COP 14: United Nations Climate Change Conference

Words into ActionSpecial edition for COP 14

United Nations Climate Change ConferencePoznan, Poland, 1-12 December 2008

© Copyright 2008 Faircount Media Group.All rights reserved. Reproduction of editorial content in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Faircount Media Group does not assume responsibility for the advertisements, nor any representation made therein, nor the quality or deliverability of the products themselves. Reproduction of articles and photographs, in whole or in part, contained herein is prohibited without express written consent of the publisher, with the exception of reprinting for news media use.

Published by Faircount Media Group

European Headquarters5 Ella Mews, Hampstead,

London NW3 2NH,United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 7428 7000Fax: +44 (0)20 7117 3338

email: [email protected]

North American Headquarters701 North Westshore Blvd,

Tampa, Florida 33609,USA

Tel: +1 (813) 639 1900 Fax: +1 (813) 639 4344


Asia-Pacific HeadquartersLevel 21, Tower 2, 101 Grafton Street,

Bondi Junction, NSW 2022,Australia

Tel: +61 (0)2 8063 4800Fax: +61 (0)2 8580 5047


Associate PublisherDavid Woods

Editor Kevin Rafferty

Assistant EditorAnna Shen

SubeditorDavid Taylor

WritersThomas L Friedman

Richard GravesTony Juniper

William KeeganPalitha Kohona

Michael LeviBjørn LomborgSunita Narain

Henry NeufeldtGwyn Prins

Kevin RaffertyMichael Richardson

General ManagerLawrence Rosenberg

Commercial DirectorRichard Baker

Marketing ManagerTrevor Raymond

Marketing ExecutivesRoger BakerAndy MossNick Reid

Office Manager Chantelle Alvarez

Cover images: © DOE/NREL, ESA/AFP/Getty Images,

NASA, Still Pictures

Printed in Lithuania

PublishersPeter M. Antell

Ross W. Jobson

Design & Production Controller

Sandip Patel

Art DirectorJim Lockwood

Picture EditorKay Rowley

Photography As credited

Production Administrator Margaret Dube

Production Coordinator Colin Davidson

WiA Delegate Publication 1

Credits

2

5 Bringingtheworldtogether byMaciejNowicki,MinisteroftheEnvironment

7 WelcometoPoznan byRyszardGrobelny,MayorofPoznan

8 Writers&contributors

10 Agenda

12 ToomuchforPlanetEarthtobear IntroductionIbyKevinRafferty

16 Moneymakestheworldgoround IntroductionIIbyKevinRafferty

20 Thecompleatglobalclimateexpert InterviewwithRobertWatson byKevinRafferty

26 TimetoditchKyoto:thesequel OpinionbyGwynPrins

30 Thenon-scepticalheretic InterviewwithSteveRayner byKevinRafferty

34 BeyondKyoto:seekinganewclimatedeal InterviewwithYvodeBoer

38 Time’sup:actnow CallToActionbySunitaNarain

40 Reductionadabsurdum–who’sfirst? FrontLineFocus:Policy byMichaelLevi

42 China&climatechange:abasisfor constructiveinternationalpartnership FrontLineFocus:China byMichaelRichardson

44 Closingtheleadershipgap OpinionbyTonyJuniper

Contents

12

40 30

38

16

62

73

75

52

48

WiADelegatePublication 3

46 Whichwayforward? OpinionbyBjørnLomberg

48 Couldthevillainsofthepastbecomethe heroesofthefuture? IndustryFocusbyKevinRafferty

52 Thedrivetodevelopa‘greencar’ IndustryFocus byKevinRafferty

56 Flightorfight? IndustryFocusbyKevinRafferty

60 Sharp:thecuttingedgeofelectrical appliances IndustryFocusbyKevinRafferty

62 SupportingEuropeanclimatepolicy ResearchbyHenryNeufeldt

64 TarnishedGoldenBangladesh FrontLineFocus:Bangladesh byKevinRafferty

66 ThebattletosavetheAmazonrainforest FrontLineFocus:Brazil byKevinRafferty

70 BacktotheFuture OpinionbyPalithaKohona

73 Growupandactalready CallToActionbyRichardGraves

75 Engineeredtosurvive InterviewwithBrianLaunder byKevinRafferty

80 Readingbetweenthelines BookReview byKevinRafferty

83 Hot,FlatandCrowded BookExtract byThomasLFriedman

85 LetterfromHeaven EpiloguebyJohnMaynardKeynes

In 2008, the world saw strong financial institutions go under and affect

part of the so-called real economy in a domino effect. Cycles are natural movements in the economy.

In our business, we’ve had steep variations in the last few years and have learned to reason and decide based on long-term perspectives. We also perceived that planning and acting based on sustainable concepts were the best and most effective ways to create value for our shareholders.

However, our current challenges are even more formidable. According to recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the need for urgent action to fight global warming calls for strict and bold actions. Mankind will have to make difficult and unprecedented decisions in times of economic slow-down and business turmoil.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, new regulations will have to be established and ultimately will result in increased costs and lower profitability in companies and industries, necessarily bringing about changes in the competitive scenario.

We firmly intend to fight global warming, which will be difficult to achieve, but crucial for our goals.

The diplomatic agenda at Poznan is to start anew and devise a path to ensure the dissemination of cleaner technologies, forest preservation and the recovery of potentially affected regions.

To make it feasible, changes will have to occur in human development so as to reduce the huge gap between the rich and the poor. Income generation and distribution, in addition to climate safety, should equally be addressed. It is important to realistically and socially identify acceptable proposals.

A new economy is under construction. Just as those who were heavily affected by losses because they did not see that the information

technology revolution would change their business environment, today, losers will be those who do not incorporate new paradigms tailored by the architecture of a new revolution: the era of a new energy and environmental technology.

Information technology brought about a swift broadening out of new horizons, more agile means of communication between people and the creation of innovative business models. Currently, it is essential to use our entire creativeness to survive in a world of duress.

Easy access to information generates new demands for products and services in a world increasingly more uniform and populous; and more natural resources in the planet, energy in particular, will be required.

The role played by business communities is fundamental, given that only gradually, with each investment decision, will innovation be routinely incorporated to businesses. Success or failure in this process will fundamentally depend on how seriously we face climate change.

Stable norms are therefore essential - the springboard to solution generation.

Clean development mechanisms need to be improved to yield greater liquidity and ensure predictability, so as to allow more stable prices and solid investment decisions.

Vale has diligently planned to face this new reality in a structured manner. This year, we established a specific corporate policy for climate change, in which our beliefs and course of actions were clearly stated to our stakeholders. Vale Carbon Program – a wide-ranging set of globally coordinated measures with the objective of attaining standards of excellence in our actions regarding climate change by 2012 - became official by our policy disclosure. This program is based on five pillars: 1) the strategic assessment of our business in the light of climate change; 2) the implementation of emission reduction and CO

2 sequestration

projects; 3) investments in knowledge and technology; 4) contributions to building a regulatory framework; 5) transparency.

We invested heavily in hydroelectricity, pioneered the intensive scale use of biodiesel on railroads, replaced fuel oil consumption for natural gas in our pelletizing plants, and created a company to develop solutions for renewable energy generation. We are currently implementing the largest reforestation project in the Amazon region; and 35% of our energy matrix is based on renewable sources.

For our resolute volunteerism and straightforward transparency, we are now a reference company in climate change, acknowledged as such by the Carbon Disclosure Project in Latin America and recognized as distinguished global leaders. We are aware that much still remains to be done. We are optimistic however and looking for new opportunities.

We greet the Poznan negotiators and wish them success in their efforts to bring about a more feasible and fair world.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Foreword


The world is undergoing continuous change which we can no longer

stop. As a result of human activities, the climate is also changing. Today, the tackling of global warming is an enormous challenge for all of us, but it is only our common efforts that can bring effects. The greatest world mechanism supporting these efforts is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), along with its Kyoto Protocol. In the course of the last session of the Conference held in Bali, an action plan was developed; it envisages the adoption of a new instrument at the Fifteenth Session in Copenhagen in 2009. This will be preceded by two years of negotiations. During this period, the Fourteenth

Session of the Conference of the Parties to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held, along with the Fourth Session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP 14/CMP 4).

I have the honour of welcoming you to this event, so deeply important on the world level, taking place in Poznan, Poland. The task of the Poznan Conference is to sum up the results of the Kyoto Protocol, along with an indication of the necessary changes and improvements which should be incorporated into the new instrument which is to be adopted.

In parallel with the Conference, we will be organising a large exhibition of technological innovations serving

to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This project should facilitate specific measures designed to protect the climate on the Earth.

In welcoming you to Poznan, ladies and gentlemen, I express my hope that through the UN Conference, we shall be able to work out effective methods to address those changes which may be harmful for all of us.

Professor Maciej Nowicki Minister of the Environment

“The tackling of global warming is an enormous

challenge for all of us, but it is only our

common efforts that can bring effects”

Bringing the world together

In 2008, the world saw strong financial institutions go under and affect

part of the so-called real economy in a domino effect. Cycles are natural movements in the economy.

In our business, we’ve had steep variations in the last few years and have learned to reason and decide based on long-term perspectives. We also perceived that planning and acting based on sustainable concepts were the best and most effective ways to create value for our shareholders.

However, our current challenges are even more formidable. According to recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the need for urgent action to fight global warming calls for strict and bold actions. Mankind will have to make difficult and unprecedented decisions in times of economic slow-down and business turmoil.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, new regulations will have to be established and ultimately will result in increased costs and lower profitability in companies and industries, necessarily bringing about changes in the competitive scenario.

We firmly intend to fight global warming, which will be difficult to achieve, but crucial for our goals.

The diplomatic agenda at Poznan is to start anew and devise a path to ensure the dissemination of cleaner technologies, forest preservation and the recovery of potentially affected regions.

To make it feasible, changes will have to occur in human development so as to reduce the huge gap between the rich and the poor. Income generation and distribution, in addition to climate safety, should equally be addressed. It is important to realistically and socially identify acceptable proposals.

A new economy is under construction. Just as those who were heavily affected by losses because they did not see that the information

technology revolution would change their business environment, today, losers will be those who do not incorporate new paradigms tailored by the architecture of a new revolution: the era of a new energy and environmental technology.

Information technology brought about a swift broadening out of new horizons, more agile means of communication between people and the creation of innovative business models. Currently, it is essential to use our entire creativeness to survive in a world of duress.

Easy access to information generates new demands for products and services in a world increasingly more uniform and populous; and more natural resources in the planet, energy in particular, will be required.

The role played by business communities is fundamental, given that only gradually, with each investment decision, will innovation be routinely incorporated to businesses. Success or failure in this process will fundamentally depend on how seriously we face climate change.

Stable norms are therefore essential - the springboard to solution generation.

Clean development mechanisms need to be improved to yield greater liquidity and ensure predictability, so as to allow more stable prices and solid investment decisions.

Vale has diligently planned to face this new reality in a structured manner. This year, we established a specific corporate policy for climate change, in which our beliefs and course of actions were clearly stated to our stakeholders. Vale Carbon Program – a wide-ranging set of globally coordinated measures with the objective of attaining standards of excellence in our actions regarding climate change by 2012 - became official by our policy disclosure. This program is based on five pillars: 1) the strategic assessment of our business in the light of climate change; 2) the implementation of emission reduction and CO

2 sequestration

projects; 3) investments in knowledge and technology; 4) contributions to building a regulatory framework; 5) transparency.

We invested heavily in hydroelectricity, pioneered the intensive scale use of biodiesel on railroads, replaced fuel oil consumption for natural gas in our pelletizing plants, and created a company to develop solutions for renewable energy generation. We are currently implementing the largest reforestation project in the Amazon region; and 35% of our energy matrix is based on renewable sources.

For our resolute volunteerism and straightforward transparency, we are now a reference company in climate change, acknowledged as such by the Carbon Disclosure Project in Latin America and recognized as distinguished global leaders. We are aware that much still remains to be done. We are optimistic however and looking for new opportunities.

We greet the Poznan negotiators and wish them success in their efforts to bring about a more feasible and fair world.

WORK ING,INVE STING

AND INNOVATINGFOR A S USTAIN ABLE F UTURE

The Odebrecht Group's companies and engineering and construction projects have been supporting the development of Brazil

and other countries for over sixty years. Our mission is to promote responsible development while sharing the benefits of growth

with local and global communities through innovation, technology, and the efficient use of natural resources. We are investing

today towards a balanced and sustainable planet for the future generations.

An Odebrecht project being carried out by ETH Bionergy is producing sugar caneethanol as biofuel while using bagasse for thermal and electric power cogeneration.

Researchers from Braskem, Odebrecht's lead company in Petrochemicals, have developedthe world's first “green plastic” – certified polyethylene made from sugar cane ethanol.

The Braskem Environmental Protection Park in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul– one of the company's nature preserves.

A young participant in the OdebrechtFoundation's environmental education programin northeastern Brazil.

Odebrecht is one of the world's top global hydropower plants contractor, helping growthis key source of renewable energy in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Foreword


Poznan is extremely proud to have been chosen to host the

Fourteenth Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the same time as the conference is taking place – between 1st and 12th December 2008 on the grounds of the International Poznan Fair – the Fourth Session of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol will be held, with the government of the Republic of Poland and the United Nations as organisers of both conferences and the accompanying events.

We expect between 6,000 and 10,000 participants to visit Poznan in connection with the conference: official government delegations from 192 countries, as well

as representatives from the international scientific community and members of non-governmental organizations.

The City of Poznan, in fulfilling its role as the host of this prestigious event, recognises it as a crucial international meeting and a leading example of responsible policymaking.

The Poznan authorities have taken the opportunity the conference offers to declare 2008 to be the Year of Climate and the Environment in our city. As a part of this project, numerous educational, cultural and promotional events have been organised in the city throughout the year. They include both gatherings aimed at the general public, such as concerts, open debates, media and promotional actions, and

also specialised events: conferences, scientific lectures and symposia.

We believe this will be a great opportunity for the City of Poznan to actively engage in the global discussion about the future of our planet.

We look forward to meeting you at the UNFCCC in Poznan.

Ryszard GrobelnyMayor of Poznan

“The Poznan authorities have taken the opportunity

the conference offers to declare 2008 to be the Year of Climate and the Environment in our city”

Welcome to Poznan

WORK ING,INVE STING

AND INNOVATINGFOR A S USTAIN ABLE F UTURE

The Odebrecht Group's companies and engineering and construction projects have been supporting the development of Brazil

and other countries for over sixty years. Our mission is to promote responsible development while sharing the benefits of growth

with local and global communities through innovation, technology, and the efficient use of natural resources. We are investing

today towards a balanced and sustainable planet for the future generations.

An Odebrecht project being carried out by ETH Bionergy is producing sugar caneethanol as biofuel while using bagasse for thermal and electric power cogeneration.

Researchers from Braskem, Odebrecht's lead company in Petrochemicals, have developedthe world's first “green plastic” – certified polyethylene made from sugar cane ethanol.

The Braskem Environmental Protection Park in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul– one of the company's nature preserves.

A young participant in the OdebrechtFoundation's environmental education programin northeastern Brazil.

Odebrecht is one of the world's top global hydropower plants contractor, helping growthis key source of renewable energy in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Writers & contributors

8

ProFessor robert WatsoN has been the Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) since 2007. His main role is to provide ministers with the best possible scientific advice and build on existing measures to ensure that science and technology are used to inform policy. He was previously chief scientist

and senior advisor for sustainable development at the World Bank. He has held senior positions at NASA and at the White House, where he was responsible for ensuring that science underpinned policymaking. He is chair of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia, and the director for strategic direction for the Tyndall Centre at the university.

thomas L FriedmaN joined the New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specialising in OPEC- and oil-related news and later served as the chief diplomatic, chief White House, and international economics correspondents. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles reporting the Middle East conflict, the end

of the Cold War, US domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. His twice-weekly foreign affairs column is syndicated to 700 newspapers worldwide. Friedman is author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, and The World Is Flat. His books have been translated into almost 30 languages including Chinese and Japanese.

briaN LaUNder read mechanical engineering at Imperial College, receiving the Bramwell Medal for graduating at the head of the class. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for experimental research on boundary layers. After teaching fluid mechanics for 12 years at Imperial College, he became professor of

mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis in 1976. In 1980, he became head of the thermo-fluids division at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (later incorporated with Manchester University as the University of Manchester).

Professor Launder is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He served two terms as head of the Mechanical Engineering Department (1983-85 and 1993-95) and was chairman of the campus-wide Environmental Strategy Group until the creation of the University of Manchester. He was the regional director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from its creation in 2000 until 2006.

dr bjørN Lomborg is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist, and an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. In 2008, he was named one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine and one of ’50 people who could save the planet’ by

The Guardian newspaper.

Yvo de boer is a citizen and former senior official of the Netherlands. He was born in Vienna in 1954, and was appointed executive secretary of the UNFCCC in August 2006. He has been involved in climate change policies since 1994. He helped to prepare the position of the European Union in the lead-up to the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, assisted

in the design of the internal burden sharing of the European Union and led delegations to the UNFCCC negotiations. He has actively sought broad stakeholder involvement on the issue of climate change. To that end, he launched an international dialogue on the clean development mechanism and has partnered international discussions with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, aimed at increasing private sector involvement.

toNY jUNiPer is a campaigner, writer, adviser and commentator, and one of the United Kingdom’s best-known authorities on the environment. He was formerly director of Friends of the Earth and presently works in several different roles, including being a special advisor with the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project and as a Senior Associate with the

Cambridge University Programme for Industry.

steve raYNer describes himself as an “undisciplined” scholar, committed to changing the world through social science. In addition to being James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and director of the James Martin Institute at Oxford University, he heads the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s national research programme Science in Society, serves

on the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and is a lead author in Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His research interests revolve around the relationship between nature and society as mediated by science and technology. Before Oxford, he spent 22 years in the US as professor at Columbia University and working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In October 2008, he was chosen by Wired as one of the 15 people whom the new US President should listen to.

dr heNrY NeUFeLdt is a geoecologist from Bayreuth and has worked for many years on sustainable land-use systems in Brazil and on soil and water salinisation in Paraguay. After an interval in the IT sector, he worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environment in Leipzig, studying the effects of mitigation policies on GHG emissions in agriculture.

Currently he is senior research coordinator at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia and coordinates the EU funded Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies for Climate Change Project (ADAM), within which he works on adaptive capacity and limits to adaptation in Inner Mongolia. His general research interest is global climate change and sustainable development, in particular mitigation and adaptation in land management in the context of science and policy.

Writers & contributors

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

Wia Delegate Publication 9

miChaeL a Levi is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and director of the CFR Program on Energy Security and Climate Change. He was project director for the CFR-sponsored independent task force on climate change, chaired by former Governors George E Pataki and Thomas J

Vilsack. He was previously science and technology fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

toNY tYLer graduated in law from Oxford University, and joined the Swire Group in 1977 and was posted to a trucking firm in Australia. The following year he joined Swire’s Cathay Pacific Airways and has remained with the airline ever since, doing jobs in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Canada, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom. In 1996, he

became director of corporate development, and was promoted to chief operating officer in 2005. In 2007, he became chief executive officer of Cathay. He is also chairman of Hong Kong Dragon Airlines and a director of John Swire & Sons (HK) and of the Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company. In June 2009, he will become chairman of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) board of governors.

dr PaLitha tb KohoNa is a citizen of Sri Lanka and Australia. He is Secretary/Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka, a position he took up in January 2007 after President Mahinda Rajapakse asked him to come back home from the United Nations the previous year to be in charge of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (with the LTTE). From 1995, he was Head

of the UN Treaty Division, where he also managed the computerisation of the UN treaty database containing 50,000 bilateral treaties and 500 multilateral treaties, together more than a million pages. Before joining the UN, he was with Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade, with extensive experience of trade and environment issues. Born in Matale, Sri Lanka, Dr Kohona has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Sri Lanka, an LLM from the Australian National University and a PhD from Cambridge University.

