In Germany, wind and solar energy coexist with energy generated by burning fossil fuels in the Western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Climate experts say it’s crucial to narrow down the global emissions gap to keep global temperature rise within the safe 1.5 degree C warming goal. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
COLOGNE, Germany, Jul 19 2016 (IPS)

Immerath, 90 km away from the German city of Cologne, has become a ghost town. The local church bells no longer ring and no children are seen in the streets riding their bicycles. Its former residents have even carried off their dead from its cemetery.

Expansion of Garzweiler, an open-pit lignite mine, has led to the town’s remaining residents being relocated to New Immerath, several kilometres away from the original town site, in North Rhine-Westphalia, whose biggest city is Cologne.

The fate of this small village, which in 2015 was home to 70 people, reflects the advances, retreats and contradictions of the world-renowned transition to renewable energy in Germany.

Since 2011, Germany has implemented a comprehensive energy transition policy, backed by a broad political consensus, seeking to make steps towards a low-carbon economy. This has encouraged the generation and consumption of alternative energy sources.

But so far these policies have not facilitated the release from the country’s industry based on coal and lignite, a highly polluting fossil fuel.

“The initial phases of the energy transition have been successful so far, with strong growth in renewables, broad public support for the idea of the transition and major medium and long term goals for government,” told IPS analyst Sascha Samadi of the non-governmental Wuppertal Institute, devoted to studies on energy transformation.

Renewable electricity generation accounted for 30 percent of the total of Germany’s electrical power in 2015, while lignite fuelled 24 percent, coal 18 percent, nuclear energy 14 percent, gas 8.8 percent and other sources the rest.

This European country is the third world power in renewable energies – excluding hydropower – and holds third place in wind power and biodiesel and fifth place in geothermal power.

Germany is also renowned for having the highest solar power capacity per capita in photovoltaic technology, even though its climate is not the most suitable for that purpose.

But the persistence of fossil fuels casts a shadow on this green energy matrix.

“The successful phasing out of fossil fuels entails a great deal of planning and organisation. If we do not promote renewables, we will have to import energy at some point,” Johannes Remmel, the minister for climate protection and the environment for North Rhine-Westphalia, told IPS.

Germany has nine lignite mines operating in three regions. Combined, the mines employ 16,000 people, produce 170 million tonnes of lignite a year and have combined reserves of three billion tonnes. China, Greece and Poland are other large world producers of lignite.

A part of the Garzweiler open-pit lignite mine, in North Rhine-Westphalia. One of the greatest challenges facing the energy transition in Germany is the future of this polluting fuel. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Garzweiler, which is owned by the private company RWE, produces 35 million tonnes of lignite a year. From a distance it is possible to see its cut-out terraces and blackened soil, waiting for giant steel jaws to devour it and start to separate the lignite.

Lignite from this mine fuels nearby electricity generators at Frimmersdorf, Neurath, Niederaussen and Weisweiller, some of the most polluting power plants in Germany.

RWE is one of the four main power generation companies in Germany, together with E.ON, EnBW and Swedish-based Vattenfall.

Coal has an expiry date

The fate of coal is different. The government has already decided that its demise will be in 2018, when the two mines that are still currently active will cease to operate.

The Rhine watershed, comprising North Rhine-Westphalia together with other states, has traditionally been the hub of Germany’s industry. Mining and its consumers are an aftermath of that world, whose rattling is interspersed with the emergence of a decarbonized economy.

A tour of the mine and the adjoining power plant of  Ibberbüren in North Rhine-Westphalia shows the struggle between two models that still coexist.

In the mine compound, underground mouths splutter the coal that feeds the hungry plant at a pace of 157 kilowatt-hour per tonne.

In 2015 the mine produced 6.2 million tonnes of extracted coal, an amount projected to be reduced to 3.6 million tonnes this year and next, and to further drop to 2.9 million in 2018.

The mine employs 1,600 people and has a 300,000 tonne inventory which needs to be sold by 2018.

“I am a miner, and I am very much attached to my job. I speak on behalf of my co-workers. It is hard to close it down. There is a feeling of sadness, we are attending our own funeral”, told IPS the manager of the mine operator, Hubert Hüls.

Before the energy transition policy was in place, laws that promoted renewable energies had been passed in 1991 and 2000, with measures such as a special royalty fee included in electricity tariffs paid to generators that are fuelled by renewable energy sources.

The renewable energy sector invests some 20 billion dollars yearly and employs around 370.000 people.

Another measure, adopted in 2015 by the government in Berlin, sets out an auction plan for the purchase of photovoltaic solar power, but opponents have argued that large generation companies are being favoured over small ones as the successful bidder will be the one offering the lowest price.

Energy transition and climate change

Energy transition also seeks to meet Germany’s global warming mitigation commitments.

Germany has undertaken to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent in 2020 and by 95 per cent in 2015. Moreover, it has set itself the goal of increasing the share of renewable energies in the end-use power market from the current figure of 12 per cent to 60 per cent in 2050.

In the second half of the year, the German government will analyse the drafting of the 2050 Climate Action Plan, which envisages actions towards reducing by half the amount of emissions from the power sector and a fossil fuel phase-out programme.

In 2014, Germany reduced its emissions by 346 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 27.7 per cent of the 1990 total. However, the German Federal Agency for Environment warned that in 2015 emissions went up by six million tonnes, amounting to 0.7 per cent, reaching a total of 908 million tonnes.

Polluting gases are derived mainly from the generation and use of energy, transport and agriculture.

In 2019, the government will review the current incentives for the development of renewable energies and will seek to make adjustments aimed at fostering the sector.

Meanwhile, Germany’s last three nuclear power plants will cease operation in 2022. However, Garzweiler mine will continue to operate until 2045.

“There are technological, infrastructure, investment, political, social and innovation challenges to overcome. Recent decisions taken by the government are indicative of a lack of political will to undertake the tough decisions that are required for deep decarbonisation”, pointed out Samadi.

Companies “now try to mitigate the damage and leave the search for solutions in the hands of the (central) government. There will be fierce debate over how to expand renewable energies. The process may be slowed but not halted”, pointed out academic Heinz-J Bontrup, of the state University of Applied Sciences Gelsenkirchen.

Meanwhile, the regional government has opted to reduce the Garzweiler mine extension plan, leaving 400 million tonnes of lignite underground.

Coastal communities in the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific Islands are already threatened by climate change with rising seas and stronger storm surges. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jan 1 2016 (IPS)

Women leaders in the Pacific Islands have acclaimed the agreement on reducing global warming achieved at the United Nations (COP21) Climate Change conference in Paris as an unprecedented moment of world solidarity on an issue which has been marked to date by division between the developing and industrialized world. But for Pacific small island developing states, which name climate change as the single greatest threat to their survival, it will only be a success if inspirational words are followed by real action.

“It’s a huge step forward and I don’t think it would have been possible without the voices of indigenous Pacific Islanders banding together and demanding action and justice…. I am very optimistic about the future,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate activist and poet from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who attended the historic meeting, told IPS.

Intense negotiations and compromise between the interests of 195 countries, plus the European Union, which make up the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the climate change convention, marked its 21st meeting in Paris last month.

Dame Meg Taylor, Secretary General of the regional Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), said that “while not all the issues identified by Pacific Island countries were included in the final outcome and agreement, there were substantive advances with recognition of the importance of pursuing efforts to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the inclusion of loss and damage as a separate element in the agreement and simplified and scaled up access to climate change finance.”

Claire Anterea of the Kiribati Climate Action Network in the small Central Pacific atoll nation of around 110,000 people added that the outcome was “good, but not perfect,” highlighting that the new temperature goal and call to boost climate finance were particularly important.

The World Meteorological Organisation predicted this year will be the hottest on record with average global temperatures expected to reach 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial age. Meanwhile Pacific Island countries are bracing for further rising temperatures, sea levels, ocean acidification and coral bleaching this century. Maximum sea level rise in many island states could reach more than 0.6 metres, reports the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.

Due to rising seas in the Marshall Islands “a simple high tide results in waves flooding and crashing through sea walls built of cement and rocks and completely destroying homes. The salt from the flooding also destroys our crops and food,” Jetnil-Kijiner said..

In the best case scenario, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea could experience a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but under high emissions this might soar to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2090.

Global warming could result in yields of sweet potato, a common staple crop, declining by more than 50 per cent in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 2050, estimates the Asian Development Bank. The burden of crop losses will fall on the shoulders of Pacific Islands’ women who are primarily responsible in communities for growing fresh produce, producing food and fetching water.

Pacific Islanders led a campaign in Paris this year to recognize a new temperature rise threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is critical, they argued, to stem future climate shocks and mitigate forced displacement as islands become increasingly uninhabitable due to loss of food, water and land.

And in a sign of shifting views in the industrialized world, Pacific Islanders were joined in their campaigning on this issue by numerous developed and developing nations in a ‘Coalition of High Ambition’ which emerged during the second week of COP21. Solidarity was demonstrated by, amongst others, Mexico, Brazil, Norway, Germany, the European Union and United States.

The final Paris agreement which seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and ‘pursue efforts’ to further reduce it by another 0.5 degree was a win for the coalition.

“1.5 degrees Celsius wasn’t even on the table before the conference began, so hearing it first announced that it even made it into the text made me cry with relief. That being said, the vague wording definitely has me worried and I know it’ll take a continued push from all of us to actually reach 1.5,” Jetnil-Kijiner said.

This will not decrease the immense challenges the region already faces in adapting to extreme weather, which cannot be met by small island economies without access to international climate finance. This year island leaders called for the international community to honour its pledge to raise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 to fund adaptation in developing countries, an objective first conceived in Copenhagen in 2009. Assessments since then of how much has been raised vary, but the World Bank claimed in April there was a serious shortfall of 70 billion dollars.

Taylor believes “there is a positive outlook for climate financing post-2020 with Article 9 of the Paris Agreement identifying that, for Small Island Developing States, financing needs to be public and grant-based resources for adaptation.” There has been debate about whether finance mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), should issue free grants or concessional loans.

Anterea emphasised that, to be effective, funding “needs to reach grassroots people through a simple processing method.”

Recognition of loss and damage caused by extreme weather and natural disasters in the final pact was also a milestone, the PIFS Secretary General added, even though it does not provide for vulnerable nations to claim liability or compensation from big polluters.

“The legal right of countries to test the liabilities of other Parties using other avenues has not been diminished by this decision,” she said.

But the greatest hope is being invested in the binding commitment by nations to set emission reduction targets and be subject to a process of long term monitoring and review, a move which would accelerate the global transition toward renewable energy and make the burning of fossil fuels, the greatest driver of greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly unviable.

“We need the five-year review as a crucial step to keeping countries’ governments accountable to our targets and goals,” Jetnil-Kijiner emphasised. If nations are not emboldened to better their goals every time, the planet may continue toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more, experts conclude.

The most pressing question, after the euphoria of the global accord demonstrated in Paris has died down, is how will these lofty promises be implemented? Pacific Islanders are depending on it.

(End)

The 2015 Climate Conference is hosted by France, who also serves as its President. The French has been eager to conclude the talks with an agreement, thus pushing countries to a fast-paced first week. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
PARIS, France, Dec 7 2015 (IPS)

Whatever effort there was made during the past four years to create a global legal architecture to combat climate change, its legacy will be defined in the forthcoming days.

Negotiators from 195 countries walked into the second and final week of the climate negotiations here in Paris on Monday after producing the final draft version of the expected global agreement last Saturday. This has a cleaner look than those preceding it but still major international policy issues lie unresolved.

“We could have been better, we could have been worse, the important thing is that we have a text, that we want an agreement next week and all parties want it,” said French Ambassador for the International Climate Negotiations Laurence Tubiana as talks closed last week.

It’s up now to ministers to continue the technical discussions delegates had during the first segment of the talks but with a politically nuanced view as countries should agree to complex economic and development meeting points to address climate change.

If the accord comes through, the world should break apart from its fossil fuel dependence and quickly move towards a low-carbon economy with more resilient cities, communities and businesses, in what accounts to a complete divorce from the 20th century development model.

For this to happen though, parties must agree to heavy cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and financial support to comply with inversion in cleaner energy and adaptation to climate impacts.

The relatively fast-paced 2015 Climate Conference (COP21) is still on schedule with the expectations of its host, the French government. According to their proposed agenda, the talks will deliver a final text by Wednesday night this week so that translators and legal advisors can prepare an official document in all UN languages. But that’s still several days away.

“The job is not done, we need to apply all intelligence, energy, and willingness to compromise and all efforts to come to agreement. Nothing is decided until everything is decided,” said Tubiana.

How the French Presidency and the facilitators it has appointed handle these upcoming days decides the fate of the agreement, which could provide a global treaty on emissions reduction or another failure like the 2009 conference at Copenhagen.

“We have advanced at the pace the French presidency wanted. There is a negotiating text for this week, but it’s not as clean as we would have liked”, Dennis Castellanos, head of the Guatemalan delegation, told IPS. “The work we have for this week is still pretty significan.t”

Guatemala currently presides over AILAC, the Latin American and Caribbean Independent Alliance, which groups eight developing countries from the region with a progressive stance and is seen as a bridging group between developing nations and the industrialized countries.

“As always, finance would be another of the key issues we would need to address,” Castellanos explained.

The financial support from developed countries, and more unusually as South-South cooperation, will determine the quality of the agreement and the tools countries will have to implement, measure, and verify their current commitments. This remains one of the cloudiest topics of the talks.

The pressure for delegates is double: they not only have the mandate to produce a globally binding agreement after the two-week long Paris talks, but it needs to be as ambitious as possible to create a longstanding solution to climate change.

The latest review of the current pledges show global warming was curved down, but still not enough as to prevent catastrophic impacts around the globe.

“The ministers have a choice: either they meaningfully address the inadequacy of current climate targets, or they make a deal that puts the world on a path to catastrophic three degrees of warming,” said Wendel Trio, Director of Climate Action Network Europe in a press release.

A key issue still undecided is what should be the limit of the temperature increase, a target set in two degrees Celsius after a political debate in the Copenhagen talks but hotly debated over the past years as still too dangerous.

The 2013-2015 review, a scientific analysis of existing literature made by a subsidiary body of the Climate Convention, concluded among other elements that 2 degrees would be catastrophic for lowland regions around the world, especially the atoll nations of the world.

The scientific body submitted a three-year long scientific review which may have convinced nations that a 1.5 Celsius target was possible, but strong opposition by an oil-rich country made it miss the last chance to be approved before the final week of talks.

As over 100 countries among the least developed and most vulnerable, along with some key players like France and Germany, push for this more ambitious target needing a faster transition to renewable energy but could in turn trigger increased actions for the private sector.

“Paris needs to send a signal that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end, so that businesses can plan for a carbon-free future. So the language in the Agreement needs to be clear,” argued Martin Kaiser, Head of International Climate Politics at Greenpeace.

As delegates are aware now that the current voluntary pledges made by countries won’t be sufficient to comb down the planet’s temperature increase to safe levels, Kaiser said “The Agreement then needs to provide the means for getting there. That’s the mechanism to scale up ambition every five years.”

This mechanism, also called the Paris Ambition Mechanism among the hopeful who push for it, would institute mandatory and periodical reviews for country’s commitments where they can be scaled up to further reduce emissions. This would be completed by a global analysis of how much can be achieved globally.

However, Kaiser stated, the first review should be before 2020 and not to “wait for the first review or stock-take to happen in 2024 or 2025, because that will set in stone the current pledges.”

So begins the last week ever of the road to a Paris Agreement, which would enshrine the process as a masterful year-long successful effort to combat climate change is down to a handful of days.or another step humanity takes into the war against itself.

(End)

Grasslands replaced the Amazon rainforest in Brasil Novo, a municipality in the Xingú River basin, where the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam is being built. Low-productivity stock-raising, with just one or two animals per hectare, is the big factor in deforestation and soil degradation in the region, and the government’s goal is to recover just one-fourth of the area degraded by this activity. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 2 2015 (IPS)

Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction programme, hailed as bold, has nevertheless left environmentalists frustrated at its lack of ambition in key aspects.

“The decision to present absolute reduction targets is praiseworthy, but they could be better and more ambitious, to the benefit of the country itself and of the global climate change talks,” said André Ferretti, general coordinator of the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian network of 37 environmental groups.

On Sep. 27, President Dilma Rousseff announced at the Sep. 25-27 U.N. Sustainable Development Summit in New York that Brazil’s goal is to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 37 percent by 2025 and 43 percent by 2030, with a base year of 2005.“The weakest point in Brazil’s commitment is with respect to the forest question. It is demeaning to promise to end illegal deforestation by 2030, admitting that illegal practices will be tolerated for a decade and a half.” -- André Ferretti

This is Brazil’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) to keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius this century, the ceiling set by experts to ward off a climate catastrophe.

Each country had until Oct. 1 to submit its INDC, to be incorporated into the new universal binding treaty to be approved at the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to be held Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 in Paris.

In order for Brazil to meet these goals, at least 45 percent of its total energy mix is to be made up of renewable sources, including hydropower, by 2030. The global average is just 13 percent, the Brazilian president pointed out.

