Flooding in Trinidad's capital of Port of Spain. As human activities have already caused approximately 1°C global warming above pre-industrial levels, impacts of the changing climate have already unfolded and manifested through floods, droughts, and heatwaves. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2018 (IPS)

The release of a groundbreaking report has left the international community reeling over very real, intensified impacts of climate change which will hit home sooner rather than later. So what now?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has revealed that the international community is severely off track to limit climate change and that we will see the world warm over 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 if no urgent action is taken.

“It is quite discouraging to be told how little time we have,” Amnesty International’s policy advisor Chiara Liguori told IPS.

Policy director of the Climate and Energy Programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists Rachel Cleetus echoed similar sentiments to IPS, stating: “This report should be the shot in the arm that governments of the world need. They asked for this information in 2015 and it is now before us, and it is deeply sobering.”

As human activities have already caused approximately 1°C global warming above pre-industrial levels, impacts of the changing climate have already unfolded and manifested through floods, droughts, and heatwaves.

This year saw an unprecedented global heatwave from the Arctic to Japan.

In the United States, extreme heat now causes more deaths in cities than all other weather events combined while Japan saw 65 peopled killed in one week due to a heatwave, which was declared to be a “national disaster.”

The IPCC report, called Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, known as SR15, projects that such extreme weather events will only get worse if warming is not limited to below 1.5°C compared to 2°C.

For instance, the 91 authors who prepared the report estimated that there will be lower risks for heat-related morbidity and mortality at 1.5°C compared to 2°C.

Seas will rise 0.1 meters less at global warming of 1.5°C, which means than 10 million fewer people would be exposed to related risks including flooding and displacement particularly in small island nations.

Impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, including species extinction of coral reefs, are also projected to be lower at 1.5°C.

“Even though it seems like a small difference, there are really consequential differences between 1.5 and 2°C,” said Cleetus.

“Every fraction of a degree we can avoid is important,” she added.

While small island developing states advocated heavily for limiting warming to 1.5°C before the Paris Agreement, the international community settled on 2°C.

However, due to the lack of climate-related commitments, the world is on a path for a temperature rise of more than 3°C.

“The feasibility of 1.5°C is tied up in policy decisions we make, technology choices, social and economic choices…and we’ve got no time to waste,” Cleetus said.

Both Cleetus and Liguori highlighted the need for a large-scale transformation in all sectors including the energy sector.

The report notes that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will need to decrease by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ by 2050.

This means that any remaining CO2 emissions would need to be removed from the air.

Many have looked to CO2 removal technologies such as bioenergy with CO2 capture and storage (BECCS), a process, which involves burning biomass such as plant matter for energy, collecting the CO2 they emit, and then storing the gasses underground.

However, Liguori noted that the controversial BECCS technology requires large lots of land in order to grow biomass, which could displace agricultural production and even communities.

“We’ve already seen patterns of climate change mitigation measures that are taken in the name of combatting climate change but at the same time they don’t respect human rights and result in serious consequences for people,” she told IPS.

“It can put an excessive burden on people that are already the most exposed to climate change and less able to defend their rights,” Liguori said.

In May 2018, Amnesty International documented how the Sengwer indigenous community from Embobut forest, Kenya were forced from their homes and stripped of their lands after a government campaign to reduce deforestation.

However, claims that the Sengwer are harming the forest were not substantiated, Liguori said.

“All these measures need to be compliant with human rights, because you cant just transfer one problem to the other. We need to shift towards a zero-carbon economy but we cannot replicate the same pattern of human rights violations that we have currently,” she added.

Cleetus also pointed to the need for climate finance for developing countries.

“Countries need help making this clean energy transition as well as help to invest in resilience to keep their communities safe—this is a piece that must be addressed,” she told IPS.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has been a crucial instrument to address climate change in developing countries and support efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

However, of the USD10 billion pledged to the fund, only three billion has been paid leaving the GCF in desperate need of sustained if not increased financial commitments from countries in order to limit warming to below 1.5°C.

But countries such as Australia and the U.S. have rejected requests to provide more money.

Climate finance has been a major sticking point in many international negotiations including at the Conference of the Parties (COP) and is predicted to pose a major hurdle at the upcoming COP in Poland where governments will convene to finalise the implementation rules for the Paris Agreement.

While the solutions to address and respond to climate change exist, it is this lack of political will and engagement that is most concerning.

“There is a lot we can do to seriously limit emissions and its up to the policymakers and governments of the world to step up,” Cleetus said.

And people have already begun to fight back, holding their governments accountable to climate action.