KeviN raFFertY is the editor of this publication, and an authority on the political economy of developing countries. Winning the important British press award as Young Journalist of the Year gave him the chance to explore India, where he spent time in the powerful North and South Blocks of the government secretariat in New Delhi and in grassroots villages of

Bihar, where there was often no grass. He was in charge, from London, of the Asia coverage of the Financial Times before leaving to start a new daily business paper in Malaysia soon described by Norman Pearlstine (then with the Wall Street Journal and later editor in chief of Time) as “the best daily newspaper in developing Asia.” He was later Asia-Pacific chief of Institutional Investor, also responsible for coverage of all developing countries. He has edited daily papers in India, Thailand and Hong Kong, making him one of the few western journalists to have reported on Asia from the outside in and the inside out. He has also edited daily papers during IMF/World Bank and multilateral development bank meetings worldwide, altogether more than 30 different cities on five continents. He is author of major books on Hong Kong and Japan, and is working on an authoritative book on the political economy of India.

sUNita NaraiN is director of the Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading environmental activist group, as well as publisher of its fortnightly magazine Down to Earth. She has worked for the centre, as a volunteer, then on its staff, since its foundation by Anil Agarwal in 1980. In 1991, she co-authored with Agarwal

a groundbreaking report, Global Warming in an Unequal World, which led to an international debate as it was the first time that the issue of equity had been raised with regards to global warming. CSE’s campaign against air pollution in the 1990s was largely credited with the decision to use compressed natural gas in Delhi’s buses, taxis and three-wheeled autorickshaws. After the untimely death of Agarwal from cancer in 2002, Sunita Narain has carried on his vision of allying “the rigour of science to the passion of journalism.”

riChard graves is the founder of Fired Up Media and editor for ItsGettingHotinHere.org – dispatches from the youth climate movement. He helps over two hundred youth leaders from around the world tell their stories in the fight against global warming and for a more just and sustainable world. He is an International Youth Foundation 2008 Global Fellow

and Program Director for Global Environment at Americans for Informed Democracy. He graduated from Macalester College in 2006 with a BA in Asian and Environmental History.

miChaeL riChardsoN is a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore. An energy and security specialist, he is currently writing a book on climate change and Southeast Asia.

gWYN PriNs is Research Professor at the London School of Economics and Director of the LSE Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events. He has recently served as the first Alliance Research Professor jointly at LSE and Columbia University, New York. He was, for more than 20 years, a Fellow in History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge,

and a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Cambridge. Since 2006, he has been working on a collaborative project with colleagues from the Universities of Oxford, Colorado and Arizona to explain why the Kyoto Protocol was doomed to fail and what to do instead.

aNNa sheN is assistant editor of this publication, and has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, US News and World Report, and ABC News. She worked at the World Bank, editing the bank’s in-house newspaper and launching Global Links, a documentary series shot and distributed around the world. As a media relations officer at the UN Food and

Agriculture Organization in Rome, she worked to educate the media on global hunger and agriculture issues. She has also worked on international media training for Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank run by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

10

10.00 Welcoming Ceremony, including the opening of the Fourteenth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) and the opening of the Fourth Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP)

1.00 Q&A: Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board 3.00 The Fourth Session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long

Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA)3.00 The Twenty-ninth Session of the Subsidiary Body

for Implementation (SBI)4.30 The resumed Sixth Session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on

Further Commitments for Annex I Parties (AWG-KP)4.30 The Twenty-ninth Session of the Subsidiary Body for

for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA)8.00 Reception, hosted by the Government of Poland

10.00 Informal Group Meetings

1.00 Event: Growing together in a changing climate3.00 Informal Group Meetings6.00 Event: International Transaction Log and registries operations

Free Day to mark Eid al-Adha

10.00 In-session workshop of the SBSTA10.00 In-Session workshop of the SBI

1.00 Event: The Least Developed Countries Fund Expert Group and National Adaptation Programmes of Action

1.00 Q&A: Joint Implementation3.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-LCA3.00 In-session workshop of the SBSTA4.30 In-session workshop of the SBI

10.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-LCA10.00 Informal Group Meetings



3.00 Closing Meeting of the SBSTA3.00 Closing Meeting of the SBI3.00 Closing Meeting of the AWG-KP3.00 Closing Meeting of the AWG-LCA7.30 Gala Banquet for Ministers and Heads of Delegations,

hosted by the Government of Poland

Poznan 2008 AgendaMONDAY 1 DECEMBER TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER WEDNESDAY 3 DECEMBER THURSDAY 4 DECEMBER

FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER SATURDAY 6 DECEMBER SUNDAY 7 DECEMBER MONDAY 8 DECEMBER

TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER WEDNESDAY 10 DECEMBER THURSDAY 11 DECEMBER FRIDAY 12 DECEMBER


10.00 Round Table: Assessment of the status of implementation of article 4, paragraph 8, of the Convention

10.00 In-session workshop of the CMP10.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-LCA11.30 Informal Group Meetings

1.00 Event: Clean Development Mechanism methodologies and Programme of Activities

3.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-KP3.00 Informal Group Meetings6.00 Event: Progress of work of the EGTT

Free Day to mark the Christian day of rest

10.00 Opening ceremony of the Joint High-level Segment of COP and CMP


1.00 Formal luncheon for Ministers and Heads of Delegations, hosted by the UNFCCC Executive Secretary

3.00 Joint High-level Segment of COP and CMP 3.00 Informal Group Meetings4.00 Round Table: Shared Vision7.00 Concert for Ministers and Heads of Delegations,

hosted by the Government of Poland

10.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-LCA10.00 In-session workshop of the AWG-KP11.30 Informal Group Meetings

3.00 In-session workshop of the CMP3.00 Informal Group Meetings6.00 Event: Update on investment and financial flows to address

climate change



10.00 Joint High-level Segment of COP and CMP

3.00 Joint High-level Segment of COP and CMP, including the closing of the Fourteenth Session of COP and the closing of the Fourth Session of CMP

MONDAY 1 DECEMBER TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER WEDNESDAY 3 DECEMBER THURSDAY 4 DECEMBER

FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER SATURDAY 6 DECEMBER SUNDAY 7 DECEMBER MONDAY 8 DECEMBER

TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER WEDNESDAY 10 DECEMBER THURSDAY 11 DECEMBER FRIDAY 12 DECEMBER

Too much for Planet Earth to bearby Kevin Rafferty

We are all living beyond our means – that’s the stark fact that must be confronted by the delegates arriving at Poznan. But how do you go about changing the world?

The waters of the Ilulissat Icefjord in western Greenland could hold up to 20 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves. The indigenous Inuits are already protesting plans to plunder the region’s natural resources.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Introduction

12

A troubling assessment of the Earth’s ecological imbalance came with the

publication of the Living Planet Report 2008 in late October, which claims that people are consuming resources so rapidly that, by 2030, two Earths will be needed to support current lifestyles.

The report, produced by WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, says that the global ecological debt is between $4 to 4.5 trillion a year – in other words, more than double the estimated losses made by the world’s financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis. It calculates that global biocapacity – the area available to produce our resources and capture our emissions and keep the Earth’s biosystems in balance – is 2.1 hectares per person. The actual footprint per person is 2.7 hectares, but there are huge differences across the globe. The US and China each account for 21 per cent of global biocapacity. But US citizens require 9.4 global hectares – meaning that if everyone on the planet lived like an American, we would need 4.5 planet Earths already – whereas average Chinese consumption is 2.1 hectares, so if everyone on Earth lived like a Chinese we would be OK, just.

Coming just before thousands of ministers, bureaucrats, environment and

climate change specialists plus lobbyists and media pundits convene at Poznan to lay the foundations for a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the report offers a quick reality check.

Cynics might ask “Why bother?” with Poznan or Copenhagen in 2009, because the way we are gobbling up the Earth’s resources we are not going to get to 2050 or any of the other target dates used

in the proliferation of position papers for Poznan. The world will probably end in a big bang of fighting over diminishing resources rather than the whimpers of people slowly suffocating from global warming.

Cynics would become more cynical if they read the UNFCCC website, which says that Poznan “provides the opportunity to draw together the advances made in 2008 and move from discussion to negotiation mode in 2009.

“Such an outcome at Poznan would build momentum towards an agreed

outcome at Copenhagen. At COP 14/CMP 4 in Poznan, all parties are expected to:

• Agree on a plan of action and programmes of work for the final years of negotiations after a year of comprehensive and extensive discussions on crucial issues relating to future commitments, actions and cooperation

• Make significant progress on a number of on-going issues required to enhance further the implementation of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol

• Advance understanding and commonality of views on ‘shared vision’ for a new climate change regime

• Strengthen momentum and commitment to the process and the agreed timeline”

To bureaucrats, buzz phrases such as “plan of action…”, “significant progress…”, “commonality of views on ‘shared vision’ (daringly in quotation marks)…” and “strengthen momentum and commitment” might seem dynamic. But the agenda and position papers lack the blood and guts of the political drama that dances somewhere offstage,

© S

lim A

llagu

i/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

The people who will suffer most from global warming are the already poor, while those who will benefit are

the already rich

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


and fail to capture the dramatic changes in climate starting to occur faster than the experts imagined.

On the rocksBritish researchers reported in October that the summer shrinkage in the Arctic ice, which this year led to the opening of the Northwest Passage, is continuing in winter, and the thickness of the sea ice decreased by 19 per cent in winter 2007. Usually the ice thins in summer and thickens again in winter, but Katherine Giles of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London noted: “After the summer 2007 record melting, the thickness of the winter ice also nose-dived. What is concerning is that sea ice is not just receding but it is also thinning.” Winter air temperatures in 2007 were cold, so they were not the cause. Which leaves the disturbing possibility that a rise in water temperature or changes in ocean circulation might be responsible.

A world away in the highest Himalayas, glaciers are disappearing. On the Chinese side, the World Bank’s David Dollar said scientists project that the glaciers will be 80 per cent gone by 2035; in India, some experts say that the glaciers may disappear in 20 to 30 years. At stake is one of the world’s great river systems, not just a

single river, but eight: the Yangzi and Yellow, the Brahmaputra, the Indus, Mekong, Irrawady and Salween from the Tibetan plateau, and the Ganga on the Indian side.

In the United States, Walden Pond, beloved of Henry David Thoreau (both icons of conservation), is suffering

from climate change. Scientists report that 27 per cent of the species of plants documented by Thoreau in the 1850s have disappeared, and that another 36 per cent are in imminent danger. The mean annual temperature has climbed by 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.24 Celsius) since Thoreau’s time, and plants and nature generally are failing to adapt quickly enough.

It could be an ominous warning. Since the Industrial Revolution there has been a significant, albeit so far slow, change in the Earth’s atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide has climbed from 280 to 387 parts per million (ppm) and is set to go higher. Because of the complexities of climate science, there is argument about how much higher it will go, how much higher it should go without total disaster, and what the implications are of each successive rise. James Hansen, the father of global warming, warns, “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path.”

He and others would like to reduce emissions to 350 ppm. The consensus is that the limit should be 400 to have a good chance of restraining the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. (See interview with Bob Watson, page 20). But some climate specialists warn that it will be impossible to restrict the rise in carbon dioxide levels to below 550 ppm, and probably difficult to keep them to 650 ppm, implying temperature rises of 4 degrees Celsius and higher. Such a scenario would throw the global cycle out of balance, with potentially disastrous consequences to the climate and a disruption of the whole of the Earth’s ecology.

John Donne’s claim that “No man is an island” is proving prophetic: a small event in an insignificant place can send ripples far and wide. The beating of a butterfly’s wings deep in the Amazon can trigger a tornado in Texas. Plastic bags and toothbrushes discarded in the US have turned up in the stomachs of albatrosses on remote Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Pollution from the factories in China that have sprung up as the economy grows by leaps and bounds has spread not only to Hong Kong but right across the Pacific to Los Angeles. The cutting down of tropical rainforests adds more

Do governments have the guts to challenge their own people and tax the instant gratification that comes at

the cost of the planet?

Albatrosses on the remote Pacific island of Midway (right) have been found with American garbage in their bellies.

Hot vapour rises from the chimneys of the Monalisa Ceramics Company (below), which was moved from the ceramics production centre in Foshan to Qingyuan following accusations that emissions from the factory were responsible for acid rain in the Pearl River Delta.

© C

hina

Pho

tos/

Get

ty Im

ages

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

14

ownership, as well as further damage to the environment, for a gain of a few years and bigger problems ahead.

The number of vulnerable people whose lives would be devastated by rising temperatures are too awful to contemplate. It is not just the polar bear whose future is at stake but also the Royal Bengal tiger, along with 1.5 billion people in the Tibetan-Himalayan ecosystem and up to half of humanity beyond. Imagine if Bangladesh and its 160 million people were squeezed by encroaching sea waters from the south and by desertification of the green land as a result of disappearing glaciers. The poorest parts of Africa would also be especially at risk.

The responses of the major players, especially as expressed during the US presidential election campaign, are

discouraging enough to make one despair for the planet. Shrill cries of “drill, baby, drill” from Republicans seeking the illusory fix of new drilling to curb dependence on oil imports, now accounting for almost two thirds of US oil use. A better way would be to increase the energy efficiency of US cars, from the current 20.4 miles per gallon, to match average European cars that get 40 mpg. But the ailing US carmakers would find it hard to cope.

The yahoo.com website in October offered five good reasons for buying an SUV, in denial of anything but pandering to pampered lifestyles. “An SUV isn’t an image vehicle. It’s a tool that helps you live the way you want to,” claimed the article, noting that you could negotiate mountain roads, tow your boat, and carry your hyper-scheduled activity machine called a child to soccer or ballet practice.

to global greenhouse gases than all the pollution caused by cars and aircraft, and almost as much as industry.

Against this, progress towards curbing greenhouse gas emissions has been slower than even the relatively modest ambitions of the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions of carbon dioxide from the US rose by 16.3 percent between 1990 and 2005. The US, although a signatory to Kyoto, has not ratified it, so has no binding target.

Nor has China, which, thanks to double-digit economic growth, has passed the US in total emissions, though the US is still far ahead in per capita terms. Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 75 per cent since 1970. Perhaps the most worrying sign is that Japan, traditionally the most stingy developed country in energy efficiency, has shown a 7 per cent increase in its gas emissions between 1990 and 2005. Japan’s Kyoto target is for a 6 per cent decrease.

The price of changeThe daunting size of the task has led some economists to say that it is too expensive, in social as well as economic terms, to dream of tackling climate change. Bjørn Lomborg (see page 46) believes that there are better things to do with the money, as well as benefits from higher temperatures, from farming in Greenland to immense oil, gas and mineral riches uncovered under the Arctic ice cap.

The problem with such philosophies of complacency or despair is that the people who will suffer most from global warming are the already poor, while those who will benefit are the already rich. The Arctic may hide 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas resources, according to the US Geological Survey. The oil is equivalent to three years of global demand, the gas the same as Russia’s huge reserves. But getting them out could trigger a war over their

One glimmer of hope came from President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech, when he put “a planet in peril” immediately after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and before “the worst financial crisis in a century” as the challenges he has to tackle. But he will not be president at Poznan and his plans for a greener US will have to fight against strong vested interests both in and out of Congress. He needs a two thirds majority in the senate – which the Democrats do not have – to ratify any treaty.

The attitude from Beijing is, by these standards, measured. China has finally admitted that its greenhouse emissions have caught up with the US, but refused to give its own figures. China added that its emissions will not fall any time soon and it will not allow the battle against emissions to impede its quest for growth. Beijing also offered its solution – the rich countries should pay 0.7 to 1 per cent of their gross domestic product to clean up the mess that their industrial pollution has caused and to transfer clean technology to the developing world. That would be about $500 billion or ten times total annual aid from the rich countries.

India’s paper on long term cooperative action stresses equity, the rights of developing countries to be allowed to develop and the responsibility of industrialised countries for existing greenhouse gases. It repeats the promise in India’s own energy plan that “our per capita emissions (of greenhouse gases) will not exceed those of developed countries.” It also claims that “any stabilisation target should be achieved on the principle that each human being has an equal right to the common atmospheric resource accounting also for the historical responsibility of developed countries in building the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (emphasis in the original).”

Emissions and omissionsThe Kyoto Protocol is a flawed document, not least because of what it omits as what it contains. The three biggest emitters – China, the US and the relentless march of deforestation – are effectively excluded, as are emissions from transport. Professors Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner have

There is no problem on Earth that any one country

can solve on its own

The Royal Bengal tiger (left) is just one of the species that is inexorably being pushed to the edge of extinction.

© iS

tock

phot

o

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


were insistent on their right to gas at below $3 a gallon, even though that is a third of the price paid in Europe. As soon as prices started to fall, the enthusiasm for alternative energy began to fade. Do governments have the guts to challenge their own people and tax the instant gratification that comes at the cost of the planet, making consumers pay for their gas and emissions? On the evidence of the US presidential election, they don’t.

Green pastures Tom Friedman (see page 80) may be right, and a green America can lead the world to new pastures where everyone in the world can enjoy an American lifestyle without damage to the environment. But on a planet with finite resources that are rapidly being depleted, it seems rather dreamy. Aiming for a more modest and energy-efficient lifestyle could help to bring the average ecological footprint into balance with what the Earth will support. It was done in the 1960s, but it would require governments to redefine real economic growth.

Who is going to pay to clean up the emissions? China’s demand for 0.7 to 1 per cent of rich GDP echoes the UN’s decades-old ambitions for economic aid. Back then, the rich countries lost interest rapidly. Economic aid was never popular and was easy to cut back when budgets needed to be trimmed, even as defence spending soared. The World Bank’s strategic framework for development and climate change, prepared for the 2008 Development Committee, offers a

drawn attention to a number of the more egregious mistakes (see pages 26 and 30). It seems odd at a time of global meltdown, when financial markets have been manipulated and distorted by bright young things on the make, that leaders of industrialised countries pin so much faith in carbon markets that have already been shown to be open to distortion, manipulation and outright lying and cheating.

Prins and Rayner themselves understate the scale of the challenge, particularly the need to do something about both supply and demand. One of the flaws of Kyoto is the assumption that governments can make promises which will instantly be fulfilled. Climate change, as Prins and Rayner note, is a wickedly complicated issue. On the supply side, there is no easy new – or cheap – technology readily available to replace fossil energy. Even nuclear power may be in short supply. Daniel B Botkin in the New York Times cautioned that known reserves of uranium are 5.5 million tonnes, enough for 80 years at current use in which nuclear power supplies 15 per cent of world electricity. If new plants were built to allow nuclear power to rise to 50 per cent of the world’s energy (and let issues of waste disposal and proliferation go hang), there would still only be enough known uranium reserves to last to 2019.

On the demand side, the attitude of governments is still less certain. When oil prices soared in 2008, Americans

wish list of idealistic thinking. “Climate change demands unprecedented global cooperation involving a concerted action by countries at different development stages supported by ‘measurable, reportable and verifiable’ transfer of finance and technology from developed to developing countries,” it says boldly, admitting that the costs “are on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year for several decades.”

There is, of course, the question of the cosy club of governments, the people who will take the decisions at Poznan and Copenhagen. Ex-US president Bill Clinton, no longer having to seek the votes of the electorate or of Congress, declared that there is no problem on Earth that any one country can solve on its own, even the US. His wisdom seems to have eluded his own countrymen and the Chinese alike.

As I write this, the Financial Times is open in front of me at the paper’s glossy 72-page How To Spend It magazine, with an article featuring a virgin wool/alpaca jumper priced at £2,500. BBC News shows sad lines of refugees at Goma, living in the open air and queuing for food handouts in the rain. It is a reminder that the Earth’s climate is heating up, resources are being guzzled at an unsustainable rate, the really poor of the world do not have a fingertip grip on the necessities of water and food for survival, while the super-rich gobble enough for every 100 people (and remember that the worst inequalities are probably between the super-rich and the dirt-poor inside the developing countries, with Brazil the most unequal country on Earth).

For all the hot air that will blow at Poznan, the Earth cannot be brought into balance until all of us reduce our ecological and carbon footprints.

The environmental outlook of US President-elect Barack Obama (below) is beyond reproach, but he will still have to sell his reforms to Congress and the American people.

Congolese children (above) at a refugee camp in Kibati near Goma beg for food vouchers that are being handed out by UNICEF and the International Medical Corps.

© S

cott

Ols

on/G

etty

Imag

es

© W

alte

r A

stra

da/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es

Money makes the world go roundby Kevin Rafferty

The global financial meltdown of 2008 highlighted the importance of international unity in resolving problems. But there’s an even tougher test of cooperation waiting in the wings.

Diesel prices approaching $5 per gallon are displayed at a Golden Gate Petroleum gas station in California in 2008. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline also reached an all-time high of $3.758.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Introduction

16

The financial crisis that smashed into the world in mid-2008

demonstrated to what extent the entire planet is a unified marketplace and yet how difficult it was for political and economic leaders to come together to resolve what should have been a relatively simple problem. Simple, at least, when compared with the raft of other global problems, such as securing sufficient food and safe water for hundreds of millions of people, relieving widespread and ingrained poverty and malnutrition especially among children, and tackling the climate change which is starting to suffocate the planet.

When the first signs of trouble manifested themselves – with billion dollar write-offs by American and European banks because of their exposure to sub-prime housing loans – it was played down as a local issue that would not trouble the world at large.

Within a matter of months, the world’s financial system was beginning to look like Humpty Dumpty, who had fallen off his wall and broken into fragments, with the white and yolk of the real economy beginning to spill out. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), described the

crisis as financial global warming that could lead to recession or worse. But his pleas were only half heard by the world leaders and not followed up.

Few countries have been able to escape the self-reinforcing chain reaction. As scared bankers refused to lend even to each other and stock markets plummeted, demands rose for cash in a safe currency. This led

to a rush to US dollars and yen, and a squeeze on weaker companies and countries to repay their debts. World trade also started to falter, putting pressures on exports, jobs and corporate earnings, which had the effect of further depressing confidence, hurting weak currencies and sending governments scrambling for money to shore up their economies. In 2007, the IMF had laid off staff because it did not have enough customers. By October 2008, it had a line of both developed

and developing countries waiting at its door, with Iceland, Hungary, Pakistan and Ukraine at the head of the queue.

Even heavily populated, oil-exporting countries such as Iran and Venezuela, with their own expensive social and political agendas to fund, complained that, as the prospects of global economic recession increased, oil prices had dropped too sharply and were too low.

Profit and lossIt will not be easy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, which was the immediate trigger for the catastrophe, was only one aspect of deep structural problems in global money flows. For years, the world economy has been running on a system of global imbalances. The US ran up huge current account deficits, financed by large purchases of its debt instruments by foreign countries running big trade surpluses, principally China, Japan and the oil-rich Gulf states. The cost of this to China has been huge; one economist calculated it at $270 billion a year – or more than 7 per cent of China’s GDP (based on a 1 per cent return on US assets then converted into appreciating renminbi

© Ju

stin

Sul

livan

/Get

ty im

ages

Within a matter of months, the world’s financial system

was looking like Humpty Dumpty, who had fallen

off his wall and broken into fragments

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


and adjusted for inflation). This allowed China to keep growth at 10 per cent a year and create new industrial jobs for its exporting machine.

Economists had been predicting that this “balance of financial terror between Asia and America” would eventually collapse, leading to chaos. The precarious imbalance rested on two legs: one was the willingness of foreign central banks to take the currency risk of lending to the US at low rates in dollars; the other was the willingness of private financial intermediaries to take the credit risk associated with lending at low rates to highly indebted US households.

As economist Brad Setser noted, the surprise was that “the second leg of the chain collapsed before the first. And its collapse looks set to deliver a nasty shock to everyone – including the countries that supply the US with vendor financing.”

Being in the US close to election time was surreal, far beyond Alice’s Looking Glass. Both candidates were singing the

praises of the US as “the best country in the world” with the “best workers in the world” and the world’s best fighting machine that was gonna win the war, whatever the cost. The costs of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus bombing raids into Syria and Pakistan, add to the overstretch of a US that is living far

beyond its means. Total indebtedness stands at more than $10 trillion, a figure that rises to $60 trillion if unfunded Medicaid, Medicare, social security and other obligations are added.