Alternative sources like wind, solar, biomass and ethanol will account for 23 percent of the country’s electricity output, up from nine percent today.

In addition, the country will attempt to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and pledged to offset emissions from regulated deforestation.

Reforesting 12 million hectares and recovering 15 million hectares of degraded grasslands are other goals announced by Rousseff, who noted that Brazil is one of the first countries of the developing South to assume absolute reduction targets for cutting GHG emissions, with goals even higher than those set by many industrialised countries.

Other countries offer reductions with respect to projected future emissions, based on current rates of production, consumption and economic growth. At the COP15, held in 2009 in Copenhagen, Brazil promised to reduce its GHG emissions by 36 to 39 percent below its projected emissions for 2020.

President Dilma Rousseff announced Brazil’s national greenhouse gas emissions reduction contribution during the Sep. 25-27 U.N. Sustainable Development Summit in New York. Credit: UN/Mark Garten

But the country’s INDC goals “are still lower than what the country could achieve, and add very little to what has already been done,” Ferreti told IPS.

In 2012, GHG emissions had already been cut 41 percent with respect to 2005, basically due to a lower rate of deforestation in the Amazon, although they rose later because of greater use of fossil fuels.

Currently Brazil, Latin America’s biggest GHG emitter, releases nearly 1.48 billion tons a year of emissions into the atmosphere.

The target for net emissions for 2030 does not differ much from the 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide released in 2012, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

“The weakest point in Brazil’s commitment is with respect to the forest question,” said Ferretti, who is also manager of conservation strategies in the Boticario Group Foundation for Nature Protection. “It is demeaning to promise to end illegal deforestation by 2030, admitting that illegal practices will be tolerated for a decade and a half.”

“In legal terms, it is contradictory to set such a lengthy timeframe to combat an illegal activity,” former lawmaker Liszt Vieira, who directed Rio de Janeiro’s botanical garden for 10 years, told IPS.

Furthermore, the targets only refer to the Amazon, leaving out other ecosystems, such as the Cerrado, the savannah that covers 203.6 million hectares, or 24 percent of the national territory, and is suffering heavy and growing deforestation, said Ferretti.

“All of this reflects the Brazilian government’s weak commitment on this issue,” said Paulo Barreto, a senior researcher at the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment. “Brazil could assume a zero deforestation goal for 2030, which would be feasible because this country has learned a lot about the issue, has the necessary technology, and has land that has already been deforested, for the expansion of agriculture.

“Besides, it would be in the best interests of the country, which depends heavily on rainfall for agriculture and energy,” he said in an interview with IPS. “Its vulnerability to drought has been revealed by the current water and energy crisis, especially in the state of São Paulo, after scarce rainfall for the last two years.”

“That’s why a good climate accord in Paris would be good for Brazil,” to prevent extreme events like drought, he said.

An ambitious goal, like zero deforestation nationwide, would give Brazil a certain leadership role in the climate conference, to encourage contributions from other countries and the reaching of agreements that would make it possible to limit climate change to less disastrous levels, said both Barreto and Vieira.

Furthermore, the role that forests play in regulating rainfall, especially the Amazon jungle in South America, is understood better today.

Brazil could also present more ambitious goals with respect to energy from alternative sources, expanding investment in wind and solar energy, said Vieira. In energy, the country is going against the current, he said, increasing generation of thermal power with fossil fuels and putting a priority on producing oil from the pre-salt deposits discovered beneath a two-kilometre-thick salt layer under rock, sand and deep water in the Atlantic.
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Vieira believes Brazil has lost the leadership role it had in environment and the climate for nearly two decades, since it hosted the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro. In his view, it is the big players in the issue – China, the United States and Europe – that will decide the future of the global climate.

But despite the limitations of the government’s national climate programme, the environmentalists consulted by IPS admitted that Rousseff’s announcement was a happy surprise.

“We expected something worse from a development-oriented government that has treated environmentalism as an obstacle to development and economic growth,” said Vieira, who formed part of the current administration until 2013, as president of the botanical garden, a position of trust in the Environment Ministry.

“The presentation of the targets was both a relief and a frustration,” said Ferretti. “It was bad because it could have been better, both in the forest question and in energy, with more attention to biomass and solar energy.”

“And it was good because, besides some good measures, such as the recovery of degraded land, goals were set for 2025 and 2030, indicating that they would be revised every five years and could be expanded, opening a door to negotiation with and emulation by other countries,” he added.

It was also positive, he said, because Brazil abandoned its stance of inflexibly defending “common but differentiated responsibilities” exempting developing countries from meeting the same kinds of targets, as they are not equally responsible for the problem of global warming.

That separation between the two blocs boosted the “Third World” leadership by some countries like Brazil, but hindered negotiations, Ferretti argued.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A satellite image of Typhoon Haiyan captures the scale of the storm. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

Imagine this, if you can: the world as we know it torn apart by ‘hypercanes’, storms with wind speeds of over 500 mph, capable of producing a system the size of North America. A tiny fraction of humanity driven to a civilisation underground, the remaining masses left to fend for themselves on the virtually uninhabitable Earth’s surface. Species extinction is complete and genetic engineering is at a new height, to ensure the continued survival of what’s left of the human race.

"I don't think I use the term "climate change" once in the book. That was deliberate. [The] last thing most people want is a preachy novel where the characters are obvious stand-ins for the author's opinion." -- Kat Ross
This is the setting for ‘Some Fine Day’, a novel for young adults by Kat Ross that falls into an emerging sub-genre of science fiction known as climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’.

Readers follow the story of sixteen-year-old Jansin Nordqvist, who’s on the verge of graduating from a military academy when her parents surprise her with a trip to the surface.

Thrilled at the chance to see the ocean, breathe fresh air and experience real sunlight, Jansin cannot anticipate what her future holds: a period of captivity with the surface ‘savages’ she’s been warned about all her life, and discoveries about the underground regime that leave her questioning everything she’s ever been taught.

Over the past two years, cli-fi novels have gone from being a fringe sub-category to a widely referenced genre on sites like Amazon, as more and more writers turn their eye to the horrific realities of catastrophic climate change.

With global climate negotiations hamstrung and world leaders unable, or unwilling, to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70 percent by 2030 to prevent the worst forms of global warming, there is no doubt that natural disasters will become more frequent and more extreme.

Given that youth will bear the brunt of an increasingly savage climate, it is impossible to underestimate the role that cli-fi could play in informing and inspiring the younger generation to take action now against the worst-case scenarios of the future.

IPS sat down with Kat Ross to discuss the ways in which fiction can contribute to the debate that is raging around the world on the ‘ifs, whens and whats’ of climate change.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: When did you first become interested in the ‘cli-fi’ genre, and what drew you to this particular form of storytelling?

Cover art for Some Fine Day.

A: I have to give props to Dan Bloom for coining the term cli-fi. It’s super catchy, and he’s really given the genre a major boost. But when I sat down to write the book, there was no question that climate change would be a big part of the plot. As a journalist, I’d been covering it for almost a decade, and every year, the predictions got scarier. Some stopped being predictions about the future and started actually happening.

I was struck by the massive disconnect between what scientists and the public were saying – like hey, can we do something about this? – and the total lack of government action. The elephant in the room is obviously the fossil fuel lobby, among others. They spend billions of dollars spreading “doubt” about the science, which is ludicrous. I think fiction can be a great way into a conversation about these issues, especially with young people.

Some Fine Day starts with a basic question: what if the worst-case scenarios actually come to pass?

Q: Is the book, though set in the future, actually a commentary on our own times? If so, what do you think are the most important takeaways for young people at this moment in history?

A: Oh, definitely! I think it’s pretty explicit that the ravaged world in the story – about 80 years or so from now – is a direct result of doing too little, too late on runaway CO2 emissions. But the cool thing is that while we may have one toe at the edge of the precipice, we haven’t taken that plunge yet. There’s still time to change the future. And young people have been stepping up for years now. Adopt a Negotiator is a great initiative that works a lot with youth. They bring accountability to these very opaque negotiations.

Ultimately, it’s the people in their teens and twenties who will be living with the consequences of the choices we make today – and they’re not happy. Governments better start listening.

Q: The book both celebrates and condemns the limits to which humanity has pushed technology and scientific experimentation — on the one hand, an entire civilisation living underground entirely as a result of scientific innovation; on the other, genetic engineering gone horribly awry. What were your thoughts as an author navigating these two extremes?

Kat Ross, author of Some Fine Day. Credit: Courtesy Kat Ross

A: Well, that’s the thing, right? Technology itself isn’t good or evil, it’s what we do with it. This is not a new question. Just look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. We’re still fascinated by her tale of death and reanimation, and the awful consequences of scientific hubris. The basic idea is that everything comes with a price, although in the case of a switch to renewables, there doesn’t seem to be quite the same downside as bringing a giant dead guy back to life.

For Some Fine Day, I had a lot of fun asking questions like, exactly how do you build an underground city? Where does the air come from, the food and water? Are hypercanes possible? (According to a scientist at MIT, the answer is yes) If all the icecaps melted, how much would the seas rise? What would that look like for the Eastern Seaboard?

In short, I have a fondness for creepy mutants and couldn’t help throwing a few into the mix.

Q: Themes of the surveillance state, fascist governance and the so-called ‘one percent’ run consistently through the book, with the protagonist first a product of, then an enemy of, all of the above. How did you imagine or hope your target audience would understand these ideas in the context of the story?

A: It’s become something of a fixture of the dystopian genre to have jack-booted thugs running things. But I think it actually made sense in the context of the story. These are people who have lost everything. They’ve been driven from the surface by massive storms, ocean acidification, species extinction, the whole enchilada. The transition to underground prefectures was spearheaded by the military, and now they’re facing very limited resources. Every drop of water, every bite of food is rationed. There’s a tendency to hoard, and to fight with your neighbours. So it’s not a very democratic society.

As you say, what’s interesting about the main character, Jansin, is that she starts off as one of the true believers – a special ops cadet who’s been trained all her life to never question orders. But she evolves over the course of the story to understand that she doesn’t have to live like that. It doesn’t have to be “us versus them.” Which is the most powerful propaganda tool ever invented.

It’s one of the reasons I like to write about young protagonists. I think in general, their minds are more open. Their core beliefs haven’t yet fossilized.

Q: There is a sense of urgency to the book that makes it an absolute page-turner. While this is a work of fiction, it does in many ways mirror the current emergency humanity finds itself in. Was this intentional? Or was the point more to create a thriller, and leave the readers to draw their own conclusions about the ‘climate politics’ of the world you create?

A: I don’t think I use the term “climate change” once in the book. That was deliberate. It’s pretty clear what’s happened, and frankly, the last thing most people want is a preachy novel where the characters are obvious stand-ins for the author’s opinion. Or maybe you do, but it’s easy to go out and find that kind of book if it’s your bag.

Some Fine Day is targeted at the young adult audience (though I think it’s for anyone), so I needed to be extra-careful there. Stealth indoctrination! Just kidding. No, I mainly wanted to tell a ripping good story, with characters you care about, and build a world that felt real in every sense.

Margaret Atwood pretty much summed it up. She says: “It’s rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots. They’re still really about people because that’s who we are and that’s what we write stories about.”

But if anyone reads my book and it inspires them to say to themselves, “Holy sh*t, this really sounds bad. Could any of this actually happen? Hey, I heard there’s a rally going on in the town square on Sunday. Maybe I should go see what they have to say…”

Well, I’d be just fine with that.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Excerpt:

St. Vincent officials are assisting residents who live close to rivers to move to safer locations. Credit Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Jun 15 2014 (IPS)

A freak storm, followed by heavy floods in December 2013, will go down in history as the most destructive natural disaster to have hit the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with reported total damages and losses of at least 103 million dollars.

Six months later, the country, which is a member of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), is still in the recovery phase of this crisis, but Tourism Minister Cecil McKee said several lessons have been learned, making the country better prepared for future catastrophic weather events.

“Although Caribbean nations have contributed little to the release of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change, they will pay a heavy price for global inaction in reducing emissions." -- Hela Cheikhrouhou, executive director of the Green Climate Fund
“We have been dealing with our river defences and our coastal defences,” McKee told IPS, adding that the government is not only repairing damaged homes but also “relocating a number of persons whose homes are situated on river banks in areas that are obviously going to put them at risk should we have a reoccurrence of such events.”

A slow-moving, low-level trough on Dec. 24 dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain on the Caribbean island states of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia and Dominica, killing at least 13 people.

Scientists have called the floods the worst disaster in living memory for the small countries, caused by higher-than-average rainfall of 15 inches, which overwhelmed the water systems’ ability to facilitate smooth run-off.

For Mckee, the Christmas disaster was a reminder that “climate change is going to be here with us for some time.”

“If we look at the events of Christmas Eve 2013, I think we can all agree that climate change is affecting not only St. Vincent and the Grenadines but the entire Caribbean in a significant way,” he asserted.

But simply understanding the problem is not enough – many of the island nations in the Caribbean are in dire need of financial resources to assist with mitigation and adaptation.

Caribbean looks to climate finance

Flooding is commonplace in the Caribbean, with Guyana, one of the most flood-prone countries in the region, recently benefitting from a multi-million-dollar credit scheme to guard against flooding.

St. Vincent has been strengthening river defences and coastal defences following deadly floods in December 2013. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

A statement from the World Bank said more than 300,000 people from the flood prone region of East Demerara will benefit from reduced flooding and climate risks as a result of an 11-million-dollar loan from the International Development Association (IDA).

Nearly 90 percent of Guyana’s population lives in this narrow coastal plain, largely below sea level and, therefore, highly vulnerable to climate change.

Extreme rainfall in 2005 resulted in flooding and damages estimated at nearly 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), or 465 million dollars at the time.

The impact on poverty was evident and many subsistence farmers, small business operators and vendors were affected.

Sophie Sirtaine, the World Bank’s country director for the Caribbean, said the funds would assist in providing opportunities for all Guyanese by reducing vulnerability to climate change.

“To boost competitiveness, it is essential to address the vulnerability to climate risks and ensure that the skills learnt in the classroom lay the foundation for future work-place success,” she told IPS.

Specifically, the project will upgrade critical sections of the East Demerara Water Conservancy dams and channels; improve drainage capacity in priority areas along the East Demerara coast; and increase flood preparedness by installing instruments to monitor hydro-meteorological data.

The IDA credit to the Government of Guyana has a final maturity of 25 years, with a five-year grace period.

During its annual board of governors meeting held in Guyana last month, Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) President Dr. Warren Smith said the Caribbean was becoming more aware of the severe threat posed by climate change on a daily basis.

“Seven Caribbean countries…are among the top 10 countries, which, relative to their GDP, suffered the highest average economic losses from climate-related disasters during the period 1993-2012.

“It is estimated that annual losses could be between five and 30 percent of GDP within the next few decades,” he added.

According to Smith, despite the region’s high vulnerability and exposure to climate change, Caribbean countries have failed to access or mobilise international climate finance at levels commensurate with their needs.

Caribbean countries are hoping that the South Korea-based Green Climate Fund (GCF) would prove to be much more beneficial than other global initiatives established to deal with the impact of climate change.

GCF Executive Director Hela Cheikhrouhou, who delivered the 15^th annual William Demas Memorial lecture during the CDB meeting, said that the concern expressed by Small Island Developing States all over the world finds a strong echo in the Caribbean, where the devastating effects of hurricanes have been witnessed by many.

“Although Caribbean nations have contributed little to the release of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change, they will pay a heavy price for global inaction in reducing emissions,” Cheikhrouhou warned.

The GCF came into being at the 16^th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UFCCC) held in Cancun, Mexico.

Its purpose is to make a significant contribution to global efforts to limit warming to two degrees Celsius by providing financial support to developing countries to help limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

There are hopes that the fund could top 100 billion dollars per annum by 2020.

“Our vision is to devise new paradigms for climate finance, maximise the impact of public finance in a creative way, and attract new sources of public and private finance to catalyse investment in adaptation and mitigation projects in the developing world,” Cheikhrouhou said.

Selwin Hart, climate change finance advisor with the CDB, said the GCF provides an important opportunity for regional countries to not only adapt to climate change but also to mitigate its effects.

McKee said the region is also putting measures in place to mobilise financial support in events similar to what affected the three OECS countries in December 2013.

“Countries are being asked to place monies in regional holding systems that would allow the region to respond more [efficiently] and I think that we are looking more and more to the international bodies and the more developed countries”, which are largely responsible for climate change, for assistance, he told IPS.

(END)

In case you missed it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third and final part of a report on Apr. 13 in which it says bluntly that we only have 15 years left to avoid exceeding the “safe” threshold of a 2°C increase in global temperatures, beyond which the consequences will be dramatic.

And only the most myopic are unaware of what these are – from an increase in sea level, through more frequent hurricanes and storms (increasingly in previously unaffected areas), to an adverse impact on food production.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Credit: IPS

Now, in a normal and participatory world, in which at least 83 percent of those living today will still be alive in 15 years, this report would have created a dramatic reaction. Instead, there has not been a single comment by any of the leaders of the 196 countries in which the planet’s 7.5 billion “consumers” reside. It’s just been business as usual.