Most recently, the Hague Court of Appeal upheld a 2015 ruling which ordered the Dutch government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

The case, put forth by the Urgenda Foundation and a group of almost 1,000 residents, argued that a failure of the government to act on climate change amounts to a violation of the rights of Dutch citizens.

Similar cases can now be seen around the world.

“This is quite encouraging because it is an element that can push governments to get there, to step up their commitments,” Liguori said.

Cleetus expressed her hope for the future of climate action and urged the international community to do more to make the transition to a carbon-free economy and society a reality.

“We don’t have to make a false choice between sustainable development, poverty eradication, and our climate goals. They can go hand in hand and indeed they must go hand in hand if we are going to surmount these policy and political obstacles to climate action,” she said.

“Our choices still matter—in fact our choices matter more than ever before. It is in our hands what the future of our world climate will look like and the kind of climate we will leave to our children and grandchildren,” Cleetus concluded.

Exxon was responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Here, part of the spill in the Chenega Bay, Evans lsland (Prince William Sound). Credit: ARLIS Reference.

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 17 2015 (IPS)

For decades, executives and decision makers at major U.S. and European fossil fuel companies were aware that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused global warming, but still provided millions in funding to boost disinformation campaigns and sponsor scientists who denied climate change.

As early as 1981, more than a decade before the first meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), leaders at oil giant Exxon acknowledged the connection between fossil fuels and climate change.“Their aim was to sell doubt. They don't have to disprove climate change, [they] just have to make people believe there was not consensus." -- Nancy Cole

The revelations emerged as part of a report released by the Washington, D.C.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), called the Climate Deception Dossiers, which explores the tactics promoted by companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Peabody Energy, Chevron and Conoco-Phillips to undermine climate science.

“They were already factoring the risks of climate change in their business as early as 1981, and 34 years later they continue to lie to the people and undermining climate science”, Nancy Cole, Director of Campaigns for the UCS Climate and Energy Program and contributor to the report, told IPS.

The Dossiers show how Exxon and other major companies funded a vast disinformation campaign that included climate deniers, contrarian think tanks and public relations firms, with evidence pointing in their direction as recently as 2015.

“Their aim was to sell doubt. They don’t have to disprove climate change, [they] just have to make people believe there was not consensus,” said Cole.

One of the climate rebukers is Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an engineer affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who received more than 1.2 million dollars in big-oil funding between 2001 and 2012 and whose salary relied exclusively on their grants, according to UCS.

For years, Soon’s academic papers have largely overstated the solar influence in global warming and have been methodically discredited by fellow researchers, scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but have been used by conservative politicians and big oil companies to cast doubt on the climate consensus.

A 2014 e-mail by climate scientist Lenny Bernstein, an Exxon employee during the 1980s, revealed that the company was aware as early as 1981 of CO2 emissions. The oil giant decided against exploring the Natuna gas field, off the coast of Indonesia, after being alerted about the massive amount of CO2 trapped in it and the potential for future carbon-cutting regulations.

If exploited, its release would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time, accounting to roughly one per cent of the world’s emissions in 1981.

“In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects,” wrote Bernstein, a veteran of almost 30 years in the industry.

The full UCS report includes over 330 pages of document from around 85 internal company and trade association documents spanning 27 years.

For instance, during the 2009 discussion of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which proposed a federal carbon emission reduction plan, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) hired a PR firm which forged letters from diverse organisations to lobby congressmen and women against the bill.

Another major player in the report is the American Petroleum Institute (API), self-proclaimed “only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry”.

A 1998 internal API strategy document outlines the roadmap devised to confront the ever-growing climate change science and explicitly aimed to confuse and misinform the public, by sponsoring contrarian scientists and targeting teachers, schools and students across the United States.

The document states that victory would be achieved when “average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” IPS reached out to API by e-mail but got no answer.

Their modus operandi mimics that of tobacco companies, according to former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Sharon Eubanks who led the Department’s successful lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

“It’s like what we discovered with tobacco – the more you push back the date of knowledge of the harm, the more you delay any remediation, the more people are affected,” Eubanks told DeSmog website.

This was echoed by Katherine Sawyer, the International Climate Organiser at the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International, who told IPS that “we wouldn’t let the tobacco industry create tobacco control policy, so why are we letting the fossil fuel industry create climate change policy?” – referring to their participation in U.N. processes.

Some fossil fuel companies appear, at least publicly, to be willing to contribute to a solution. Six major European companies (Shell, BP, Total, Statoil, BG Group, and Eni) sent an open letter to the UNFCCC and the French Government stating they can take faster climate action if governments provide a global interlinked system of carbon pricing.

“If governments act to price carbon, this discourages high carbon options and encourages the most efficient ways of reducing emissions widely,” states their letter.

