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Why Copenhagen Still Matters: The climate talks won't seal a binding global deal, but a lot can still go right in Denmark

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Sat, 2009-12-12 06:49 — admin

BusinessWeek Special Report

By Eileen Claussen

Two years ago this week, on the island of Bali, representatives of 180 nations agreed on an ambitious timeline for reaching a global agreement to address climate change. The Bali Road Map, as it was called, identified key issues to be resolved and set a 2009 deadline for completing the negotiations.

That deadline has now arrived. Yet as nations gather for the climate talks in Copenhagen, the real negotiating has barely begun. The draft text is a lengthy, confusing compilation of every single proposal from a wide swath of nations. Many of the ideas are implausible, but all remain in play. President Barack Obama and other world leaders recently confirmed what was widely presumed: Copenhagen won't deliver a final legal agreement. The goal is now an interim political deal setting the stage for a full treaty in 2010.

The delay is disappointing to many but comes as no surprise. Obama is putting a "provisional" target on the table, but until Congress enacts comprehensive climate legislation, the U.S. is in no position to take on a binding international commitment. And there are many other obstacles. Governments still remain far apart on core issues: how to finance stronger efforts in developing countries, whether major emerging economies such as China will take on binding commitments, and how fulfillment will be verified.

ADVANCES NONETHELESS
But important and heartening progress has been made since Bali. In Washington, the House passed a comprehensive bill in June aimed at reducing U.S. emissions and fostering a clean-energy economy. Meantime, the U.S. government has taken positive steps—with stimulus funding and proposed regulatory actions—to support the development of lower-carbon energy sources and to reduce emissions.

In China, which now surpasses the U.S. as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the government has set ambitious goals for increasing renewable power and energy efficiency, and it just announced a voluntary goal of reducing by 2020 the carbon intensity of its economy 40% to 45% from 2005 levels. India and other emerging economies are also pledging stronger action, while the European Union already has an emissions- trading system in place that is beginning to deliver actual reductions.

But all of these positive developments fall far short of a viable global solution. With leadership from the world's major economies, we need an international agreement to ensure that all countries are doing their part to reduce emissions and that these combined efforts are getting us to a place where scientists affirm we can avoid the worst effects of climate change.

A LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK
Copenhagen can propel us toward that goal. Many governments have come prepared to announce political commitments. Wealthy nations also can be expected to pledge up-front money to help poorer countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. But it is critical that the talks in Copenhagen make substantial progress in establishing the legal and institutional framework for converting these pledges into a binding treaty with a robust design. There must be legal clarity about countries' commitments and their compliance with them, so that each can be confident that all are delivering their share. And there must be a sensible, accountable system for providing the support developing countries will need to do their part.

Simply building this framework will require the major parties to do something they've so far resisted: compromise. And compromise requires political will. Countries will have to embrace real commitments, and they will have to look beyond short-term political concerns so we can forge a solution that protects all nations and all people for decades, even centuries, to come.

The science on this issue is now absolutely clear: Climate change is largely the result of human activities, it is happening now, and it is happening much faster than predicted. But it is political reality, as much as science, that will drive the global climate talks. And right now the political reality is that key countries have a lot of work to do to resolve core issues before a lasting global agreement can be reached.

No one is expecting miracles out of the Copenhagen meeting this month. But it is imperative that we see genuine gains—with the goal of agreeing to a final climate treaty when the negotiators meet at the end of 2010 in Mexico City. The Bali Road Map misjudged the distance from Bali to a final agreement, but at least we can take heart that the nations of the world are still on this road together. The challenge is to stay on course to a destination that proves itself worth the trip.

Eileen Claussen is president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

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Sat, 2009-12-12 06:56 — admin

Stolen e-mails aside, we need to accept that global warming is real.

By Tim Rutten
December 12, 2009

It wasn't very long ago that a dinner party guest who wanted to spare the hostess any embarrassing contention simply avoided discussing religion or politics and stuck to the weather. Not anymore. In fact, it says something unutterably depressing about the state of the nation that we've finally managed to politicize even the climate.