Anthropologists, who study human beings’ similarity to and divergence from other animals, concluded a long time ago that humans are not superior in every aspect. For instance, human beings are less adaptable than many animals to survive in, for example, earthquakes, hurricanes and any other type of natural disaster. You can be sure that, by now, other animals would be showing signs of alertness and uneasiness.

The first part of the report, released in September 2013 in Stockholm, declared with a 95 percent or greater certainty that humans are the main cause of global warming, while the second part, released in Yokohama at the end of March, reported that “in recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans”.

The IPCC is made up of over 2,000 scientists, and this is the first time that it has come to firm and final conclusions since its creation in 1988 by the United Nations.

The main conclusion of the report is that to slow the race to a point of no return, global emissions must be cut by 40 to 70 percent by 2050, and that “only major institutional and technological changes will give a better than even chance” that global warming will not go beyond the safety threshold and that these must start at the latest in 15 years, and be completed in 35 years.

It is worth noting that roughly half of the world’s population is under the age of 30, and it is largely the young who will have to bear the enormous costs of fighting climate change.

The IPCC’s main recommendation is very simple: major economies should place a tax on carbon pollution, raising the cost of fossil fuels and thus pushing the market toward clean sources such as wind, solar or nuclear energy. It is here that “major institutional changes” are required.

Ten countries are responsible for 70 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas pollution, with the United States and China accounting for over 55 percent of that share. Both countries are taking serious steps to fight pollution.

U.S. President Barack Obama tried in vain to obtain Senate support, and has used his authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to cut carbon pollution from vehicles and industrial plants and encourage clean technologies. But he cannot do anything more without backing from the Senate.

The all-powerful new president of China, Xi Jinping, has made the environment a priority, also because official sources put the number of deaths in China each year from pollution at five million.

But China needs coal for its growth, and Xi’s position is: “Why should we slow down our development when it was you rich countries that created the problem by achieving your growth?” And that gives rise to a vicious circle. The countries of the South want the rich countries to finance their costs for reducing pollution, and the countries of the North want them to stop polluting.

As a result, the report’s executive summary, which is intended for political leaders, has been stripped of charts which could have been read as showing the need for the South to do more, while the rich countries put pressure on avoiding any language that could have been interpreted as the need for them to assume any financial obligations.

This should make it easier to reach an agreement at the next Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in Lima, where a new global agreement should be reached (remember the disaster at the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009?).

The key to any agreement is in the hands of the United States. The U.S. Congress has blocked any initiative on climate control, providing an easy escape for China, India and other polluters: why should we make commitments and sacrifices if the U.S. does not participate?

The problem is that the Republicans have made climate change denial one of their points of identity.

They have mocked and denied climate change and attacked Democrats who support carbon taxing as waging a war on coal. The American energy industry financially supports the Republican Party and it is considered political suicide to talk about climate change.

The last time a carbon tax was proposed in 2009, after a positive vote by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, the Republican-dominated Senate shot it down.

And in the 2010 elections, a number of politicians who voted for the carbon tax lost their seats, contributing to the Republican takeover of the House. The hope now for those who want a change is to wait for the 2016 elections, and hope that the new president will be able to change the situation – which is a good example of why the ancient Greeks said that Hope is the last Goddess.

And this brings us to a very simple reality. The U.S. Senate is made up of 100 members, and this means that you need 51 votes to kill any bill for a fossil fuels tax. In China, the situation is different, but decisions are taken, in the best of hypotheses, not by the president alone, but by the seven-member Standing Committee of the Central Committee, which holds the real power in the Communist Party.

In other words, the future of our planet is decided by 58 persons. With the current global population standing at close to 7.7 billion people, so much for a democratic world!
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Part of the Sustainable Urban Masterplan for Shanghai, this image shows the channels with pedestrian and slow traffic lanes on the right, and urban food gardens on the left. The channel transports water from vertical farm to vertical farm, cooling the city and being filtered through various plants and organisms along the way. Credit: Except Integrated/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
NANTES, France, Oct 5 2013 (IPS)

With presidents and prime ministers failing to take meaningful action to avert a planetary-scale climate crisis, the mayors of cities and towns are increasingly stepping up to enact changes at the local level.

“Cities are on the front lines of climate change,” Richard Register, founder and president of Ecocity Builders, an organisation that pioneered ecological city design and planning, told IPS.

With the backing of their residents, many cities and towns around the world are becoming cleaner, greener and better places to live by banning cars, improving mass transit, reducing energy use and growing their own food while adding public and green spaces.

“Getting cities right solves many problems,” Register said.

Cities are truly ground zero for action on climate change, protection of ecosystems, biodiversity, energy use, food production and more because that’s where most people live today, he said. Cities consume about 75 percent of the world’s energy and resources. They are directly or indirectly responsible for 75 percent of global carbon emissions.

By 2050, 75 percent of the world’s 9.5 billion people will live in cities. The urban areas to house this huge increase amounts to more than all the building humanity has ever done. Nearly all of this new building will be in the developing world.

“All of this new urban infrastructure must be done right,” said David Cadman, a city councillor from Vancouver, Canada and president of ICLEI, the only network of sustainable cities operating worldwide and which counts 1,200 local governments as members.

ICLEI members have committed to reduce their carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

“Cities are major players in issues like energy, climate, sustainable food production,” Cadman told IPS.

Climate change is a “five-alarm fire and hardly any national government is taking the needed actions”, he said. On top of that, national governments largely ignore the role of cities and only recently granted them 10 minutes of speaking time at the annual U.N. climate negotiations to create a new global treaty.

“We continue to have the political courage to act,” said Anna Tenje, deputy mayor of the small Swedish city of Växjö, which slashed its carbon emissions 40 percent and aims to be Europe’s greenest city.

Växjö was a very polluted region in the 1960s, but the public and business community backed efforts to re-invent it as a green city. People now fish and swim in the once polluted lakes that surround the city, she said at the 10th Ecocity, the World Summit on Sustainable Cities, a recent conference that drew more than 2,000 mayors, local officials and members of civil society to Nantes.

Växjö is doing also every well economically, Tenje said, proving that cutting emissions is not a burden.

All new apartment blocks are so well-insulated they don’t need furnaces for heat. Solar panels have been installed in schools and on the roof of City Hall. A biogas plant produces vehicle fuel from sewage and school food leftovers, while another larger plant using domestic waste as its feedstock is under construction.

The city aims to be fossil fuel-free by 2030 and has launched a major effort to get people out of their cars by making public transit, walking and cycling more enjoyable than driving, the deputy mayor said.

Last year’s landmark sustainability summit Rio+20 in Brazil chose “The Future We Want” as its motto. While little was accomplished in Rio, some cities and towns were already creating the future they want, said Andrew Simms, a climate economist at Global Witness and fellow of the New Economics Foundation in the UK.

Around the world, cites and towns are creating their version of what Simm’s nine-year-old daughter calls ‘Happyville’:  Green, sustainable places with thriving local economies and healthy, prosperous lifestyles for all residents, Simms told IPS.

Many Danish cities get their energy from wind, and the Belgian city of Ghent doubled the number of bikes on streets in less than 10 years with the dream of becoming car-free. Citizens in the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre have weekly neighbourhood meetings to discuss how the city budget will be spent, resulting in a big improvement in services.

Cities can also grow much of their own food, Simms said, noting that Havana’s urban gardens grow half the city’s fresh fruit and vegetables. New York City estimates it has 4,000 acres on which it too could grow food. The city of Boulder, Colorado is working towards producing all of its own food.

Skyrocketing resource use fuelled by overconsumption remains a major challenge, but here too cities have a major role to play. The Brazilian mega-city of Sao Paulo banned billboards and transit advertising, while Europe’s premier city, Paris, has reduced such advertising by 30 percent to beautify the cityscape and de-emphasise material consumption.

Simms says that public spiritedness has become rarer in cultures bombarded by 180 ads a day telling people all they need to be happy is to buy stuff.

The only barriers to every village, town and city becoming ‘Happyville’ are a lack of political courage and self-interest dominating public interest, he said.

A contentious global agreement on how to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the global airline industry will be at the top of the agenda over the next two weeks at an international summit, potentially solidifying details that have yet to emerge after more than a decade and a half of talks.

A C-141 Starlifter leaves a contrail over Antarctica. Credit: public domain

While civil society and the aviation industry have often been far apart in their views on the optimal strength and framework for the new regulations, prominent voices on both sides are now urging governments to set a clear timetable at talks that began Tuesday in Montreal.

Some say the negotiations, under the 191-member International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), a U.N. body, will offer a last, best opportunity to cut back on the sector’s globally significant greenhouse emissions while offering a fillip to broader multilateral efforts at combating climate change. Others are warning that failure to reach an agreement at the summit, which runs through Oct. 4, could result in an international trade war.

“The need for immediate reductions has never been greater, and ICAO delegates have a great chance to seek rapid emissions reductions,” Brad Schallert, programme officer for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS from sidelines of the talks. “Yet currently, both NGOs and the industry are hoping for stronger language than what is currently in the draft agreement.”

The draft in question, which was unveiled in early September, came out of a 10-month process convened to try to move along the broader negotiations.

In the aftermath of the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, a decade and a half ago, the United Nations mandated ICAO to evolve a mechanism by which to cut down the aviation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. Since that time, the talks have progressed slowly when they’ve progressed at all.

In January 2012, however, the European Union put in place a far-reaching agreement to require both inbound and outbound airplanes to purchase “carbon credits” to offset their emissions. That led to virulent pushback from certain countries – led by the United States but including developing countries warning that their nascent but booming airline industries shouldn’t be forced to pay for decades’ of high pollution levels coming from developed countries.

The response temporarily halted the European Union’s scheme, though failure to come to an agreement at the current ICAO could lead it to reinstate the plan. Several officials have recently warned that doing so could lead to a trade war.

Vague timeframe

Given both the type of fuel it burns and the altitude at which its planes operate, in addition to its massive growth in recent decades, the airline industry is one of the single largest contributors of greenhouse gases. Analysts suggest that if it were a country, the industry would be the seventh-largest global polluter.

Currently those emissions contribute between 2 and 3 percent of total greenhouse gases. Yet there is broad agreement that these levels are set to increase dramatically in coming years.

In an attempt to prod the talks along and to deal with the sudden existence of the E.U. regional scheme, in November a high-level committee was tasked with formulating a compromise agreement. This committee included strong representation from the countries sceptical of the E.U. plan.

Yet to the frustration of both environmentalists and many within the airline industry, the draft states only that it “decides to develop” a global market-based mechanism to limit aviation emissions.

“The view is that it’s problematic that the agreement says it will develop, not that it will adopt, a global mechanism – the idea that there will simply be a recommendation isn’t good enough for either the NGOs or the industry,” Schallert says.

“Both the airlines and the manufacturers work on 30- to 40-year timescales, so they need signals that give them certainty. For both groups, the benefits of global measures are that they result in fewer market distortions.”

Further, a relatively speeded-up timetable is important for the industry, which is labouring under its own self-imposed schedule for cleaning up the sector.

In a landmark resolution in 2010, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) – representing 84 percent of all air traffic – agreed to be “carbon neutral” by 2020. This included a decision to impose an annual fuel-efficiency improvement of 1.5 percent until 2020 and a 50 percent reduction in emissions (under 2005 levels) by 2050.

At an annual meeting in June, IATA members reiterated these goals while also calling on governments to agree to the creation of a single global mechanism to limit aviation-related emissions.

“The ICAO Assembly is a real opportunity to demonstrate progress on tackling aviation CO2 emissions,” Paul Steele, executive director of the industry-wide Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), said last week, speaking on behalf of the industry.

“Governments now need to play their part by agreeing a package of actions, including a global market-based measure, to help reduce emissions even further … and show climate change leadership.”

E.U. motivator

Regardless of what exact timeframe is decided upon in Montreal – in the event that any agreement is arrived at – another and more controversial issue remains: what, if anything, to do until a global mechanism goes into effect. It is here that the European Union’s scheme remains both a motivator and an obstacle for ICAO negotiators.

“We are supportive of provisions in the draft resolution that will go before the ICAO Assembly for ICAO to do the work on [a global market-based] scheme,” Nancy Young, vice-president of environmental affairs for Airlines For America, a U.S.-based association, told IPS.

“In the meantime, we oppose the application of country-based or regional market-based measures to international aviation without the consent of the country of an airline’s registry.”

Yet under new language in the ICAO draft agreement, states would indeed be able to institute emissions regulations on flights to or from other countries “prior to the implementation of a global … scheme”. In a turnaround, however, the E.U. permits would cover emissions only within E.U. airspace, rather than applying to the entire flight as initially required.

Initial reports suggest that the European negotiators are amendable to such a change, though any new language would need approval from the European Parliament.

“If that is the case, then we have reason for optimism that we’re moving away from the path toward confrontation,” Steve Brown, chief operating officer at the National Business Aviation Association, told IPS in a statement, “and instead may be headed toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.”

Relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

A debate is heating up here over the extent to which U.S. government-facilitated private-sector development investments should be required to take into account how those ventures impact on climate change.

The discussions focus on a small and relatively little-known federal agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the government office in charge of mobilising private capital in pursuit of international development priorities. While OPIC generally receives high marks, in recent years some groups have been particularly impressed by the agency’s focus on investments in small-scale, de-centralised renewable energy projects."The world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations." -- Justin Guay of the Sierra Club

“Outside of USAID” – the government’s main foreign aid arm – “OPIC is investing pretty much the only U.S. [government] money specifically for off-grid clean energy that directly supports clean energy access for the poor,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Any energy investment today by most agencies is about ‘energy access’, but this is disingenuous because that energy goes into the grid and the vast majority is then consumed by the rich and by large companies. Without associated infrastructure to rural areas or to make energy affordable for the poor, most of these investments are just increasing the general supply.”

OPIC’s mandate is set to run out soon, and Congress is currently tasked with figuring out the details of its re-authorisation. The Sierra Club and some other groups are warning that new legislation could undermine the agency’s unique coupling of climate-related and anti-poverty aims.

Capping the cap

Since its establishment in the early 1970s, OPIC has mobilised and insured some 400 billion dollars in investments in more than 4,000 projects in 150 countries. The agency says its renewable portfolio today stands at around one billion dollars.

Last week, OPIC and 14 other development institutions agreed for the first time to “substantially scale up” their green investments in developing countries, with the aim of collecting 100 billion dollars a year for the effort by 2020.

“The challenges of transitioning to a green economy are far outweighed by benefits of job creation, innovation and poverty alleviation,” Elizabeth Littlefield, OPIC’s president, said following the meeting.

In addition to Littlefield’s reported personal commitment to these issues, OPIC’s focus on investment in green energy was motivated by a 2009 court decision that forced the agency to pay attention to the carbon emissions of its investments. The result was a binding policy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its projects by 30 percent by 2018 and by 50 percent by 2023.

It is this emissions “cap” that is now the focus of debate in the U.S. Congress. While some are demanding that the regulation be maintained or even extended to other agencies, others are urging that it be tweaked or done away with entirely.

Some among this latter group represent oil-and-gas interests with a clear business stake in weakening the emissions cap. Yet a more nuanced view is also being offered by development scholars and advocacy groups worried about an imbalance between long-term international aims and immediate human development issues.

“There’s broad recognition that to really have a transformative impact and to reach billions of people there’s going to need to be a mix of renewables and non-renewables, but for some countries natural gas is a more viable model to provide access to citizens and unleash private business activity,” Ben Leo, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“My sincere hope is that a compromise can be found amongst environmental and development groups. One could imagine, for instance, a very limited exception to the OPIC greenhouse gas cap for a small subset of countries – those that are very poor and very low emitters of carbon dioxide. Niger, for instance, has basically zero emissions.”

Access vs resilience

Much of the impetus for the current discussion around the greenhouse gas cap is centred on energy access in Africa. In part this is due to President Barack Obama’s new Power Africa initiative, proposed during his trip to the continent in June, which aims to double energy access in sub-Saharan countries through a mix of public and private investment.

As part of the proposal, OPIC would commit around 1.5 billion dollars in energy project funding and insurance, which recent experience would suggest would be largely earmarked for renewable and decentralised projects.

As part of a related bill currently pending in the House of Representatives, however, Congress would require that OPIC issue new guidance that could weaken the emissions cap. Similar talks are now taking place in the Senate. (OPIC was unable to offer comment on these legislative proposals by deadline.)

“We’re concerned that there are some folks who think we need to loosen the cap in order to make room for natural gas and fossil fuels, because those energy sources are cheap,” Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“But the role of development finance institutions is to take into account both pieces of the formula – we can’t look at energy decisions without looking at their impacts. Similarly, it’s worth examining who would really benefit from lifting this cap – local communities or the companies that would be investing in massive natural gas infrastructure?”

Multilateral funders have increasingly run up against the tension between energy access and climate concerns. The past year has seen increasing movement away from certain very dirty forms of energy – both the World Bank and the United States, for instance, largely banned the overseas funding of new coal-fired power plants.

Nonetheless, relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future, in part because U.S. supplies have made it both plentiful and cheap.

Those now advocating for OPIC’s greenhouse gas cap note that other foreign aid funders – including within the U.S. government – will continue to focus on non-renewable energy investments. But they also view the resilience of green, decentralised energy production to be an important anti-poverty goal in and of itself.