But the decades-long opposition of fossil fuel companies has eroded their credibility among climate scientists, activists and much of the public.

“For 20 years, the world’s largest polluters have stymied progress in the UNFCCC by exerting undue influence over the treaty process—from direct lobbying to sponsoring the talks themselves,” said Sawyer, recalling that this year’s COP21 climate talks in Paris will be sponsored by corporations like EDF and ENGIE whose coal operations contribute to the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of France’s emissions

“In order for the UNFCCC process to create the meaningful policy our planet desperately needs, negotiators need to kick big polluters out,” she said.

Throughout the world, fossil fuel companies have been hit both in their image and their financial appeal after years of campaigning by divestment groups, organisations that promote getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds linked to high-carbon industries such as coal, oil, and carbon.

“I definitely feel like the fossil fuel divestment movement is David against Goliath,” Perri Haser, lead organiser of the divestment campaign at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told IPS. “But here’s the thing about David and Goliath: we know how that story ends.”

A 2013 report highlighted how 90 companies, 50 of them publicly traded, were responsible for almost two-thirds of the world’s industrial carbon emissions over the past two and a half centuries.

That several major oil companies acknowledged risks from CO2 emissions as early as the 1980s doubles its significance since more than half of all industrial carbon emissions from 1750 onwards have been released since 1988.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The new U.S. effort to reduce carbon emissions sends a powerful signal to the business and energy sectors that the country is moving away from coal and embracing energy efficiency and renewables, says the WWF’s Samantha Smith. Credit: Rennett Stowe/CC by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

New efforts by the U.S. to reduce its carbon emissions are being welcomed around the world. On Monday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

This “is the strongest action ever taken by the U.S. government to fight climate change,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s Climate Action Commissioner.

Hedegaard said it’s an important step for “a president really investing politically in fighting climate change.”

“We’ve been waiting a long time to see who will be the first through the climate action doorway,” said the Seychelles Islands Ambassador Ronald Jumeau, who is a spokesperson for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). The very existence of many of these low-lying islands is threatened by sea level rise from a warming climate.

As the largest carbon emitter historically it’s important for the U.S. to take the lead, Jumeau told IPS.

“Now its time for other major carbon-emitting countries to step up,” he said. This is especially true for Japan, Canada and Australia, as well as China and India. “Small islands states are moving quickly to reduce our emissions and we cheer anyone who joins in.”

Several Pacific island countries hope to have their electricity from 100 percent renewable energy by 2020. Just last year the tiny country of Palau near New Zealand became the first nation to achieve this.

Other countries have also stepped up. China recently increased its renewable energy target and has banned new coal power plants in many urban regions. Just two weeks ago, Mexico increased its ambitious renewable energy target from 15 to 25 percent by 2018.
The U.S. announcement is one of a series of recent steps by a few countries to reduce emissions, said Samantha Smith, the leader of the WWF Climate and Energy Initiative.

“This is very encouraging and ought to inspire others to act,” Smith told IPS in an interview from Oslo.

In taking a strong public stance on emissions, the U.S. is sending a powerful signal to the business and energy sectors that the country is moving away from coal and embracing energy efficiency and renewables, Smith said.

“There are already more jobs and better jobs in the U.S. solar industry than in coal,” she added.

A recent study found that employing energy efficiency alone would create more than 600,000 skilled jobs, cut air pollution, fight climate change and result in 17 billion dollars in energy savings.

Jumeau said many countries will closely watch to see if the EPA can actually deliver on its promise given the contentious politics in the U.S.

The coal industry and its supporters in the Republican party will try to block the EPA, but they’re unlikely to be successful, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC.

While the EPA action on power plants is a positive sign by the U.S., it’s not ambitious enough to prevent global warming from rising well beyond 2 degrees C, Meyer told IPS.

New and larger commitments to cut carbon are what U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wants leaders to bring the Climate Summit 2014 in New York City in September.

“Ban Ki-moon has made it clear he wants commitments not speeches in New York. But it’s not clear what will happen,” said Meyer.

The European Union is the leader in cutting emissions – but it could and needs to do far more, said Smith.

“The EU has already reached its 2020 target but is unwilling to go further, when it could do more on renewables and energy efficiency,” she said.

She hopes the U.S. announcement will encourage the EU to be more ambitious in the run-up to the new global climate treaty to be finalised in Paris in 2015. Short-term reduction targets like 2020 are very important from an energy investment perspective, since they spell out where a country or region is going, she said.

Equally important is the scientific reality that carbon emissions must peak before 2020 to have a reasonable chance of staying below 2 degree C of global warming.