Take, for example, the controversy that erupted on the eve of the global climate conference in Copenhagen, when hackers skeptical about global warming stole and released e-mails and documents from computers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The center is an important source of baseline historical data on climate change, and the hackers claim the e-mails show that scientists there manipulated, suppressed and even falsified numbers to make a case for global warming. Others who've looked at the material say taking e-mails out of context creates misleading impressions, and that the worst you can say about the British climatologists is that they evinced an arrogant desire to keep what they regarded as the skeptics' "junk science" out of peer review journals.

In either case, the unit's chief has stepped down and an investigation is underway. Far more interesting has been the immediate reaction by the enthusiasts who've labeled the affair -- what else? -- Climategate.

This week, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and that President Obama should scrap plans to attend the conference. In Hollywood, two conservatives, screenwriter Roger L. Simon and filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd -- yes, Virginia, there are conservatives west of La Brea -- urged the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take back the 2007 Oscar it gave Al Gore for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

The impact of this autonomic red-blue division often is amplified by the fact that we Americans are, by and large, technologically advanced but scientifically illiterate. Our national conversation is dominated by a culture of assertion rather than a respect for evidence reasonably assessed. Thus the endless wrangling over self-evident nonsense like creationism. It's precisely the insistence on treating a scientific theory, evolution, and an allegorical notion, creationism, with a faux evenhandedness that creates a situation in which 75% of Americans believe most scientists disagree over global warming.

In fact, the scientific consensus on the issue is broad and deep. Nor does it rely on science done at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia. Even if something untoward occurred there, we have two other scientific organizations providing baseline climate data -- both of which happen to be funded and directed by the U.S. government. One is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the other is the Global Historical Climatology Network -- operated not by the EPA or the Interior Department but by the Commerce Department. Their historical data essentially matches that compiled at East Anglia.

So what are we to believe: that huge numbers of British and American scientists have entered into a conspiracy to dupe the world on climate change? Why? What would they stand to gain?

As Alan I. Leshner, who heads the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, wrote this week: "It is wrong to suggest that apparently stolen e-mails . . . somehow refute a century of evidence based on thousands of studies. . . . Doubters insist that the Earth is not warming. This is in stark contrast to the consensus of 18 of the world's most respected scientific organizations, who strongly stated in an Oct. 21 letter to the U.S. Senate that human-induced climate change is real. Still, the doubters try to leverage any remaining points of scientific uncertainty about the details of warming trends to cast doubt on the overall conclusions shared by traditionally cautious, decidedly nonradical science organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science."

Long ago, Cicero suggested that a mysterious public act could be best assessed by asking: Who benefits? Is it really any accident that Palin and most of the GOP lawmakers trying to discredit the science on global warming come from states enriched by petroleum production and industries with sizable carbon footprints? (The delegate from Saudi Arabia has taken a similar position at Copenhagen.)

If you feel like you've been here before, think back on the long and agonizing debate over tobacco regulation and second-hand smoke. As additional tens of thousands died,

Big Tobacco produced one eccentric scientific skeptic after another. Every one of them got a sympathetic hearing from lawmakers elected from tobacco-growing states.

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Sat, 2009-12-12 07:09 — admin

Foreign 2009-12-12 12:19
VANCOUVER, Dec 12 (AFP) -- Business interests and US partisan politics are behind the furor over leaked emails that have whipped up a controversy at the Copenhagen climate talks, Canadian experts say.

The global talks to hammer out a deal on curbing greenhouse gas emissions are being derailed by public attention on the so-called "Climategate," scientist Andrew Weaver and author James Hoggan told AFP.

Intercepted from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top center for climate research, the emails have been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatize global warming.

Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming.

The controversy "gives voice to dissenters at the table in Copenhagen, like Saudi Arabia and Russia," said Hoggan, author of "Climate Cover-up" about big-business funding of opponents of environmental causes.

But more importantly, he said, the success of the treaty being hammered out in Copenhagen in talks until December 18 will depend on the United States, where political opposition to climate change is "driven by an extremist view."

"A lot of this is just about politics in the US, and this undermines political will in the US," Hoggan told AFP.

The email messages containing words like "trick" between climate scientists, were apparently stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and recently released on the Internet.

They have triggered an investigation by the university and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Canada's Globe and Mail daily newspaper said the emails "revealed a dangerous bunker mentality among the scientists" and "a crisis of confidence in global-warming science."