“To a great extent our stance is not really based on climate concerns – this is just the right tool for the job,” Sierra Club’s Guay says.

“The debate is centred on an outmoded debate on clean energy, that it’s expensive. But the world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations. It would be a tragedy if this debate gets focused through a prism that’s decades old.”

Yard clippings and agricultural waste smolder into char in Foundation of Sustainable Technology's (FoST) biochar maker. Biochar helps fertilise soil and improves its ability to retain water. Credit: Rob Goodier/E4C/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 26 2013 (IPS)

Even as policymakers around the world wrestle with how to cut future emissions of global greenhouse gases, some scientists and environmentalists are increasingly turning their attention to the carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere, trying to discern ways that this level can be efficiently and safely brought down.

Amidst a burgeoning crop of innovative, even outlandish ideas is one that looks back to an ancient agricultural technique known as biochar. This is a fertilisation practice that involves making charcoal out of a previous year’s crops and mixing that into the soil to nourish the subsequent year’s fields – in the process secreting that plant’s carbon away from the atmosphere.“People in developing countries are often constrained by poor soils, those that are acidic or poor in nutrients, and that’s where the addition of biochar tends to show the largest increase in growth rates.” -- Thayer Tomlinson of the International Biochar Initiative

In May, a U.S. science station announced that, for the first time, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm). Climate scientists have been warning for years that levels beyond 350 ppm would bring about a “tipping point” of accelerating polar ice melt, rising global temperatures and extreme weather.

“We need a paradigm shift in our approach to climate, to really change how we look at what a solution means – most of the discussion is not only focused on the energy sector but on ongoing emissions,” Mark Hertsgaard, a writer who has focused on climate issues for the past two decades, told a Washington audience Thursday.

“Ongoing emissions, current and future, are adding about two ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year, but what’s driving the problem is the 400 ppm already in the atmosphere. While all of the discussion is currently about that two ppm, we also have to get serious about the 400 ppm – how to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

Hertsgaard points to a recent United Nations report that found the decade prior to 2010 experienced a historically unprecedented number of “extreme weather events”. Even if all new emissions were suddenly halted, he notes, scientists suggest that global temperatures would continue to rise for at least another three decades.

Yet according to a growing number of soil researchers, climate scientists and others, biochar could offer an opportunity to reduce those pre-existing global levels of carbon dioxide.

Through photosynthesis, all plants naturally take carbon dioxide out of the air as an integral part of their own life cycle. Under normal circumstances that carbon would then be re-released into the atmosphere when the plant dies and decomposes, but the idea behind biochar is to consolidate that carbon in a solid form that can be placed beneath the ground – and hence out of the atmosphere, at least for a certain period.

The central part of the process is to burn the plant – perhaps crops after they have died, perhaps trees that have died from an infestation, or perhaps something planted specifically for the purpose – in a low-oxygen fire, and convert it to charcoal. The resulting “biochar” can then be used as a high-potency fertiliser, offering benefits for both the farmer and the broader fight against climate change.

According to estimates done by Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell University agricultural science researcher, the world would be able to fully offset its annual greenhouse gas emissions if biochar were to be added to around 10 percent of existing agricultural fields.

That’s the idea, anyway. Thus far, even for those who view the science as relatively solid, the potential to significantly scale up biochar use internationally remains far off.

“Many questions remain, but the key here is that we need to broaden our gaze to make agriculture central to the discussion on climate change,” Hertsgaard says. “In theory, biochar could be a means of turning back the clock on climate. Certainly agriculture could be a crucial part of the solution to dialling back the problem.”

Soil benefits

Thus far, funding and policy support for biochar have been uneven, although there is clear government interest in the United States and the European Union.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has perhaps shown the greatest institutional interest to date, financing a regular series of small grants for continued research into biochar, particularly at universities. Yet while attempts have been made in the U.S. Congress to secure funding in major agricultural legislation, these have not yet been successful.

Internationally, the United Nations, World Bank and USAID, the United States’ foreign policy arm, have likewise fostered and studied a series of projects, but observers suggest that most donors are still adopting a wait-and-see approach. There are currently several dozen small-scale and pilot projects going forward in developing countries, however, most notably in India.

Indeed, while the international climate discussion offers a tantalising if still remote potential for biochar, the food security needs of developing countries today constitute the most tangible opportunity for this approach. A host of simple, low-cost designs are now available for creating biochar, most of which are fashioned out of simple 55-gallon drums.

“People in developing countries are often constrained by poor soils, those that are acidic or poor in nutrients, and that’s where the addition of biochar tends to show the largest increase in growth rates,” Thayer Tomlinson, communications director for the International Biochar Initiative (the IBI, which has a wealth of domestic and international data here), a U.S.-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“Part of the importance here is that communities can use agricultural residue, rather than firewood or cordwood, and convert that into useful products. These significant soil benefits can be provided without cutting down forests, without depending as heavily on commercial fertilisers, and simply using products that could otherwise be discarded.”

The IBI has been around since 2007, and Tomlinson says during that time interest in biochar has built noticeably, from industry, entrepreneurs, development experts and others.

“Watching the bibliographic references to biochar, there have been huge increases on a year-to-year basis,” she says. “This issue tends to span several interest groups – agriculture, energy, climate change – so it’s been difficult to find a true agency ‘home’, but there is clearly building commercial interest.”

Meanwhile, the industry is working to standardise the burgeoning sector’s products. Last year, the IBI came out with initial standards for defining biochar, and two months ago it unveiled a new certification programme for North American producers.

In April, the group submitted a “carbon offset” protocol to U.S. regulators, aimed at quantifying how much carbon is in biochar and the emissions that its use would counterbalance. That submission is currently open to public comment.

Washington and Beijing are stepping up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

The United States and China have agreed on a suite of potentially far-reaching initiatives aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the world’s two largest economies and largest polluters.

Environmental groups are applauding initial reports of the agreements, arrived at during high-level talks here on Wednesday and Thursday. Further, there is also a sense that the discussions indicated a warming of relations between the two powers that could constitute the basis for an important new cooperative relationship at international negotiations on climate change."Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world." -- Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute

“I thought it was one of the best sessions for climate change I’ve ever sat in,” a senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration, speaking on background, told reporters Thursday. “Not only were they high-level officials on both sides, but I thought that there was candid discussion, interesting discussion, and most importantly, proposals for cooperation moving forward.”

As unveiled Wednesday and further refined Thursday, the two countries have agreed to jointly focus on five broad areas. These include cutting down on emissions from heavy transport, strengthening energy efficiency, and improving the collection of greenhouse gas-related data.

Washington and Beijing will also step up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants, and collaborate on building new “smart” electrical grids that are both more efficient and can more easily incorporate renewable energy sources and distributed generation.

The talks also advanced modalities behind a landmark agreement struck between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June to reduce the amount of HFCs, “super-greenhouse gases” used in refrigeration and air conditioning, the two countries use and produce.

“They’re clearly addressing some of the largest sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions – buildings, transportation and power, which together constitute the majority of emissions for both countries,” Alden Meyer, director of the Washington office of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“For the moment, however, it’s hard to gauge the actual impact on emissions without knowing more of the details. The most fundamental question is whether these initiatives will merely help the two countries meet already-stated emissions-reductions goals between now and 2020. That would still be good, of course, but it wouldn’t be adding additional ambition to the global effort.”

Current U.S. policy revolves around a 17 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020. For China, the central goal is to cut its economy’s “carbon intensity” by 40 to 45 percent, also by the end of the decade.

Yet Meyer notes that “everyone agrees” that both countries need to do far more if there is to be any chance of keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the current international goal that climate scientists warn constitutes a dangerous cut-off point.

The talks are also being seen as a key success on the part of the new U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, long known for his climate advocacy. Kerry was integral in setting up a new U.S.-China working group on climate, and reports suggest the secretary of state has been actively engaging in this way in nearly every country he visits.

“This is no longer a side issue – Kerry has made climate into a centrepiece of political discussions, elevating it to the top tier of the geopolitical agenda, up there with security and economic issues,” Meyer notes. “That’s also being helped by the recent push by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the International Energy Agency to warn that this is a major threat to development and the world economy alike.”

Patching the disconnect

Climate change was not the only issue under discussion during the two-day U.S.-China summit, known as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). But the talks did showcase the initial results of the bilateral working group on climate, set up in April, the final report of which can be found here.

“One of the great features this year is the special sessions on climate change and energy security, so we envision smaller sessions with a very focused agenda,” an Obama administration official told reporters in a briefing Monday.

“We want to demonstrate to the world that the two largest economies in the world can cooperate in this century to help tackle these environmental challenges … We’re hoping that at the end, we can cite some concrete examples of our cooperation through reduced emissions.”

Nor are the five initiatives outlined this week planned to be the end of the new U.S.-China cooperation. The working group on climate is reportedly working unusually intensively, a schedule that is expected to continue.

By October, the group is expected to agree on the implementation details for the first five initiatives. Thereafter, the Obama administration has suggested that climate issues will remain on the annual S&ED agenda, which will include annual review of implementation of previous initiatives and the assumption that new ones will be launched.

The results from this week’s discussions could now be used as a springboard to jolt ongoing international negotiations in the lead-up to a Paris summit, in 2015, where world leaders will be required to fashion a new global deal on climate change.

“There is renewed momentum between the U.S. and China on climate change. Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world,” Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank, said in a statement.

“These actions can help build trust and enhance cooperation between these two major countries. The benefits of joint action are clear. Now, we need them to follow up with actions that will drive down global emissions and take advantage of economic opportunities in a low-carbon future.”

UCS’s Meyer notes that the disconnect between the United States and China on the way forward on climate action has been a key obstacle in the international talks over the past several years.

“To the extent that they’re now cooperating on the ground, hopefully that will spill over into a more useful partnership in the negotiations for a post-2020 deal,” he says.

“In Paris in 2015 we’ll need broad engagement and cooperation among leaders of major countries, which is what we didn’t have going into the Copenhagen summit [in 2009]. To have this new relationship at the leadership level more than two years out from the Paris talks is a good thing – this level of engagement among leaders will be essential.”

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

U.N. climate talks have largely stalled with the suspension of one of three negotiating tracks at a key mid-year session in Bonn, Germany.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations claim the controversial issue of “carbon farming” has been pushed back onto the agenda after African nations objected to the use of their lands to absorb carbon emissions."There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits." -- Helena Paul of EcoNexus

At the Bonn Climate Change Conference this week, Russia insisted on new procedural rules. That blocked all activity in one track of negotiations called the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” (SBI). The SBI is a technical body that was supposed to discuss finance to help developing countries cope with climate change, as well as proposals for “loss and damage” to compensate countries for damages.

The SBI talks were suspended Wednesday.

“This development is unfortunate,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Figueres also said the two-week Bonn conference, which ends Friday, had made considerable progress in the two other tracks. A complex new global climate treaty is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015 with the goal of keeping global warming to less than two degrees C.

“Governments need to look up from their legal and procedural tricks and focus on the planetary emergency that is hitting Africa first and hardest,” said Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), an African-wide climate movement with over 300 organisations in 45 countries.

And where there is “progress” at the climate talks it is in the wrong direction, according to civil society.

“We’ve seen many governments in Bonn call for a review of the current failed carbon markets to see what went wrong, why they haven’t actually reduced emissions and why they haven’t raised finance on a significant scale,” said Kate Dooley, a consultant on market mechanisms to the Third World Network.

“If we don’t learn these lessons we’ll be doomed to repeat these environmentally and financially risky schemes, at the cost of real action to reduce emissions,” Dooley said in a statement.

In Bonn, two key African negotiators appear to be pushing the World Bank agenda rather than their national interests, civil society organisations claim. Those negotiators are also working for organisations receiving World Bank funding.

One appears to want African nations’ mitigation actions to be based on agriculture, they said.

The World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and other organisations favour what they call “climate smart” agriculture. This is defined as forms of farming that are sustainable, increase productivity and with a focus on soaking up carbon from the atmosphere.

African environment ministers from 54 nations recently stated they were not obligated to use their lands to mitigate carbon emissions since Africa is not responsible for climate change. They also instructed African negotiators at the Bonn climate talks to focus on helping African agriculture adapt to a changing climate.

“Are these people serving two masters?” asked Mariam Mayet of the Africa Centre for Biosafety, which works to protect farmers’ rights and biodiversity across the continent.

“What is the World Bank’s level of influence over these individuals, and is there a risk that this is impacting on their actions and the outcome here?” Mayet told IPS.

In December 2011, more than 100 African and international civil society organisations sent a joint letter to African ministers asking for “no soil carbon markets in Africa”.

Globally, agriculture is a major source of global warming gases like carbon and methane – directly accounting for 15 percent to 30 percent of global emissions. Changes in agricultural practices such as reducing or eliminating plowing and fertiliser use can greatly reduce emissions.

Agriculture can also be used to absorb or trap carbon in the soil. When a plant grows, it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa, with woodlands being used mainly for carbon sequestration instead of food production.

“There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits,” Helena Paul of EcoNexus, an environmental NGO, previously told IPS.

Soils are extraordinarily variable and different climatic regimes affect how they function, said Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. While soils are a key part of the planet’s carbon cycle, we don’t know enough about soil carbon, Arnalds told IPS at a recent Soil Carbon Sequestration conference in Iceland.

That complexity does not suit carbon markets well and drives up costs of accounting and verification. However, Arnalds does believe that soils and agriculture have an important role in climate change and farmers should be compensated for their efforts.

The emissions data suggests that the globe could warm well more than the two degrees Celsius that climate scientists have set as an acceptable level by the end of this century. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide rose by 1.4 percent last year, setting a new record, according to data released Monday.

The findings, from the International Energy Agency (IEA), come just weeks after scientists in Hawaii recorded carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere higher than 400 parts per million, another modern record.“The most important takeaway here is that this two-degree ‘pathway’ is still within our reach.” -- Kelly Mitchell of Greenpeace

The data suggests that the globe could warm well more than the two degrees Celsius that climate scientists have set as an acceptable level by the end of this century, a target towards which international negotiations are currently working.

“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director, said Monday at the launch of a special report on the issue.

“The path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees C, but … much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth, an important concern for many governments.”

While such estimates have been published previously, the warnings and a set of detailed recommendations are particularly significant coming from the IEA. The Paris-based organisation was set up in the early 1970s to coordinate global oil supply, and continues to advise primarily the world’s richest countries.

“It’s one thing for an environmental group to be saying this, but the IEA is a very respected authority on energy markets and policy, with lots of analytical capacity,” Nathaniel Keohane, the vice-president for international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“This is an organisation founded to respond to the oil shock of the 1970s, yet they’re saying that a ‘climate shock’ is what we now have to watch for, in terms of threat to long-term economic prosperity. This report helps point us in a direction of where we need to go in the near term to try to get back on track.”

Indeed, Keohane says the new report can in part be seen as a “hopeful” document, in that the four policy recommendations its lays out would allow international climate negotiators to realistically continue working towards limiting global temperature rise to just 2 degree C.

“The most important takeaway here is that this 2 degree ‘pathway’ is still within our reach,” Kelly Mitchell, a campaigner with Greenpeace, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Further, the IEA makes the point to clarify a host of no-cost measures towards that pathway. With countries around the world already experiencing the impacts of climate change, that leaves very few reasons left why governments should be delaying action on climate change.”

The IEA recommendations would use only currently available technologies and could be implemented at no net cost, it says. These include a new focus on energy efficiency, continuing to limit the growth of the coal industry, reducing the amount of methane leakage during oil extraction, and speeding up the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies.

Nearly half of these savings would come from energy efficiency alone. Fully implementing the recommendations would reduce emissions by around eight percent by 2020, the organisation estimates.

“This does not take us all the way where we need to go,” EDF’s Keohane cautions. “But this is a package of policies that would help create the opportunity to turn towards ‘climate safety’.”

Back on track

The overall rise of 1.4 percent in carbon dioxide emissions masks some potentially positive news. The United States, for instance, reduced its 2012 emissions to levels last seen during the 1990s, largely on the back of strong new use of domestically sourced natural gas, while Europe also saw a decline.

At 3.8 percent, China too saw its emissions grow more slowly than anytime in the past decade, as Beijing has begun pouring funding into renewables. Yet China also posted the largest contribution to the new global emissions increase.

Indeed, developing countries made up some 60 percent of those emissions, up from 45 percent a little over a decade ago. Due to the large growth in energy demand from these countries, IEA analysts point out that developing countries “stand to gain the most from investing early in low-carbon and more efficient infrastructure”.

Climate negotiators are currently meeting in Bonn, Germany. Yet progress in the talks has been stymied in particular by disagreements between developed and developing countries over how to allot responsibility for emissions cuts.

The IEA is now warning that governments across the globe, though particularly in major emitting countries, will need to put in place these policy reforms by 2020. That’s already an extremely tight deadline, but actually the IEA says “intensive action” is required well before that date.

“Delaying stronger climate action to 2020 would come at a cost,” the report states. “1.5 trillion dollars in low-carbon investments are avoided before 2020, but 5 trillion dollars in additional investments would be required thereafter to get back on track.”

