Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
New Climate Strategy: Track the World’s Wealthiest
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.
Since about half the planet’s climate-warming emissions come from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to follow these rich folks when setting national targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… With international climate talks set to start this week in Italy among the countries that pollute the most, the authors hope policymakers will look at the strong link between how rich people are and how much carbon dioxide they emit.
“You’re distributing the task of doing something about emissions reduction based on the proportion of the population in the country that’s actually doing the most damage,” said Shoibal Chakravarty of the Princeton Environment Institute, one of the study’s authors.
Rich people’s lives tend to give off more greenhouse gases because they drive more fossil-fueled vehicles, travel frequently by air and live in big houses that take more fuel to heat and cool.
By focusing on rich people everywhere, rather than rich countries and poor ones, the system of setting carbon-cutting targets based on the number of wealthy individuals in various countries would ease developing countries into any new climate change framework, Chakravarty said by telephone.
(7 July 2009)
Gore: Deal on Emissions from Land Useage Change Critical
Robin Pagnamenta, The Times Online/UK
A global deal to cap surging emissions of carbon dioxide from soil will form a critical part of any successful agreement to tackle climate change in Copenhagen later this year, Al Gore said today.
[Al Gore cited the example of Indonesia, the world?s third largest emitter of carbon dioxide (Ben Gurr/The Times)]Al Gore cited the example of Indonesia, the world?s third largest emitter of carbon dioxide (Ben Gurr/The Times)
The former US Vice President and environmental campaigner urged world leaders who are set to gather for a UN meeting in the Danish capital in December to recognise the critical importance of soil carbon: an often overlooked part of the debate on global warming.
“There is three times as much carbon in the first two meters of soil than there is in all of the world’s vegetation,” he told an environmental conference at the Smith School in Oxford.
Current estimates indicate that changing land use – including the burning of peatland, the conversion of degraded former forest land to agriculture and desertification through over-farming – is responsible for as much as 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than either deforestation, power generation or transport.
(7 July 2009)
Gavin Schmidt: a climatologist trying to give out the right signals amid the noise
Leo Hickman, Guardian
Leading Nasa climate scientist says increasing the level of noise is a useful political tactic in interview in The Edge magazine
—
Anyone who follows the climate change debate closely will no doubt have come across Gavin Schmidt and the website he co-founded called RealClimate.org during their online meanderings. Schmidt is a British climatologist and climate modeller based at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and he says that he helped to establish RealClimate.org to try to “provide context and background on climate science issues that are often missing in popular media coverage”. As you can imagine, he’s a busy man.
Schmidt features in this week’s edition of The Edge as the latest interviewee in the online magazine’s Third Culture series.
… And here’s Schimdt on the “noise” created by the climate change debate, a subject he’s touched on before on the Guardian:
In unmoderated forums about climate change, it just devolves immediately into, “you’re a Nazi, no you’re a fascist,” blah, blah, blah. Any semblance of an idea that you could actually talk about what aerosols do to the hydrological cycle without it devolving into name calling seems to be fantasy. It is very tiresome.
The problem is that the noise serves various people’s purposes. It’s not that the noise is accidental. A lot of the noise when it comes to climate is deliberate because the increase of noise means you don’t hear the signal, and if you don’t hear the signal you can’t do anything about it, and so everything just gets left alone. Increasing the level of noise is a deliberate political tactic. It’s been used by all segments of the political spectrum for different problems. With the climate issue in the US and not elsewhere, it’s used by a particular segment of the political community in ways that is personally distressing. How do you deal with that? That is a question that I’m always asking myself and I haven’t gotten an answer to that one.
(6 July 2009)
India Says Developed Nations Are Responsible for Climate Change
Bibhudatta Pradhan, Bloomberg
Developed countries must bear “historic responsibility” for industrial emissions of greenhouse gases they have produced, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said ahead of climate change talks this week.
“What we are witnessing today is the consequence of over two centuries of industrial activity and high consumption lifestyles in the developed world,” Singh said in a statement in New Delhi today before leaving for the Group of Eight summit in Italy. “It is the developing countries that are the worst affected by climate change.”
… India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, has said he is talking to countries such as Brazil, China and South Africa on taking a common stand in international negotiations that richer countries like the U.S. and Britain must reduce their emissions 45 percent by the year 2020 from 1990 levels.
(7 July 2009)
How the US Is Blocking Progress on Climate Change
Christian Schwägerl, Spiegel (Germany)
As the predictions for global warming get more and more alarming, talks on a worldwide climate treaty have stalled — largely due to the United States. The G-8 summit in L’Aquila, which begins Wednesday, is likely to generate little more than the usual platitudes.
… The latest information coming from the scientific world suggests that the consequences of climate change could be far worse than previously predicted. According to a climate change “synthesis report” released in June, with which climatologists provided an update on previous predictions, the concentration of CO2 in the air is already too high, and the oceans are warming up much more quickly than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had assumed two years ago.
But even as leaders around the globe insist that they want to do everything possible to prevent such a temperature increase, international negotiations have been bogged down for months. The United States and many resource-rich nations are blocking progress, so much so that no breakthroughs are expected to emerge from the G-8 summit in L’Aquila.
The international politicians gathering in L’Aquila at the invitation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi know that their hands rest on the earth’s thermostat. They also know that their influence will be critical to whether new, more effective climate protection rules will be adopted at the United Nations climate summit in December, rules that would replace the widely ignored 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
… The United States has taken the most adverse stance, even though President Barack Obama campaigned on a platform to save the climate and has assembled what could be described as a dream team when it comes to environmental policy
… But the Obama administration is realizing that ordinary Americans are adamantly opposed to their country becoming the global leader in a radical new green movement. A majority of Americans do not consider the climate crisis to be particularly important: According to a poll carried out in January by the Pew Research Center, only 30 percent of Americans rated global warming as a top priority for President Obama. The issue came last on the list of priorities, far below the economy and terrorism.
Meanwhile the US oil and coal industries’ experienced lobbyists are hard at work to influence public opinion. And when a member of the House of Representatives recently referred to climate change as a “hoax,” his comments were met with applause. Although Obama is allocating billions and recruiting top scientists nationwide for climate protection, he has deliberately not yet given a strong speech on the environment directed at the rest of the world.
Energy Secretary Chu is noticeably troubled by his country’s failure to take a leadership role.
(7 July 2009)