But Hoggan said close examination shows the email messages are not "scandalous," and the real issue is the identities of whomever stole them and is "attempting to create or fabricate this scandal."

"We are at a pivotal moment in human history in terms of reaching a post-Kyoto agreement on regulating greenhouse gases," Weaver, a Canadian scientist on the IPCC, told a press conference Thursday.

Weaver said two men tried to hack emails in computers at the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis in his building at the University of Victoria -- but left when workers challenged them.

He also read out examples of dozens of hate emails and phone messages he said he receives each day from people who do not believe human activity is responsible for global warming.

"Each and every time an IPCC report is released... very similar things happen," said Weaver. "If you don’t like the message you try to discredit the messenger."

"There is a war on science," he added, alleging it was being led by right-wing ideologues and business interests and their tactics "exploit a lack of scientific literacy in the general public."

"An all-out attack on the validity of climate science has been undertaken by industry groups," agreed Hoggan, whose book is based on four years of research into the funding of climate deniers.

"Groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow have been at the core of a decade-long campaign to delay government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Hoggan said in a press release.

Opponents of the climate treaty, however, call the scientists "alarmists" and dispute that there is a consensus among scientists about climate change.

"The science behind global warming alarmism is falling apart from within, and the Climategate documents demonstrate why," said Sam Kazman, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an email to AFP.

"There's been no statistically significant warming over the last 10-15 years, despite increasing levels of supposedly dangerous CO2.

"CEI is proud to have helped delay the energy rationing sought by the alarmists, and we plan to continue doing so in several ways, including our announced intention to challenge EPA’s Endangerment finding in court."

And Dan Miller of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute alleged the British scientists had felt "so threatened by skeptics' contrary findings that they deleted or manipulated their own data." (By DEBORAH JONES/AFP)

MySinchew 2009.12.12

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Sat, 2009-12-12 07:17 — admin

Climate Change Summit Copenhagen Foreign 2009-12-12 18:20

Protesters taking part in a demontration during the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Photo courtesy: AFP.

COPENHAGEN, Dec 12 (AFP) -- A planetary chain of protests headed by a mass rally in Copenhagen on Saturday cranked up the heat on problem-plagued talks to build a pact to roll back climate change.

The centre of the Danish capital was in virtual lockdown, with thousands of police deployed or on standby ahead of a six-kilometer (four-mile) march that would take green and anti-capitalist demonstrators to the UN conference venue.

"All week we have heard a string of excuses from northern countries to make adequate reparations for the ecological crisis that they have caused," said activist Lidy Nacpil of the Philippines, from a group called the Jubilee South Coalition.

"We are taking to the streets to demand that the ecological debt is repaid to the people of the South."

Within the Bella Center congress hall, Nobel prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu was to lead children in creating "a sea of candles" representing a call from generations imperilled by climate change.

From Australia to the Arctic circle, protestors readied banners and chants, urging the 12-day marathon to meet the threat posed by Man's meddling with the climate system.

Scientists say rising concentrations of greenhouse gases -- mainly the invisible byproduct of burning oil, gas and coal -- are trapping solar heat, warming Earth's surface and disrupting weather patterns.

If these emissions fail to peak less than a decade from now, the world is doomed to more vicious droughts, flood, rising seas and storms, spelling hunger, homelessness and disease for millions, the experts say.

In Australia, organisers said around 50,000 people had taken to the streets nationwide, wearing sky-blue shoelaces in a call for a strong and binding agreement in Copenhagen.

In Hong Kong men, women and children marched, some dressed as pandas, while others held life rings bearing the slogan "Climate Change Kills. Act Now. Save Lives."

Indonesians rallied in front of the US embassy in Jakarta calling for help for developing nations in reducing greenhouse gases.

A crowd chanted "US is the biggest emitter" and unfurled banners that read "US is the carbon mafia leader" and "Be a part of a legally binding agreement".

If all goes well, the 194-nation conference under the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will wrap up on Friday with a historic deal sealed by more than 110 heads of state and government.

It would commit major economies to actions that would curb their carbon emissions and set up a financial machine to generate hundreds of billions in dollars for poor countries most exposed to the ravages of climate change.