Under a global financial system that has been in place since Richard Nixon unilaterally abandoned the gold standard, the US has enjoyed a free ride: not only could it cheerfully run up massive current account deficits, but it avoided IMF criticism, delivered freely and stingingly to any other deficit country, because it had an effective veto stake of 16.77 per cent plus the number two job at the fund (Japan has 6.02 per cent, Germany 5.88, France and the UK 4.86 each, China, after a recent boost, 3.66 and India 1.89 per cent). In spite of demands made over several years – including those by Gordon Brown when he sat in the key IMF chair – the rich countries have resisted China or India’s entry to the G7 (North America has two places, Europe four and Japan just one), the financial stability forum or other global financial

The global financial crisis has been – and

will continue to be – a distraction from other pressing global issues

A market trader (right) bows his head after share prices at the October 24, 2008 session of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange closed 8.3 per cent down, dropping to their lowest level in more than four years.

Two scrap collectors at a plastics recycling mill in Hubei Province, China (below), which is ceasing production as the global financial crisis starts to bite. Many of China’s recycling mills have been forced to stop collecting scrap material as the nose-diving order prices have plunged along with oil, metal and other commodities.

© C

hina

Pho

tos/

Get

ty Im

ages

© T

ed A

ljibe

/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

18

Take water. About 1.1 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion don’t have basic sanitation, meaning a toilet. But low-income countries are most vulnerable to water scarcities exacerbated by climate change. By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people in Africa

will face problems of access to water because of climate change. At the other extreme, rising sea levels and more intense tropical storms will also subject hundreds of millions of people to the torture of too much water in the form of flooding. This won’t just affect the tens of thousands of people in

bodies. Yet in October, Gordon Brown called upon China and the oil-rich states to contribute extra funds to the $250 billion that the IMF has available.

China has accumulated a massive $1.9 trillion in reserves, but Brown’s demand begs the question of why China should contribute if it has not been given a place at the world’s top financial table. On the other side of the coin, China has been reluctant to become an international player, fearing that its own policies might be constrained.

Investing in the futureWhat is undoubtedly true is that the global financial crisis has been – and will continue to be – a distraction from other pressing global issues, not least because governments and individuals are being pressed for their daily survival. A World Bank report in October 2008 said that the number of malnourished people in the world would rise by 44 million to 967 million because of higher food and fuel prices. Even though impending recession has brought prices down, they are higher than in previous years and show few signs of declining significantly. Some commentators claim that world leaders should pay more attention to questions of widespread poverty and malnutrition, the need to raise food output and access to safe water rather than climate change.

The difficulty is that, as Professor Bob Watson, the UK chief scientific adviser, notes, the people who will be most severely affected by temperature rises and climate change are the already poor and populations of developing countries that are the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases. Rising temperatures and Arctic icecap melting may make it easier to mine the resources of the Arctic or to grow crops in Greenland, but they will also put the already vulnerable people of Africa, South Asia and Latin America at greater risk.

low-lying islands, but also the millions in countries such as Bangladesh and Myanmar. There are too many people to resettle as farmers in Greenland, even if there were the political will.

Look at food. A rise of just 1 per cent in global temperatures will lead to a 5 to 10 per cent yield reduction in major cereal crops in low latitudes. Rain-fed agriculture is particularly vulnerable, and semi-arid and dry sub-humid zones in Africa will lose up to 20 per cent of their growing season by 2050. Loss of glacial melt water in the Andes, Central Asia and South Asia will bring changes to the hydrologic cycle and damage the cereal-producing areas of Asia and North Africa. Climate change will also stimulate malarial mosquitoes to roam into the highlands of East Africa and threaten new areas with diseases.

The lesson of all this is that there can be no luxury of an either/or approach – either tackle climate change or improve food security and access to safe water – it simply has to be both.

The financial global warming of 2008 is a major setback to tackling the real global warming, not least by diverting time and money to the immediate problem. The more difficult lesson is that, compared to real global warming – with its multiplicity of complex and unpredictable players, the forces of nature, its inexact science and complex human lifestyles – sorting out the global financial system will be relatively simple.

By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people in Africa

will face problems of access to water because

of climate change

As this Oxfam campaign hoarding in Leeds, UK (left) so eloquently points out, the financial meltdown hasn’tjust been about paying extra for a tankful of petrol.

A small lake on high ground of the Arctic icecap (below), consisting of water left after a glacier has melted away.

© Jo

hn H

arris

/rep

ortd

igita

l.co.

uk

© S

till P

ictu

res

GE Energy.indd 1 10/11/08 14:12:37

GE Energy.indd 1 10/11/08 14:12:37

The compleat* global climate expertby Kevin Rafferty

Professor Robert Watson’s opinions have earned him the wrath of ExxonMobil and cost him his own country’s support as chairman of the IPCC. In spite of these setbacks, he has stayed on message.

Professor Robert Watson during his time as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), answering questions at a news conference in 2001.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Interview

20

Memo to president-elect Barack Obama: your country needs Bob

Watson if it is to regain respect and leadership in matters of climate change and the environment.

Indeed, if there is one man who might be able to transform the scientific and political landscape and give a much-needed boost to the cause of climate change – globally, not just in the US – it is Watson.

Watson says that he does not know anyone in the winning US camp and is happy – “really, really loving it here” – in exile as the British government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. But he is also licking his wounds from a double rebuff at the hands of President George W Bush. Not only did Bush and his cronies reject Watson’s warnings on climate change, but they played a role in ousting him as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Without Bush’s hostility, it might have been Watson standing alongside Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri to collect the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

A key question for the future will be whether Watson can patch up differences and work harmoniously with his rival and successor Pachauri. Together, the American with strong roots in science, government and

international affairs, and the Indian, with the different perspective of a developing country, could be an immensely powerful force.

As he rushes in to his offices at Nobel House in London’s Smith Square

on the fringes of Whitehall, where the UK’s top bureaucrats and leading politicians have their lairs, Watson is the very epitome of the unkempt, hirsute, anorak-and-haversack, do-good professor who, like the White Rabbit, is always running late.

But having divested himself of said anorak and haversack, in clashing blue and red, and seating himself before his computer, he is at once the besuited bureaucrat. The professorial mien remains: his glasses hang on a chain round his neck as if he lives in fear of forgetting them, but he only uses them for peering into the middle distance. His beard sprouts wildly and his torrent of words flows in every direction as ideas gush out with one unfinished thought morphing into another, marking him as a man for whom words can’t keep pace with his furious thoughts.

But don’t be fooled. Watson is the Compleat Global Climate Expert – not merely a specialist on climate change, but experienced on wider questions of climatology and the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity, agriculture, deforestation, reforestation and afforestation, and biofuels. He retains a professorial post, as director of strategic development at the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change

Robert Watson (above right) with his IPCC co-chairman James J McCarthy in Geneva, Switzerland in 2001.

© A

P Ph

oto/

Euge

ne H

oshi

ko

© A

P Ph

oto/

Don

ald

Stam

pfli

Watson is a man who understands the vital nexus

between policy making and political power and

the need for international cooperation

*SIC

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


Research. Also, crucially, Watson is a man who fully understands the vital nexus between policy making and political power, as well as the need for international cooperation.

From ozone to danger zoneWatson was actually born in the United Kingdom and obtained his doctoral degree at London, and this propelled him into vital work on the depletion of the ozone layer. As he recalls it, his doctorate contained “some interesting work on gas-based chemical kinetics, how chlorine and bromine and fluorine atoms reacted with ozone to form BrO and C1O radicals, then I looked to see what would happen to those radicals and how they reacted with atoms. And it turned out that was the basis for understanding what happens in stratospheric ozone depletion. My PhD and other people’s work became the basis for

understanding part of how chlorine and bromine destroyed ozone.”

So it was natural that Watson would get involved with work on the ozone layer. But it also offered him his first lesson in how hard it was to get international cooperation. He tells it as a simple story, but it took endless telephone calls, sweet-talking, cajoling and arm-twisting before he could

even get the myriad different national agencies to come together to make a common assessment of the depletion of the ozone layer.

From there, Watson went on to become chief scientist for the Office of Mission to Planet Earth at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as associate director for environment in the White House during the Clinton administration, chief scientist at the World Bank and, from 1997 to 2002, chairman of the IPCC, the post from which George W. Bush had him removed – another bitter lesson not only in politics, but also in the petty rivalries of international organizations. (See sidebar on page 23 for some of the political games)

“A lot will happen over the next 50 years, but it is going to be a real

challenge to limit ourselves to a rise of 2 degrees Celsius”

Members of the ecological action group Greenpeace display a giant banner (right) during the opening ceremony of the XXVII session of the IPCC at the City of the Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia, Spain in 2007.

The Schwarze Pumpe power station (below) run by Europe’s biggest power company, Vattenfall, in Werder near Berlin. This new installation is part of a pilot project that utilises carbon capture and storage technology to trap greenhouse gases and thus allow continuing burning coal but with radically reduced emissions.

© M

icha

el U

rban

/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

© G

reen

peac

e

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

22

levels, and China and India have been growing very rapidly. So if you were to ask which way emissions are going, apart from in Europe, they are going up fairly fast, so we are towards the top end of any of those IPCC scenarios, not the bottom end. Obviously, a lot will happen over the next 50 years, but it is going to be a real challenge, to limit ourselves to 2 degrees Celsius.”

Watson favours an emissions target, but he admits it will be difficult to negotiate. He offers a digression on putting a price on carbon: “People have often been talking about putting a price on carbon of $20 a tonne of CO2 equivalent or $50 or $100 a tonne of CO2 equivalent, and the IPCC has shown very nicely in theory how you go from $20 to $50 to $100 in all the key sectors – energy, transportation,

building – and how you effectively get significant reductions for your CO2 equivalent. The interesting thing is with oil prices being $100 to $150 per barrel, it is a carbon price of many hundreds of dollars per tonne of CO2, somewhere probably between $400 and $600 per ton of CO2.

“My personal view is to go with emissions targets, setting a long-term target for 2050 and intermediate targets every ten years or so between now and 2050, and that they have to be fair for developed and developing countries and any countries in between. That is going to be a hard thing to argue.” Implementing such a long-term plan involves setting target figures and establishing emission rights, both issues fraught with numerous questions as to what’s fair or equitable or even politically feasible.

Watson says that he has moved on. The political bruises he suffered have not blunted his willingness to speak out. He does not pretend that the EU target of limiting climate change to an average global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times will be achieved. Instead, Watson advises, it would be best to prepare for a 4 degree rise.

“When I say the science is solid, we certainly know the Earth’s climate is changing, and we certainly know that it’s most likely due to human activities. But there is still an uncertainty as to what would be the climate change for a given level of greenhouse gas concentrations, and there is still an uncertainty factor of two to three for any greenhouse gas level. The reason is that we have an uncertainty is because of what’s called the climate sensitivity factor. That is to say, how will the Earth’s climate respond to any given greenhouse gas loading.”

To achieve two degrees would mean setting a limit of 400 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. But even at this level, cautions Watson, “you have a 50-50 shot at making 2 degrees Celsius. If the world were to allow greenhouse gas emissions to go to 550 ppm, you have got a 50-50 shot at 3 degrees Celsius. Again, there is a big spread.”

He denies being a defeatist: “If we just stick our heads in the sand and believe that it will only be 2, we won’t know how to adapt to 3 and 4. In other words we need to at least understand what the implications are of 3 and 4, and what we would do if we were to move to 3 and 4. As we understand what the implications are of 3 and 4 – especially 4 – I would hope that people would say ‘hey, we don’t want to see that world, we have to redouble our efforts to try to hit 2’.

“We also have to be quite candid: if you look at the emissions trajectories, the US is significantly above 1990

“We have to engage the US, there is no question,” says Watson, “If we don’t engage the US, I don’t see how we get India and China to come on board.”

Watson offers some very guarded optimism about the US, citing legislation in Congress pushing the US to reduce emissions, plus state and local initiatives, particularly in California, and pledges from companies such as Walmart, General Electric and Dupont to make voluntary reductions. Then there is, he says, “the evangelical movement and the religious right arguing that climate change is a moral and ethical issue and that you shouldn’t destroy God’s creation. (With this) ensemble and with political leadership at the presidential level – and it will need that – you can then galvanise these disparate groups to move forward.”

Number crunchingWatson then throws in some really scary numbers. If it is business as usual, he says, “OECD countries’ (emissions) would go up about 60 percent and developing countries about 140 percent. If you want to hit something like 500 or 550 ppm, the OECD countries, instead of going up by 60 percent, would have to go down by 60 percent, and the developing countries, instead of going up by 140 percent, would go up only 60 percent. These are significant changes.”

Put another way, Watson says “a top liner for business as usual suggests that we might go from seven gigatonnes of carbon to about 25 gigatonnes by 2090. But if we do want to hit this 450, which is the figure that gives you a one-in-four chance of 2 degrees Celsius, we have to be down to about 2.5 by the year 2100 – that’s ten times less than the projected number. These really are very, very significant changes. Therefore you would have to have per capita emissions for everybody that are much more like the developing countries are today than the US numbers.”

But is such a scenario practical? “If you play games on technology choices, the answer is yes,” insists Watson. “But, are we moving in the right direction? To get to 450, you would have to do lots of end-use efficiency, saving at least five gigatonnes. You would have renewables in many parts of the world

“My personal view is to set a long-term target for 2050 and intermediate targets every ten years”

The leather processing zone (left) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. To keep costs low, everything for processing is burned – including tires, plastics, papers and leather – and the toxic waste is then dumped into local rivers and canals.

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


Rajendra Pachauri speaks at a function celebrating his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the chairman of the IPCC. Pachauri succeeded Robert Watson as chairman after a vote held in 2002.

You can hear the disappointment in Professor Robert Watson’s voice when he talks about being ousted as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I got dumped by the then current president Bush, with the US lobbying against me basically because they did not like the message,’ he explains. “Was I disappointed? Obviously yes, but it WAS a democratic process. It proved to me once again that political power is everything.

“I lost an election; I shouldn’t say I was dumped. Effectively two things happened. The US asked itself if they wanted the devil they knew – which was me – or the devil they didn’t – which was Rajendra Pachauri. The view was, incorrectly, that I had made a series of policy statements when I was very careful never to make one. I always used the ‘if… then’ scenario: if you want to achieve the following, then you need to do this; if you want to avoid the following, then you need to do this.”

Oil major ExxonMobil also played an important role, Watson says, in turning the US against him and in favour of Pachauri. But the clinching

factor was “Patrick Obasi, an African who was Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), who totally supported me when I was elected but then turned against me and lobbied every African government to vote for Pachauri.

“Patrick’s passed away now, a very decent guy, so don’t misunderstand me,” continues Watson. “But his comment to me was – and he said it to my face – ‘Bob there’s two reasons why I won’t lobby for you this time. One, you seem to favour the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the other co-sponsor of IPCC, not WMO’. I didn’t know what that meant, to be honest, because I interacted with both organizations. Secondly, he said ‘You have allowed IPCC to be more powerful than the parent. IPCC is a child of WMO, do not allow it to become more politically powerful’.”

Watson regards the charge as unfair because “we always gave credit to WMO and UNEP, who were the parents. He should have been proud of the success of the IPCC.”

The effect of Obasi’s change of allegiance was inevitable. “When you

lose the 30 odd African votes…” says Watson. “I won all of Europe, most of the small islands states that were there, most of Latin America apart from a couple of votes. But if you lose Africa and Asia – and they all locked together in complete solidarity – (it becomes) a sheer numbers game. But it was a democratic process. Did I think it was a fair process? Yes. Political solidarity is a good thing. It is very important that you do have political solidarity on some things.”

The final clincher was that Pachauri refused suggestions of having co-chairmen: “Patchi did not want it. He wanted to chair it alone. I have always felt personally that these assessments should be co-chaired, preferably with someone from a developed country and a developing country.”

Watson says that losing the IPCC job gave him other opportunities, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Agricultural Assessment. “It’s actually diversified my thinking… Patchi’s done a good job. The IPCC Fourth Assessment was a very successful document.”

And the Nobel Prize-winning Pachauri got a second term.

Bush whacked: how Watson lost the IPCC job

© A

P Ph

oto/

Saur

abh

Das

24

and use a lot of biofuels and carbon capture and storage. Most of this – over 80 percent – would be a combination of end-use effi ciency, nuclear, biofuels and carbon capture storage.”

He warns that there are lots of stumbling blocks, including public acceptance of nuclear energy, the fact that carbon capture and storage is still at pre-commercial technology levels, and that current biofuels are questionable as to their economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Regarding the Kyoto Protocol, Watson says: “I don’t know what other model would work, given that every country in the world uses energy and those that only use a little aspire to use more energy because it is the foundation of economic growth and poverty alleviation. The three things you need for a vibrant society are a bare minimum access to energy, water and food. Energy is crucial to growing food. It is often crucial for getting water, so you need all countries involved.”

The other achievements of Kyoto, Watson says, were in putting climate

change on the scientifi c and political map and in getting agreement from a range of countries, albeit with the major omission of the US. Watson adds: “I believe the structure of Kyoto was right. It’s not just about carbon dioxide, but it’s all greenhouse gases. It recognized that it is not just about energy, but also brought in agriculture and forestry. It recognized that a trading system makes sense. I think that was a crucially important part of it, that you could have a buying and selling of carbon. For the last few years we have been learning how to do it.”

He is sanguine about getting a successor deal at Copenhagen next year and predicts that even if substantial progress is made in Poznan and agreement reached about the direction of travel, the inclusion of aviation and maritime sectors, about how to balance developing and developed countries, and about how to handle the complicated interplay between energy, food, water and forests, there is more

to be done. He is thinking beyond Copenhagen and suggests, “What you might need to have is a Copenhagen Bis. That is to say, you get as far as you can in Copenhagen and then you may have to adjourn it and start again a few months later in 2010, to give certain countries a little bit more time to get everything done. You don’t close it, you adjourn. It is a very complex agreement that has to be reached.”

The country that may most need time is the US. Barack Obama, he notes, will have to get his economic team in place and sort out “some pretty tricky foreign policy issues. Where will climate change fi t in the immediate challenges of the new US president? I am sure climate change will be there, but you have also got to engage the Senate and the House, you have got to engage the private sector much more informally. Could the US get its act together – I don’t mean that in a bad sense – but get all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle assembled for an agreement in late 2009? That’s a very, very aggressive schedule.”

Surely, it is one where the US cannot afford to do without the experience and wisdom of Professor Robert Watson as a leading player advising and pushing the president.

A NASA satellite photograph (below) showing the dense cloud of smog enshrouding China. Any attempt to set global targets for controlling emissions of greenhouse gases is going to have to engage the Chinese government in the debate – which is unlikely to happen until the United States agrees to come to the negotiating table too.

© N

ASA

“If we don’t engage the US, I don’t see how we get India and China

to come on board”

With many years of experience in the wind

power industry, DONG Energy is one of the lea-

ding offshore wind farm developers. Further-

more, we are busy onshore. We have extensive

experience in operating onshore and offshore

wind turbines.

Horns Rev 2 – the world’s largest

In Denmark we have been involved in building

and running wind energy projects for years.

At present, six Danish offshore wind farms

are in operation, with a total capacity of 234

MW. In addition, we are currently building the

world’s largest offshore wind farm, Horns Rev

2 off the Danish west coast. The wind farm

will be commissioned in 2009 and will have

a production capacity of 209 MW – enough

to cover the electricity demand from 200,000

households.

Large offshore projects in the UK

In the UK we have two 90 MW wind farms in

operation. We own 50 percent of the Barrow

Project in the East Irish Sea and we are the

sole owner of Burbo Bank in Liverpool Bay

which is in production. Our latest project is

the Gunfleet Sands 1 and 2; situated in the

Thames Estuary, with a capacity of 172 MW.

Gufleet Sands 1 will be commissioned in 2009,

Gunfleets Sands 2 in 2010.

Onshore wind farm activities

We are working with onshore wind farms in a

number of countries. For instance, in Poland

we have build and are running the Lake

Ostrowo wind farm, and we are working on the

Karnice 1 project. In Sweden the Storrun pro-

ject is under development. In total, our current

operating onshore wind farm activities have a

production capacity of 235 MW.

Read more about us and our engagement in

a long range of renewable energy projects at

www.dongenergy.com

DONG Energy is one of Northern

Europe’s leading energy groups.

We are headquartered in Denmark.

Our business is based on procuring,

producing, distributing, trading and

selling energy and related products

in Northern Europe. The company de-

livered revenue of DKK 41.6 billion in

2007 (approx. EUR 5.6 billion or USD

8.3 billion). DONG Energy has more

than 5,000 employees. For further in-

formation, see www.dongenergy.com.

RENEWABLE ENERGY IS THE FUTURE

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

With many years of experience in the wind

power industry, DONG Energy is one of the lea-

ding offshore wind farm developers. Further-

more, we are busy onshore. We have extensive

experience in operating onshore and offshore

wind turbines.

Horns Rev 2 – the world’s largest

In Denmark we have been involved in building

and running wind energy projects for years.

At present, six Danish offshore wind farms

are in operation, with a total capacity of 234

MW. In addition, we are currently building the

world’s largest offshore wind farm, Horns Rev

2 off the Danish west coast. The wind farm

will be commissioned in 2009 and will have

a production capacity of 209 MW – enough

to cover the electricity demand from 200,000

households.

Large offshore projects in the UK

In the UK we have two 90 MW wind farms in

operation. We own 50 percent of the Barrow

Project in the East Irish Sea and we are the

sole owner of Burbo Bank in Liverpool Bay

which is in production. Our latest project is

the Gunfleet Sands 1 and 2; situated in the

Thames Estuary, with a capacity of 172 MW.

Gufleet Sands 1 will be commissioned in 2009,

Gunfleets Sands 2 in 2010.