Jumeau says his colleagues at AOSIS are cautiously optimistic. They sense a change in the wind regarding public concern about global warming.

“Everyone around the world is suffering and its getting worse. The public is beginning to notice and see the impacts support scientists’ warnings.”

The new directives follow a previous mandate to set tougher emissions standards for cars and smaller vehicles. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

In an effort to reduce oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, President Barack Obama on Tuesday directed his administration to develop new fuel efficiency and emissions standards for trucks within the year.

The new directives follow a previous mandate to set tightened emissions standards for cars and smaller vehicles and encompass the president’s next step in trying to address U.S. emissions without needing to go through the U.S. Congress.

Speaking Tuesday, he made a point of touting the successes of his administration’s previous fuel-efficiency standards.

“Our levels of dangerous carbon pollution that contributes to climate change has actually gone down even as our production has gone up,” the president stated. “And one of the reasons why is because we dedicated ourselves to manufacturing new cars and new trucks that go farther on a gallon of gas — and that saves families money, it cuts down harmful pollution, and it creates new advances in American technology.”

Credit: UCS

The president did not stipulate any specific fuel efficiency standards that his administration wants to establish. Instead he noted that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation would have until March 2015 to develop a proposal for the newest round of fuel efficiency standards.

The new announcement constitutes the third round of Obama administration fuel efficiency standards, the second of which came into effect only last month.

The EPA and Department of Transportation have already implemented standards for model year 2012 to 2025 passenger vehicles and model year 2014 through 2018 heavy-duty trucks and buses. The latest regulations will be applicable to model years from 2018 and onwards.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an advocacy group, anticipates that previously established fuel efficiency standards for trucks made between 2014 and 2018 will reduce oil consumption by 390,000 barrels per day in 2030. They will also cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 270 million metric tonnes.

“Oil is the biggest contributor to climate change emissions in the U.S.,” Don Anair, the research and deputy director of UCS’s Clean Vehicles Programme, told IPS. “The administration already finalised fuel-efficiency standards for cars, which are the biggest consumers of oil, and trucks are second only to those.”

Although trucks, busses and long-haul tractor trailers only comprise seven percent of traffic on U.S. roads, they account for more than 25 percent of oil used on the roads and contribute to about 20 percent of carbon pollution in the transportation sector. In total, motor vehicles emit a third of carbon pollution in the U.S.

“In terms of tackling the climate impacts of transportation, trucks are the next biggest thing, and we’ll have significant oil emission reductions,” Anair said.

UCS also foresees the new standards creating over 40,000 jobs by 2020 and over 70,000 a decade later.

In response to the president’s declaration, the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association (EMA), a trade association, indicated that it would continue to design more fuel efficient engines and vehicles.

“EMA and its members have a long and successful record of working cooperatively with … regulatory agencies,” said EMA President Jed Mandel. “Our past efforts have resulted in … lower greenhouse gas emissions and improved fuel efficiency from medium and heavy-duty diesel vehicles.”

Some advocates of greater efficiency have suggested that research and development funding could potentially be raised by ending tax breaks on oil companies.

“There is potential for investing those funds in technologies that we know we need for addressing our oil consumption, climate change impacts, and air pollution,” UCS’s Anair said. “Making those investments in the technology of the future rather than continuing to provide tax incentives for established industries makes a lot of sense.”

Indeed, Obama himself has repeatedly called on Congress to end these subsidies.

“We need to get rid of, I think, the 4 billion dollars in subsidies we provide to oil and gas companies every year at a time when they’re earning near-record profits,” the president noted in 2011, “and put that money toward clean energy research, which would really make a big difference.”

Global challenge

As the United States seeks to ameliorate carbon emissions through fuel efficiency standards, the Obama administration is also trying to encourage developing countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions to ward off climate change.

On a visit to Indonesia on Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged the country to take a more active role in combating greenhouse gas emissions, going so far as to name it as big a security risk as terrorism.

“In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” Kerry said in Jakarta.

Climate change poses a particularly acute risk to Indonesia, an archipelago composed of more than 17,000 islands, as higher temperatures melt glaciers and ice, causing the sea level to dramatically rise and putting many Pacific islands at risk.

“This city, this country, this region is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry said. “It’s not an exaggeration to say to you that your entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.”

Nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 2013 (IPS)

Four prominent climate and energy scientists are calling on environmentalists to rethink their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy, warning that there is no “credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power”.