But since the start of the talks on Monday, progress has been negligible and the mood soured by finger-pointing.

A draft blueprint, presented on Friday, ran into problems almost immediately among the three main groups of players -- developing countries, emerging giant economies and the United States.

Poorer countries lashed it for failing to spell out commitments on finance while the United States complained it failed to bind China and other high-population, fast-growing economies to tough pledges on emissions.

Conference chair Connie Hedegaard scheduled an informal meeting with environment ministers on Saturday in the first of what is likely to be a gruelling effort to break the deadlock.

Formal talks begin early next week, culminating in the summit next Friday.

Those rostered to attend include US President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Premier Wen Jiabao of China, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama of Japan and the heads of the European Union (EU). (By RICHARD INGHAM/AFP)

MySinchew 2009.12.12

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Sat, 2009-12-12 07:30 — admin

COPENHAGEN (AP) — Environment ministers from around the world were arriving in Copenhagen Saturday to ramp up pressure on climate negotiators working on a pact to curb global warming, as protesters gathered to demand that the world's leaders take strong action.
The ministers will have nearly a week of intense public and private talks before more than 100 heads of state and government come to the Danish capital at the end of next week.

On the chilly streets outside the conference center, police assigned extra squads to watch thousands of protesters gathering for a march to demand that leaders act now to fight climate change.

"All week we have heard a string of excuses from northern countries to make adequate reparations for the ecological crisis that they have caused," said Lidy Nacpil, of the Jubilee South Coalition. "We are taking to the streets to demand that the ecological debt is repaid to the people of the South," she said in a statement.

Pledges made to cut heat-trapping greenhouse emissions are far below what scientists say is needed to keep global temperatures from rising to potentially catastrophic levels.

A draft agreement was sent around Friday to the 192-nation conference, although it set no firm figures on financing or on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It said all countries together should reduce emissions by a range of 50% to 95% by 2050, and rich countries should cut emissions by 25 to 40% by 2020, in both cases using 1990 as the baseline year.

So far, industrial nations' pledges to cut emissions have amounted to far less than the minimum.

The draft also left open the form of the agreement — whether it will be a legal document or a political declaration.

Ian Fry, the representative of the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu, made an emotional appeal for the strongest format, one that would legally bind all nations to commitments to control carbon emissions.

Speaking for citizens of atolls and islands around the globe that could be swamped by rising sea levels, Fry called on President Obama to earn the Nobel Peace Prize he collected Friday by taking up the fight against climate change, which he called "the greatest threat to humanity" and international security.

"I woke up this morning crying, and that's not easy for a grown man to admit," Fry said, choking as he spoke in the plenary crowded with hundreds of delegates. "The fate of my country rests in your hands."

Todd Stern, the special U.S. climate envoy, called the text "constructive" but singled out the section on helping poor countries lower their growth of carbon emissions as "unbalanced." He said the requirements on industrial countries were tougher than on developing nations and the section was not "a basis for negotiation."

Environmental groups welcomed the text as a step forward, although they lamented the absence of what they considered essential elements.

The draft agreement, drawn up by Michael Zammit Cutajar of Malta, said global emissions of greenhouse gases should peak "as soon as possible," while avoiding a target year.

It called for new funding in the next three years by wealthy countries to help poor nations adapt to a changing climate, but mentioned no figures. And it made no specific proposals on long-term help for developing countries.

The funding is perhaps the hardest part.

As the draft was circulated Friday, European Union leaders announced in Brussels after two days of tough talks that they would commit $3.6 billion a year until 2012 to a short-term fund for poor countries. Most of this money came from Britain, France and Germany. Many cash-strapped former East bloc countries balked at donating but eventually all gave at least a token amount to preserve the 27-nation bloc's unity.

Still unknown is how much the wealthier nations, such as the U.S. and Japan, will contribute.

Republican point of view

Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn on Saturday urged against U.S. participation in an international agreement on climate change, maintaining it would result in soaring energy prices and damage America's economic competitiveness.

Blackburn of Tennessee is among a group of GOP congressional critics of Democratic climate legislation that plans to travel to the climate conference in Copenhagen next week to voice opposition to the blueprint offered by President Obama.