Onshore wind farm activities

We are working with onshore wind farms in a

number of countries. For instance, in Poland

we have build and are running the Lake

Ostrowo wind farm, and we are working on the

Karnice 1 project. In Sweden the Storrun pro-

ject is under development. In total, our current

operating onshore wind farm activities have a

production capacity of 235 MW.

Read more about us and our engagement in

a long range of renewable energy projects at

www.dongenergy.com

DONG Energy is one of Northern

Europe’s leading energy groups.

We are headquartered in Denmark.

Our business is based on procuring,

producing, distributing, trading and

selling energy and related products

in Northern Europe. The company de-

livered revenue of DKK 41.6 billion in

2007 (approx. EUR 5.6 billion or USD

8.3 billion). DONG Energy has more

than 5,000 employees. For further in-

formation, see www.dongenergy.com.

RENEWABLE ENERGY IS THE FUTURE

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Opinion

26

On 25 October 2007, Professor Steve Rayner of Oxford University

and I jointly published an essay entitled Time To Ditch Kyoto (Nature 449, 973-75, 2007). We documented how the Kyoto Protocol had failed as a specific policy and we argued that it was doomed to fail – as was any regime based on similar principles – because such an approach by international treaty, setting output targets, would never provide an adequate solution for a “wicked” problem as deeply complex as the world’s climate.

Time To Ditch Kyoto elicited considerable public and professional reaction. Last year, our position was seen by some to be heretical. Today, outside the circle of those officials, carbon traders, think-tankers, journalists and academics professionally involved in the promotion of the Kyoto approach, that is no longer the case. Last year, we suggested that the objective of the Bali Climate Conference in December 2007 should be to switch tracks to a radically different type of climate policy that might have a hope of producing real changes in the real world of emissions reductions.

This has not happened. We enter the Poznan conference with the European Union’s climate policy holed and sinking, but with the emergence elsewhere of the principles of what a viable climate policy might actually look like. The challenge at Poznan is therefore the same as that of Bali: namely to find a path from the Kyoto Road to a new route, based on a deal

Time to ditch Kyoto: the sequelby Professor Gwyn Prins

In 2007, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner published their controversial critique of the Kyoto Protocol in the journal Nature. One year on, Prins takes another long, hard look at the global landscape.

with a chance of working. Such a deal will not involve the leading instruments of the current conventional wisdom among the expert community of climate policymakers.

Four things happened at Bali, which set the terms for 2008. Firstly, there was a strong policy drive prominently supported by the UNFCCC Secretariat, by former US Vice President Al Gore, the European Union delegation and the British New Labour government, which called for a bigger and better Kyoto, meaning new, tighter, declared and binding CO2 output targets attached to timetables. That position was defeated. Secondly, the main outcome of the Bali Climate Conference was that the geopolitical centre of gravity for future climate policy moved decisively from Europe to the Pacific.

Japan declared its position from the outset. As the owner of the revered and ancient name of Kyoto, it did not want to see it attached to a failed diplomatic strategy. So it stated explicitly that Kyoto follow-on must be based on different principles. That position attracted support from significant countries, notably Canada and India. Thirdly, it is plain in retrospect that, despite the much televised booing and hissing, the United States was

The serenity of the golden pavilion of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto belies the controversy which still rages around the climate change deal developed in the city.

Japanese Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita (right) with a cake to mark the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol at the Bali Climate Conference in 2007.

© iS

tock

phot

o

© Je

wel

Sam

ad/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


not isolated on substance at Bali. The future of climate policy is therefore no longer in a position to be shaped in or by Europe, but by the dynamics of the four corners of the Pacific: China, India, Japan and the United States.

The consequence of Bali was that the de facto centre of gravity for forward-looking discussion moved to the Major Emitters/Economies Meetings (MEM). The UNFCCC may in the future serve the purpose of legitimation; but it was not, and cannot be, the negotiating forum where work can be done, especially not work that involves the arduous reconfiguration now urgently required.

Such work is especially difficult because the motivations of those

who support the Kyoto Road are multiple. They include a sort of “policy fundamentalism” and a deep-seated

anti-Americanism often found in the current European policy elite. Money is a driver too. Many of the leading advocates of a Kyoto-like approach

now have financial stakes in carbon companies and markets closely tied to the existing regime and therefore a stake in its continuance, whether it succeeds or not. These characteristics make their negotiating position brittle because it is inflexible; and that touches on a second feature of 2008.

Commanding public supportThere has been a rapidly deepening gulf between the view of climate policy held in the expert community and broader opinion across the industrial world where the evidence is of a general public switch-off. Opinion polls in the United Kingdom, conducted before the financial crash, showed that substantial majorities were concerned about the general issue but were not prepared to change their lifestyles materially. They viewed green taxation, and other measures that would increase the daily cost of living, as merely surrogates for general taxation by stealth. These findings are replicated elsewhere.

The reaction of much of the expert community to such evidence has been to regret the state of false consciousness into which the general public has fallen and to insist that it must change its mind. But the rubber hit the road in Canada in October 2008. The significant failure of the Canadian Liberal Party’s Green Shift policy to introduce carbon taxation (specifically, a form of cap and dividend) and promote the Kyoto instruments, has a wider resonance. It should be a warning that in democracies there is little hope of success in pursuing policies that do not command public support.

The same lesson was learned in America. Remember that the starting point for this type of legislation was the unanimous 1997 Senate vote not to proceed to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. So it should have come as no surprise that there were so few votes canvassed (thirty, perhaps even fewer), in support of the Lieberman-Warner bill as a route to an American climate policy based on a national cap-and-trade arrangement. The promoters decided not to proceed. This lesson is important because it

“There has been a rapidly deepening gulf between the view of

climate policy held in the expert community and

broader opinion across the industrial world”

Canadian Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion (left) faced enormous criticism and opposition when he attempted to introduce the new Green Shift policy, which would have imposed a new form of taxation on carbon.

US senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman (left) were defeated in their attempt to introduce the Climate Stewardship Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

© B

ill G

rimsh

aw /e

pa/C

orbi

s©

AP

Phot

o/D

enni

s C

ook

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

28

reminds us that, within the American political system, climate policy is less likely to be produced by presidential or congressional leadership but more likely to be led by state and local initiatives. Indeed, there is evidence that this is happening.

In April 2008 another article appeared in Nature (R Pielke, T Wigley and C Green, Dangerous Assumptions, Nature, 452, 531-32, 2008) which documented the steady reduction in the energy intensity of industrial societies. This feature of much of the last hundred years, relied upon as a major dynamic in delivering lower emissions, now seems to have stopped and may even have reversed. This finding shows how urgent it is to ditch Kyoto and the flawed assumptions upon which it is based, because the challenge of emissions reductions is incontrovertibly much larger than currently acknowledged. It also shows how any policy that hopes to achieve real reductions in emissions has to shift to the supply side and focus in the first instance upon the largest users of energy within the largest economies.

The spike in oil and gas prices during 2008 served to stimulate further the increasing use of coal as a primary fuel in major economies (2008 BP Statistical Survey). This general trend is possibly the most important component in reversing the decline in energy intensity. China’s heavy dependence on coal for its continuing industrialisation is common knowledge, and it was an important

reason why the United States did not and would never ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Any arrangement that does not deal with the issue of coal burning, and therefore does not involve China and, in the same context, India, is not worth having. But the question of coal is not only a Chinese question.

Even against this tempestuous background, the European Union’s climate policy steamed serenely on, like the Titanic towards the iceberg. Having achieved its political goal of setting a target of a 20 per cent reduction by 2020, the European Commission

increased speed, adding a third 20 per cent (of the proportion of energy to be generated by renewable sources) – the 20/20/20 target – regardless of the evidence of public mistrust and disinterest, and increasingly blunt warnings of disinvestment from major European corporations. The Commission package to introduce compulsory auctioning of permits within the EU and to attempt to force external parties to purchase such permits was presented to the European Parliament this summer. There it encountered

intensive doubts and amendments within the environment committee. In the end, the Irish rapporteur ignored a 56-6 vote against her within her own EPP faction and sent the Commission’s package for consideration virtually unchanged. Predictably, the result was the ship hitting the iceberg of the European Council, which forms the background to the Poznan meeting.

Coal was an important part of the reason for this collision. Poland depends for 90 per cent of its energy on its considerable coal reserves, which give it one of Europe’s highest levels of energy security. But to comply with the EU’s targets, it would have to cease using its own coal and to switch to Russian gas on an enormous scale – just when the Eastern European and Baltic states were urgently signalling to their western allies the dangers of Vladimir Putin’s re-assertive Russian nationalism after the August Caucasus crisis. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Council: “We don’t say to the French that they have to close down their nuclear power industry and build windmills. Nobody can tell us the equivalent.” In late October, further fears were realised when Russia started to organise a gas exporter’s cartel with Iran and Qatar (together with 60 per cent of global production). And the global recession deepens.

The EU strategy is thus vulnerable to a veto by Poland and other Eastern

“Within the American political system, climate policy is less likely to be

produced by presidential or congressional leadership but more likely to be led by state and local initiatives”

The coal-burning power plant (above) providing energy for the uranium mine at Krasnokamensk, Siberia. The coal used has been found to contain traces of uranium.

©Iv

leva

/Gre

enpe

ace

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


European nations on old-fashioned geopolitical grounds, which will supersede any concerns for the climate. These countries are backed by a wider group who are concerned with protecting their industries from recession. The Italians have already made their vote conditional upon a root and branch review of cost implications that meets their criteria. This will, at the very least, delay action on the current EC package until the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen and may actually cause it to fail with the ending of the current mandate period.

Creating an effective global strategyAll this raises practical questions

for global climate policy. If it is not possible to produce a working strategy in Europe, where the political elite at least expresses enthusiasm and political will, then where in the world will it be possible to produce such a policy? The flawed EC package may yet be rammed through. There seem to be three possibilities of dealing with Polish and Eastern European opposition. The first is kick the issue ahead, as was done at the October Council, by making aspirational statements without any formal substance: the substance to be determined in future negotiations. Secondly, there is bribery: buying votes by offering Poland and its voting block some sort of cost certainty that would basically remove these countries from EU’s policy. But that would cost a great

deal and the German paymasters are in no mood to pay. Thirdly, the Poles could be promised the gift of carbon capture and storage with which to go on burning their coal, thus finally tying EU policy to the supply side, where it should have been years ago.

Given that the first option is pusillanimous and the second immoral, this third option is, for every reason, the most attractive. The third option also links with the central thrust of the alternative to the failed Kyoto Road, which was laid out by the Japanese at the July G8 Hokkaido summit: the

Hokkaido Road. Because their islands are poor in raw materials and energy sources, the Japanese are world leaders in energy efficiency. Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan has made a habit of grasping every tiny improvement in energy efficiency. So the first stage of the Hokkaido Road is to generalise that Japanese approach and introduce faster capital replacement systems for the heaviest energy-using technologies, such as in the power generating, aluminium smelting, iron and steel, and cement-manufacturing areas.

But in the long term, it is clear that coal will be used and, if there is to

be any hope of reducing the carbon burden in the atmosphere, the suite of technologies which compose carbon capture and storage must be rapidly integrated and proven.

Therefore Lord Rees of Ludlow, the President of the Royal Society, coordinated the G8 countries’ learned societies at a meeting to demand funding to accelerate CCS demonstrators, which had been in abeyance. A start was made with a Japanese taking the lead. Bringing forward the deployment of viable CCS is probably the single most effective practical step to reduce anthropogenic emissions of carbon in the medium term.

Integral to the Hokkaido Road, as well as the improvement to existing energy technologies, is the need for an investment programme equivalent to the Green Revolution. It should be focused on developing primary energy sources for the 21st century in the same way in which each previous era of industrial history has switched its prime energy source: from wood to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to whatever will be the suite of power sources (and, on the demand side, linked power uses) of the future. Rees has written of a new Manhattan Project. This revolution would have the additional benefit of offering important opportunities for new investment and jobs at a time of worldwide economic recession. Since it could make clean energy cheaper than dirtier energy – the target suggested by the Breakthrough Institute of California – there would be a chance of winning public support in the democracies. People will see action on climate policy not as just another clutch of stealth taxes but also as something that is in their – financial and other - interests.

Poznan has the opportunity to recognise these inconvenient truths and, once they are recognised, quickly re-engineer a radical new climate policy based on the Hokkaido Road, not Kyoto, ready for adoption at the Copenhagen meeting next year. The policy will not depend upon carbon trading in its present form; it will not lead with emissions targets tied to specific dates (although benchmarks are part of the sectoral strategy for reducing energy intensity); it will not focus upon international legal agreements that are hard, if not impossible, to enforce. It must start from a frank recognition of its failure to date, in order to build the principles for its future success.

“Any arrangement that does not deal with the

issue of coal burning, and therefore does not involve

China and India, is not worth having”

Stockpiles of freshly-mined, high quality coal await transportation at the Wieczorek coal mine in Katowice, Poland (below). Poland has established itself as the largest producer of coal in the entire European Union.

© S

ean

Gal

lup/

Get

ty Im

ages

The non-sceptical hereticby Kevin Rafferty

Oxford University’s Steve Rayner has upset the establishment with his controversial views on the Kyoto Protocol. He insists his opinions offer a practical, as opposed to ideological, solution to climate change.

The lighthouse on Qingdao Island, just off China’s eastern coast, the lanterns of which are powered by the wind.


30

In the October 2008 issue of Wired, regarded as America’s agenda-setting

hi-tech magazine, the staff published it’s Smart List of 15 people to whom new US President Barack Obama should listen. At number 11 was Oxford University professor Steve Rayner, whose profile carried the caption “Take climate change seriously.”

Mainstream climate specialists, both in government and in science, were shocked by this listing of Rayner as a leading thinker on climate change, not least because, in 2007, he and Professor Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics upset the establishment by writing a controversial article in the journal Nature condemning the Kyoto Protocol as a mistake and a failure.

While offering congratulations to the new US president, Wired warned him to expect to be snowed under by an avalanche of advice from his cabinet, members of Congress, advisory groups, think tanks and lobbyists. It warned: “The policies that emerge from such groupthink tend to be weird mashups (sic) of conflicting interests or warmed-over slabs of conventional wisdom. The country needs fresh directions and

crisp action plans on intractable issues like climate change, energy, security and defence.”

Rayner certainly offers that. He may look mild and conventional enough for

an Oxford professor, wearing a purple open-necked shirt under a dark blue sweater and blue jeans, but he quickly offers damning unconventional wisdom on the main issue of the day. A quick

taste comes in Rayner’s description of himself as a “non-sceptical heretic” on climate change.

He has himself been derided as a mere social scientist pedalling the old refusenik ideology of George W Bush and his ilk, as if he doesn’t understand the scientific evidence. Rayner responds that as a social scientist – and Professor of Science and Civilization – it is not him but the economists, bureaucrats and politicians who are risking the future of humanity by attempting to tackle climate change by utilising top-down means that aren’t working, can’t work, and are too simplistic for the complex questions involved. Far from being a refusenik or a delayer of action, he claims that it is the Kyoto process that has led to massive and damaging delays.

He distinguishes his heretical self as being “long convinced of the seriousness of climate change and continued unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions,” as distinctly “different from the conventional true believers: those who accept both the conventional framing of the science and the notion that a universal global treaty involving 170 odd countries in some kind of cap-and-trade system is the only way to respond to the challenges presented

© S

till P

ictu

res

© Jo

e Ra

edle

/Get

ty Im

ages

“Society, the economy and technology will change just as fast – if not faster – than

climate changes”

US President-elect Barack Obama (right) is likely to be inundated with advice on environmental issues from fellow politicians, think tanks and lobbyists.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


by rising greenhouse gas emissions and rising concentrations.”

He damns Kyoto with the faintest of praise, saying “I think one has to recognise that it was of tremendous symbolic importance. It stated: ‘Look government, there is a real issue here that it would be prudent to address’.”

Solving a “wicked” problemIn their Nature article and elsewhere, Rayner and Prins have claimed that Kyoto was derived from earlier international agreements on the ozone layer, sulphur emissions and nuclear weapons. But these were “tame” problems – that is to say, complicated but with defined and achievable end-states – whereas climate change is “wicked” – meaning it comprises open, complex and imperfectly understood systems. Kyoto believed in a magical silver bullet, whereas Rayner and Prins coined the expression “silver buckshot” for the multiple attacks that should be made in dealing with climate change.

Kyoto has fatal flaws, Rayner believes, not least because it has

given “an illusion of effective action, tranquillizing political concern.” But the track record is not good: there’s been lots of hot air about cutting emissions, but in the last five years there has been a net increase in global carbon dioxide emissions of 3.4 per cent. On top of that there has been notorious abuse and profiteering in Europe’s emissions trading scheme by sales of surplus credits. Germany, for example, has a

large domestic Kyoto credit surplus as a windfall from the destruction of East German industry and is using this to continue to operate lignite-fuelled power stations and selling higher value surplus domestic credits to the UK.

As a result of Kyoto, Rayner says, “You have this idea that you can track the marginal cost of damage from climate change and the marginal cost of abating greenhouse gas emissions, and where those curves intersect is the rational point for intervening with policies. That is very much the line being taken by the IPCC, which is in many ways a gigantic benefit-cost analysis. It’s the line taken by (Lord) Stern: we can add up the damage, we can add up the costs in terms of global GDP and mitigation measures, and can see that’s the way to go.

“My own view is that this is a demonstration of the hubris of economists rather than anything related to reality; that we don’t really know what the costs are going to be in terms of impacts. Society, the economy and technology will change just as fast – if not faster – than climate changes.

Lord Stern (left), author of The Stern Review, which analysed the economics of climate change and concluded that mitigation was the best path to pursue.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (below) arrives at work in light clothing to promote his ‘Cool UN’ initiative, intended to reduce the United Nations Secretariat building’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

© U

N P

hoto

/Esk

inde

r D

ebeb

e

© U

N P

hoto

/Pau

lo F

ilgue

iras

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

32

adaptation. I have a different view for adaptation. The G8 plus five would be fine. Don’t worry about the rest for the time being. Upper Volta’s emissions really don’t matter. Secondly, within those countries I would focus on the large intensive sectors: electric generation, ground transportation, cement manufacture, where there are already technologies that can be used to reduce emissions or substitute for the velocity of emissions. Basically what I would do is make a combination

of installed technology goals and government R&D support designed to bring down fossil intensity by an earlier date, and get those installed on the ground. I wouldn’t worry about measuring emissions. I would worry about technology substitution. It is not that I am opposed to goals or even targets, but emissions targets are nonsense because they are not really measured anywhere. They are inferred, and if you start to extend that inference beyond simply burning coal, oil and gas to the behaviour

That could either be very good news or it could be extremely bad news. We don’t know. And we don’t really know what the costs of emissions reductions are going to be.

“But in any case, why do we start dickering around with the idea of doing a benefit-cost analysis with costs that are in the 2-4-5 percent of GDP range fifty years hence, when they really bear no relation to real world decisions? Just look at what the sub-prime mortgages have done. Just look at what the costs of the Iraq War have been. You really have to wonder what this conversation has all been about.”

Rayner says climate change is “a strategic decision”, like getting married or intervening in financial markets, “something that had to be done. If you make that decision, then you follow a quite different policy path.”

Rayner is also concerned about timescales. “If there were no time constraints, I would be willing to believe that you could eventually establish an economically efficient, environmentally effective carbon market. That would create a price signal that would stimulate R&D, which would bring down the costs of the alternative technologies. So you would have two curves: the price of carbon technologies going up and the price of alternatives coming down, and where they intersect is a good point because it means that the non-carbon technology is cheaper. But that is way out in time and the cost is way out there. What we need to do is bring down the costs of alternatives and bring it much closer to the present day.

“We have had 10 years of trying to establish carbon markets. Where have we got to? We have the ETS, the bright shining exemplar of the best we can do. Sorry, at that rate the game’s going to be over by the time we get this thing sorted out. It doesn’t make sense, especially if you take seriously the idea that China and India (are coming in). China’s emissions are now bringing about a reversal in the global decline of carbon intensity and energy intensity in relation to GDP, which has been going on for 140 years.”

So what is the solution? “Focus on the large emitting countries,” says Rayner. “This is for mitigation, not for

of forests and coasts, the inferences become quite dodgy.

“ETS does have the merit of restricting itself to carbon, the one good thing that they have done. Emissions trading within jurisdictions, which share common legal frameworks in reinforcing contracts, might well be part of a domestic instrument that countries might choose to adopt. International emissions trading, particularly once you start to expand it to all sources and sinks, simply becomes a way of wriggling out of doing something that could be effective.”

A question of dogmaOnce started, Rayner is remorseless in his attack. “There are two bits of dogma in Kyoto. The economic dogma is that you want to create a market and the market will be the most efficient means of delivering the outcomes you seek – even though it is a market driven by an artificial shortage driven by these permits and the fact that you are going to need a huge accounting system in place. Essentially you are creating a parallel currency, and people will then speculate, which is what is happening. In carbon markets you are seeing people putting a lot of money in speculation and no evidence that one single gramme of carbon has been reduced.

“The other dogma is the political dogma, which is that all countries are sovereign states of equal standing and that this is therefore a global problem in which everybody needs to be involved in formulating a solution – which is a piece of ideology that doesn’t relate well to the nature of the actual challenge.”

His plans would attract and engage China and India, he says: “What I am talking about is a massive public investment in energy R&D and using that to drive an energy modernisation programme in the high-emitting countries. I think that actually provides incentives for China and India because they can take advantage of the most up-to-date, energy-efficient, non-polluting technologies. Indeed, they would be responsible for developing some of them. China in principle can generate by wind alone as much electrical energy as the United States uses every year. If China were to do that, it would soon become the supplier of cheap wind technology to the world. There is nothing in trading for China, nothing.”

“You ask me which technology is going to be

most important, but I don’t know and nobody else

does either. I am just the only one who is honest.”

The Third Session of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (right) which met in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 and brought into being the controversial Kyoto Protocol. ©

UN

Pho

to/F

rank

Lea

ther

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


The lignite-fired power station at Obiliq, just west of Pristina in Kosovo. The facility is essential to provide the energy to combat the region’s ferocious winters, but its emissions are blighting the surrounding landscape.