The warning comes just ahead of a new round of international climate negotiations, slated to start next week in Poland, aimed at arriving at an international consensus on action to mitigate climate change beyond 2015. Yet observers are increasingly pessimistic that this process will be able to keep the planet’s average temperature rise below two degree Celsius by the end of this century, the current stated goal."Solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down." -- Steve Clemmer of UCS

The new call comes in the form of a letter sent over the weekend to world leaders, prominent environmentalists and green organisations. Most prominently, it was signed by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who for decades has written of the dangers posed by climate change; today, he is perhaps the single most recognisable researcher speaking on the issue in the United States.

Also signing on to the call, addressed to “those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear energy”, are two additional U.S. scientists, Ken Caldeira and Kerry Emanuel, and one from Australia, Tom Wigley. Each are associated with major research institutions.

“We appreciate your organization’s concern about global warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change,” the four state.

“With the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology that has the potential to displace a large fraction of our carbon emissions. Much has changed since the 1970s. The time has come for a fresh approach to nuclear power in the 21st century.”

Currently, nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Globally, that figure is slightly lower, with 30 countries hosting nuclear reactors that provided around 12 percent of worldwide electricity production, as of 2011.

As of July, around 434 reactors were operating globally, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a U.S. lobby group. In addition, 71 new plants were under construction, including two here in the United States.

In their letter, the four scientists say that while they support renewable forms of electricity production, these methods appear unable to deal with the quickly ramping-up global demands for energy. They also suggest that new nuclear plant designs are cheaper and “much safer” than older reactors, while new incineration methods can “solve the waste disposal problem”.

The letter has been embraced by the nuclear industry, which many analysts suggest has been stagnating for years over environmental and safety concerns.

“The letter puts an exclamation point on a phenomenon that has been unfolding for several years, namely the steady growth in support for nuclear energy from leading environmentalists,” Marv Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, told IPS in a statement.

“Greenhouse gas emissions would be vastly higher if nuclear energy facilities did not provide 40 percent of the electricity globally that is produced by carbon-free sources of power (63 percent in the United States) … There is ever-increasing recognition of this analysis.”

Expensive, slow, risky

In fact, the number of environmentalists who have publicly begun advocating for nuclear power in the face of climate change remains quite low, though James Hansen will now be a notable addition.

Among environmentalists, initial reactions to the letter have been adamant, if respectful, rejection.

“[We] respect these scientists, and thank them for their years of service. Unfortunately, we will have to agree to disagree with them on this one,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“While we agree that the climate crisis is the most urgent challenge of our time, this group fails to acknowledge that wind, solar and [energy] efficiency are the faster, cheaper and safer way to fight the climate threat.”

Brune says nuclear plants are “too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky”, while noting that Germany, one of the world’s largest economies, is currently decommissioning its nuclear plants while focusing significant funding on renewable energy sources.

Indeed, green groups have been increasingly trumpeting the falling costs of renewables, with wind energy falling by around 43 percent over the past three years, and solar down by 80 percent. The economics of nuclear, on the other hand, have become even more complicated in recent years, with several U.S. plants shutting down over feasibility concerns.

Further many renewable technologies are currently ready to be put into action, compared to the decade it can take to build a new nuclear plant. A major report released last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a U.S. research group, found that currently available renewable technologies could provide 80 percent of U.S. demand by 2050.

And while, in their letter, Hansen and the other scientists allude to new technologies that would make the nuclear option cheaper and safer, most such methods have yet to be demonstrated.

“There certainly are proposed technologies that proponents say would address many of these concerns, but they don’t have a proven track record, and have yet to be deployed on a large scale,” Steve Clemmer, director of energy research for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“It would have been nice to know exactly what this letter is referring to, as they don’t actually back up these claims. If they’re going to convince environmental groups, they’re going to need to offer some good technical information.”

While UCS has focused for years on issues of nuclear safety and price (a recent analysis on a U.S. plant under construction can be found here), the group doesn’t reject the prospect of nuclear energy entirely.

“Because the climate issue is so large and the need to reduce emissions is so big and urgent, we certainly don’t want to take nuclear power off the table as a potential solution to climate change,” Clemmer says.

The United States alone, for instance, will likely have to reduce its emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050.

“As such, we’re definitely supportive of things like research and development of nuclear and other technologies that can reduce carbon emissions, and we want to make sure we have as many options at our disposal,” Clemmer continues.

“But where we are today is a different story. We’re not in a position to allow for large-scale deployment of nuclear power, due to concerns over security, proliferation, safety, waste disposal. Meanwhile, solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down.”

The Israeli claim of Iranian ICBMs targeting the United States was first made 15 years ago, after a commission led by Donald Rumsfeld warned in mid-1998 that Iran and North Korea “could” threaten the United States with ICBMs within five years. Credit: public domain

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Oct 11 2013 (IPS)

In an effort to provoke any possible opposition in U.S. political circles to a nuclear deal with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to exploiting an old claim that Iran is building intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States.

