The Danish capital is moving rapidly toward a zero-carbon future, as it erects wind farms, transforms its citywide heating systems, promotes energy efficiency, and lures more people out of their cars and onto public transportation and bikes.
Among the first sights to greet visitors to Denmark on
It did not attract as much media attention as COP15 in Copenhagen did in 2009. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, COP16 folded on a slightly more positive note than the disappointing edition of the previous year. But the agreement reached may have saved the UN process, Greenpeace said, but not the climate.
In an official press release, the UNFCCC
(Reuters) – Developing countries accused Japan on Wednesday of breaking a pledge to extend a U.N. pact for fighting global warming beyond 2012 and said that climate talks in Mexico would fail unless Tokyo backed down.
Japan, among almost 40 industrialized nations curbing greenhouse gas emissions
(Reuters) – About 45 nations met on Thursday to seek ways to raise billions of dollars in aid to help the poor combat climate change as the United Nations warned them of a long haul to slow global warming.
Environment ministers and senior officials in Geneva were reviewing whether rich
(Reuters) – Aid promises from rich nations to help poor countries slow global warming are reaching the $30 billion goal agreed in Copenhagen but analysts say much of that is old funding dressed up as new pledges.
Officially, the promises total $29.8 billion, Reuters calculations show, apparently meeting a pledge of “new and additional”
Ample blame exists for the demise of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate, from President Obama’s lack of political courage, to the environmental community’s overly ambitious strategy, to Republican intransigence. A way forward exists, however, to build on the rubble of the Senate’s failure to cap carbon emissions.
(Reuters) – U.S. Senate Democrats said on Thursday they will wait until September at the earliest to take up broad climate-change legislation, a potentially fatal blow to the White House push to curb greenhouse gases.
The delay means Democrats have little time to advance the complex
China, which last year walked away from COP 15 without agreeing to anything, now wants to hold its own climate talks.
The talks, scheduled for October, according to the UN’s top environmental official, Achim Steiner, will take place in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, northwest of Beijing.
Government officials around the industrialized world are hoping that the Tianjin talks will pave the way for a new, binding, climate change treaty after COP 15’s
United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, appointed Costa Rican expert on climate change, Christiana Figueres, as the new U.N. climate chief on May 17th. She will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) on July 1st.
De Boer, of the Netherlands, announced his resignation last February after the Copenhagen climate summit where 120 world leaders failed to come to a binding agreement on global warming.
Figueres, 53, is the first person in this U.N. position to come from a developing country. She has been a member of Costa Rica’s negotiating team on climate change since 1995. She represented the Caribbean and Latin American on the Executive Board of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism in 2007, and from 2008 to 2009, Figueres served as vice president of the Bureau of the Convention.
It might seem odd that South America, too often the victim of corporations looking for cheap labor and even cheaper natural resources, would become Mother Earth’s most vociferous advocate.
Yet it has, confirming a belief that suggests adversity creates heroes. This is certainly true in South American countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and even Venezuela , where some of the most egregious examples of corporate pollution have left South Americans, and their indigenous counterparts, thoroughly disgusted not only with capitalism but with Western civilization as a whole.
Take, for example, the Cochabamba protests of 2000 , incited by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation. Cochabama, Bolivia’s third largest city, has since become the permanent site for a yearly festival, the Feria del Agua (Water Fair).
The CO2 reduction pledges made by 76 nations following last December’s Copenhagen climate conference will likely lead to a global temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Centigrade (5.4 Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to an analysis by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
In an article in Nature, the researchers described the current reduction commitments as “paltry” and said the goal of holding temperature increases to 2 degrees C is in “dire peril.”
Researcher Malte Meinshausen told the BBC, “There’s a big mismatch between the ambitious goal, which is 2 C, and the emissions reductions. The pledged emissions reductions are in most cases very unambitious.”
One of the issues raised during last years summit in Copenhagen was the need to recognize that carbon dioxide emissions are only part of the problem of global warming.
In fact, 50 percent of climate warming comes from non-CO2 factors like Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and black carbon, or soot, and these are issues that can be addressed and remedied much more quickly than CO2, which is known to stay in the atmosphere for a lengthy period.
“Fast Action Strategies” that focus on non-CO2 issues could reduce warming quickly, effectively buy some time while the pressing issues of CO2 reduction are addressed. The video clips below illustrate this:
Friday, December 18th, 2009 was one of the saddest days of my career. The Copenhagen Climate Conference had ended with a non-binding Copenhagen Accord. And no one knew what it meant. When I returned to the negotiating center, it was as empty as the Copenhagen Accord. The NGO and government leaders had abandoned the center. And the accord’s emission reduction commitments were blank.
On January 31st, we got to see what the pledges are. The small island nation of the Maldives has committed to 100% mitigation by 2020. The Maldives foreign minister announced, “The Maldives’ submission of its mitigation action is voluntary and unconditional…The Maldives looks forward to its mitigation action being registered and publicly available.” That’s leadership.
Not much in terms of effective policy came out of the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, or COP15. In fact, the best that can probably be said is that nations agreed to disagree; poor ones unwilling to take on carbon emission reductions that would stunt their industrial growth, and rich ones unwilling to take the blame for emissions that have, to date, caused most of the problems and benefited rich nations most of all.
To highlight this ambivalence, on January 26 Yvo de Boer, United Nation’s senior climate change official, noted that governments could either comply with proposed emissions limits by the deadline, or later if they preferred – a paradox that has led many to ask what the purpose of the deadline was?