© U

N P

hoto

/Fla

ka K

uqi

He refuses to guess the energy mix that will emerge: let a hundred, a thousand, a million technologies bloom is his attitude. “I refuse to make bets on particular technologies. You ask me which technology is going to be most important, but I don’t know and nobody else does either. I am just the only one who is honest. People will basically pick their favourite technology based on a whole host of factors (such as) there is a big company in my congressional district… or it’s what I studied in engineering school… or it’s small and everyone can have one in their backyard and that’s democratic… or it’s nice and big and bright and shiny and macho…

“I would say that there is a whole range of technologies already invented, quite well developed but just too expensive. What I think we should be doing is focussing on bringing the price of those down through R&D. I am not talking of magic moonbeams twenty years hence. Actually I am not talking about technologies that are likely to be on line and affordable in a few years time because venture capitalists can do that. What we have is a gap between the three to five years’ horizon of a venture capitalist and the five to 20 year horizons that gets you

from the venture capitalist to the basic research that governments carry out. That’s what we should be doing.”

He is cautious about the nuclear solution: “I worked for nine years at the Oakridge National Lab in Tennessee. I don’t think that there’s any particular technical problem with having nuclear in the mix. There are obviously issues of social acceptability, particularly with how to deal with radioactive waste and

with proliferation. Also it remains to be seen whether it can be done in a cost-effective manner, because nuclear has proven in the past to be more expensive than anticipated.”

At root, he has radical views on “what climate change is basically about. The issue is not about saving the planet or hyperbole of that sort. It is about how many poor people in developing countries are going to go home and get sick and die young

each day – and we already allow large numbers to die. Secondly, it is about the loss of species in marginal eco-systems. Thirdly, it is about the cost of adaptation, particularly in protecting major urban areas from impacts such as coastal erosion and sea-level rise. My bet is that the poor people in developing countries and the species in marginal eco-systems will be less of a priority than the protection of coastal infrastructures.”

Rayner is currently concerned with looking at the broader picture. He is trying to move to new challenges, “about problems the next level up, which is how does one break out of the path dependency of large infrastructure systems. How does one make a technological rupture from fossil energy is one example.” He also wants to focus on how modern cities waste millions of gallons of purified water in flushing human waste.

But there will always be a place for radical thinkers like Rayner, who isn’t afraid to raise uncomfortably pertinent and impertinent challenges to the establishment in the ongoing debate on climate change. As he admits: “I have been trying to get out of climate change for seven years now, but it won’t let me go.”

“It is not that I am opposed to goals or even targets, but emissions targets are nonsense because they are not really measured

anywhere.”


34

As executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention

on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer has a tough job. He has to help the world’s governments move beyond the Kyoto deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle global warming. While most countries accept that urgent measures are needed, disagreement remains about sharing the burden. Nevertheless, a new agreement must be in place by 2009. Here, De Boer talks about the compromises he thinks are necessary to find a way through the maze.

How important is it to take action sooner rather than later to address climate change? What are going to be the costs of inaction?If you take urgent action now in line with the most ambitious scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and halt the increase of global emissions of harmful

greenhouse gases (GHG) by 2020 and dramatically cut them back by 50 percent by 2050, you will probably avoid temperature increases of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). You will avoid a rate of temperature increase that is severely

harmful to ecosystems. And you will limit the probable rise in sea levels to 50 centimetres (20 inches).

Taking action later will lead to temperature rises of 3, 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. You will always have the opportunity to take action to avoid things getting worse. But there is a limit, of course, when you get to the real tipping points. When you see the ice caps disappearing, sea levels rising by

Beyond Kyoto: seeking a new climate dealThe sheer frustration of trying to get world governments to work together and take the threat of climate change seriously once drove Yvo de Boer to tears. But he won’t give up the struggle.

seven metres, the Gulf Stream ceasing to function, an ice age in Northern Europe – by then it’s too late.

When setting targets to reduce greenhouse gases, what is the correct balance between being challenging without being unrealistic?I think that ‘credible’ and ‘realistic’ are subjective terms. If you say today that we must introduce car-free Sundays to tackle climate change, that would not be realistic. People wouldn’t believe it’s necessary. But the notion of introducing car-free Sundays after the oil crises in the 1970s was perfectly acceptable. So I think the sense of urgency is one of the factors that determines acceptability.

The other factor is how intelligently you design the regime. If you implement a climate change policy that kills energy-intensive industry in one part of the world but sees it develop in another, then that’s not an effective policy. If I raised the cost of a haircut to 100 euros ($154) in the town where you live but nowhere else, you would get in your car and get a haircut in the next town. But if it cost 100 euros everywhere, you will accept that as a level playing field and accept the cost.

You’ve challenged Shell for cautioning against targets that might not be achievable. Why?Leadership by developed countries is crucial to fight climate change. Without leadership, developing countries don’t have a lot to follow. According to the IPCC scenario, industrialised countries should reduce emissions in a range of 25 to 40 per cent in 2020. However, currently I see some pushback from leaders in certain rich countries. In Europe, some industries and companies – including Shell – are warning against “overstretched targets”, even though Shell has always showed a strong leadership role on climate change.

This is not the time to cut back ambition levels. On the contrary, oil companies should turn themselves into modern energy companies.

By 2030, approximately $20 trillion will be invested to meet the world’s demand for energy, half of which will be spent in developing countries. And much of that will come from multinationals such as Shell. If climate change is not taken into account,

Oil companies should turn themselves into modern

energy companies

Yvo de Boer (left), executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

© U

N P

hoto

/Dev

ra B

erko

witz

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


worldwide emissions will rise by 50 per cent. Science tells us that emissions need to decline 50 per cent by 2050 to avoid the most dramatic impacts of climate change. The world needs an energy technology revolution and oil companies like Shell will have to play a role. This calls for bold decisions today. Incrementalism is the worst enemy of technological breakthroughs.

The first period of the Kyoto Protocol, which set binding emission targets for developed countries expires in 2012. Can a new deal be reached to replace it by then?The Kyoto Protocol was a first step. The amount of emissions it reduces is clearly not enough. But it put in place an incredibly valuable architecture, including the carbon market, that puts a price on carbon and uses market mechanisms to seek out the cheapest options for reducing emissions.

The next step is to build on that architecture and make it more ambitious. It is imperative that work concludes in 2009 at the UNFCCC conference on climate change in Copenhagen in time to get the next phase in place. This will be the last conference to get the details right before the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of 2012. If we fail to get that work done by 2009, the risk is that we would get a highly fragmented and inefficient approach to climate change.

What in your view are the key elements of the post-2012 deal?The first is for industrialized countries to make ambitious commitments and to provide financial and technological resources to enable developing countries to tackle climate change. Without that it will be impossible to get major developing countries to engage in the process. Of course, the participation of developing countries is, in turn, politically essential for industrialized nations like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and others to sign up. To what extent major developing countries are willing to engage depends on rich nations showing leadership. So how much rich nation leadership do you need to get how much further engagement from developing countries? That is a political debate.

The challenge for participants at the Copenhagen conference will be to fix technical issues and use the convention to create financial incentives for low emissions investments, climate-friendly innovation and green growth all around the globe, especially in developing countries. One important way of doing this is by putting a price on carbon. We already have emissions trading. The clean development mechanism under the convention helps companies in rich industrialized nations reduce emissions by financing projects in developing countries.

You also need to look at other measures beyond the convention. For example, what tax breaks are needed to encourage exports of clean or environmentally sound technologies? How can export credit agencies help ensure those technologies get to market? And how can you improve the investment climate in developing countries to attract the investments they’re looking for?

Isn’t the real stumbling block how to share the many costs and burdens of

such a deal? Is compromise actually possible between the industrialised and developing countries?We need to get beyond the rhetoric and analyze what’s true and what’s not. First, we mustn’t forget that Europe outsourced its energy-intensive industry to developing countries because the wages were lower. That’s the reason why those sectors are in developing countries in the first place. And many of those factories are still owned by foreign companies: 60 per cent of China’s export earnings come through foreign owned companies.

Secondly, I think that it is important to be precise. I’ve heard people say that aggressive unilateral European action on climate change that places extra costs on production in Europe will destroy the European chemical industry because it’s exposed to fierce international competition.

There are about 20,000 chemicals on the European market, but if you dig a little deeper and look at how many of them are actually seriously exposed to international competition, it’s probably just a matter of a handful of feedstock.

So let’s be realistic... If you’ve got the context right and

you’ve fully understood the specifics, then I think you can begin to get everyone to act on climate change without creating competitive distortions and without subsidising the competition to take jobs away from you. That’s not going to be easy, of course.

One more thing: it’s worth mentioning that the goal of developing countries is not to have the most inefficient industries for as long as possible. Issues such as energy security, energy prices and air quality are driving every economy in the world to begin to act.

The European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the first of its kind

The world needs an energy technology revolution

Sugar cane harvest and distillation (right) to produce ethanol in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Germany’s first underground storage plant for CO2 in Ketzin (above), capable of storing up to 60,000 tons.

© S

hell

Phot

ogrp

ahic

Ser

vice

s, S

hell

Inte

rnat

iona

l Ltd

© M

icha

el U

rban

/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

36

huge increase in the use of coal. So the question is, how can you use fossil fuels and tackle climate change? I think that carbon capture and storage is an essential part of the solution.

Having said that, carbon capture and storage doesn’t work everywhere.

For instance, it depends on how close the storage location is to the source of emissions. We will have to satisfy a significant constituency that it is safe. It’s a challenge that we will have to come to grips with. Otherwise I don’t see how we can have our cake and eat it in terms of seeing increased fossil fuel demand and addressing the climate change challenge as well.

There are some encouraging signs.

and has suffered numerous setbacks. What do you feel is the future role of emissions trading?The advantage of emissions trading and the clean development mechanism is that it helps you to find the cheapest solutions to reduce emissions in a global market. Trading schemes are essential because they improve efficiency and lower cost. But they only work if you create scarcity in the number of emission allowances that are distributed to emitters of greenhouse gases. That’s where the ETS went wrong for a little while. It also inadvertently produced windfall profits for power generators.

My hope now would be that rather than developing a number of different schemes in different places – an inefficient way of doing things – we could jump straight to an international trading scheme that works according to harmonised standards, reporting measurements and verification methodologies. That way we can design a system that doesn’t simply result in emissions being moved from country A to country B, but that really lowers them overall.

Changes in land use, deforestation and farming are also responsible for greenhouse gases. What action is required to address these?Deforestation is an issue that we have to come to grips with. It accounts for about 20 per cent of global man-made emissions. Land use is a very interesting field, but we need to be able to analyse, measure and certify impacts better and understand how to bring these into a trading system without destabilising it. If you award carbon credits for avoided deforestation and introduce them into a market-based mechanism, what will happen to the price in the market? But overall I think the goal at Copenhagen will be to expand the areas in which action is taken on GHG emissions in a credible and measured way.

What role do you think that carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will play in helping reduce emissions?If I look at projected world economic growth and the related growth of energy demand, then fossil fuels are an indispensable part of the future. You cannot supply the energy to grow the global economy for the next 30 to 50 years without a significant role for fossil fuels. And all of the scenarios project a

There is a European Union pilot project with China. OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has established a carbon capture and storage fund. There are European efforts to facilitate it through EU legislation. And there are a number of pilot projects that are critical to come to grips with the sceptics out there and to lower the costs of this technology.

The challenge is to look at this issue in an integrated way. CCS has a potential role to de-carbonise power production and support the creation of a hydrogen economy. It produces hydrogen, which can power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This changes the economic and financial context of CCS too. We need to stop seeing this as something industry alone needs to develop and look at it in a longer-term perspective. Start looking at how investments will help us get where we need to be in 2050 or 2100, instead of thinking in terms of short-term investments and where we’ll be in 2020.

At the last UN climate conference in Bali in 2007, you famously shed tears of frustration at the sluggish pace of negotiations. Are you fighting a battle that can be won?I’m fighting a battle that I know can be won. The question is, am I fighting a battle that will be won?

One thing that frustrates me is that the very clear public and political understanding that we need to advance urgently on this issue – and all take on our responsibilities – does not always translate into the same urgency in negotiations. It’s a process of ups and downs. The G8 meeting last year was very euphoric and the EU announced their goal of cutting GHG emissions by up to 30 per cent by 2020. And four successive reports from the IPCC pointed to the sense of urgency.

But if you look at where we are now, Canada is saying it cannot meet its Kyoto obligations, in a recent speech [delivered April 16, 2008 at the White House Rose Garden] President Bush basically announced that US emissions would continue to grow until 2025, and Russia is asking why they should limit emissions if others are not doing so. So that sense of urgency needs to be injected on an almost daily basis to ensure that you keep enough tempo in the negotiations.

Yvo de Boer spoke to James Schofield for Shell World, courtesy of Royal Dutch Shell.

Researchers in the laboratories at Cellana (above), a joint venture between Shell and HRBioPetroleum to turn marine algae into biomass that can be used to make biofuel to replace conventional diesel or petrol.

My hope would be that we could jump straight

to an international trading scheme

The NedPower Mount Storm wind farm (above) located in West Virginia in the United States, a joint venture between Shell WindEnergy and the US company Dominion to provide a low-emission energy source.

© S

hell

Phot

ogrp

ahic

Ser

vice

s, S

hell

Inte

rnat

iona

l Ltd

© S

hell/

HR

BioP

etro

leum

/Cel

lana

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Call To Action

38

For the past 17 years, since the first intergovernmental negotiation took

place in Washington DC in early 1991, the world has been haggling about what it knows but does not want to accept. It has been desperately seeking every excuse not to act, even as science has confirmed and reconfirmed that climate change is real, that it is related to carbon dioxide and other emissions, and that the emissions are related to economic growth and wealth. Climate change is human made and it is devastating the world as we know it. The science is not just certain but unequivocal.

We will know the pain of climate change if we look at the faces of the millions who lost their homes in the Sidr or Nargis cyclones, which ripped through Bangladesh and Myanmar. Science has clearly established that intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones will increase as the Earth heats up. We need to know that the thousands who died in these events did so because the rich have failed to contain carbon dioxide emissions.

Talk not actionAs the call for action is becoming more strident and more urgent – as it must – much of the western world is offering petty responses and small answers.

There is a well-orchestrated media and civil society campaign to paint China and India as the dirty villains. If those countries protest about their need to develop, the response is to tell them that they are most vulnerable. We cannot afford to waste time in the blame-game. Even if in the past, the

western world created the problem, they must take the lead in reparations.

The west’s hysteria is growing. But so is their inaction. The irony is that these countries had agreed in 1997 to make a small cut in their gargantuan emissions, in the interest of us all. These emission

Time’s up: act nowby Sunita Narain

Climate change is definitely the biggest challenge of our century. But its sheer complexity and urgency is defeating us.

cuts were nowhere close to what was needed, then or now, to avert climate change. Since then, these countries have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to contain their emissions. Between 1990 and 2005 – when they agreed to cut emissions – the emissions from rich countries actually went up by 11 per cent; emissions from the growth-related energy sector increased by 15 per cent. They have reneged on their commitment. They’ve let us all down.

The world’s need for energy – to run everything from factories to cars – is the cause of climate pain. In spite of years of talk and empty promises, no country has been able to de-link its growth from the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. No country has shown how to build a low carbon economy nor been able to re-invent its pathway to growth.

As yet, the rich world has found only small answers to existential problems. It wants to keep its coal power plants (even as it points fingers at China and India). It wants to build new coal power plants. It believes it can keep polluting and keep fixing. This time, the answer it has hit upon is carbon capture and storage – to pipe the emissions underground and hope the problem will just go away. In this way it can have its cake and eat it.

Smoke rising from chimneys at Didcot, a coal-fired power station, overlooking the flooded banks of the River Thame in Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom.

As the call for action is becoming more strident and more urgent, much of the western world is

offering petty responses and small answers

Aerial view of the Ayeyarwady delta area (left) devastated by cyclone Nargis, as seen by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his team, during a helicopter tour along the shores of the Andaman Sea in Yangon, Myanmar.

© U

N P

hoto

/Eva

n Sc

hnei

der

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


It also wants to keep its cars and add more. Or, better still, drive more. It can do this by simply growing fuel and pumping it into vehicles. It does not matter if this biofuel is a small blip in the total consumption of oil – all the corn grown in the US can only meet 12 per cent of its petrol use.

It does not matter if it there is not enough land to grow food and fuel in the world. The cynics will say, after all, that the corporations rule the oil and the food business; scarcity will only increase their business. But the realists should say that the illusion of solutions is the opiate of the rich. This way they need do nothing, but can create an illusion of action. And turn their attention to the countries that are just learning the mind-matter game.

Is it not ironical that even though science tells us that drastic reductions are needed, no country is talking about limiting its consumption? Every analysis proves that efficiency is part of the answer, but it is meaningless without sufficiency. Cars have become more fuel efficient, but people just drive longer and have more cars.

We are the changeWhat then is the way ahead? Firstly, we must accept that the rich world must reduce emissions drastically. Let there be no disagreements or excuses on this. There is a stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, built up over centuries in the process of creating nations’ wealth. It is a natural debt. This has already made the climate unstable. Poorer nations will add to this stock through their drive for economic growth. But that is not an excuse for the rich world not to make deep-binding emission reduction targets. The principle has to be that they must reduce so that we can grow.

The second part of this agreement is that poor and emerging countries need to grow. Their engagement will not be legally binding, but based on national targets. The question is how to find low-carbon growth strategies for emerging countries, without compromising their right to develop.

This can be done. It is clear that countries like India and China can provide the world with the opportunity to avoid additional emissions. The

reason is that we are still in the process of building our energy, transport or industrial infrastructure. We can make investments in leapfrog technologies so that we can avoid pollution. In other words, we can build our cities based on public transport, base our energy security on local and distributed systems including biofuels and renewables, and develop our industries

using the most energy- and pollution-efficient technologies.

We know it is not in our interest to first pollute and then clean up, or to be inefficient and then worry about saving energy. But we also know that the high-end technologies needed for energy efficiency and transition to low carbon futures are costly. It is not as if China and India are bent on first investing in dirty and fuel-inefficient technologies. We are merely following

the example set by the rich world: first add to emissions, make money, and only then invest in efficiency.

The new dealIf we know that the world can leapfrog to make the transition to cleaner technology, the question is why is this not happening? Why is it that the world talks big but gives small change?

When the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated, the world decided to invent the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to pay for the transition in the poorer world. But the mechanism was designed to fail. The obsession was to get the cheapest emission reduction options for the rich world. As a result the price of CERs – the Certified Emission Reduction unit used in this transaction – has never reflected the cost of renewable and other high technology options. It is a cheap and increasingly corrupt mechanism. It is also a convoluted development process, in which rules bind governments not to think of big change. In fact, the current CDM provides disincentives for governments in the south to drive policies for clean energy or production. Any policy designed for good is bad in the CDM portfolio. It is not additional and it will not qualify for funding.

The world must realise the bitter truth. Equity is a pre-requisite for an effective climate agreement. Without cooperation, this global agreement will not work. The world must seriously consider the concept of equal per capita emission entitlements so that the rich reduce and the poor do not go beyond their quota. We need climate responsible action. We need effective action. And we need it today.

Current ethanol production is primarily from the starch in kernels of field corn.

Between 1990 and 2005 emissions went up by

11 per cent

A Makati City Police car (right) runs through Manila’s main financial district. The car is the first police vehicle in the Philippines to run on a mixture of 40 per cent diesel and 60 per cent used cooking oil from a fast food chain.

© B

ob A

llan

/ DO

E/N

REL

© R

omeo

Gac

ad/A

fP/G

etty

Imag

es

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Front Line Focus – Policy

40

Aggressive efforts by the United States to control emissions are essential

not only because the US is the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter, but also because US foot-dragging undermines its international ability to lead. Nowhere is such leadership more essential than in making China and India part of a global effort to stop and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

This logic, however, is consistently taken too far. US action is a necessary element of any effort to corral China and India, but it will be far from enough on its own to unblock progress. If world leaders do not acknowledge this now, they will be sorely disappointed when the United States acts, and China and India fail to follow.

The United States has made itself an easy target for Chinese and Indian (not to mention European) leaders. Despite study upon study showing that modest caps on greenhouse gas emissions would impose relatively small economy-wide costs on the country, and that the potentially deeper impacts on particularly vulnerable sectors could be ameliorated through prudently crafted policy, the United States has consistently rejected limits on its emissions. This opens up several

credible arguments for Chinese and Indian leaders.

Do as I say, not as I doThe first stems from equity. The United States is far wealthier than either China or India and has emitted much more of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. Moreover, when measured on a per person basis, it continues to emit far more greenhouse gas than either of the emerging Asian giants. Why, Chinese and Indian leaders rightly

ask, should we be given responsibility for cleaning up the atmosphere when greater polluters are unwilling to take such responsibility themselves?

Another comes from economic prudence. If American policymakers are worried that, despite what the models say, constraining emissions will be economically ruinous, why should China and India – with far poorer data on their economies and much weaker abilities to predict future paths – trust that all will turn out well for them too? Indeed, it is sensible for them to worry

Reductio ad absurdum – who’s first?by Michael Levi

As the world searches for a new global climate deal in 2009, all eyes are firmly on the United States to start the ball rolling. But we should be looking towards China and India too.

at least as much as US policymakers about economic consequences. It’s reasonable for them to ask the United States and others to demonstrate that robust low-carbon growth is feasible and sustainable before they embark on ambitious efforts themselves.

By moving to control its emissions, the United States could undermine both arguments. Chinese and Indian leaders could no longer assert that they were waiting for the US to lead. By beginning to cut its emissions, the US would also provide a real-world counterpoint to the claim that economic growth and emissions cuts are incompatible.