One potential strength of the IEA’s recommendations is that they could easily be implemented in parallel to the international climate negotiations. While political will is necessary to see through some of the recommendations – particularly phasing out coal use and fossil fuel subsidies – others wouldn’t require much political involvement.

“The headline agreements from the international talks will take place starting in 2020, but these are four practical, pragmatic policies that could be put in place leading up to that point,” EDF’s Keohane says.

“This means the United States has to take the lead, and will also require action from China, the E.U., India, Brazil. But each of these recommendations could be implemented regardless of what happens in Bonn and later talks, and each will be critical to getting us across the finish line.”

Also on Monday, researchers released a first-ever ranking of 100 entities in the United States, historically the largest greenhouse gas emitter, by their level of greenhouse gas emissions. At the top of the list are three power companies, which researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts say constitute five percent of all U.S. annual emissions.

At number four on the list is the U.S. government, based on 2011 data.

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, which make climate change mitigation and adaptation measures essential to preserving its spectacular natural landscapes, like Pico de Orizaba, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

The Climate Change Fund set up in November in Mexico faces enormous challenges such as the enforcement of anti-corruption standards, which make it unlikely that concrete actions will begin this year, according to civil society organisations.

The fund, which will allocate resources to mitigate and adapt to climate change, was created under the General Climate Change Law of June 2012, with an initial budget of only 78,000 dollars, assigned mainly for administrative expenses.

The initiative was adopted in accordance with the global strategy that emerged at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16) held in December 2010 in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancún.

“We know that recipient countries face significant corruption challenges,” and that is a concern because “the Mexican fund may be a model” for other countries that need assistance, Lisa Elges, the head of the Climate Governance Integrity Programme for Transparency International (TI), told IPS.

“A corruption risk assessment is needed, as well as people’s participation and involvement in monitoring the process,” she said.

TI, the global anti-corruption watchdog, is planning to publish in July or August a report on climate finance mapping and assessments which will analyse funds received by nine countries, including Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Panama.

The TI experts found failures of accountability, of dispute settlement mechanisms and of coordination with national funds. In addition there were conflicts of interest between actors involved, such as companies, and a lack of monitoring for projects from initial design to completion.

Mexico’s Climate Change Fund is meant to attract and channel public, private, national and international resources for actions against the effects of climate change, with a priority on adaptation.

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, such as severe drought, intense rains and frosts, for which measures of mitigation and adaptation are essential.

Since 2006, this country of 118 million people has received more than seven billion dollars in loans or donations from the private sector, multilateral bodies and other countries for environmental policies, in response to the government’s call for resources to overcome the challenges, according to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA).

Among the ongoing projects is the restoration of wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico, financed by the World Bank, and the design of a model for monitoring, verifying and reporting in the forestry sector, an initiative that is due to be launched in 2015, with aid from Norway.

Carlos Tornel, a public policy analyst at CEMDA, told IPS that the climate fund “must have clear rules, accountability and transparency, and should not be the only financing mechanism.”

A report on the flow of resources to Mexico’s climate fund from the public coffers, international institutions and the private sector will be published this month by CEMDA.

In the view of the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, it is preferable to have a well-defined structure and guidelines in place first, before beginning to finance projects.

“We want to design something that really works well. We have to make it transparent, make it functional, and reduce costs,” Luis Muñozcano, the assistant director general for climate change projects in the environment ministry, told IPS.

Draft guidelines for the climate change fund stipulate the definition of the responsibilities of those involved, procedures for receiving and disbursing funds, a mechanism for accessing information, and transparency in accounting for the resources, among other aspects.

By 2020 a system of financial incentives and subsidies should be in place for adaptation and mitigation measures.

The Mexican fund can also channel cash to energy efficiency, renewable energy, biomass use and clean transportation projects.

Every year Mexico emits some 748 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, according to the most recent measurements collected in 2010 and officially released last December.

The General Climate Change Law establishes a plan to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and by 50 percent by 2050, with reference to 2000 levels.

Mexico’s Fifth National Communication delivered in 2012 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change predicts that achieving the planned emissions reduction by 2020 will require 138 billion dollars of investment.

“We want a standardised approach. The issue is to see if money was efficiently used. Moreover, in practical terms, the complaints schemes are not operational at the national level,” said Elges, referring to the global Green Climate Fund created at COP 16 and originally promised starter capital of 30 billion dollars.

At the Cancún meeting it was agreed that industrialised nations should contribute 100 billion dollars a year to that fund from 2020 onwards. The Green Climate Fund is devoted to assisting poor countries to adapt to climate change impacts and to develop low-carbon economies. The World Bank is to administer the resources for the first three years according to the standards of the Convention.

The Green Fund is governed by a council of 24 delegates, with equal numbers from developed and developing nations, who are responsible for use and oversight of the resources.

After South Korea was elected as the headquarters of the Green Climate Fund last year, TI received a complaint from one of the other candidate countries accusing South Korea of buying votes with irregular payments. But the Asian country denied the allegations and the case did not proceed further.

However, Elges saw this as a warning sign of the dark shadows that can haunt these kinds of funds.

The other candidates to host the central office of the Green Climate Fund were Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland and Switzerland.

“It remains to be seen who is going to allocate the budget. So far, the finance ministry is the only body responsible,” said Tornel.

The tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Credit: howlmonteal/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 16 2013 (IPS)

The largest climate rally in U.S. history is expected Sunday in Washington DC with the aim of pressuring President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Activists are calling Keystone “the line in the sand” regarding dangerous climate change, prompting the Sierra Club to suspend its 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The group’s executive director, Michael Brune, was arrested in front of the White House during a small protest against Keystone on Wednesday.

“The Keystone XL pipeline is part of the carbon infrastructure that will take us to dangerous levels of climate change,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia.To permit the pipeline would represent a heartbreaking acquiescence to climate change on the part of President Obama and our national leaders.

“By itself, Keystone won’t have much of an impact on the climate, but it is not happening on its own,” Donner told IPS.

Carbon emissions are increasing elsewhere, and the International Energy Agency recently warned humanity is on a dangerous path to four degrees C of warming before the end of this century. Children born today will experience this. Preventing that dire future is inconsistent with expanding tar sands production, Donner said.

A new study released this week revealed that the volume of Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly. Ice volume has fallen 80 percent since 1980, according to the latest data from European Space Agency satellite, CryoSat-2. Summers with a sea ice-free Arctic are only a few years away, scientists now agree. This will have significant and permanent impacts on weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Keystone XL is the key to opening up the expansion of the tar sands industry,” said Jim Murphy, senior counsel with the National Wildlife Federation.

“By rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, we can keep this toxic oil in the ground,” Murphy said in a statement.

Keystone XL is intended to bring 700,000 to 800,000 barrels of a heavy, tar-like oil from the northern Alberta tar sands 2,400 kilometres south to the refineries on the Gulf Coast. Nearly all the resulting fuels are destined for export.

Since the seven-billion-dollar Keystone XL crosses national borders, it is up to President Obama to issue a permit declaring the pipeline serves the “national interest” in order for it to be approved.

“The only way Keystone XL could be considered in the national interest is if you equate that with profits for the oil industry,” Steve Kretzman of Oil Change International previously told IPS. Oil Change is an NGO that researches the links between oil, gas, coal corporations and governments.

“It couldn’t be simpler: Either we leave at least two-thirds of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or we destroy our planet as we know it,” wrote Sierra Club’s Michael Brune in explaining the decision to engage in civil disobedience.

“That means rejecting the dangerous tar sands pipeline that would transport some of the dirtiest oil on the planet,” said Brune.

Tar sands carbon emissions on a “well-to-tank” basis (i.e., production) result in emissions that are on average 72 to 111 percent higher than other U.S. transportation fuels, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Canada’s tar sands aren’t really a “carbon bomb” from a scientific perspective, says Donner. The world’s coal deposits contain many times more carbon. However, the tar sands and Keystone have symbolic importance.

“Climate change is a complicated problem. Lots of things need to be done to address it. We’re at a point where changes need to happen soon,” he says.

Writing in the Daily Kos Saturday, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of the environmental justice group Green For All, says, “Hurricane Katrina taught us a lesson – and Superstorm Sandy reinforced it. People living in neighborhoods with the fewest resources have a harder time escaping, surviving, and recovering from disasters.

“And they’re more vulnerable to the extreme weather climate change will bring. For example, African-Americans living in Los Angeles are more than twice as likely to die during a heat wave than other residents of the city,” she says in a piece titled “Why People of Color Should Care about the Keystone Pipeline”.

“To permit the pipeline would represent a heartbreaking acquiescence to climate change on the part of President Obama and our national leaders. It would be throwing our hands up helplessly in the face of one of the biggest threats our country has ever faced. That’s not the kind of leadership we voted for.

“There are certain points in history, like the Civil Rights Movement, when the consequences of inaction are so great that we have to make bold choices,” Ellis-Lamkins says. “This is one of those times.”

Crack patterns in Arctic permafrost as viewed from a helicopter. Credit: Brocken Inaglory/cc by 3.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 14 2013 (IPS)

Thawing permafrost is emitting more climate-heating carbon faster than previously realised. Scientists have now learned that when the ancient carbon locked in the ice thaws and is exposed to sunlight, it turns into carbon dioxide 40 percent faster.

“This really changes the trajectory of the debate” over when and how much carbon will be released as permafrost thaws due to ever warmer temperatures in the Arctic, says researcher Rose Cory of the University of North Carolina.

There are 13 million square kilometres of permafrost in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe. As previously reported by IPS, a 2011 study estimated that global warming could release enough permafrost carbon to raise global temperatures three degrees C on top of what will result from human emissions from oil, gas and coal.

Human emissions are headed for four degrees C of global heating, warned the International Energy Agency (IEA) this week. A rapid “decarbonization of electricity supply” is needed to avoid that future, the IEA said as it released a new book titled “Electricity in a Climate-Constrained World”.

“The solutions are well-known: increased energy efficiency, greater research and development of low-carbon energy production, and putting a realistic price on carbon,” the book says.

Carbon emissions from permafrost are not included in IEA projections. Climate models haven’t included them either, Cory told IPS. Nor has anyone factored in the latest discovery that sunlight accelerates the conversion of ancient carbon into carbon dioxide gas.

“We’re trying right now to scale up this finding to get an estimate of how much more carbon might be released,” she said.

Cory and her colleagues studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight.

They found that sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon into carbon dioxide gas by at least 40 percent compared to carbon that remains in the dark. The team reported its findings in an article published online Feb. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This means permafrost carbon is potentially a huge factor that will help determine how fast the Earth warms,” said co-author George Kling, a University of Michigan ecologist.

“We can’t say how fast this Arctic carbon will feed back into the global carbon cycle and accelerate climate warming on Earth, (but) the fact that it will be exposed to light means that it will happen faster than we previously thought,” said Kling in a statement.

Once the Arctic gets warm enough, the carbon and methane emissions from thawing permafrost will kick-start a feedback that will amplify the current warming rate, Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, previously told IPS.

There is no accurate estimate of methane emissions, which are 40 times as potent in terms of warming as carbon. Methane could have a big impact on temperatures in the short term, Schaefer said.

In 2011, Schaefer’s research showed that the permafrost “tipping point” was just 15 to 20 years away. In light of Cory’s discovery, that will now have to be revised. The only question is how much sooner.

Prepare for a three to five degree C warmer world, said Sir Robert Watson the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Speaking at a symposium in London Tuesday, Watson, the science director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the world has missed its chance to stay below two degrees C.

“All the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we’re on our way to a three to five degree C world,” Watson told participants at the symposium.

When Watson was chair of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, optimism was high there’d be a global agreement to limit emissions. “We were hopeful that emissions would not go up at the tremendous rate they are rising now,” he told the Climate News Network, a UK journalism news service.

“(Now) all the promises in the world, which we’re not likely to realise anyway, will not give us a world with only a two degree C rise.”

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 12, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2013 (IPS)

In a major annual address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama offered further details on a broad and ambitious range of policy priorities, taking advantage of perhaps his single most significant opportunity to guide the public conversation on his second-term agenda.

Discussing some of the most potent debates currently taking place in Washington – including gun control, immigration, climate change, voting rights and U.S. counterterrorism efforts – the president continued a recent trend of speaking around the partisan immobility that has characterised the U.S. Congress.

Instead, he engaged in a campaign-style attempt to explain his stance on these issues to the estimated 38 million people who tuned in to primetime coverage.While the message was mixed, there will be clarity soon. We’ll see whether or not President Obama is indeed serious about addressing the climate crisis by his choice on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Following a surprisingly progressive – and forceful – second inaugural speech, in late-January, the first State of the Union speech of President Obama’s last term in office was overwhelmingly devoted to issues of fixing the United States’ stuttering economy and still high unemployment rate. Focus on these issues was relatively absent from the inaugural address, in favour of broader themes.

On Tuesday, however, the president sought to tie the two more closely together. He offered not only a reiteration of his current policy stance on ongoing debt and austerity negotiations, but also attempted to explain how legislative action on issues related to climate change, immigration, manufacturing and infrastructure updating – and even setting a higher minimum wage – were key to safeguarding the U.S. economy.

Energy independence was particularly key in this regard.

“Today, no area holds more promise than our investments in American energy,” the president said, speaking before both houses of Congress and other dignitaries. “After years of talking about it, we are finally poised to control our own energy future … But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”

The president announced his intent to push for the creation of a new Energy Security Trust that would use revenues from domestic oil and gas production to fund research into renewable energy sources, and called for more spending on wind and solar energy. He also urged Congress to look again at market-based “emissions trading” solutions.

The president proposed a new focus on energy efficiency, with a goal of halving wasted energy by 2020. Importantly, unlike other initiatives, such a process could be done without the participation of Congress. Indeed, in line with a growing chorus of calls from environment groups, the president warned Congress that he would increasingly turn to executive actions – circumventing legislators if they did not move on climate-related issues.

Still, many environmentalists were frustrated by a Obama’s pledge to expand oil and gas drilling, and by his failure to clarify his stance on a contentious pipeline, currently pending authorisation, that would bring dirty “tar sands” oil from Canada through the U.S. Midwest.

“The priority President Obama placed on climate change was welcome, but his emphasis on fossil fuels like oil and gas was not at all compatible with such prioritisation,” Karen Orenstein, a researcher with Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“While the message was mixed, there will be clarity soon. We’ll see whether or not President Obama is indeed serious about addressing the climate crisis by his choice on the Keystone XL Pipeline. He must reject the pipeline if his words in tonight’s address are to be worth more than the paper on which they’re written.”

Eradicating extreme poverty

Orenstein also noted that the president’s stance on climate change will have significant ramifications for his hopes for global development.

“Decades of development gains will be undermined,” she warned. “It is impossible to eradicate extreme poverty without forcefully confronting the U.S. role in causing climate change.”

While domestic issues were the inevitable focus of President Obama’s address, he did range farther afield, including referencing the United States’ ongoing responsibility towards poor and developing countries. In this he offered few specifics, however, and tied such rhetoric directly to the national and global economy.

“We also know that progress in the most impoverished parts of our world enriches us all,” the president stated.

He pledged that the United States would “join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades”, promising to work to connect more communities to the global economy and to empower women and poor communities. The president also promised to focus on saving children from preventable deaths and to bring about “an AIDS-free generation”, Washington’s stated policy goal on the issue.

On more standard foreign policy issues, President Obama made a major announcement on U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, reportedly decided upon only earlier in the day, stating that half of U.S. troops – 34,000 – would be back home by this time next year.

That number is far higher than called for by some military top brass, but is in line with the preferred recommendation made by the former top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen.

And while final details are still being negotiated on whether and how U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan thereafter, the president was clear on his own vision.

“After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home,” he stated within the first minute of his address, noting later, “And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.”

Many had also hoped for a specific discussion of the president’s hopes to significantly reduce the United States’ massive stockpile of nuclear weapons.

This issue has recently been a source of regular discussion here in Washington, as the president’s nominee for secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, is aligned with a group that prominently endorses an eventual goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. (Earlier on Tuesday, Hagel cleared a key but highly contentious Senate committee hearing on a party-line vote.)

Yet perhaps in part due to complications brought about by Tuesday’s test by the North Korean government of a nuclear weapon, Obama declined to include specifics on the issue. Instead, he noted only that “we will engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals.”

Nuclear experts were nonetheless heartened.

“The president is making it clear that the United States will continue to reduce the size and role of outdated Cold War nuclear arsenals,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington watchdog, told IPS.

“Further reciprocal reductions of these bloated arsenals would increase our leverage on other nuclear-armed states to exercise restraint and join in serious multilateral disarmament discussions.”

The third and most important part of President Obama’s new agenda will come when he unveils his visions for the 2014 national budget, slated for mid-March.

For the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has publicly released a draft plan on how the department’s programmes will adapt to global warming, in a move that could lay additional groundwork for important new emissions rulemaking the agency may announce in coming months.

Obama is being urged to set new carbon standards on U.S. power plants, cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by at least a quarter by 2020. Credit: public domain

The EPA is tasked with oversight of the health of both human communities and natural systems, mandated with creating and implementing standards relating to air and water quality, among others. As such, the agency has emerged at the frontlines of Washington’s attempts to push through stricter climate-related regulations while circumventing the U.S. Congress, which remains fractious and politicised over the reality of human responsibility for global warming.

