at a 2-week conference in Nairobi, but Villepin said the talks were struggling and urged Europe to look at ways of pressurising states into backing Kyoto.
“Europe has to use all its weight to stand up to this sort of environmental dumping,” the prime minister told a meeting on sustainable development, according to the text of his speech published on his official website.
“I would like us to study now with our European partners the principle of a carbon tax on the import of industrial products from countries which refuse to commit themselves to the Kyoto protocol after 2012,” he said.
(13 Nov 2006)
Related article at Financial Times.
Sweden Tops Climate Change Efforts, U.S. Near Bottom, Environmentalists Say
Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Associated Press
NAIROBI, Kenya – Sweden, Britain and Denmark are doing the most to protect against climate change, but their efforts are not nearly enough, according to a report released Monday by environmental groups.
The United States — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — ranked at 53, with only China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia doing worse.
(14 Nov 2006)