And yet the challenge of getting China and India to take steps remains immense. Some argue that by capping its own emissions, the US will unleash forces of innovation that will make clean energy so cheap that the rest of the world will follow out of economic common sense. In reality, although caps will stimulate innovation and lead to lower costs, most clean technology is likely to remain a premium product.

Addressing the real issuesAny action taken by the US won’t necessarily be contagious. Three fundamental sets of forces will shape the decisions of Chinese and Indian

The United States has consistently rejected limits

on its emissions

The view of downtown Phoenix, Arizona is obscured by high levels of particulate pollution. Phoenix wrestles with this so-called Brown Cloud – consisting of tiny particles of carbon and nitrogen dioxide gas – every winter.

© Ja

ck K

urtz

/ZU

MA

/Cor

bis

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


leaders regarding climate change – and US action at home, by itself, will have limited impact on each of them.

The first set of forces is economic. US action would have the biggest impact, helping demonstrate that emissions controls are compatible with growth, and lowering the costs of clean technologies. But it would not change the fact that deep emissions cuts would impose significant near-term costs on China and India. The US and others would still need to take steps to make emissions cuts economically acceptable (though not necessarily free) for the rapidly emerging economies. Paying for some of the cuts might do that, or else focusing on emissions cuts that, by making more efficient use of energy, would yield positive economic returns by themselves. Alternatively, or in tandem, policymakers could focus on non-economic payoffs, such as the reuction in local air pollution or improvements in energy security that costly emissions cuts could deliver.

The second set of forces retarding action is social. The growing middle classes in both China and India chafe at urban air pollution – which is particularly acute in China – and many of the steps that would cut it would reduce emissions too. But social forces can also stand in the way of climate

progress. Both countries make strikingly inefficient use of energy. If market forces were allowed to operate – by cutting subsidies and letting energy prices float – both countries would reduce energy consumption and emissions, and also become economically better off. Subsidies and price controls, however, serve other social goals, such as controlling inflation and helping

expand access to energy. Convincing governments to reform them is a far from straightforward task.

The final set of forces shaping Chinese and Indian decisions involves energy security, where US domestic action will have little influence. Some energy security concerns, of course, push leaders in constructive directions. China is shifting to greater use of renewable energy and adopting policies to cut energy intensity, both of which will reduce its reliance on imports while reducing emissions as a bonus. But as with social forces, energy security incentives swing both ways. China might cut emissions by shifting from coal to natural gas, but the switch from a domestic resource to imports makes its leaders uneasy. In the future, it might equip its coal plants with equipment to capture and sequester their carbon dioxide emissions – but even if that could be made economically attractive, it would greatly increase coal demand and energy insecurity, something that makes Chinese policymakers apprehensive.

Getting China and India to reduce their emissions requires shifting their leaders’ calculus in each of these areas: economic, social, and security. US action at home can start that ball rolling, and help negotiators brush aside the simplest excuses for doing nothing. But that will only open the door. Real progress will require much more.

Solar energy panels at the state run silk factory in Mysore, India. Silk production in modern India is undergoing something of a renaissance.

A water well sits in front of modern wind turbines at the Buffalo Gap Wind Power project in Texas.

The challenge of getting China and India to take

the steps that they must remains immense

A coal mine workers’ village in Shanxi Province, China (left). Shanxi is the country’s top coal producing region and pressure is on to meet the country’s need for energy despite the negative impact on air, water, soil and health.

© R

ober

t W

allis

/Cor

bis

© S

till P

ictu

res

© B

ob D

aem

mric

h/C

orbi

s

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Front Line Focus – China

42

China’s turbocharged growth may slow as the global economy falters.

But sustained expansion has already vaulted China into the lead position as a greenhouse gas polluter and seems likely to keep it there unless the country is hit by a deep recession while other economies recover. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published research in June which showed that China had overtaken the US by a wide margin as the leading emitter of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for warming the planet.

Other studies, such as those from the Washington-based Carbon Monitoring for Action, have also confirmed China’s climb to the top of the CO2 emissions league in overall terms, though not, of course, in per capita terms.

The Dutch report found that China’s CO2 emissions rose by 8 per cent in 2007, accounting for two-thirds of the growth in last year’s 3.1 per cent rise in global emissions. China’s share was 14 per cent higher than the US, now the second largest polluter. With nearly a quarter of the world’s CO2 from burning fossil fuels coming from China, the new data underscored the importance of getting Beijing to join any deal to curb global warming. Neither China

nor the US ratified the Kyoto Protocol. As a developing country, China was not obliged to put a national cap on its emissions. The US refused to do so, saying it would damage growth.

With negotiations underway to forge a more comprehensive arrangement to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, the pressure is on all significant polluters to take part.

Will China move away from being a major part of the problem to being

a major part of the solution? Will it play a full and constructive role in the costly and politically difficult process of controlling emissions? The signals so far are mixed. The Chinese government must balance the imperative of continuing rapid expansion to provide jobs and social stability against the risk of degrading the natural resource base on which future growth depends.

To sustain people, this resource base must include sufficient supplies of fresh water, arable land and air. China’s stock

China & climate change: a basis for constructive international partnershipby Michael Richardson

China’s exploding economy has recently placed it in lead position as a greenhouse gas polluter. But changing Beijing’s attitudes towards emissions caps isn’t going to be easy

of these natural assets is being seriously damaged by excessive and wasteful use. Urbanisation and industrialisation are eating into productive farmland. Many Chinese cities are shrouded for much of the year in noxious smog. Northern and western China already suffers from chronic water shortage. This will become even more serious as glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau – a vital source of fresh water for about 750 million people in China, India and other parts of Asia – continue to melt.

The need for actionChina’s rise as a “dirty power” with a coal-dependent economy is impelling it to take more effective action to cut emissions. However, like the US, it has so far shied away from setting a mandatory national cap on emissions. Beijing has said it will consider voluntary targets for reducing emissions, but not binding targets until 2050. Both China and the US are relying on improvements in industrial efficiency and the introduction of advanced technology to reduce greenhouse gases per unit of GDP. The European Union and many scientists say this is far short of what is needed. Only when America takes tougher measures is China likely

Studies have confirmed China’s climb to the top

of the CO2 emissions league in overall terms

A farmer leads a cart past the cooling towers of the coal-fired Datong County thermal power plant in Qinghai Province, China. Urbanisation and industrialisation are having a devastating effect on productive farmland.

© C

hina

Pho

tos/

Get

ty Im

ages

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


to consider a stronger target. The Chinese government will also expect other economic competitors in the developing world – notably India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa – to contribute to the international negotiations and implement any agreements.

Still, China’s position on global warming has evolved in recent years. Before that, Beijing blamed the US, Europe, Japan and other advanced economies for the mess, asserting that they should be responsible for cleaning it up. China can rightly argue that while it may be an economic powerhouse now, it has contributed less than 8 per cent of the total emissions of CO2 from energy use since 1850, while America is responsible for 29 per cent and Western Europe 27 per cent.

China can also argue that although it may have overtaken the US as the top emitter of CO2 – largely because it gets around 70 per cent of its commercial energy from coal, the highest carbon-emitting fuel – its per capita emissions remain far below those of wealthy nations. The Dutch report pointed out that when emissions are measured in terms of population size and level of economic development, China drops much lower in the league of global polluters. China’s per capita CO2 emissions in 2007 were 5.1 metric tons, compared with 8.6 tons for the European Union, 11.8 tons for Russia and 19.4 tons for the US.

Beijing has also made the point that much of the growth in China’s emissions is to produce goods consumed in the west. Somehow, an equitable formula for dividing responsibilities and costs for cutting emissions must be found. It will not be easy because the outcome could profoundly reshape competitive advantage around the world, with those bearing a lighter load gaining an edge on their rivals.

Revolutionary thinking Yet the scale, scope and intensity of Chinese pollution far outpaces what occurred in the US and Europe during their industrial revolutions. If it continues unchecked – and if other big emerging economies follow a similar high-carbon growth path – the impact on the health of the planet and the viability of the global economy could

be catastrophic. One promising fact is that 71 per cent of total CO2 emissions are accounted for by just five states: China, the US, the EU, India and Russia. If this relatively small group of countries could strike a deal, it would form the basis of a wider pact.

China is becoming a more active participant in the UN negotiations on climate change because it realizes it must be a player if it wants to shape any post-2012 framework. Chinese scientists

are also warning that China will suffer badly from the consequences of more extreme climatic conditions. In 2006, the Chinese government’s first national assessment of climate change issued a warning that economic growth and development could be undermined.

China has a poor record in applying environmental policies that are economically and politically painful. To encourage it to do so, the US, Japan,

the EU, Australia and a number of other developed nations have offered substantial aid and technical assistance to China for emission control. The already huge capacity of China’s coal-fired plants generating electricity is being rapidly enlarged. China could hasten the transfer of pollution control technology. Much of it belongs not to governments, but to private sector companies in the West. China could use some of its $1,600 billion in foreign exchange reserves, by far the world’s largest, to buy this proprietary equipment and know-how. This would also help reduce its trade surpluses with the US and Europe.

A more difficult, but still essential, step is to advance market reform in China. Beijing controls energy prices, often keeping the costs to industrial and private users at well below international levels in order to keep Chinese exports competitive and prevent consumer unrest. Provinces, countries and cities compete to attract energy-intensive industries to provide jobs and revenue. Meanwhile, Chinese banks give easy credit to state-owned firms, rather than to businesses in the private sector that may be more efficient.

China has shut some smaller and older power plants because of their high pollution levels. It is already doing what Britain and Europe have done or said they will do. China is installing new nuclear power plants, expanding hydro, wind, solar and other renewable energy. It is also trying to run its energy-intensive industry and infrastructure more efficiently. But only when the governments of the US and other big established polluters show that they are serious about reining in greenhouse gas emissions can China and other large emerging polluters be expected to follow with their own, probably less stringent, caps.

Greenpeace activists staging a protest at the Castle Peak coal power station in Hong Kong in 2005.

Beijing has made the point that much of the growth in

China’s emissions is to produce goods

consumed in the west

Delegates arriving at the 101st Guangzhou International Trade Fair in China (right). The fair attracts thousands of businessmen from around the world, highlighting the country’s importance as a manufacturing base.

© S

aman

tha

Sin/

AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

© R

ex


44

When it comes to predictions about the future, it is inevitable that we

attach uncertainty and scepticism to how we are told things might shape up. We are all too willing to hear the reassurances that encourage the status quo, and too quick to deny the warnings that demand change.

These are predictable human traits, and seem especially prevalent when projections about the future are based on the often highly cautious language of science: “Maybe…”, “Perhaps…”, “Chances are…” Is it any wonder that so many people are still confused about the scale and nature of the threat posed by climate change.

Despite the confusion, however, some aspects of our collective near-term future are becoming ever more certain. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report shows how global average temperature has sharply

increased recently. This is 90 per cent likely due to human activity and that a range of impacts are already occurring as a result. Projections are offered showing how these are set to worsen, depending on how much more greenhouse gas we release into

the atmosphere. On this latter subject, things do not look good.

In 2000, the IPCC published a series of emissions scenarios for the 21st Century, taking into account possible population growth rates, technological developments and patterns of economic growth. The worst-case scenario projected a high rate of increase in emission levels going forward. Unfortunately, data published for 2005 and 2006 show that the worst case

Closing the leadership gapby Tony Juniper

Human minds work in a certain way. Always tuned to the here and now and living mainly in the short-term, we sometimes find it hard to grasp the implications of longer term trends.

scenario was less extreme than what has actually happened. We are on a trajectory worse than the worst case scenario set out in 2000.

While some governments, such as those of the EU countries, have adopted a policy goal of setting in place measures to avoid a global average temperature increase above 2 degrees Celsius, some recent projections put even a 4 degree increase in the realm of what might be called optimistic realism. Allowing emissions to accumulate to this level would, however, unleash disaster on a scale never before witnessed by civilized human societies.

While this kind of outcome seems ever more plausible, the lack of urgency demonstrated in the face of it further compounds our propensity for short-term thinking. It is rather like hearing a fire alarm and looking around to see that everyone is carrying on as normal. The natural conclusion is that there is no fire, but rather a mistake or false alarm. So what is to be done to cut through our natural short-termism and the apparent absence of urgency?

Taking the leadThe simple answer is that the world needs leadership. It requires figures in positions of influence and authority to step up to the challenge at hand and to persuade others to follow. The United Nations meeting on climate change in Poznan in 2008 offers leaders the opportunity to do just that: to rise to the challenge, to set a course for a low carbon future, and to inspire the world to embark on that course with optimism and confidence.

The science tells us that time is now short and that we are on the brink of changes not witnessed during the entire history of human civilization. We also know enough now to anticipate that failing to act on climate change will undermine decades of effort and progress across a wide range of other endeavours, including decades’ long struggles to alleviate poverty and conserve biodiversity.

When it comes to development and ongoing efforts to enable people to have better lives, it is clear that climate change poses a huge blockage to progress. Increasingly frequent reports of drought stricken agriculture and towns inundated by flood waters

The simple answer is that the world needs leadership

The garbage dump of Stung Meanchey in Cambodia (left) is home to more than 2000 people, about 600 of whom are children who earn money selling recyclable garbage. ©

Stil

l Pic

ture

s

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


amply demonstrate how departures from normal weather conditions can cause devastation. The poorer the community, the more serious is often the impact. Climate change could thus be a further driver of inequality, with the poor paying a heavy price for the high consuming lifestyles of the rich.

The longer we leave the day when we bend the curve of greenhouse gas emissions downwards, the bigger will be the cost on those least able to cope with the changes ahead, and indeed who were least responsible for their cause in the first place. And it is not only humanitarian impacts that will harm developing countries and their populations. Damage to infrastructure and property will dent growth, slow development and thereby exclude hundreds of millions from access to basic services. Starkly put, the more greenhouse gases we pump out, the less likely it is that we will ever win the battle against poverty.

Governments can very well set targets, such as those included in the Millennium Development Goals, but unless there is a priority focus on drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, then they might as well accept that these are mere aspiration, statements of hope, flimsy dreams with little prospect of fulfilment. And the same goes for setting targets to stem the loss of biological diversity – as has been repeatedly done at meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The lessons of historyFor decades, different societies around the globe have been engaged in attempts to stem the loss of natural habitats and declining wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have been established. Populations of endangered species have been carefully nurtured back to health. Much of this excellent work could soon be undone. Isolated pockets of habitat are highly vulnerable to climate change, and so are the animals and plants within them, especially those unable to move easily. Climate change will cause ecosystems to function differently, predator and prey relationships to alter, and seasonal cycles and migration patterns to be disrupted. Again, the longer we leave the moment at which we cut emissions, the greater the damage that will be caused.

There are five occasions in the long history of life on Earth when a large-

scale loss of animal and plant species has occurred – the last one was when the dinosaurs disappeared, about 65 million years ago. This was a dramatic event, leading to the loss of a huge proportion of life on Earth. It was by no means the worst, however. That appears to have happened at the end of the Permian era about 251 million years ago, possibly following the release of huge quantities of carbon dioxide from volcanoes, putting into effect a catastrophic period of global warming and ocean acidification that caused most species to go extinct.

It is widely believed in conservation circles that a sixth great extinction event is underway, this time set in motion by humans. This has previously been

mainly driven by large-scale habitat loss such as rampant deforestation, the impact of introduced species and the over-exploitation of different natural resources, but is now being accelerated by rapid global warming. Taking control of climate change, including stabilising deforestation, is thus a critical aspect of what must now be done if we are to bequeath to future generations at

least a good proportion of our planet’s unique biodiversity.

When the costs of inaction are considered, then it is quite clear that the benefits of taking early action far outweigh any short-term advantages that appear to come with delay. Certainly there will be winners and losers in setting in motion the transition, but the former undoubtedly outnumber the latter, especially if a slightly longer-term perspective is taken.

Taking the longer-term view is sometimes hard, but there is no choice but to do that now. There are times in history when people and societies have done this, and they have become all the stronger and prouder for the leadership they showed. The kind of leadership we need is rare, but is certainly needed in Poznan in 2008.

Perhaps reminders from history can help us see the significance and power of stepping out from the comfort zone of consensus, to stand out with a message that must be heard but which many do not wish to hear. In November 1936, Winston Churchill gave a speech that warned of great peril ahead. He was at the time a lone voice, but possessed sufficient vision to speak out of a terrible danger that lay ahead. In the face of the need for urgent and decisive action on climate change, his words seem to fit the situation we face today only too well.

“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid in fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent... Owing to past neglect in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences... We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now...” Churchill, of course, went on to galvanise action to meet the gravest threat of the 20th century, and to prevail.

His words strike an eerie tone, as the world pores over projections of greenhouse gas emissions, temperature rise and dramatic climate disruption, and finds that there are few leaders who will help us to close the gap between our short-term human attention spans and the terrible longer-term consequences of inaction. The Poznan meeting is a big part of our last chance – we must seize it with both hands.

It is quite clear that the benefits of taking early action far outweigh any

short-term advantages that come with delay

Artist’s impression (above) of the death of the dinosaurs after Earth was struck by a comet or asteroid 65 million years ago. Clouds of smoke and dust block the light and warmth of the Sun and provide a source for acid rain.

© D

. Van

Rav

ensw

aay

/ Sci

ence

Pho

to L

ibra

ry


46

Many environmental campaigners and celebrities have been

pounding home the message that the world must concentrate above all else on reducing carbon emissions in order to tackle climate change.

Limited resources mean that we cannot fix all of the world’s problems and misplaced fear has driven us to concentrate on a poor way to tackle climate change, instead of embracing the best and brightest solutions to the biggest problems.

This fear has been stoked by campaigners such as Al Gore, who warn of a looming 20ft wall of water that is going to submerge low-lying areas. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we should expect ocean level rises of between half a foot and two feet by the end of this century. We should remember that very little land was lost when the sea rose by that much or more last century – and that it costs relatively little to protect the land from rising tides. In many places during the last century, we actually gained land.

Activists are correct when they point out that climate change will mean more heat waves and heat-related deaths. But rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells, and the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change’s health effects, global

warming will actually save lives. By 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year – but 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.

The Kyoto Protocol is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heat waves. It could actually cause 80,000 more deaths each year because fewer people would be saved from cold-related deaths in the winter.

Which way forward?By Bjørn Lomborg

In Poznan in 2008 and again next year in Copenhagen, it is likely that discussion will focus on going above and beyond Kyoto. Furthering a flawed plan is not sensible – and could end up costing lives.

Urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures during heat-waves more effectively – and much more cheaply – by planting trees, adding water features and reducing heat-soaking black asphalt in at-risk cities.

We know that global warming will mean more precipitation and the risk of more flooding. Yet addressing this through Kyoto-style polices would do almost nothing at very high costs. We could respond more effectively by managing people and wealth on floodplains. We could improve public planning, inform people better about flood risks, cancel public subsidies to settlements in floodplains, use levees more sparingly, and allow floodplains to do their job.

Global warming is also going to increase the number of people at risk of catching malaria by about 3 per cent over this century. According to scientific models, implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the rest of this century would reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2 per cent.

Our focus on cutting emissions means that it’s easy to miss the fact that malaria death rates are already climbing in sub-Saharan Africa – not because of climate change, but because of poverty. Poor, corrupt governments find it hard to afford spraying, mosquito nets and effective treatment that could together eliminate this disease. Spending

Misplaced fear has driven us to concentrate on a poor way to tackle

climate change

A fisherman stands ashore at Tepuka Savilivili, an islet near Kiribati in the Pacific, whose vegetation has been systematically destroyed by rising sea levels. The larger island of Tepuka, seen in the background, is still forested.

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


$3 billion annually (or 2 per cent of the Protocol’s cost) on these measures could cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade. For every dollar we spend saving one person through climate policies, we could save 35,000 through direct intervention.

Getting our priorities straightIn each area, current climate change policies are not the most effective approach. That doesn’t mean we should ignore man-made climate change.

We know the typical cost of cutting a ton of CO2 is about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. Spending $20 to do $2 of good is not smart.

The way to reduce the cost of cutting emissions is to dramatically increase spending on research and development of low-carbon energy. In Poznan and in Copenhagen, every nation should commit to spending 0.05 percent of its gross domestic production exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies. This would increase global R&D ten-fold, yet cost almost one-tenth of the cost of Kyoto. Talk about a win-win scenario!

Climate models show that the Kyoto Protocol would have miniscule

effects. Even with the United States and Australia signed on and everyone living up to their promises, the effects of global warming would be postponed by just seven days at the end of the century. At a cost of $180 billion per year, focussing scarce resources on such poor solutions to climate change seems especially lamentable when we consider what this money could achieve, given the other challenges facing the planet.

Research conducted for the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 project, which gathered Nobel Laureates in May to prioritize the soundest solutions to the biggest problems, revealed that $1 billion (0.5 percent of Kyoto) spent on tuberculosis identification and treatment would save one million lives in the Third World. Similarly, spending $200 million (0.1 percent of Kyoto) on getting low-cost drugs which are widely available in rich nations to the world’s poorest could avert 300,000 heart attacks a year.

The Copenhagen Consensus research also told us that if we made preventing

conflict a priority by spending $2 billion on peacekeeping troops, we could avoid three out of the four new civil wars that will occur this decade. Or for $19 million a year (0.01 percent of Kyoto) spent on iodizing salt, we could practically wipe out goitre.

Nobel Laureates at the Copenhagen Consensus project concluded that investments such as providing micronutrients to sub-Saharan Africa offered much greater benefits than spending a fortune on reducing carbon emissions to battle climate change.

Low-cost, durable solutions exist for many global challenges. Our resources are limited but have the potential to achieve a staggering amount of good, if only we focus first on the best responses to the biggest problems.

A young mother in Bangladesh arranges a mosquito net around her infant child to provide protection from mosquito and flies.

The way to reduce the cost of cutting emissions is to dramatically increase

spending on research and development of low-carbon energy

A Chinese farmer (above) stands among the parched plants on his land. The receding of the glaciers in the mountains surrounding China is having a devastating effect on irrigation and the country’s river systems.