“We’re happy the government is finally waking up to the cold, hard reality of climate change and seeing its impacts,” Elizabeth Perera, a Washington climate policy expert with the Sierra Club, an environment advocacy group, told IPS.

“The more real and specific that you can talk about these impacts, the more we think there will be a fire lit under the government to do something on the action side. On climate change, you have to remember, we’re talking about major costs across all parts of the government and economy.”

The draft plan comes in response to a government-wide requirement, mandated through executive order in 2009 by President Barack Obama, in which this year all U.S. government agencies are required to file climate change-related adaptation plans with a newly created office within the White House, the Council on Environmental Quality.

Each of these plans will now be open to public comment for two months, although the plan by the EPA is expected to garner some of the most significant public scrutiny. According to a five-year plan, adaptation planning is to be integrated across the EPA’s operations by 2015.

Environmental justice

The draft plan, although extending to 55 pages, is less a detailed plan of attack than a framework. Yet this framework does cover the EPA’s critical responsibility of writing regulations, and thus could lay down a few markers for what some observers are assuming will be a more aggressive President Obama in his second term.

During his second inaugural address, in late January, the president surprised many by devoting more time – and more forceful rhetoric – to climate change than to nearly any other policy area, despite the issue having received lower priority than several others during his first term.

Notwithstanding the vicious debate and policy paralysis that continues to characterise Washington’s actions on climate change, the EPA clarifies immediately how it plans to approach the issue.

“We live in a world in which the climate is changing,” the draft plan states in its first line (in accordance with a 2011 policy statement). “Changes in climate have occurred since the formation of the planet. But humans are now influencing Earth’s climate and causing it to change in unprecedented ways.”

The EPA’s focus is, of course, primarily on the United States. It notes that during the past half-century average temperatures in the country have been pushed up by more than two degrees Fahrenheit, precipitation has increased by around five percent, and sea level has risen by up to eight inches.

Yet it also notes the broader implications of a warming planet. “Around the world all countries are expected to feel the effects of climate change, although the specific impacts will vary,” the draft states. “The impacts, however, are expected to disproportionately affect developing countries and those already at risk.”

Indeed, even in the United States, poorer and marginalised communities are often at greater risk, the agency warns, recognising that “The impacts of climate change raise environmental justice issues … focus(ing) on the health of and environmental conditions affecting minority, low-income, and indigenous populations.”

Executive authority

As outlined by federal requirements, the draft plan focuses on adaptation to global climate change, rather than on new planning for how to combat or mitigate global warming. Nonetheless, the document makes clear that the realities of climate change – both those that are now certain and those that are yet unclear – will in coming years inform nearly all processes within the EPA, including the writing of new regulations.

Further, the agency’s positioning on the issue of adaptation will almost inevitably be coloured by its potentially central role in the U.S. administration’s plans for combating climate change more broadly over President Obama’s second term.

While the president’s only major legislative effort on the issue – a market-based “emissions trading” bill – failed to make it through the U.S Congress in 2009, many environmentalists today quietly point to noteworthy gains made without Congress’s participation, particularly on new fuel-efficiency requirements the EPA oversaw last year.

With few power dynamics changed in the Congress following the November national election (Democrats continue to hold the Senate while a smaller Republican majority remains in the House), many environment activists are now calling on the president to step up the use of his executive authority to push through rule changes with potentially far-reaching impact.

Officials close to Obama have likewise supported such options, with one noting last week that the administration will “continue to look for tools, administrative actions that we can take that don’t require Congress”.

“This is something within the government’s purview – there are so many aspects they can address for which we don’t need actual legislation,” Sierra Club’s Perera says. “That has to be why they’re moving forward so quickly right now.”

In an open letter sent last month to President Obama, nearly 70 environmental groups called on the White House to “Use your executive authority.” The letter continued: “You have the authority under existing law to achieve urgently needed reductions in the carbon pollution that is disrupting our climate and damaging our health.”

In particular, the signees are urging the president to set new carbon standards on U.S. power plants, cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by at least a quarter by 2020. Such a responsibility would fall to the EPA, which could make a related announcement as soon as April.

Against that prospect, Republican politicians and some business leaders have already begun pushing back. Referring to the agency as “overly zealous”, Representative Ed Whitfield warned last week that “If (the EPA) starts trying to do this with existing plants, they’re going to have a real battle.”

Further, with the EPA’s head having recently stepped down, Senate Republicans are currently vowing to use confirmation hearings for a new agency chief as an opportunity demand a weaker regulatory approach.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in June 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

Environmentalists here are warning that the United States is not on track to meet a target of a 17-percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, despite President Barack Obama’s stated commitment.

Yet, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington-based environment think tank, the country can still meet that goal by using existing federal laws and state action, and investing in renewable energy sources.

“Even without Congressional involvement or new technologies, the U.S. can meet its modest goals of a 17-percent reduction,”Nicholas Bianco, a senior associate at WRI and lead author on the report, told IPS. “We don’t need to wait for new technologies, it can be done now.”

The impact of climate change in the United States is becoming increasingly apparent, in the form of extreme weather events such as record-breaking heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and forest fires. Weather-related damage in the U.S. reportedly totalled 60 billion dollars in 2011, and these amounts are expected to rise in the coming years.

The report offers several key recommendations for both the federal and state policy initiatives aimed at emissions reduction. At the federal level, it particularly encourages the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pursue emissions reduction at power plants.

At the state level, it focuses on potential greenhouse emissions reductions from policy initiatives in transportation. Yet it also encourages states to venture into areas typically considered the realm of the federal government, focusing on power plants and industry, as well as emissions from refrigerators and air conditioners.

A significant motivation in such approaches is to circumvent the U.S. Congress, which many agree could prove to be one of the biggest obstacles to reaching agreements on reducing climate change.

“Partly due to a small but vocal number of climate-change deniers, and partly because a significant portion of the Congress is beholden to the fossil fuels industry, U.S. companies don’t appreciate the long-term benefits of an economy that is more fuel efficient and based more on renewable energy,” Michele de Nevers, a senior programme associate at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

In lieu of legislation

Power plants are the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, followed by the transportation sector, which is responsible for about 30 percent of emissions.

Because state and local regulations play a significant role setting policy for both of these sectors, Bianco and his co-authors are pushing states to achieve reductions in the transportation sector through policies that encourage the use of lower-carbon fuels and lowering vehicle miles travelled. In particular, they are encouraging local governments to prioritise the creation of policies that will improve the efficiency of motor vehicles, and significantly raise standards on all types of vehicles.

If states are able to improve energy efficiency, Bianco suggested, the outcomes will be positive for both governments and the public, as investments in renewable energy will save billions of dollars in long-term costs, including to the environment.

“People save money and it’s relatively cheap,” he said. “It may require a little investment, but this will be quickly paid off.”

The report also recommends the need for increased regulation of the power sector at the state level, as the United States shifts from coal-fired generation toward natural gas-fired and renewable generation. This trend has been driven by dramatic increases in natural gas extraction.

However, scientific research is now showing evidence of significant methane emissions from the use of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the now widely used approach in the U.S. whereby millions of gallons of water and chemicals are pumped underground to break up rocks and release trapped gasses. This could mean that natural gas could have a greater impact on global warming overall than even coal, due to emissions that escape into the atmosphere during the extraction process.

On Wednesday, the EPA released data that, for the first time, suggests that fracking is the second-highest source of U.S. emissions, behind power plants.

“In fact, there is a very safe and cheap technology to capture them and prevent these emissions from escaping,” de Nevers said.

“The (WRI) report encourages states to strengthen their regulations on fracking, and doing so would go a long way toward addressing the issues that local states are most concerned about, like toxic chemicals getting into the water supply.”

Yet evaluating how much methane is leaking from an increasing number of natural-gas operations, and then limiting such emissions, will be a challenge, Bianco and others are warning.

According to Susan Tierney, a WRI board member, the United States’ goal of a 17-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was actually lower than was originally recommended by environmentalists. This level was agreed upon, she says, because 17 percent was considered achievable, albeit modest.

“Even so,” she says, “the U.S. still has not made progress toward achieving the target, and emissions will continue to rise if it continues along its present rate.”

According to CGD’s de Nevers, the best thing that could happen to U.S. policymaking now would be to get agreement on putting a tax on carbon emissions.

“Only economics will motivate a lot of the actions that are referred to in this report,” she warns. “But the only way to get this‘price tag’ on emissions is through Congressional legislation, and that is just not happening.”

But, she continues, “In the meantime, states and local policies can fill this gap.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office to President Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2013 (IPS)

Following surprisingly forceful statements on the threat of global climate change by President Barack Obama during his second inaugural address on Monday, campaigners here are expressing cautious optimism that a second Obama administration will be able to see through some of the substantive actions on carbon reduction that largely eluded the president’s first term.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” President Obama said Monday, speaking before a million spectators gathered in front of the U.S. Congress in central Washington.

“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.”

In addition to sounding vigorously – and, for some, surprisingly – progressive themes on equality, the president also pledged to help the United States “lead … the transition” towards sustainable energy sources.

On Tuesday, his press secretary reiterated that clean energy technologies would be a “huge” part of the new global economy, “whether anyone in Washington or elsewhere likes it or not.”

Ultimately, climate change received more focus in the inaugural address than did any other policy area – a stark turnaround from the administration’s relative neglect of the issue during its first term.

“It was very heartening to hear the president’s comments on this issue, and we’re enthusiastic that he mentioned making this part of his legacy,” Adrianna Quintero, the executive director of La Onda Verde, the Natural Resources Defence Council’s Latino Advocacy programme, told IPS.

On Thursday, Quintero was involved in a joint letter, signed by 20 Latino organisations, including the Americas Business Council, calling on President Obama to take executive action to curb pollution at existing coal-fired power plants.

Latinos were a significant – some say deciding – factor in President Obama’s re-election, and demographics analysis suggests they will remain a decisive voting bloc for decades.

“We want the president to know that Latinos support him on this and want action on climate change,” Quintero says. “We care about immigration, health care and other issues, but this is central to our lives as well, as it affects the health and wellbeing of our communities.”

Offshoring emissions

Environmentalists are focusing particular attention on U.S. coal reserves, both in terms of their potential use in domestic power plants but also, and especially, for their potential export. As U.S. coal use has steadily decreased in recent years, in line with trends in many Western countries, coal use in developing countries has increased dramatically.

“The big story out of the United States is the expansion of the country’s coal export – this is the biggest domestic threat to the climate,” Kelly Mitchell, a campaigner with Greenpeace, an environment watchdog, told IPS.

“Contrasted with the country’s great successes over the last couple of years in moving away from coal use, we’re now seeing risk of those emissions moving offshore.”

Indeed, a decade ago coal made up a full half of the electricity production in the United States; today, that figure is down to just a third. Since 2008, just one new coal plant has broken ground in the country, versus around 100 that had been planned under the administration of former president George W. Bush.

On Tuesday, the Sierra Club, a venerable environment group that has spearheaded a major anti-coal campaign in the United States, announced that more than 50 gigawatts – 130 plants – of coal-fired production capacity had been retired since 2010, around a sixth of the country’s total coal usage.

Yet as domestic consumption has plummeted – a trend that nearly all analysts see continuing – major coal producers in the United States have been forced to look for other avenues by which to sell their product. The industry states that the United States’ massive coal reserves account for more than a quarter of the entire global supply.

According to a new report released Tuesday by Greenpeace, the United States is currently planning on exporting 190 million additional tonnes of coal a year. “This would add 420 million tonnes of CO2 (carbon dioxide) a year to global emissions before 2020,” the report states, more than all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in Brazil in 2010.

The report focuses on 14 major new planned oil, gas and coal operations around the world, and warns that, if these go forward, they will add 300 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent to the global atmosphere by 2050.

“That’s why exports have become such a big threat – they’re functioning as a fire exit for some of these companies,” Mitchell says.

“There is a little hypocrisy in this situation. The U.S. is moving forward to reduce emissions while at the same time the federal government is allowing a huge uptick in exports. That means we’re not living up to our responsibility to address the climate problem.”

Northwest export terminals

Attempts to pinch off U.S. coal export have focused on the Pacific Northwest, where several major new proposed coal-export facilities are currently awaiting licensing and official approval at the state and federal level.

“The coal industry is inevitably going to try to find a way to utilise the reserves of coal that they still have, either domestically or internationally, so our goal right now is to work to block these export facilities,” Eitan Bencuya, a communications strategist with the Sierra Club, told IPS.

The public response in opposition to construction of these terminals has reportedly been strong. Environmentalists, health professionals and elected officials in the region have all urged regulators to look at the proposals not in isolation but rather in aggregate, including how construction of the export infrastructure could impact on global carbon emissions.

“This is the power of the grassroots,” Bencuya says. “Thousands and thousands of people are coming together across multiple states to show their opposition to these export facilities, which in turn will help the U.S. keep its coal reserves in the ground. Even if we are able to retire coal plants domestically, simply shipping it abroad and burning it elsewhere is still going to hurt our planet.”

Experts on the health of our planet are terrified of the future. They can clearly see the coming collapse of global civilisation from an array of interconnected environmental problems.

Poor communities are hit hardest by extreme weather events. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

“We’re all scared,” said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.

“But we must tell the truth about what’s happening and challenge people to do something to prevent it,” Ehrlich told IPS.

Global collapse of human civilisation seems likely, write Ehrlich and his partner Anne Ehrlich in the prestigious science journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This collapse will take the form of a “…gradual breakdown because famines, epidemics and resource shortages cause a disintegration of central control within nations, in concert with disruptions of trade and conflicts over increasingly scarce necessities”, they write.

Already two billion people are hungry today. Food production is humanity’s biggest industry and is already being affected by climate and other environmental problems. “No civilisation can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population,” the authors say.

Escalating climate disruption, ocean acidification, oceanic dead zones, depletion of groundwater and extinctions of plants and animals are the main drivers of the coming collapse, they write in their peer-reviewed article “Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?” published this week.

Dozens of earth systems experts were consulted in writing the 10-page paper that contains over 160 references.

“We talked to many of the world’s leading experts to reflect what is really happening,” said Ehrlich, who is an eminent biologist and winner of many scientific awards.

Our reality is that current overconsumption of natural resources and the resulting damage to life-sustaining services nature provides means we need another half of a planet to keeping going. And that’s if all seven billion remain at their current living standards, the Ehrlichs write.

If everyone lived like a U.S. citizen, another four or five planets would be needed.

Global population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050. It doesn’t take an expert to conclude that collapse of civilisation will be unavoidable without major changes.

We’re facing a future where billions will likely die, and yet little is being done to avoid certain disaster, he said.

“Policy makers and the public aren’t terrified about this because they don’t have the information or the knowledge about how our planet functions,” he said.

Last March, the world’s scientific community provided the first-ever “state of the planet” assessment at the “Planet Under Pressure” conference  in London. More than 3,000 experts concluded humanity is facing a “planetary emergency” and there was no time to lose in making large-scale changes.

In 2010, a coalition of the national scientific bodies and international scientific unions from 141 countries warned that “the continued functioning of the Earth system as we know it is at risk”.

“The situation is absolutely desperate and yet there’s nothing on the front pages or on the agenda of world leaders,” said Pat Mooney, head of the international environmental organisation ETC Group.

“The lack of attention is a tragedy,” Mooney previously told IPS.

Solutions exist and are briefly outlined in the Ehrlich paper. However, these require sweeping changes. All nations need to do everything they can to reduce their emissions of fossil fuels regardless of actions or lack of them by any other country, he said.

Protection of the Earth’s biodiversity must take centre stage in all policy and economic decisions. Water and energy systems must be re-engineered. Agriculture must shift from fossil-fuel intensive industrial monocultures to ecologically-based systems of food production. Resilience and flexibility will be essential for civilisation to survive.

A key element in meeting this unprecedented challenge is “…to see ourselves as utterly embedded in Nature and not somehow separate from those precious systems that sustain all life”, writes England’s Prince Charles commenting on the Ehrlich’s paper.

“To continue with ‘business as usual’ is an act of suicide on a gargantuan scale,” Prince Charles concluded.

Around the world, 2012 was the year of extreme weather, when we unequivocally learned that the fossil fuel energy that powers our societies is destroying them. Accepting this reality is the biggest challenge of the brand new year.

Hurricane Sandy off the Carolinas on Oct. 28, 2012. Credit: NASA

Re-engineering our societies and lifestyles to prosper on green alternatives is the penultimate challenge of this decade.

There is no more important task for all of us to engage in because climate change affects everything from food to water availability.

A number of scientific analyses have demonstrated we already have the technology to re-engineer our society to thrive on green alternative energy. The newest of these was published Wednesday in the prestigious journal Nature. It plainly states that politics is the real barrier, not technology nor cost. (It is far cheaper to act than not.)

Keeping global warming to less than two degrees C is mainly dependent on “when countries will begin to take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, according to the study “Probabilistic cost estimates for climate change mitigation”.