"If President Obama has his way, the Copenhagen conference will produce mandatory emissions limits that would destroy millions of American jobs and damage our economic competitiveness for decades to come," Blackburn said in the Republican's weekly radio and Internet address.

Blackburn reiterated the long-standing argument of Republican leaders in Congress that mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions would result in dramatically higher energy costs as industry was forced to shift away from fossil fuels or pay for carbon-capture technologies.

Supporters of such caps argue that legislation can be crafted to mitigate many of the additional costs to consumers through increases in energy efficiency and other measures such as allowing polluters to purchase emission allowances if that's cheaper than making actual reductions from their smokestacks.

Obama has said that the United States will commit at Copenhagen to greenhouse gas reductions — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — in the range of 17% by 2020 from 2005 levels.

But Blackburn maintained that the Democrats' cap-and-trade proposal to achieve such reductions would create "a bureaucratic nightmare that would make households, small businesses and family farms pay higher prices for electricity, gasoline, food and virtually every product made in America."

"Just think of what will happen to small businesses and manufacturers hit with these skyrocketing energy bills, especially when nations like India and China don't agree to these mandatory emissions limits," she said.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Sat, 2009-12-12 10:57 — admin

Boycott Copenhagen
Any deal at the Copenhagen climate summit will be more about politics than science. President Obama should stay away

Sarah Palin
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 December 2009 16.30 GMT

With the publication of damaging emails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicised scientific circle – the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

The emails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicised science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the US Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development.

Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits – not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate – far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real. Unlike the proposals China and India offered prior to Copenhagen – which actually allow them to increase their emissions – President Obama's proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions. Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs (as Obama admitted during the campaign). That's not exactly what most Americans are hoping for these days. And as public opposition continues to stall Congress's cap-and-tax legislation, Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats plan to regulate carbon emissions themselves, doing an end run around the American people.

In fact, we're not the only nation whose people are questioning climate change schemes. In the European Union, energy prices skyrocketed after it began a cap-and-tax programme. Meanwhile, Australia's parliament recently defeated a cap-and-tax bill. Surely other nations will follow suit, particularly as the climate email scandal continues to unfold.

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the US will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs – particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicised conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

This article was originally published on washingtonpost.com.
© The Washington Post Company 2009

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Sat, 2009-12-12 07:38 — admin

By Rob Young
Business reporter, BBC World Service

The Copenhagen climate summit's search for a deal to curb the world's greenhouse gas emissions won't succeed unless there is agreement on another thing too - money.
Many of the countries which are most at risk from climate change are poor.
They say they can't afford to switch to cleaner energy generation or to defend their populations from problems such as drought and the rising sea level without help from rich countries.
Industrialised countries - which are historically responsible for emitting greenhouse gases - agreed to help such nations when they signed up to the UN climate change convention (UNFCCC).
But no binding deal which includes specific amounts of money has yet been agreed. Copenhagen could be where this changes.
'Significant money'
The amounts developing countries need are vast, far beyond what they can afford to pay themselves.
For example, the government of Liberia on the west coast of Africa says it would have to spend half of its entire national budget to build sea defences for its main coastal cities.
CLIMATE CHANGE GLOSSARY
Select a term from the dropdown:

Mitigation - Action that will reduce man-made climate change. This includes action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or absorb greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Suggest additions
Glossary in full
"The financing is absolutely critical," says Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UNFCCC. "We need to see significant money on the table in Copenhagen."
The cash would be spent in two broad areas - in the jargon they're called adaptation and mitigation. The first is coping with a changing climate. The second is not making climate change worse by emitting even more pollutants.
Various studies have been undertaken to work out the size of the bill comes to - with results ranging from tens of billions of dollars to more than a trillion dollars per year.
Three of the most authoritative estimates fall between these extremes.
The British economist Lord Nicholas Stern reckons poor nations will need $100 billion a year by the year 2020 - with that amount doubling in the following decade
The UN calculates developing countries would need more than $500 billion a year
The European Commission has suggested developing countries will need $147 billion (100 billion euros) a year by 2020
In a document published earlier this year, the European Commission suggested 20-40% of this money could come from the developing countries themselves. Another 40% could come from carbon markets, it said, and the rest - 22bn to 50bn euros, or $32bn to $74bn - from industrialised-country governments.
The United States has not suggested a figure, but US chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, has said the US does "absolutely recognise our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere".
Fast start
At present, the UN estimates a total of $21bn is transferred from rich to poor countries - in government aid, money from carbon markets and cash from private sources.