© S

till P

ictu

res

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Industry Focus

48

Major oil companies are the villains who almost everyone loves to

hate. The environmentalists accuse them of making record profits even when the planet is being suffocated by their greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, Joe Six-Pack complains about the rising price of gas for his pickup truck – soaring up to $4 per gallon at the local pump – before prices fall, along with his savings and job prospects, as the US plunges into recession.

Some, although definitely and defiantly not all, of the major oil companies – or Big Oil as they are collectively known – would like to be seen as environmentally friendly and even ‘green’. Several have even gone out of their way to advertise their new claims. BP has adopted a logo that draws attention to its environmentally friendly intentions. For years, both Chevron and Shell have been running ads in newspapers and on television that show them going inventive extra miles to protect the environment.

But there are still barriers before the oil majors can be seen as participants, let alone partners, in the struggle to protect the planet. One is secrecy and the role of oil companies in shaping government policy behind the scenes. Another is their attitude towards

potential new reserves of oil and gas, and to the whole climate debate. The issue of secrecy and subterfuge is the more dramatic, but the attitude to uncovered new carbon resources may be the defining issue that separates some oil majors and puts them on the wrong side of the climate debate.

This is time for a word of caution. The companies usually referred to as

Big Oil – such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Chevron – are actually quite small compared with the mostly state-owned companies in the big oil-producing nations. ExxonMobil, for example, boasts that it is “the largest publicly traded petroleum and petrochemical enterprise in the world.” It is second (after Walmart) in the Fortune 500 list, as well as being the most profitable company in the world in 2007, making $40.6 billion – the equivalent of $78,000 profit every minute. However, it ranks only 14th in the global top league of oil

Could the villains of the past become the heroes of the future?by Kevin Rafferty

Development of alternative fuels is becoming more urgent as conventional oil reserves ebb. The major oil companies are at a crossroads: do they invest for a greener future or dig ever deeper into old technologies?

producers, with just 10 per cent of the oil reserves of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company.

The company lineIn terms of the company’s website – which is, after all, the way that the organisation chooses to represent itself – ExxonMobil stands alone. It states its guiding principles as follows: “We must continuously achieve superior financial and operating results while simultaneously adhering to high ethical standards.” Environment policy ranks 10th on Exxon’s lists of standards of business conduct, after ethics, gifts and entertainment but before product safety and harassment in the workplace.

The company states: “It is ExxonMobil Corporation’s policy to conduct its business in a manner that is compatible with the balanced environmental and economic needs of the communities in which it operates. The Corporation is committed to continuous efforts to improve environmental performance throughout its operations.”

Its statements on climate change are low key. “Managing the risks from increases in global greenhouse gas emissions is an important concern for ExxonMobil, industry and governments around the world,” is its main headline,

There are still barriers before the oil majors can be seen as participants,

let alone partners

The Chevron Empire in Plaquemines Parish near the mouth of the Mississippi River, seen 19 days after the area was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As a result, around 991,000 gallons of oil were accidentally released into the surrounding countryside.

© G

reen

peac

e/C

hris

tian

Asl

und

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


and it promises to improve its efficiency and reduce emissions in its operations. Later, it is grudging about the dangers of climate change, stating: “Climate remains today an extraordinarily complex area of scientific study. The risks to society and ecosystems from increases in CO2 emissions could prove to be significant, so it is prudent to develop and implement strategies that address the risks, keeping in mind the central importance of energy to the economies of the world.”

Critics cite well-attested attempts by ExxonMobil to influence and even subvert government policy. The most trenchant critics accuse Big Oil – and specifically Exxon – of being more influential than Big Tobacco, as well as more deadly because refusing to tackle global warming will damage not only the health of smokers, but also that of the nation and the whole world. The company’s tentacles go deep into US government, especially since George W Bush became president.

Philip Cooney, who had previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, was a key player in the White House during George W Bush’s first term. Cooney edited the reports of various government scientists, injecting an element of uncertainty about warnings of global warming. Until, that is, the New York Times published some examples of his handiwork, after

which he resigned. A week later he joined ExxonMobil.

Greenpeace in the US started a website, www.exxonsecrets.org, that it says was “born out of a need to easily explain the complex web of organisations, pundits, lobbyists and sceptic scientists running Exxon’s

campaign to deny and undermine the scientific evidence on global warming.” It lists about 40 organisations that the oil company has funded, including the American Petroleum Institute, Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Another crusading site – www.exxposeexxon.com – lists donations by ExxonMobil to the campaigns of leading US politicians.

More significantly, The Royal Society, which takes its science seriously, attacked ExxonMobil in 2006 both for its own views and for its financial support for groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence.”

But perhaps the most powerful claim against ExxonMobil came in 2008, when 73 of the 78 adult descendants of John D Rockefeller accused the oil giant of failing to do enough to combat climate change. ExxonMobil was formed by two offspring of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, so he is generally counted as the company’s founding father. The Rockefeller family members, who described themselves as the company’s longest continuous shareholders, charged the company with being too focused on making short-term gains from higher energy prices. Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, a great granddaughter of John D Rockefeller, said that Exxon was “profiting in the short term from investments and decisions made many years ago by focusing on the narrow path that ignores the rapidly shifting energy landscape around the world, including developing nations.”

She claimed that the company was betraying the forward-looking vision of the founding Rockefeller: “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil. Part of John D Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.” The descendants said they had gone public because they believed that future energy will come from sources other than oil and natural gas, and that Exxon needed to move more quickly into sustainable technology to secure its long-term viability.

The family and other dissident shareholders proposed that the jobs of Exxon’s chairman and chief executive Rex W Tillerson should be split (as they are at other oil majors). They

Waves pound against the sandbagged seawall in Kivalina, Alaska. The city sued ExxonMobil, eight other oil companies, 14 power companies and one coal company, claiming that the greenhouse gases they emit contribute to global warming that threatens the community’s existence.

73 of the 78 adult descendants of

John D Rockefeller accused the oil giant of failing to do

enough

John D Rockefeller (above) is considered the founder of ExxonMobil, yet his descendants accused the company of disregarding climate change and the search for alternate energy in the pursuit of short-term profits.

© A

P Ph

oto

© A

P Ph

oto/

Mar

y Sa

ge

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

50

questions about climate change and admits that there is no magical “silver bullet” solution.

Royal Dutch Shell’s website is the most informative, albeit without the attractive in-your-face challenge of Chevron’s, but the company is so concerned about the future of global energy that it has developed two possible scenarios for the world to 2050. Jeroen van der Veer, its chief executive, states bluntly in his Foreword to the

won 39.5 percent support, but lost the vote. Afterwards Tillerson said, “A lot of climate change policy is still up for debate.” He added that society must be realistic about the economic impact if the burning of fossil fuels was curbed. Tillerson, who took over in 2006, is generally regarded as more concerned about climate change than his predecessor, Lee R Raymond, who was publicly sceptical about the effects of global warming.

The bigger pictureOther oil majors have been more open about the climate debate. Take BP (which started life in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and in 1954 became British Petroleum before reverting to the initials BP), which in 2000 unveiled a new logo. It looks like a flower but, according to BP, it is “a sunburst of green, yellow and white symbolising dynamic energy in all its forms. It was called the Helios after the sun god of ancient Greece.” The company said that it had decided to keep the initials BP because of their worldwide recognition and because they fitted the company’s aspirations: “Better people, better products, big picture, beyond petroleum.”

On its website, BP has links allowing you to download the full Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It sums up its own position: “BP supports precautionary action to limit greenhouse gas emissions and works to combat climate change in several ways, even though aspects of the science are still the subject of expert debate.” It devotes several pages to its plans and aspirations for alternative energy supplies, though they offer a smorgasbord of snacks rather than a fulfilling analysis of the challenges and prospects in each area.

Chevron’s website offers a direct challenge on its home page, with a main headline that says: “ The Power of Human Energy: finding newer, cleaner ways to power the world.” The website lacks the substance of BP’s, but it does offer three pages of frequently asked

document that, “Never before has humanity faced such a challenging outlook for energy and the planet. This can be summed up in five words: ‘more energy, less carbon dioxide’.”

Shell’s two scenarios are entitled Scramble, a free for all, and Blueprints, in which there is cooperation and a coordinated global effort to cut greenhouse gases (GHGs). Shell sums up the two. Under Scramble, there is “a world of intense competition between

WORLD POPULATION1

1950

400

USA

gigajoule (GJ) per capita (primary energy)

GDP per capita (PPP, ’000 2000 USD) Data shown 1970-2005

Europe EU15

Japan

South Korea

China

India

300

200

100

00 10 20 30 40

1 billion people

OECD

Non OECD

1975

2000

2025

2050

CLIMBING THE ENERGY LADDER

These charts (right) give a stark indication of the scale of the problem facing the world. Above, a chart measuring population growth in both developed (orange) and developing (blue) countries, with projections up to 2050. Below, a chart indicating the rate at which primary energy use increases with rises in per capita income.

The BP sunburst logo (right) is named Helios, after the Greek sun god, and symbolises dynamic energy.

© A

P Ph

oto/

Cha

rles

Dha

rapa

k

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


individual countries, which rush to secure more energy for themselves. Political responses to the twin crises of energy squeeze and climate change are often knee-jerk and severe, leading to price spikes, periods of economic slowdown and increasing turbulence.” In this scenario, by 2050, GHG emissions would be “heading towards concentration levels in the atmosphere far above the levels that scientists indicate are safe.” An outsider might comment that the instability would probably lead to war and a breakdown of global governance so that the world might not actually see 2050.

Blueprints, as its name suggests, involves international planning and efforts by local and national governments to introduce standards and taxes to change behaviour, improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and invest in renewable, non-polluting fuels. Realistically, Shell predicts disorder at first, but then a global policy framework is put together which will see widespread use of electric cars, renewable sources of energy, and wide use of carbon capture and storage.

Even in the optimistic scenario, where there is planning, consultation and cooperation rather than a free for all, Shell concludes that the world has left things too late. It says: “Even with these (Blueprint scenario) wide-ranging and rapid changes – and reductions in emissions of other

GHGs like methane from agriculture – atmospheric concentrations of GHGs in a ‘Blueprints’ world still stabilize at levels higher than the 450 parts per million that scientists are currently calling for.”

Critical questions for Big Oil are how much oil and gas the world has left, how much effort should be made to tap those reserves, and at what cost in money and to the environment. “Drill, baby, drill,” became the shrill Republican cry in the US at the frustration of rising gas prices and the realisation that the country had become

heavily dependent on foreign oil. The American Petroleum Institute had already prepared the ground, claiming in its 2008 ads that “America’s future” lies in more drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The API ad claimed: “Oil and natural gas powered the past. But the future? Fact is, a growing world will require more, 45 per cent more by 2030, along with greatly expanding alternatives. We have substantial oil and natural gas resources right here. Enough to power 60 million cars and heat 160 million households for 60 years. With advanced technology and smart policies, together we can secure America’s future.”

An endangered Grey Whale in the feeding grounds near Sakhalin Island, where it was alleged by Greenpeace that ExxonMobil was conducting illegal seismic tests for gas and oil.

ExxonMobil has just 10 per cent of the oil

reserves of Saudi Aramco

Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the first to sound the warning about global warming, wrote in April in Yale Global Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu): “Conventional fossil fuel supplies are limited, even if we tear up the Earth to extract every last drop of oil and shard of coal… ExxonMobil proudly advertises that they’re (sic) drilling the depths of the ocean and searching the most extreme pristine environments… It would be possible to find more fossil fuels, and extend our addiction and pollution of the environment, should we be so foolish as to take the path of extracting unconventional fossil fuels such as tar shale and tar sands on a large scale. That choice cannot be left to the discretion of industry moguls. The planet does not belong to them.”

Some extremists would be prepared to let the Arctic melt, the better to be able to get to oil, gas and mineral resources, and to go gangbusters to tap tar sands and other marginal sources, so that Peak Oil – the point at which oil production reaches its peak – can be denied forever, or so they claim. It is a dangerously attractive delusion, especially if you are an oil major like ExxonMobil, which has not invested in alternative fuels in the same way as BP, Chevron and Shell.

But if you destroy the Arctic wilderness in the hunt for every last drop of oil, where do you go next?

© G

reen

peac

e/Ig

or G

avril

ov


52

Japanese companies have clearly taken over the leadership in the quest

to produce a ‘green car’, although it remains an open question whether the expression ‘green car’ is an achievable ambition or simply an oxymoron. Even the auto giant Toyota refused to predict when a completely carbon dioxide free car would be on the road, offering the cheapness, ease, flexibility and mobility of the traditional car.

Automotive technology is improving quickly and green is the way to go. All major Japanese manufacturers and General Motors, the US giant, have electric or hydrogen powered vehicles that are beyond the concept stage and have hit the road for tests. Europeans are also joining in, and a new challenge is about to come from China.

Japanese leadership of the green market has been helped by several factors. From the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, the country sought maximum energy efficiency as a national priority. In addition, Japan’s longstanding search for lean, mean, just-in-time manufacturing was epitomised by the motor industry, with Toyota setting the best example.

Toyota opened up a huge lead over its rivals by choosing to go

green via a hybrid car that combined a conventional petrol engine with an electric motor. It began work in the early 1990s when US automakers were still gung-ho about building gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles or SUVs. Toyota’s first hybrid was sold in 1997 in Japan, and a more powerful version went on sale in the US and Europe in 2001. By mid-2008, Toyota announced

that cumulative sales of its flagship Prius had reached more than a million vehicles and it was aiming to sell a million hybrid cars a year. The car’s name, said Toyota, comes from the Latin “to go before” since “the Prius is the predecessor of cars to come.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named the Prius the most fuel-efficient car sold in the US in 2008. When it is slowed or stopped in traffic, or is reversing or descending hills, the vehicle’s computer shuts off the engine and runs the car from the battery, which helps fuel consumption and reduces emissions in urban areas

The drive to develop a ‘green car’by Kevin Rafferty

With soaring fuel prices and dwindling reserves, the need to develop alternative motor vehicle technology has never been more urgent. But is the concept of a ‘green car’ simply a modern myth?

where a conventional gasoline engine vehicle performs least well. According to the EPA, the 2008 Prius achieved 48 miles per gallon in city driving, slightly less on the highway. In the UK, the Prius did better, scoring 56.5 miles per gallon in urban areas and 67.3 outside urban areas. In UK tests, the Prius was tied for third place in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, with 104 grams per kilometre, with the two top spots reserved for diesel-powered cars.

Goldman Sachs predicts that the global market for hybrid cars will rise from half a million cars in 2007 to 2.5 million by 2015, with Toyota and Honda maintaining their lead.

All the Japanese companies are also pioneering new lighter materials and more efficient production lines that will emit less CO2 in the production process. Honda says that in terms of CO2 emissions in the life cycle of a vehicle, just 6 per cent are generated by the production process, against 78 per cent produced while driving.

In pole positionToyota and other Japanese companies have advantages over their overseas rivals through their tie-ups with electronics and battery makers. Toyota

Motor vehicle technology is improving quickly and green is the way to go

Honda’s vehicle assembly line (above) for their new FCX Clarity , a hydrogen fuel-cell car whose purring engine has been much admired by drivers. The Clarity’s only exhaust emissions consist of a trickle of water.

© H

onda

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


has a joint venture with Panasonic, Nissan with NEC, and Mitsubishi Motors with GS Yuasa, which are all making improved lithium-ion batteries and planning the next generation of batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Toyota has also developed a fuel cell for a hydrogen-powered car that can be started and operated at minus 30 degrees Celsius, overcoming one of the traditional problem of fuel cells failing in cold weather. Its growing expertise in battery production will be tested over the next few years.

Toyota announced that it was advancing its schedule for testing a plug-in version of the Prius to 2009, a year earlier than planned, using lithium-ion batteries, which are more advanced than the nickel-metal hydride batteries used in existing hybrids. Toyota is also planning an as-yet-unnamed plug-in hybrid vehicle, which is already being tested on the roads of five countries, including the UK and US. This should be ready for launching about the same time as GM’s Chevy Volt, the production version of which was unveiled in September 2008 to mark GM’s 100th birthday. The Volt is “not comparable” to the Toyota plug-in hybrid, according

to GM vice chairman Bob Lutz because the engine in the GM vehicle will only recharge the battery pack and won’t directly turn the wheels.

In 2008, Toyota also announced that it is developing an electric small car, an area where it was thought to have fallen behind its rivals. It is also rumoured to be incorporating a solar-powered feature into its new hybrids. Japan’s car giant has a whole range of concept cars on its drawing boards from the i-REAL, a single person vehicle that is only 700 millimetres wide with a top speed of 18.6 kilometres per hour, through the carbon fibre reinforced plastic 1/X (pronounced “one-Xth”) that aims to have the same space as a Prius but double the fuel-efficiency, to the FT-HS hybrid sports car with a 3.5 litre V6 gasoline engine.

Even so, when Toyota was asked when the conventional internal combustion engine would reach the end of the road and be surpassed by a zero emissions car, it was coy. These questions were put to Toyota:• When will the world’s first zero

emissions car be ready for popular use – meaning at an affordable price, with the ability to run without recharging for as long as a petrol-based car now goes without the need for refuelling?

• Will it be electric or hydrogen powered? What will be the carbon footprint of making the car compared to today’s vehicles?

• Will the world’s clean trucks come at the same time as the cars or is their technology further off ?

Toyota provided a written answer as follows: “We looked at your questions and tried to answer to them, but unfortunately there are too much uncertainties to answer what you are expecting. Also, since all the questions are directly related to our corporate management and technology development, it is very difficult to answer to them. I am very sorry that we did not meet your expectation.”

Honda admits it will be at least a decade before a non-carbon emitting car is produced. “The internal combustion engine is expected to continue to provide the principal means of mobility until at least 2020,” Honda says in its 2008 environmental review.

But Honda has a jump-start on a new zero emissions vehicle. Drivers who have been behind the wheel of the FCX Clarity say that it feels like an ordinary car, apart from the lack of engine noise. That is because it is a hydrogen fuel-cell car whose purring engine is less noisy than the tyres on the road. This,

Renault’s Z.E. electric concept car (below) being shown at the Paris Motor Show in 2008. The vehicle has solar panels in the roof and boasts zero tailpipe emissions.

The heart of the Honda Insight’s hybrid system is the Integrated Motor Assist (right), which couples a 1.0 litre, 3-cylinder engine with an ultra-thin electric motor to maximise the car’s performance and efficiency.

© F

ranc

ois

Dur

and/

Get

ty Im

ages

© A

hmad

Pes

aran

/ D

OE/

NRE

L

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

54

say critics, makes it a danger to blind people and absent-minded pedestrians who rely on engine noise to warn them of approaching cars. The Clarity’s only exhaust emissions consist of a trickle of water. The Environmental Protection Agency has already certified the car, which is being delivered to retail customers on a leasing basis.

But there are snags with the hydrogen-powered car that outweigh its zero CO2 emissions. One is the price. Honda president Takeo Fukui said that the price “should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase.” Another is the difficulty of finding fuel at filling stations, which would cost $2 million to build. Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the book The Hype about Hydrogen, wrote scathingly: “Other than the traditional media, which is as distracted by shiny new objects as my 16-month-old daughter, nobody should get terribly excited when a car company rolls out its wildly impractical next-generation hydrogen car. Too many miracles are required for it to be a marketplace winner.”

Apart from price and the difficulty of finding or building fuel stations, hydrogen itself, as Romm puts it, doesn’t come from Santa Claus. In the US, 95 per cent of hydrogen is made from natural gas, so a hydrogen car does little to reduce net carbon dioxide emissions nationwide.

Electric cars have an advantage over hydrogen, not least because the motor in a hydrogen car is the same

one as in an electric vehicle. Here too the Japanese makers have more than a head start because of their superior technology in production of the batteries which are at the heart of the vehicle. But there is still the question of the electricity source and the increased demand for power from the grid.

Heavy trafficThe modern electric car market is

starting to get crowded. The first electric vehicle predates the internal combustion engine, going back to the 1830s, when Scottish entrepreneur Robert Anderson

invented an electric carriage. Before the turn of the 20th Century, electric vehicles had been driven at more than 60 miles (100 kilometres) per hour. But soon afterwards the internal combustion engine took over. Electric vehicles remained for some specialised jobs, such as forklift trucks or milk delivery floats, where speed or long-distance travel, the two strengths of conventional cars, were not required.

Modern electric-powered vehicles, initially held back by opposition from their own makers backed by the oil companies, are now coming into their own, driven by the potential profits from ‘green cars’. The REVA Electric Car Company was set up in Bangalore in 1994 as a joint Indo-US venture

and its first vehicle was produced in 2001. More REVA vehicles have been produced than any other electric cars, but they are lightweight and, in the US, can only be used as a neighbourhood car with a limited top speed.

In 2003, two entrepreneurs in California founded Tesla Motors, which produced a prototype electric car in 2006 and a car ready for the road in March 2008. This vehicle can do 220 miles per charge and go from zero to 60 miles per hour in just under 4 seconds. Lotus Cars is assembling the Tesla under contract and is helping with design and engineering. Although the Tesla addresses the usual problems associated with electric vehicles – speed and range – it is a stylishly expensive roadster at $100,000.

Traditional automakers have cheaper models almost ready for the road. Mitsubishi’s MiEV has a range of 160 kilometres per charge. Its battery weighs 204 kilogrammes, less than half the Tesla’s, thanks to the battery tie-up with Yuasa. The Mitsubishi vehicle will sell for $28,000, with a subsidy of $10,000, when it goes on the market in 2009. Equally important, Mitsubishi Motors is promising a “quick charge” device to get 80 per cent power into the vehicle in 30 minutes. Nissan and Toyota are chasing Mitsubishi closely with vehicles that will be superior in running to their US rivals, thanks to their battery power. The Chevy Volt will only do 40 miles per charge.

European carmakers are also joining the race to go green with the launch of Daimler and RWE’s e-mobility project in Berlin, backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, which will see “more than 100” Mercedes electric cars able to use 500 recharging points throughout the city. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy has promised 400 million euros for the development of green cars, and Renault showed off its surreal hybrid concept car Ondelios at the 2008 Paris Motor Show, a vehicle described as “a business jet on wheels, with inspiration from a Gulfstream V and the starship Enterprise.”