Climate change has already pushed global temperatures up 0.8 degrees C, with significant consequences. No climate scientist thinks two degrees C will be “safe”. Many countries, especially least-developed countries and small island states, want the global target to be less than 1.5C of heating. Even then large portions of the Arctic and Antarctic will continue to melt raising sea levels, albeit at a slower rate.

Delay in making the shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources will be very costly. Waiting until 2020 to curb global emissions will cost twice as much compared with peaking emissions by 2015, the Nature analysis shows.

Serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means 65 percent of current coal power plants will have to be shut down in the next decade or two, a previous Nature study reported by IPS shows.

Instead of serious action, global emissions continue to break new records, rising about three percent per year. It appears 2012 will be about 52 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes of CO2 equivalents). This is our annual climate scorecard, the most important number in human history. That number needs to fall to be between 41 and 47 gigatonnes (Gt) by 2020 to have a reasonable chance of staying below two degrees C of warming.

Current emission reduction commitments by countries are not nearly enough, likely to result in emissions of about 55Gt in 2020, studies estimate. Despite knowing this and knowing 11 of the last 12 years were the warmest ever measured, countries refused to increase their reduction targets at the most recent United Nations climate conference in Doha last December.

An extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel industry is behind this political failure to act. Just like the tobacco industry before them, the fossil energy industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on misinformation about climate change and lobbyists to fight against any action to reduce fossil fuel use.

Their only interest is increasing their profits through increased sales of coal, oil and gas.

The fossil fuel industry could transform itself into good corporate citizens through the provision of green energy services that our societies need. But they have refused to do so over the past 20 years despite making promises to do so.

Survey after survey show the public wants action on climate. And since no one wants their children to live in a catastrophic four-degree C superheated world, the failure to take serious action on climate is a clear and absolute failure of democracy.

The only way this will change, and the only way to get action, is if people take responsibility for the future and march on their capitals demanding action, refusing to leave until there is. To get action we all must act.

Time is short. There are just 24 months to 2015 when emissions need to begin to decline. There are no other options left but to march in the streets. The environmental organisation 350.org is organising one such march Feb. 17 in Washington D.C.

Dozens more marches are absolutely essential. It is time to act. It is time to march.

*Stephen Leahy is the lead international science and environment correspondent at IPS. Based in Uxbridge, Canada, near Toronto, Steve has covered environmental issues for nearly two decades.

About 80 percent of Guyana’s forests, some 15 million hectares, have remained untouched over time. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ROSEAU, Dominica, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

Imagine Guyana and Dominica without forests and rivers, or Antigua, Barbados and St. Lucia without beaches.

Atherton Martin, a conservationist and former minister of agriculture in Dominica, says climate change should be forcing Caribbean countries to take a hard look at how they are managing their natural resources, lest they eventually disappear.

“What the climate change principles tell us is that basically when your natural resource systems are debilitated, weakened or destroyed by climate change, your economy is thereby destroyed,” he told IPS.

But all is not bleak. Martin believes climate change could potentially benefit the Caribbean in two ways – firstly, by forcing a change in mindset where countries take the lead instead of simply reacting; and secondly, by allowing governments to build stronger economies by accessing millions of dollars in climate change funding.

He pointed to Guyana’s push to become a low carbon economy, noting that it has already drawn down more than 70 million dollars from carbon credits on just 10 percent of its forest systems.

“They expect to draw down a total of over 250 million dollars over the next year and this is a deal made on carbon credits and sequestration valuation with just one country, Norway,” Martin said.

In July 2009, Guyana launched a low carbon strategy aimed at promoting economic development, while at the same time combating climate change.

At the launch, then President Bharrat Jagdeo called for a platform on which developing countries like Guyana are not seen as mere recipients of aid, but as equal partners in the search for climate solutions.

A low carbon economy is one where economic activities are geared to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that would otherwise go into the atmosphere, and where other activities and lifestyles seek to minimise the effects of climate change.

About 80 percent of Guyana’s forests, or some 15 million hectares, has remained untouched over time. An expert study commissioned by Guyana estimates that the country would earn some 580 million dollars annually if it were to engage in economic activities that could lead to the destruction of the forests, but the economic value to the world, if these same forests were left standing, would be equivalent to 40 billion dollars.

Jagdeo has described Guyana’s forests as a global asset, home to at least 8,000 plant and animal species that make it one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. The forests also act as a sink to absorb carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

With the right low-deforestation economic incentives, Guyana would avoid emissions of 1.5 gigatonnes of CO2 a year.

Earlier this year, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved an institutional strengthening project for Guyana’s Low-Carbon Development Strategy. The approval means that nearly six million dollars will flow to Guyana for implementation, following an initial sum of 1.06 million dollars released to the country from Norway for preparatory work.

Guyana’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) Investment Fund, dubbed GRIF, was established in October 2010 in order to fund projects of the country’s low-carbon strategy.

The project will strengthen the technical and administrative capacity of those institutions responsible for implanting the strategy, and develop an MRV (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification) system on a national level.

The partnership between Norway and Guyana is the second-biggest REDD+ partnership in the world, according to the Guyanese government.

Martin pointed out that there are arrangements with the World Bank, the Organisation of American States (OAS), other financial institutions and the United Nations that could allow Caribbean countries to earn financing as a result of their climate change resilience activities.

“They could value their natural resources on the basis of their sequestration of CO2 and then convert that sequestration property into hard cash, as Guyana is doing, or convert it into expanded negotiating room on debt reduction and expanded negotiating room on getting more concessionary loans,” he said.

President and founder of the Dominica-based Waitkbuli Ecological Foundation, Bernard Wiltshire, an attorney, agrees that a new way of thinking is necessary.

He told IPS that Caribbean countries now need to build “appropriate industries” and get involved in “the right kind of tourism”, for example.

“Dominica could have a tourism industry that could far outstrip Antigua. Antigua has the sun, sand and sea and so on, but Dominica has the sea and in addition to that it has a lot more than Antigua,” Wiltshire said.

“Everybody is saying sun, sand and sea are what you need for tourism and are ignoring nature tourism, adventure tourism, heritage tourism and wellness tourism,” he said.

“These things are growing. Just slouching, drinking rum under a palm tree – that is going out of fashion. The tourism industry in the Caribbean is going downhill because we are competing with the larger countries. Tourists are going farther afield, they want more adventurous things,” Wilshire added.

He pointed to Southeast Asia and the jungles of Burma as new hotspots, adding that “Dominica has its own Caribbean jungle right here” and could attract thousands of people who are looking for a jungle adventure.

Martin lamented that a region like the Caribbean, with so many extraordinary opportunities, has such financially strapped economies.

“You have countries with national annual budgets of 600 million dollars. If you can draw down in a year or two years half of that or even more from converting the silent work of your natural systems into hard dollars from the international financial community, you are home free,” he told IPS.

He said that the Caribbean could very rapidly turn itself around purely on the basis of taking that climate-resilient look at its natural systems by understanding how vulnerable it is and hence how vital it is to reorganise the way in which it manages its natural resources.

“The expertise is available to you to do the calculations that would get the rest of the world to finally begin to reward you for conserving your forests, conserving your reefs, conserving your water systems and so on,” Martin said.

“That’s a no-brainer and climate change is just begging the question. It’s saying to us, ‘hey guys, you have an option, and guess what, for once this option is to the advantage of small islands like ours’,” he added.

Rising seas pose a major threat to businesses like this bar located in waters near the Tobago Keys in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Credit: Peter Richards

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

As the world’s most tourism-dependent region, with the sector accounting for one in every eight jobs, the Caribbean has much to fear from climate change.

Three years ago, the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) signed a 1.8-million-dollar agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to enhance climate resilience in the tourism sector, and work towards designating the Caribbean a carbon neutral destination.

Programme coordinator Earl Green told IPS said that the project’s main outcome is the development of a web-based carbon footprinting tool, which provides a common platform for development of tourism sector greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories in the region.

“GHG inventories allow for baseline and future scenarios, which may be used for cross-country comparisons, (and) also represent a key step in planning for low carbon development in the tourism sector across the region,” he said.

The programme was piloted in four countries – The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize and Guyana – that the CCCCC said were chosen because of the strong support from the tourism industries in these countries and also the diversity of their product, including cruises in the Bahamas, scuba diving in Belize, small-scale ecotourism and cultural tourism in Guyana, and resorts in Tobago.

“The pilot project was very successful. We had an exit meeting with the IDB on Monday. It offers lessons for future efforts in more complex tourism markets such as Jamaica and Barbados and for whole island responses as in the case of The Bahamas,” CCCCC’s communication specialist Tyrone Hall told IPS.

“As part of the ongoing mitigation and adaptation thrust undertaken by the Centre, we sought to reduce the carbon footprint of this key economic sector. This included installing motion sensors in hotels to ensure that once they are not occupied utilities aren’t being used, retrofitting buildings to ensure efficiency of things like A/C units and so forth,” he added.

The firm retained by the CCCCC to undertake a consultancy under the Caribbean Carbon Neutral Tourism Program (CCNTP) in its report noted that the identification of mitigation options involved extensive discussions with stakeholders in the tourism sector.

“These discussions have pointed to capacity building as one of the most important GHG mitigation measures for the Caribbean, as ‘knowledge is power’. Stakeholders with the knowledge of carbon accounting and the principles of low carbon tourism/economies are better able to identify approaches to reduce GHGs within the own operations,” Dillon Consulting Limited noted.

The agreement with the IDB called for the development of suitable financing mechanisms, which would be needed to support investments in adaptation and mitigation measures within the tourism sector in order to facilitate climate resilience and carbon neutrality.

It also called for the development of a strategic framework to access the Climate Investment Funds -Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) under its Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR), that would attract concessional financial options, including concessional loans, guarantees, grants, and equity enhancements that can be used by the region’s tourism sector for investing in climate resilient infrastructure and services.

Green said it “is especially important to find the appropriate financing mechanisms and associated governance solutions for tourism-related climate change projects”.

“Determining the right mix of policy financing instruments will be crucial and a full range of options should be considered,” he said.

The range of financing instruments available includes grants and concessional loans; carbon offset flows, market rate loans, equity placement and policy incentives such as subsidies and tax credits.

“Much of these mechanisms are most appropriate for large-scale projects, while smaller projects and discreet pilot programme often require one or two funding sources,” Green added.

The CCNTP programme was also piloted in the four Caribbean countries because the CCCCC said it felt there was need to take advantage of the results of the Review of the Economics of Climate Change Studies (RECCS) coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC).

“With the web-based tool, the pilot countries can now log-in and view their greenhouse gas emissions and even forecast what it will be in the future. The real benefit of the tool is that these countries can now map the carbon footprint of their tourism sector and even compare their performance to other islands,” said Hall.

He told IPS that “once that happens, it opens up opportunities for knowledge transfer and so forth. This tool will be useful for decision-making and planning on a regional and national level as we seek to improve the sector and strengthen other parts of the economy”.

The consulting firm in its report noted that energy efficiency and deployment of renewable energy in the Caribbean accommodation sub-sector are significant sources of potential GHG reductions, and ongoing work in this field has the potential to significantly contribute to the development of low carbon tourism in the Caribbean.

Making the shift to a future climate with less than two degrees C of warming means 65 percent of existing coal power plants will have to be shut down in the next decade or two. Credit: Rennett Stowe/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

The most important number in history is now the annual measure of carbon emissions. That number reveals humanity’s steady billion-tonne by billion-tonne march to the edge of the carbon cliff, beyond which scientists warn lies a fateful fall to catastrophic climate change.

With the global total of climate-disrupting emissions likely to come in at around 52 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes) this year, we’re already at the edge, according to new research.

To have a good chance of staying below two degrees C of warming, global emissions should be between 41 and 47 gigatonnes (Gt) by 2020, said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich.

“Only when we see the annual global emissions total decline will we know we’re making the shift to climate protection,” Rogelj told IPS.

Making the shift to a future climate with less than two degrees C of warming is doable and not that expensive if total emissions peak in the next few years and fall into the 41-47 Gt “sweet spot” by 2020, Rogelj and colleagues show in their detailed analysis published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study is the first to comprehensively quantify the costs and risks of emissions surpassing critical thresholds by 2020.

This shift means 65 percent of existing coal power plants will have to be shut down in the next decade or two.

“There are enormous benefits if global emissions decline before 2020. Failure to do so will mean we will need to use more nuclear, massive amounts of bioenergy, large-scale carbon capture and storage,” he said.

The costs and social implications from deploying all this will be “huge”, he said.

“Delay is by far the riskier option,” Rogelj said, noting that failure to act now means those additional risks, costs and social disruption will land on the heads of the next generation.

“We’re deciding that the next generation will have to pay significantly higher costs because we’re not doing anything now.”

These climate-disrupting emissions are primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The global total also includes other greenhouse gases that are warming the planet such as methane, nitrous oxide, and a few other chemicals.

In 1990, global emissions were 38.2 Gt, and in recent years, they have been growing at a rate of three percent per year. This growth is despite commitments by industrialised countries to reduce their emissions.

In 2009, all industrialised countries, including the United States, made emission reduction pledges under the Copenhagen Accord. However, even if countries reach their Copenhagen targets, global emissions will be about 55 Gt in 2020, the study estimates.

Staying below two degrees C is still feasible, but it will be far more expensive and difficult, imposing an additional cost burden amounting to trillions of dollars over 2020 to 2050.

Earlier this month, during the annual U.N. climate conference in Doha, governments declined to increase their emission cut targets. Citing economic difficulties, countries like the U.S. and those in the European Union looked to a new global climate treaty that would not make additional emission reductions until 2020.

Despite the urgent need to reduce emissions, the fossil fuel industry received a record 523 billion dollars in public subsidies in 2011, 30 percent more than the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency.

“Lots of actions at the local and national level are needed to bring emissions down over the next few years,” said energy researcher David McCollum of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg, Austria.

Waiting until 2020 before emissions decline means millions of hectares of land will be needed to produce biofuel, billions of dollars invested in new nuclear power plants, and new technologies like carbon capture and storage must not only work but be effective on a large scale, McCollum told IPS.

“At 44Gt (in 2020) we can choose the most cost-effective reduction options. Above 55Gt, we need everything and they’d all better work,” he said.

The authors of the study acknowledge these numbers might be too optimistic because current climate models cannot incorporate emissions from melting permafrost and other natural sources of greenhouse gases that might result from increasing temperatures.

Staying below two degrees is not a matter of science or technology. It will be determined by political and social decisions to take the necessary steps to shift to low-carbon living, said McCollum.

And, in that regard, the choices made before 2020 are critical, both he and Rogelj conclude.

Rich countries came to the U.N. climate talks in Doha intent on delaying needed action on climate change for another three years and a still to be hammered out new global treaty.

Poor communities are often hit hardest by extreme weather events, but have the least say in global negotiations. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

This delay will be extraordinarily expensive and risky.

Every year that fossil fuel emissions fail to decline adds to the cost and reduces the odds that a global temperature rise can be kept below two degrees C.

“Science says emissions need to peak in 2015,” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, as the final plenary of COP 18 concluded last Saturday night, a full day late.

The 195 parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) approved a set of documents called “The Doha Climate Gateway” that does not increase emission reductions or guarantee much-needed financial help to poor countries suffering present and future impacts of climate change.

“Doha is a betrayal of people living with impacts now. And it is a sellout of our children and grandchildren’s future,” said Naidoo.

“The fossil fuel industry won,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy, who has attended nearly every one of these climate negotiations over the past 18 years.

“The science is clear that four-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground but we continue to burn them like there is no tomorrow,” Meyer said.

“Doha became more of a trade fair…Negotiators protected the interests of corporations and not the needs of people,” he told IPS.

More than 16,000 delegates participated in the two-week conference of the parties (COP) in Doha, Qatar, a country rich in oil and gas in the heart of the Middle East fossil fuel empire.

Meyer, along with representatives from more than 700 civil society organisations, blamed the U.S. for blocking proposals for greater emissions cuts. The U.S. also refused to commit a singly penny to assisting countries hard hit by climate change. U.S. negotiators did acknowledge poor countries were suffering costly damages and losses.

The world has already warmed 0.8 degrees C, altering weather patterns and increasing extreme events which have led to nearly 400,000 deaths and more than 1.2 trillion dollars being lost every year, according a 2011 study.

A delegate from Bangladesh told IPS that climate-related damages cost his country three to four percent of its annual GDP. Climate change, which is also driven by deforestation and land conversion for agriculture, is undercutting development and will push his country’s and other countries’ economies into a steady decline, he said.

To help governments cope, industrialised nations promised to put 100 billion dollars a year into a Green Climate Fund by 2020. To bridge the gap until then, developing nations asked for 60 billion dollars in total by 2015. Britain, Germany and a few other countries promised to contribute six billion dollars.

But the U.S., Canada, Japan and others agreed only to more talks next year.

“The U.S. spends 60 billion dollars on its military marching bands,” said Naidoo.

The only hope is to build a robust grassroots movement to force countries to act in the interest of the public and future generations, he said.

“We have to build a new social movement like (the one) that overcame slavery,” agreed Oxfam International climate change policy advisor Tim Gore.

“We reject what our leaders are doing here. We are more angry, more impassioned to defeat this process,” said Gore.