The Netanyahu claim takes advantage of the extreme position that has been taken on the issue by Pentagon and Air Force intelligence organisations but goes even further.

In an Oct. 1 interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS News, Netanyahu said Iranians are “building ICBMs to reach…the American mainland within a few years”. And in an interview with Charlie Rose a week later, he said the Iranians “are developing ICBMs – not for us, but for you.”

Netanyahu added, “The American intelligence agency knows as well as we do that Iran is developing ICBMs.”

Independent specialists on the issue say, however, that no evidence supports Netanyahu’s claim.

Michael Elleman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the author of an authoritative study on Iran’s missile programme, told IPS, “I’ve seen no evidence of Iranian ICBM development, let alone a capability.”

Elleman said Iran would need to test a missile at least a half dozen — and more likely a dozen times — before it would have an operational capability for an ICBM.

Thus far, however, Iran has not even displayed, much less tested, a larger version of its existing space launch vehicle that would be a necessary step toward an ICBM, according to David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Iran has only tested a space launch vehicle that can put a very small satellite into orbit, Wright told IPS.

“The fact that it’s not happening suggests something is holding them back,” said Wright. “Clearly we’re not seeing them moving very fast in that direction.”

The highly politicised nature of U.S. intelligence assessments on the Iranian ballistic missile programme has given Netanyahu the opportunity to make the claims of an incipient Iranian ICBM without fear of being called out.

Pentagon and industry interests pushing the idea of an Iranian ICBM threat to get support for spending on a missile defence system have long had a deep impact on intelligence assessments of the issue.

Netanyahu actually began warning of Iranian ICBMs targeting the United States 15 years ago, after a commission on foreign ballistic missile threats led by Donald Rumsfeld had warned in mid-1998 that Iran and North Korea “could” threaten the United States with ICBMs within five years.

The Rumsfeld Commission, which was organised to pressure the Bill Clinton administration to approve a national missile defence system, arrived at its five-year timeline by inviting the four major military contractors to suggest how Iran might conceivably succeed in testing an ICBM.

It also rejected the normal practice in threat assessment of distinguishing between what was theoretically possible and what was likely.

Since 2001, the U.S. intelligence community has been saying that Iran “could” have the capability to test an ICBM by sometime between 2012 and 2015, if it was given enough foreign – meaning Russian – assistance.

But it was generally recognised that the Russian government was unlikely to assist Iran in building an ICBM. And as the report on the issue published by the National Intelligence Council in December 2001 explained, “We judge that countries are much less likely to test as early as the hypothetical ‘could’ dates than they are by our projected ‘likely’ dates.”

In other words, “could” actually meant “is unlikely to”. But that fact was never covered in news articles, so it remained unknown except among a few policy wonks.

By 2009, it had become obvious to most of the intelligence community that the 2015 date could no longer be defended, even with the misleading “could” formulation. A National Intelligence Estimate that year, which was never made public, reportedly said Iran couldn’t achieve such a capability until sometime between 2015 and 2020.

Intelligence organisations connected with the Pentagon and the Air Force, however, never gave up the 2015 date. The Air Force’s National Air and Space intelligence Centre and the Defence Intelligence Agency published a paper that repeated the mantra: “With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015.”

In April 2010, the Pentagon quoted that statement word for word in a report to Congress.

When Netanyahu wanted to turn the heat up on the Iran nuclear issue in February 2012, his close allies cited that military estimate in support of an even more extreme claim. Strategic affairs minister Moshe Yaalon said Iran was developing a missile with a 6,000-mile range, which would allow it to reach the east coast of the United States.

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz went even further. “We estimate,” he said, “that in two or three years they will have the first ICBMs that can reach the east coast of America.”

Steinitz said the Israeli assessment was in line with the assessment of the Pentagon. But even the military estimate doesn’t say that Iran would have such an ICBM. It said only that Iran could test an ICBM, which would still leave Iran several years away from having an operational ICBM.

In July 2013, the Air Force National Air and Space intelligence Centre, DIA and Office of Naval Intelligence issued a new report on “Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat” that states flatly, “Iran could develop and test an ICBM capable of reaching the United States by 2015.”

That language omitted any reference to foreign assistance, which had always been a key element in the formula that had been adopted to satisfy missile defence interests.

But those interests were obviously pressing for even stronger language. Missile defence advocates have been pressing Congress to approve a missile defence site on the East Coast, making an Iranian ICBM threat even more important politically.

Iran, meanwhile, has said it is not interested in ICBMs at all. Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said in April 2010 that Iran “has no plans to build such a missile”.

And Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Aerospace Division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has guided Iran’s missile programme for decades, said in 2011 that Iran had no intention of producing missile with ranges beyond 2,000 km.

Iran was only interested in missiles that targeted U.S. bases in the region, Hajizadeh said.

Iran had a good strategic reason for its disinterest in an ICBM, according to a team of U.S. and Russian specialists who analysed the Iranian missile programme in May 2009. Iran would have to use rocket motor clusters, the U.S.-Russian team observed, and longer-range missiles based on that technology would have to be launched from above ground.

It would take days to prepare for launch and hours to fuel – all of which would be clearly visible to spy satellites, according to the team.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

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.”

U.S. President Barack Obama chairing the Security Council Summit on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in 2009. Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Reactions have been mixed to President Barack Obama’s call for greater nuclear arms reductions in the United States and Russia, made during his speech in Berlin on Wednesday.

“We may no longer live in fear of global annihilation, but so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe,” Obama stated. “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.”

The president addressed about 6,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, marking 50 years after U.S. President John F. Kennedy made a similar speech at the height of the Cold War."So long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe."
-- President Barack Obama

Obama announced he would push to work with Russia to reduce the number of U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe, as well as the total number of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by both countries.

“To me, the speech today was disappointing,” John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP), a New York advocacy group, told IPS. “Obama did not talk about some important multi-lateral opportunities, nor about creating more opportunities.”

Others lauded the president’s call as critical, if belated.

“The Berlin Wall fell more than two decades ago, and these reductions are long overdue,” Lisbeth Gronloud, a senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, said Wednesday.

“The president’s initiative implicitly acknowledges that today nuclear weapons are a liability, not an asset,” Gronloud added.

The New START Treaty of 2010 limited U.S. and Russian stockpiles to 800 missiles, bombers and submarine launchers each, as well as 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.

The Obama administration is now proposing cutting each country’s strategic warheads by a third, which would leave the United States and Russia with slightly over 1,000 nuclear weapons each.

“Bipartisan national security leaders agree that further, deeper nuclear reductions would increase U.S. security, lead to budget savings, and help pressure other nuclear-armed states to join the disarmament enterprise,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Arms Control Association, said Wednesday.

An expensive system

According to the Arms Control Association, the United States spends an estimated 31 billion dollars annually to support its arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and associated delivery systems.

If the country reduced its deployed strategic warheads to 1,000 or fewer, the group estimates, taxpayers would save some 58 billion dollars over the coming decade.

With terrorist and cyber attacks increasingly prevalent in recent years, analysts have stepped up calls for the U.S. government to re-evaluate whether a massive nuclear arsenal remains the most relevant way of addressing those threats, particularly given the hundreds of billions of dollars in upkeep those arsenals require.

Obama has renewed commitments to the U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which forbids all nuclear test explosions. Ratification of the treaty has already failed once in Congress, however, and the president has set no new deadline for submitting it to the Senate.

Obama has also stated that he plans to hold the fourth meeting of the Nuclear Security Summit, a biennial meeting to prevent nuclear terrorism around the world, in 2016, with the United States hosting the talks.

The administration now hopes to work with NATO allies to come up with concrete proposals for reducing the world’s stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by the New START Treaty from 2010.

Russia, which has many more tactical weapons than either the United States or Europe, has been resistant to such reductions in the past.

On Wednesday, Russia’s initial response to Obama’s call for reductions was lukewarm. One senior foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladmir Putin said Moscow wants to “expand the circle of participants” of countries reducing their nuclear arms.

“How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russia’s nuclear potential?” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told reporters in St. Petersburg.

Rehashing statements

In the United States, some civil society voices are suggesting that Obama’s new proposals sound suspiciously repetitive.

“President Obama’s nuclear proposals in Berlin are a tired rehash of U.S. nuclear policy,” said Alice Slater, the director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group, “designed to maintain America’s global military superiority in a web of alliances entangling other nations in a U.S. sphere of nuclear weapons and missile ‘offenses’ under the ribs of a leaky nuclear umbrella.”

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have already made it clear that they will push back against any treaty that proposes cuts deeper than those proposed in the 2010 New START Treaty, suggesting that the proposed reductions would hurt U.S. security.

“I do not believe the American people will support the president’s policy, which will serve only to weaken our nuclear deterrent and our ability to deal with threats to our strategic interest in the years to come,” James Inhofe, a conservative senator and ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday.

According to LCNP’s Burroughs, if proposed cuts made it into the treaty, it is not certain they would receive the required two-thirds majority in the Senate. However, he said a political understanding between the Obama administration and the Russian government would not actually require congressional approval.