ADAPTING TO SEA-LEVEL RISE

Liberians face rising flood threat
A tale of two cities: Maputo and Rotterdam
This could begin to increase if plans for fast-start funding - such as the 7.2bn euros ($10.6bn) the EU is promising over the next three years - take off.
But where would the bigger sums needed in the longer term come from? Carbon markets are one source, governments another.
According to a World Bank estimate, the carbon markets already provide about $6.5 billion per year (for mitigation, not adaptation). They encourage poor nations to build schemes like wind farms instead of coal-fired power stations, under a scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism.
The EU and the UN are keen to expand the CDM, although the programme is controversial. The UNFCCC predicts it could generate between $50 billion and $100 billion a year by 2030.
The other source - public money from industrialised countries - is potentially tricky, with many governments having to make tough spending decisions as they recover from the economic downturn.
Governments have various options for raising the money. One would be through dedicated green taxes where the "polluter pays", for example, a levy on international aviation and shipping.
The United Nations Development Program estimates that a carbon tax in OECD nations could raise about $265 billion a year (based on a price of $20 a tonne).
Non-payment penalties
But few countries are keen to impose a carbon tax unless their competitors do.
Another question to be discussed at Copenhagen is how to channel the money to the developing countries.

This whole agreement and negotiation should be based on trust and confidence
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

Help for poor 'has not materialised'
Funds were set up for this purpose under the Kyoto Protocol but far less money was deposited in them than developing countries expected. Developed countries apparently preferred to transfer funds in bilateral deals, and it is now hard, if not impossible, to check whether funding pledges have been met.
This is one reason why many developing countries want a binding financial deal, the kind of which has not been agreed before.
Some want rich nations to be fined or penalised if they don't live up to their commitments.
This time, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wants any financial deal to be "measurable, reportable and verifiable" so countries know exactly who has paid what and where it was spent.

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Wed, 2009-12-16 10:13 — admin

COPENHAGEN — Negotiators have all but completed a sweeping deal that would compensate countries for preserving forests, and in some cases, other natural landscapes like peat soils, swamps and fields that play a crucial role in curbing climate change.

Environmental groups have long advocated such a compensation program because forests are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. Rain forest destruction, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees, is estimated to account for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The agreement for the program, if signed as expected, may turn out to be the most significant achievement to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks, providing a system through which countries can be paid for conserving disappearing natural assets based on their contribution to reducing emissions.

A final draft of the agreement for the compensation program, called Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, is to be given on Wednesday to ministers of the nearly 200 countries represented here to hammer out a framework for a global climate treaty. Negotiators and other participants said that though some details remained to be worked out, all major points of disagreement — how to address the rights of indigenous people living on forest land and what is defined as forest, for example — had been resolved through compromise.

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Fri, 2009-12-18 08:58 — admin

COPENHAGEN — President Obama called on world leaders to come to an agreement on climate change, no matter how imperfect, and pressed for a global climate change accord to include a way to monitor whether countries — namely China — are complying with promised emissions cuts.

Speaking just hours after arriving here for what is supposed to be the last day of high-stakes talk to address global warming, and clearly frustrated by the absence of any agreement, Mr. Obama was both emphatic and at times impatient.

“The time for talk is over,” he said.

Mr. Obama warned the 119 world leaders gathered at a plenary session at the Bella Center that they needed a mechanism to hold one another accountable for their commitments. “These measures need not be intrusive, or infringe upon sovereignty,” he said, in a direct reference to the concerns expressed by Chinese officials, who have been balking at proposed verification measures. “They must, however, ensure that an accord is credible, and that we are living up to our obligations. For without such accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page.”

The talks, ongoing for the past two weeks, appeared locked over the verification measures as the final hours of the meeting approached without a deal and with plenty of tension.

For More Information:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/science/earth/19climate.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

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