The COP process is an obstacle because a few big countries can easily block the will of the majority, said Mohamed Aslam, former environment minister and chief negotiator for the Republic of the Maldives.

“The signs of global warming are obvious and we know that the safe limit is to stay below 1.5 C…and yet we are failing to act,” Aslam said in a press conference.

The U.N. spends millions of dollars on these negotiations and they are going nowhere, he said. “We are running out of time. (We) need to take this to another fora,” he said.

What is lacking is a real commitment to reduce global emissions, said Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“What needs to change most is political will,” Figueres told IPS.

In Doha, the U.N. secretary-general announced a world leaders’ summit in 2014 to hammer out emission reduction targets to keep warming below two degrees C. The Doha Climate Gateway confirmed details for a new negotiation track to have a new global climate treaty ready for ratification in 2015 and go into force in 2020.

Under this agreement all countries will likely be obligated to make emission cuts, varying in depth and timing. Without additional cuts before 2020, reductions afterwards will need to be rapid and massive, moving to a zero-fossil fuel emission society in a few decades based on the science.

The Doha agreement includes a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol with the European Union, Australia and a few other countries agreeing to cut fossil fuel emissions between 2013 and 2020. However, they did not set new targets, agreeing instead to a mandatory review of targets in 2014.

The nations involved only represent 12 percent of global emissions, and do not include large developing country emitters like China, India and Brazil. The U.S. has never participated, while Canada and Japan have opted out of the second phase but are supposed to make to make comparable cuts but offered nothing new.

“Rich countries think they can protect themselves from the impacts, leaving the poor with no clear pathway to the future,” said Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid.

“Our leaders have let us down. Civil society will have to lead to get the future we really want,” said Adow.

Food prices will soar and hundreds of millions will starve without urgent action to make major cuts in fossil fuel emissions. That is what is at stake here on the last day of the U.N. climate talks known as COP 18, scientists and activists say.

Lidy Nacpil of Jubilee South Asia Pacific. Nacpil is based in the Philippines, which is currently experiencing devastation as a result of Typhoon Bopha. Credit: Stephen Leahy/IPS

Carbon emissions are already disrupting the world’s climate, making extreme weather events like droughts, floods and storms more damaging. Agriculture and food production are extremely vulnerable to the impacts climate change, several scientific studies show.

“It is very strange there is no emphasis on food security here in Doha,” said Michiel Schaeffer, a scientist with Climate Analytics.

“There is no question climate change poses a major risk to our ability to produce food,” Schaeffer told IPS.

Climate Analytics, along with Germany’s Pik Potsdam Institute, prepared the World Bank report “Turn Down the Heat” that warns many parts of the world won’t be able to grow food if global temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit).

The report also warns humanity is on the path to a four-degree-C world, a world with unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods, with serious impacts on ecosystems and agriculture.

A four-degree-warmer C world means an average of four to 10 degrees warming over land, too warm for many crucial food crops. Large parts of Africa, China, India, Mexico and the southern United States will suffer declines for that reason, said Schaeffer. There will also be significant changes in rainfall patters and higher evaporation levels.

With just 0.8C of warming there have been widespread droughts, flooding and extreme weather events linked to climate change. Food prices have jumped, as large areas of the U.S. grain belt faced drought this year. Food prices will spike when extreme events occur in food-producing areas in the future, he said.

Research shows that even at two degrees C of warming, there will be serious food production problems at regional levels. If temperatures go beyond three degrees, it becomes a global problem. Without major reductions in fossil fuel emissions, a three- to four-degree C world collides with peak population growth.

“This will be catastrophic,” said Schaeffer.

Negotiations are a “million miles from where we need to be to even have a small chance of preventing runaway climate change,” said Lidy Nacpil of Jubilee South Asia Pacific, a network of faith-based and development organisations.

COP 18 is in its final few hours on Friday with no additional emissions cuts on the table. Talks will go late into the night and perhaps continue on Saturday.

“We cannot go back to our countries and tell them that we allowed this to happen, that we condemned our own future,” Nacpil said in a statement.

“African negotiators are throwing their hands up in despair, and asking why they should even bother coming to the negotiations, if the developed countries continue to wring more demands from us in return for no money or commitments,” said Seyni Nafo of Mali and a spokesperson for the African Group of Negotiators in the U.N. climate talks.

“This cynicism is at its most stark in the agriculture negotiations,” Nafo said in a statement.

Without greater emission cuts, it will undermine our ability to grow food or adapt, said Meena Raman, a negotiation expert at Third World Network, an NGO based in Malaysia.

“There is still a fighting chance here in Doha for something,” Raman told IPS.

One thing that’s needed is the promised financing from industrialised nations to help less developed nations cope and to strengthen their food production systems.

“Finance for adaptation is a key demand of developing countries here at the climate negotiations,” said Doreen Stabinsky, professor of Global Environmental Politics at the College of the Atlantic.

“Without adaptation, global food production is likely to suffer losses of 14 to 30 percent in the three major crops of spring wheat, maize and soy,” Stabinsky said.

Even if action on adaptation is taken soon, there will still be losses ranging from four to 26 percent.

“We need to start increasing local and crop diversity now” to build resilience to extreme climatic conditions farmers are beginning to face, said Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation, the UK partner of the African Biodiversity Network.

Traditional farmers have hundreds of different types of seeds for different conditions, but they are often pushed aside in favour of technological fixes for food security such as hybrid and genetically engineered seeds, Anderson told IPS.

“These farmers can have tremendous diversity even within the same variety of maize, ones that sprout sooner, or flower later,” she said.

That kind of diversity greatly increases the odds of getting a decent harvest, whereas modern monoagricultural approaches only succeed under certain conditions. The latter approach is the one being pushed by agribusiness and governments. If they succeed, there is no question it will be a huge failure under the extreme conditions of climate change, she said.

“I can’t explain why industrialised nations here in Doha can’t see the urgency of all this,” Anderson said.

Two young Arab activists frustrated with Qatar's lack of public leadership at COP18 unfurl a banner in protest on Dec. 6 and are de-badged. Credit: adopt a negotiator/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Qatar, Dec 6 2012 (IPS)

United Nations climate talks are on the edge of collapse Thursday, according to a coalition of civil society and representatives from half of the world’s countries.

Once again, rich industrialised nations are putting nothing on the table in terms of increased emissions cuts and financial support for poor nations, said Celine Charveriat, director of advocacy and campaigns for Oxfam International.

“This is just like WTO (World Trade Organisation) negotiations where rich countries refuse everything until the very last minute,” Charveriat told IPS.

The atmosphere is tense and angry with less than 24 hours left before the summit known as COP18 concludes on Friday, she said.

“We need raised ambition from developed countries. If not, we will be extinct,” said Emmanuel Diamini, chair of the Africa Group of negotiators.

“Ambition” refers to increased reductions in emissions primarily from burning of fossil fuels. Even if major industrialised economies like the United States, Canada, Japan and the European Union achieve their currently promised cuts, temperatures will likely rise between four and 10 degrees C based on the latest science.

The vast majority of carbon emissions contributing to climate change are from developed nations.

“When we call for increased ambition, they (developed countries) say we are blocking progress,” Diamini said at a press conference.

If there is no increase in ambition in Doha, when will it happen? asked Yeb Sano, head of the Philiphines delegation.

“Hundreds of thousands of my people are homeless and in evacuation centres today after typhoon Bopha,” Sano said.

“We refuse to make this a way of life….We must not do just what our political masters tell us but what seven billion people need, ” he said. “Doha must be the place where we turned things around.”

Much of the acrimony is focused around the U.S. refusal to commit to anything new.

“The U.S. negotiating team should be replaced,” said Kumi Naidoo, head of Greenpeace International. They have spent four years blocking negotiations, according to Naidoo.

“People are dying because of climate change. People are losing their homes, their livelihoods, their source of food. It is saddening to see rich country negotiators actively blocking progress in order to maintain the profits of their coal, oil and forestry industries,” Naidoo said in a press conference.

The U.S. has put the most carbon emissions into the atmosphere and bears the biggest responsibility for acting to reduce emissions and providing financial help to poorer countries already being impacted, he said.

Greenpeace joined with ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, WWF, and with African and many other nations to say that a Doha agreement must include scaled-up public climate finance from 2013, deep emissions cuts and a mechanism to address loss and damage from the impacts of climate change.

The political and public atmosphere around the financial crisis in Europe won’t allow us to go further, said Kristian Ruby, assistant to the EU chief negotiator.

The EU is proposing a mandatory review of emission cuts in 2014.

“U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening a world leaders’ summit on this in 2014. And by then the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) will have released its latest scientific assessment,” Ruby told IPS.

There is progress, but not enough, he agreed, noting that China has been holding up that progress because it wants greater ambition from developed nations.

“One of the keys to success here is to get the U.S. to make some new financial commitment,” he said.

Poor nations say they need at least 60 billion dollars for 2013 to 2015 to help them cope. Those nations have seen the number of extreme weather events increase 600 percent over the past 30 years, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Governments found trillions of dollars to bail out the financial sector. This is a far greater crisis, said Charveriat.

Canada is also a major villain blocking progress here, she said.

“Canada has become rich and prosperous from its huge fossil fuel industry. And here they are offering absolutely nothing to pay for their pollution of the atmosphere,” she said.

“What has gone wrong in Canada? They used to be a leader. Now they are one of the worst laggards, down at the bottom with the U.S.”

The Green Climate Fund is empty: Oxfam opening stunt at COP18. Credit: Courtesy of Oxfam

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Qatar, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

Extreme weather disasters, including floods and droughts intensified by climate change, have totalled many billions of dollars in damages this year.

And much worse is yet to come, warned the World Bank, International Energy Agency and even the big accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited (PwC) in a separate reports detailing the consequences of failing to make major reductions in the fossil fuel emissions that cause climate change.

Those reports also urged all countries attending the U.N. climate change negotiations here in Doha, Qatar to agree to do far more to reduce emissions.

“The U.S. does not anticipate increasing its emission targets beyond what has already been agreed to,” said Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation at the U.N. Climate Change negotiations known as COP18.

“We are already making an enormous effort with singular urgency,” Pershing said in a press conference Monday.

The United States pledged to make a three-percent reduction compared to 1990 levels by 2020. Pershing said the U.S. is on track to meet that target. However, the U.S. target is nowhere near the 40-percent reduction scientists say must be made by 2020 to avoid extremely dangerous climate change of more than two degrees.

A newer analysis by climatologist Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK suggests that 70-percent reductions are needed by industrialised countries by 2020, with similar reductions by most other countries a decade or so later.

Oil-rich Qatar is a controversial host for the annual two-week U.N. climate change conference. The small nation on the Arabian penninsula has the world’s biggest per person carbon footprint, mainly due to its huge gas and oil industry. With less than 2.5 million citizens, it is also one world’s wealthiest nations.

“I don’t believe in counting carbon on a per capita basis. What matters is how much each country produces, “said Qatar’s Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, the COP18 president.

Hamad Al-Attiyah has an important role in leading the 191 nations participating here through a complex series of negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

When asked if Qatar has a specific emissions reduction target, Hamad Al-Attiyah said the country has a national reduction strategy and had made and will continue to make investments in emissions reduction. “We are investing a lot of money,” he said. “We are confident that will reach the highest target compared to other countries”

He also pointed out that as an exporter of natural gas, Qatar is helping other nations use a lower carbon energy source compared to oil or coal.

Qatar and the COP president have yet to prove their leadership on the issue, said Wael Hmaidan, director of CAN International, a global network of over 700 non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“This week, it is up to the president to prove to the world he takes climate change seriously. The best way would be to make a pledge for an emission reduction target for 2020,” said Hmaidan.

“Doha must deliver results,” Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told IPS.

The Doha climate talks are the most complex ever, Figueres said. Three main tasks need to be accomplished during these talks. First is an agreement to reduce emissions from now until 2020 under the Kyoto Protocol framework. “Developed nations must take the lead here,” she said in a press conference.

The second is to lay the groundwork for a new post-2020 global climate treaty that will necessarily mean a rapid reduction of fossil fuel use to create a very low-carbon global society.

The third task is to provide technical and financial assistance to help developing countries reduce their carbon emissions and to adapt to impacts of climate change such as droughts, flooding, loss of agricultural productivity.

Three years ago, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, industrialised countries agreed to provide 100 billion dollars a year in new and additional funding to developed nations by 2020. They also agreed to a Fast Start Finance programme of 30 billion dollars from 2010 to 2012 to take the first steps.

While the fast-start funding has been delivered, only 33 percent can be considered new, according to a report from Oxfam International. The rest of the money was pledged before the Copenhagen conference – and at most, only 24 percent was additional to existing aid promises.

Just 43 percent of known Fast Start Finance has been given as grants. Most of it was in the form of loans that developing countries have to repay at varying levels of interest, the Oxfam report titled “The looming climate ‘fiscal cliff'” found.

There is no money for 2013. At Doha, countries are supposed to pledge new funding through the newly established Green Climate Fund that will be based in Korea.

“If leaders come to Doha with no new money, the Green Climate Fund risks being left as an empty shell,” said Oxfam International Climate Change Policy Advisor Tim Gore.

“Developing countries are heading towards a climate ‘fiscal cliff’ without any certainty about how they will be supported to adapt to climate change risks, (with the fund) being left as an empty shell for the third year in a row,” Gore said in a release.

Obama talks with Hurricane Sandy victims at a shelter in Brigantine, N.J. He says dealing with climate change will be a personal mission in his second term. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 15 2012 (IPS)

Two-thirds of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves cannot be used without risking dangerous climate change, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned this week.

Preventing the consumption of those two-thirds will be the primary task of the annual U.N. climate negotiations that resume at the end of this month.

Late Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama surprised many by saying climate change will be a personal mission in his second term.

“The re-election of President Obama guarantees continuity of the U.S. pledge of reducing emissions 17 percent below its carbon emissions in 2005 by 2020,” said Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“The U.S. is fully aware of the need to increase its ambition in terms of mitigation (emissions reduction) and finance to help developing countries adapt,” Figueres told IPS.

The U.S. emission reduction target is equivalent to a three-percent reduction compared to 1990 levels – a baseline most countries use. Global emissions need to be 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels in the year 2020 to keep temperatures from rising beyond two degrees C, climate scientists have said.

By contrast, the United Kingdom is already 18 percent below its 1990s level and plans to be 34 percent below in 2020.

In 2010, there was a binding agreement to limit global warming to two degrees C at the U.N. climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based NGO.

“We are nowhere near to getting there. The situation is urgent. Climate change is not tomorrow’s problem, it is today’s problem. Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call to the people of the United States,” Steer said at a press conference.

Although global heating of the planet by two degrees C is not considered safe, going beyond that is often called dangerous climate change. To have a coin-flip chance (50-50) of staying at two degrees C, the IEA has calculated that most of the world’s coal reserves, 22 percent of oil and 15 percent of natural gas reserves must stay in the ground.

Geographically, two-thirds of these reserves are in North America, the Middle East, China and Russia, according to the IEA’s annual flagship publication, the World Energy Outlook, published Monday.

Global temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees C. In the U.S., this year will be the hottest on record, and an ongoing drought has cost the economy billions. Superstorm Sandy caused 50 to 70 billion dollars in damages.

Worldwide, the cost of climate change is estimated at 1.2 trillion dollars annually. (A trillion seconds is nearly 32,000 years). The greatest impacts are on the poor and on poor countries, Steer said.

“History will judge harshly any president who fails to seriously grapple with climate change,” he added.

No one expects a breakthrough in the 18-year-long U.N. climate negotiations that reconvene as COP 18 on Nov. 26 in Doha, Qatar.

The Doha climate talks offer “an opportunity to hit the reset button” and for the U.S. to bring the leadership the world urgently needs, said Steer.

That just might happen. On Wednesday, at President Obama’s first White House press conference since his re-election, Obama surprised many by saying climate change will be a personal mission in his second term.

Obama also said he will spend the next few weeks to “find out what more we can do to make short-term progress” on the issue.

While jobs and economic growth remain top priorities, if “we can create jobs, advance growth and make a serious dent in climate change and be an international leader, I think that is something the American people would support,” he said.

Ending government subsidies for the fossil fuel sector is a crucial part of keeping two-thirds of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground, said Cliff Polycarp, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute.

“The world needs to shift investments from high-carbon energy to low-carbon renewable energy,” Polycarp told IPS.

In 2012, more than 600 billion dollars will be spent worldwide on oil and gas exploration and production, according to a Harvard University study titled “Oil: The New Revolution”.  That study forecasts a boom in fossil fuel production that could push global heating of the planet to a catastrophic eight degrees C higher, according to Oil Change International, a U.S.-based NGO.

“The reality is that the oil industry makes most of its money on extraction, not on selling gasoline to consumers,” Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, told IPS.

Shifting the fossil fuel industries and its financial backers’ investments to low-carbon energy will require government intervention in terms of incentives for renewables and a significant price on carbon said Polycarp.

A growing number of businesses are asking governments to eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industries and to impose a carbon tax or fee, said Steer, who formerly worked at the World Bank.

“They know the writing is on the wall and say these changes need to come sooner rather than later,” he said.