But he also warned of severe objections to proceeding in that direction.

“The steps that Obama was talking about taking with respect to tactical nuclear weapons or the long-range strategic weapons is basically making any U.S. reduction contingent on Russian reciprocity,” Burroughs told IPS.

“I understand the political reasons…but the United States could make reductions on its own and invite Russia to follow – and we’d be perfectly safe.”

Mining tar sands oil in Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 70 percent of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must remain in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change. So why did the energy industry spend 674 billion dollars in 2012 looking for more?

A moratorium on investments new fossil fuel infrastructure is the obvious thing to do about this, said Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth in the UK."It's bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership." -- UCS's Alden Meyer

The United Nations is the place to get countries to begin a serious conversation about imposing such a moratorium starting Monday in Bonn, Germany, Rehman told IPS.

The 195 parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting next week in Bonn on a new climate treaty that would go into force in 2020 and discuss ways reduce emissions from fossil fuels prior to 2020.

The World Bank, International Energy Agency and a new report from economist Lord Nicholas Stern all say that close to 70 percent of known reserves of fossil fuels are “unburnable” to have a chance of global warming staying below two degrees C.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8C, leading to the loss of most of the sea ice in the Arctic, extreme weather events around the world, rising sea levels and oceans that are 30 percent more acidic.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will likely hit 400 parts per million (ppm) this May. That will be the first time in at least three million years.

All nations have agreed under the UNFCCC to keep temperatures below two degrees C, which is by no means a safe level of warming. However, scientists say we are on a path to at least three degrees C, which will trigger irreversible feedbacks leading to much higher temperatures and far worse impacts.

“It’s illogical to be making new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure,” Rehmand said.

The Carbon Tracker agrees. It’s a thinktank whose supporters include the big banks, Standard and Poor’s and the International Energy Agency. It co-authored the “Unburnable Carbon 2013” report with Lord Stern.

The Carbon Tracker says investments in fossil fuel are foolish and continuing them will inevitably crash the global economy because countries will be forced to severely limit how much fossil fuel is burned.

“The scale of ‘listed’ unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing,” said Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC.

“This report makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term,” Speeding said in statement.

While banks and investors are finally waking up to the carbon-climate problem, countries have struggled for two decades under the UNFCCC to construct a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions enough to stay below two degrees C. Perversely, those same countries are pumping 1.9 trillion of their taxpayer’s money each year into subsidising the fossil fuel industry, reported the International Monetary Fund last month. (1.9. trillion seconds is about 60,000 years.)

Countries have promised to reduce these subsidies for the world’s richest industry, but few have acted.

“It’s bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership,” said Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy.

The result is that global carbon emissions rise ever higher each year when they need to begin to decline. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is getting wider every year, Meyer said at a press conference last week.

The UNFCCC meeting in Bonn Apr. 29 to May 3 is one of several weeks of meetings before the annual Convention of the Parties (COP 19) negotiations in Poland this November. The main issues, as always, will be deciding how big the emissions cuts will be, the timing of those cuts and what the contribution should be for each country.

“There are two things to tackle in Bonn: how developed countries fulfill their promises to cut emissions deep and meet their financial commitments to enable developing countries to address climate change now,” said Meena Raman, negotiation expert at the Third World Network.

Developed countries and blocs like the U.S., Canada and the European Union do not appear ready to increase their promised emission cuts even though they are insufficient to achieve the two-degree C target and are collectively less than those from developing countries, as previously reported by IPS.

China is now the world’s biggest carbon emitter but it will be many years yet before the carbon molecules in the atmosphere with little Chinese flags on them will match those with U.S. flags. Since CO2 resides in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, emissions of 50 years ago have the same impact on the climate as those emitted today.

“It’s not hard to figure out the total amount of CO2 from the U.S. and other developed countries already in the atmosphere,” said Sivan Kartha, Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center.

“Taking responsibility for the mess you made is a widely-accepted principle,” Kartha told IPS.

This politically thorny issue is known as “historical emissions” and it pits the South against the North. More recently, countries in the North have been pushing the concept of “mitigation potential” suggesting that it is harder for the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions because of existing infrastructure than it is for poor countries like India who haven’t built them yet, he said.

While “moratorium” will only be whispered about, “equity” will be the buzzword in play in Bonn this week, Kartha said.

Positive developments on climate are largely found outside the UNFCCC process. China and the U.S. recently signed a landmark agreement on climate and clean energy. Both countries agreed climate change poses a serious risk and have agreed to take a global leadership position, said Alden Myer.

“I take this a very positive sign,” but it remains to be seen if this translates into action, Meyer said.