BMW also announced that it would produce a special edition of its Mini E electric car to 500 select users on a one-year lease from 2009. The Mini E promises to be indistinguishable from the regular petrol and diesel versions,

Unfortunately, there are snags with the hydrogen-

powered car that outweigh its zero CO2 emissions

Visitors gather to look at a compact Toyota gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle (left), which is on display during a preview of the Taipei International Auto Show in 2007. Toyota has consistently led the world market in the development of hybrid vehicles since the 1990s.

© P

atric

k Li

n/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


but will have a 201bhp electric motor where the engine would otherwise be and a series of lithium-ion battery packs in place of the rear seats. The Mini E will have a range of about 150 miles on a full charge, which will take 2.5 hours through a wallbox in the garage.

The Europeans are still small players. However, the green auto challenge from China is about to go international. BYD (Build Your Dreams), the offspring of the world’s second biggest rechargeable battery maker, which only entered the auto market in 2003, showed off its hatchback F3DM plug-in hybrid in Geneva and Paris in 2008. The manufacturer claims that the car will be able to travel for 100 miles on a single charge of its self-developed batteries, which will be able to power the car to run over 600,000 miles. Unfortunately, the manufacturer did not provide specs or prices, although the larger F6DM sedan version of the hybrid will have a one-litre engine. BYD is still relatively small, with total Chinese sales of all its cars of 100,000 units, and exports of 10,000, both of which it plans to double. Most auto analysts say it will be 15 to 20 years before the Chinese will be an international force.

Even though automakers are making progress towards a ‘green’ car, the question is this – can an individual vehicle ever really be green?

The newly rising rich in emerging countries seem determined to do their best to catch up with the west in polluting the planet by demanding their own luxurious mobile chariots. Stand outside five-star hotels in cities like Beijing or Shanghai, or even Singapore or Cairo, and you see the brightest earners turning up in huge hot-rods in spite of the massive taxes that most countries impose on them.

Among the middle classes too, the demand for personal mobility is symbolised by India’s Tata Motors’ decision to produce the Nano – a people’s car costing the round sum of one lakh (100,000 rupees) or about $2,500. This puts it within the price range of any family which has managed to get a first foot on the ladder of modern

prosperity. Although farmers’ protests and political opposition in West Bengal forced Tata to cancel plans to build the car in that state, the company plans to produce 50 Nanos a day at Pantnagar in Uttarakhand by early 2009. These days, a car, along with an apartment or house, colour TV and refrigerator, has entered the Must Have list of every modern Indian family.

Common sense, especially in the face of sprawling modern cities and growing traffic jams, would be to concentrate on improving public transport with mass transit systems to carry commuters to work, shoppers to their malls and sports fans to their stadiums. That’s where common sense meets diminishing oil and gas reserves, soaring fuel prices and the 21st-century demands for a cleaner, greener lifestyle with air that’s fit to breathe.

Unfortunately, it is also the crossroads where desire to be one-up from the Joneses – or the Patels or the Wongs – meets the politicians’ and planners’ lack of imagination and the scarcity of public resources for big projects.

The issue also involves the planning of cities. The world’s oldest cities – such as Varanasi in India, which has been continuously inhabited for 4,000 years – were built as tightly knit communities, often around a local feature such as the river or a lord’s castle. Temples or churches, schools and local shops were integrated into the community. Mass transit systems were then built in order to ferry the citizens from place to place. London is unusual in that a public transport system was developed before the car was invented.

However, the explosive growth of emerging markets from the mid-1990s, along with the spending power of the newly rich, is threatening the old framework. In Delhi and Beijing, public mass transit is trying to catch up with the sprawl of the city. And in Mumbai and Shanghai, mass transit has been left far behind.

In Bangkok, the idea that any vehicle can ever be green is tested every day. Rush hour traffic crawls at a rate of 50 metres in 30 minutes – which would challenge the credentials of any emission-free car – yet the newly rich are moving further afield to gated communities up to a kilometre from the main road, 10 kilometres from the shops and 20 kilometres from work.

It is the price of their freedom, but a price that the planet can ill afford.

NOTE: The author of this artcle has never owned a motor car nor ever held a driving license.

These days, a car has entered the

Must Have list of every modern Indian family

A power cable is seen plugged into the electric-powered Tesla Roadster (right) at the company’s California HQ. This zero emissions vehicle costs $109,000, can travel nearly 250 miles on a single charge, and is capable of going from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds.

Chetan Maini (right), the deputy chairman of the REVA Electric Car Company, presents the newly launched REVAi in Bangalore in 2007. More REVAs have been produced than any other electric-powered car.

© Ju

stin

Sul

livan

/Get

ty Im

ages

© D

ibya

ngsh

u Sa

rkar

/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages


56

Of all the symbols of globalization, none is more visibly potent than

the aeroplane. Aircraft can physically cut distances from weeks to hours, delivering fresh products to faraway markets or business executives to meetings thousands of miles away, reuniting families split across continent or tearing them apart by raining weapons of destruction on their heads.

But the jet aircraft is at the heart of one of the bitterest battles that will be waged at Poznan, and is already raging in Brussels, Geneva and all major cities east and west, north and south.

The argument centres on the emission of carbon dioxide and other deadly greenhouse gases. The aviation industry says that it accounts for just 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, but it contributes almost 8 per cent – or $3.6 trillion – to world gross domestic product, as well as providing 32 million jobs worldwide and carrying 35 per cent of inter-regional exported goods by value.

Nonsense, say critics. Greenpeace UK claims that: “according to the government, aviation accounts for 13 per cent of the UK’s total climate impact (this figures takes into account greenhouses gases other than CO2 and the fact that pollutants are dumped

straight into the atmosphere, at altitude). Flying causes 10 times more climate change than taking the train.”

The Aviation Environment Federation, a British pressure group, cited an unpublished report by four government-funded bodies which claimed that airlines are pumping 20 per cent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that had been estimated. This could bring CO2 emissions to

1.48 billion tonnes by 2025, more than double the current 670 million tonnes and higher than the 1.03 billion tonnes forecast for 2025. If accurate, this could lead to the “worst case scenario” for climate change. The critics also complain that aviation is currently exempt from Kyoto Protocol regulations and should be immediately brought into line and its subsidies stripped away. The European Union is already taking action to try to make airlines pay for the mess they cause and is drawing up laws for an emissions trading scheme for airlines that will take effect from 2012.

Flight or fight?by Kevin Rafferty

Controversy rages as to the true impact of the aviation industry on the environment. Here, Cathay Pacific’s Tony Tyler confronts his critics.

This could not have come at a worse time for airlines, which are still reeling from jet fuel prices that reached more than $180 a barrel in 2008. In addition, airlines have to pay a cracking cost above the spot market prices, and the crack itself soared from a historic $10 a barrel to $40 a barrel. Not to mention the costs of security charges and softening demand for air travel as the global economy heads towards recession. The world’s airlines together are forecast to lose $5 billion in 2008 and US airlines may lose $13 billion.

High flyerAt the sharp end of the business, Tony Tyler, chief executive of Cathay Pacific Airways, the Hong Kong based carrier, which with its sister carrier Dragonair has a fleet of more than 90 aircraft flying to 111 destinations worldwide, says the European move will impose an unfair penalty on long-haul non-EU airlines, such as Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines – which are two of only six five-star airlines in the world, according to the influential Skytrax survey (the others are Asiana, Kingfisher of India, Malaysian Airlines and Qatar Airways).

This is because the EU promises to tax emissions on Cathay or other airlines flying from London or Paris or Amsterdam for the whole of their journey from Europe to their Asian destination, not just for the portion of the flight that crosses EU territory. This means that a Cathay Pacific aircraft taking off from London for the 12 hour flight to Hong Kong will have to pay

The European Union is already taking action to try to make airlines pay for the

mess they cause

International air travel has risen to become part of the fabric of everyday life in the 21st Century.

© iS

tock

phot

o

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


more than an Emirates’ aircraft leaving London and going only as far as Dubai, just over six hours away.

Tyler accuses the EU of “jumping the gun”, and urges that an aviation emissions trading scheme should be global, rather than confined to a single continent. He adds: “We are not against emissions trading schemes. In fact, I think that emissions trading is the right way to go, to try to make sure that our industry pays for the externalities of our activities. And there is no doubt that, at the moment, all industry – the airline industry is not the only one – businesses and consumers are not paying for the externalities, in this case climate change. It is a big cost out there that is being uncovered, and the world needs a way to make people pay the true cost of the environmental impact we’re having. The best way of doing that is an emissions trading scheme.”

The problem for Europe is that plans for a global scheme are making slow progress, though most airlines, as well as IATA, the International Air Transportation Association, to which the world’s airlines belong, support emissions trading and the principle that airlines must pay their way. Tyler points out that plans are under way within ICAO, the United Nations body charged with looking after international aviation. A group of 15 countries are

working out a scheme that will be both practical and accepted worldwide by both developed and developing countries, although he admits “it is (proving) slower than we would have all liked.” But if Europe goes ahead with its own scheme, it may be difficult to fit it into a global scheme later or could end up imposing double taxation.

The devil is in the details of how to plan and manage an ETS scheme. The issues include: whether the trading scheme should be ‘closed’ – meaning within the same industry – or ‘open’ – meaning trading across all sectors would be allowed; the price of allowances in the trading market and the amount that have to be purchased; and whether allowances should be auctioned, which would probably drive prices up, or ‘grandfathered’ – which

is to say based on past emissions – or benchmarked, based on each entity’s emissions efficiency against a sector average using a mathematical formula.

Paying as you goSome airlines, including Cathay Pacific, have introduced schemes for passengers to offset their own carbon footprint on the flight by paying an extra tax. It is an optional extra that only 2 to 3 per cent of passengers have chosen to pay. But Tyler says that “big corporations like (banking giant) HSBC, who are a big corporate account of ours, offset all of their travel.”

In 2008, British Airways also offered its passengers the chance of paying a modest sum – just £26 on a long-haul flight from London to San Francisco and only a few pounds for flights

Tony Tyler, chief executive of Cathay Pacific, speaking to the press in Hong Kong in 2008.

One of Cathay Pacific’s 90-strong fleet (right) taxis past the terminal at Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong.

© M

ike

Cla

rke/

AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

© M

ike

Cla

rke/

AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

58

within Europe – to reduce their carbon footprint and do something practical for climate change. With a single click on the www.ba.com website when booking their flight, passengers can offset their flight emissions and support a new wind farm in Ningxia, one of the poorest regions of China, as well as run-of-the-river hydroelectric plants in Gangsu in China and Santa Catarina in Brazil. The upgraded offset scheme uses UN certified emissions reductions to help finance clean energy projects in developing countries. British Airways said: “The UN framework guarantees that offset payments will lead to genuine reductions in emissions through the projects we have chosen with our new provider, Morgan Stanley,

leading providers in the sourcing of certified emissions reductions from projects developed under the UN Kyoto Protocol.”

Cathay’s Tyler stressed airlines’

commitments to working for a greener Earth: “The industry accepts that it is part of the problem and must be part of the solution, but it is not as big a

part of the problem as everyone seems to think. Also, compared with other industries, the airline industry’s track record in terms of increasing efficiency has been much better. When you think back 30 to 40 years ago, the amount of carbon being emitted per passenger kilometre was many times what it is now. With new engines, bigger aircraft, shorter air routes, improved technology, these have all delivered huge productivity improvements in the area of carbon emissions. You wonder what other industries have achieved the same. I think very few. Even though we have done a good job of getting where we are, we are being treated as if we are the new tobacco. It is a bit of a bum rap, though to be honest we have not done a very good job as an industry of presenting our case. We have done a lot better in the last couple of years, but the train has left the station.”

Fuelling debateTyler drops a few names to show that he keeps up with the issues, pointing out that it was not easy for airlines to switch to new fuels: “Nowadays some of the more far-thinking green activists, like Jonathon Porritt or Oliver Tickell, will say that aviation is an industry where there is no obvious substitute for oil. Unlike some other industries – power generation, surface transport – where there are various things you can do. But in aviation, the jet engine is here to stay for the foreseeable future. While it clearly has got to pay its way and play its part, we should recognise that it may be much more efficient to cut carbon emissions from other industries. And if we are going to make investments in technology, we may get a much bigger bang for the buck by investing and improving other industries. If a billion dollars will improve power generation by 50 per cent, you are going to save a lot more carbon than by investing a billion dollars in some technology that is aviation related.”

Tyler notes that, in Asia, probably the most devastating impact on greenhouse gases is coming from deforestation, “which is also having an impact on environmental issues like biodiversity. If half the emotional energy and media

“The industry accepts that it is part of the problem and must be part of the

solution, but it is not as big a part of the problem as people seems to think”

A plane lands at Hong Kong International Airport (left). The Chinese air traffic system is in need of modernisation.

Labourers with bushels of onions (left) at a wholesale market in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui in China. The industry relies on aviation to ferry their produce around the world.

© Jo

hnny

Hen

shal

l/Ala

my

© S

till P

ictu

res


60

Sharp Corporation, the Osaka-based maker of home appliances, is a

considerable emitter of greenhouse gases and effectively encourages its customers to do likewise by buying its wide range of modern conveniences. Yet the company claims it is striving to balance “business expansion with environmental preservation.”

How does it square this seemingly impossible circle? Hiroshi Morimoto, executive officer and group general manager of Sharp’s environmental protection group, says that, by 2010, Sharp’s own emissions of greenhouse gases will be less than the emissions of gases saved through its customers’ uses of its energy-saving products.

“Consumers who purchase Sharp’s efficient air-conditioners, refrigerators or televisions (which today use 50 per cent less power than 1997 models) may be able to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions at home by using these products,” said Morimoto. “We have calculated that adding up the carbon dioxide reductions that Sharp products help achieve, these will, by the year 2010, be greater than the total greenhouse gas emissions by Sharp’s worldwide business activities.”

In the fiscal year to March 2008, Sharp calculated that its own gas emissions were 1.76 million tonnes, against 1.37 million in emissions that its clean and green products saved. But, Morimoto added, “in the next year or the year after next, the balance will

change, and after 2010, the figure for emissions reduction will grow faster and may become two to three times bigger.” Sharp’s own emissions are growing by about 5 per cent a year as it opens new factories.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was simply a conjuring trick, since even the greenest of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners or audiovisual equipment emits carbon dioxide.

But at the 2008 IFA electronics show in Berlin, the world’s largest consumer electronics show, Sharp displayed a new big-screen television that it said was carbon-neutral. The new machine

combines a solar panel with cutting edge liquid crystal display and the single panel can provide enough electricity to power the 52-inch television for 4.5 hours, the average time a Japanese household spends watching TV each day. Unfortunately the claim could not be tested because there was no sunlight in the exhibition hall.

Morimoto suggests that the carbon neutral household could almost be in sight – at least in Japan – if it invests in Sharp’s energy-saving products and its

Sharp: the cutting edge of electrical appliancesby Kevin Rafferty

Can the Japanese manufacturer Sharp realise its dream of getting its customers to save more on emissions than its factories produce?

new solar cell power generation system. The average Japanese household emits 3,500 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide a year, he says, which could be reduced by 900 kilogrammes by replacing two air-conditioners, refrigerator and television set with modern appliances. The emissions cut is based on Sharp appliances made 10 years ago.

A further massive 1,700 kilogrammes could be cut, said Morimoto, by installing a 4.28 kilowatt solar power generating system, which would be expected to generate 4,587 kW hours of electricity per year. (Japan, of course, has the advantage of being able to build on years of research into energy efficiency; it would take more effort by profligate American or European households, where emissions are higher, to dream of being carbon neutral).

However, it’s also easier said than done, even in Japan. Morimoto admitted that he did not have solar panels installed in his own house. It’s too old, he claims – it was built 20 years ago. Nevertheless, Sharp’s business philosophy and environmental practices are worth looking at as evidence of Japanese dedication to cutting emissions and achieving maximum energy efficiency.

Greener than green According to Morimoto, all 39 Sharp factories worldwide have achieved ‘green’ status, and the company is moving to Super Green and Super Green II. Achieving the Super Green II status involves superior performance according to 200 almost obsessively calculated points. ‘Green’ is the most frequently used word in Sharp’s reports, usually prefixed with ‘super’, including the ambition to have a super green strategy, super green management, super green offices, super green procurement, super green technologies and certified super green products that will bear a leaf logo.

At Kameyama in Mie prefecture, Sharp has vertically integrated its business model and invited other manufacturers of glass substrates and colour filters to set up plants adjacent to its own LCD panel plant, so that they can share infrastructure. Kameyama has a photovoltaic power system and a superconducting magnetic energy storage system that are among the largest in the world; a third of the electric power is generated in-house and 100 per cent of the waste water is recycled.

The superiority of Sharp’s plant has already been

recognised by customers who are asking for products

made at Kameyama

Sharp’s advanced manufacturing complex at Kameyama

© S

harp

PROJECTED GLOBAL ELECTRICITY DEMAND

(TWh)

Generating cost(yen/KWh)

SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC

46 yen/KWh

23 yen/KWh

14 yen/KWh

Oli-fired thermalpower cost28 yen/KWh

Nuclear power cost28 yen/KWh

Year

Source: Created by Sharp based on Renewable Energy Scenario to 2040, published by the European Renewable Energy Council, and reports of the German Advisory Council on Global Chance (WBGU)

Source: Created by Sharp based on PV Roadmap 2030 (PV2030), published by NEDO

40,000

35,000

30,000

25,000

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

50.0

40.0

30.0

20.0

10.0

0

2001 2010

2010

2020 2030 2040 2100

Primary Energy Estimates

TOTAL36,346 TWh

REN

EWA

BLE

ENER

GY

POWER COST TARGETS FOR SOLAR POWER GENERATION

Year2007 2020 2030

OIL-FIRED THERMAL POWERNUCLEAR POWER

OTHER

OTHER

SOLAR THERMAL

SOLAR THERMAL

SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC

SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC 9,113 TWh (approx. 25% of total)

WIND

WIND

BIOMASS

BIOMASS

HYDRAULICLARGE-SCALE HYDRAULIC

SMALL-SCALE HYDRAULIC

GEOTHERMAL

GEOTHERMAL

019%

22%

34%

59%

82%

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


Morimoto says the superiority of the plant has already been recognised by customers who are asking for products made at Kameyama.

The company’s “next cutting edge factory,” added Morimoto, “is the Sakai plant, a 21st century manufacturing complex opening in March 2010 in Osaka. This new factory complex

has two features. The first is a further development of vertically integrated business models. In this complex, we have two kinds of business, an LCD plant and a thin film solar cell plant. In the case of the LCD plant we need many kinds of parts, such as glass substrates and colour filters. Those components are produced in the same place in Sakai complex, with the cooperation of the leading companies in various types of industry that we invite to join us.

“The second (feature) is horizontal deployment of thin film technology, now used for LCD TV production and also for thin film solar cells production. This thin film technology is used for two business categories in Sakai complex, so we will be able to achieve a very efficient productive system.”

Sakai will cost more than 450 billion yen (almost $5 billion dollars with the strengthening yen) and, along with LCD panels for 40 to 60 inch TVs, it will produce the latest generation of thin film solar cells. The cell’s film is about two micrometres thick, so it requires only one per cent of the silicon used in crystalline-silicon solar cells. At Suzuka City Hall in Mie, the solar modules also serve as skylights, so they offer light as well as capturing solar power. Sakai plant itself will not run on solar power, which will provide only 1 or 2 per cent of the power production.

The new generation thin film solar cells are a big leap, but they also show

how slow solar power has been to develop and how far it has to go.

Sharp started solar cell production in 1963. The business grew rapidly when Japan offered housing subsidies for solar cells in 1994 and solar production was linked to electricity power lines. By 2007, Sharp’s cumulative production reached two gigawatts out of worldwide production of eight gigawatts. Yet Sharp exports most of its production to Europe and the US: solar power in Japan, where winters are typically sunnier than in Europe, represents less than one per cent of total power.

Another weakness is the slow improvement in energy conversion of solar cells. When Morimoto joined Sharp in 1980 it had just developed the first thin film solar cell. “At that time the conversion efficiency was around 5 to 6 per cent. After almost 30 years, we have around 10 per cent conversion efficiency.” Crystalline-silicon solar modules can achieve around 13 or 14 per cent, but if this could be improved to 25 per cent then solar production might really take off.

Sharp’s own emissions of greenhouse gases will

be less than the emissions of gases saved through its

customers’ uses of its products

Sharp are working at the forefront of solar cell development. Their research (below) demonstrates the importance they attach to solar power in the future.

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


exposure and political will was going into sorting that problem out, not to mention investment, we may do a much more valuable job than just beating up the airlines.”

Some airlines, though not Cathay, are looking actively at alternative fuels, but, so far, jet kerosene is far superior to the alternatives in terms of efficiency and safety. But because long-term supplies are limited, the quest for other fuels is gathering pace. IATA’s goals are that by 2017 alternative fuels will provide 10 per cent of total supplies. The most promising renewable sources are third generation biofuels including algae, jatropha, halophytes, switchgrass and babassu, all plants or trees that do not have an impact on the food chain, as the first generation biofuels produced from sugars, oils and fats of agricultural products do. Airbus Industrie, Virgin Atlantic, Air New Zealand, Continental, Japan Air Lines and KLM all have active plans to use biofuel in at least one engine in active flight.

Tyler stresses that airlines are looking at a constant variety of options to make flying more efficient and with a smaller carbon footprint, from towing aircraft to the runway before starting engines – which has disadvantages when the engines don’t start and there is a queue of aircraft waiting behind – to not painting aircraft to reduce weight – but this is harder when modern aircraft are partly built of metal and partly from composites giving a blotched look to a naked aircraft. One factor in Europe that would save 12 per cent of emissions would be for governments to get their act together and have a single air traffic control system, thus creating a “European sky” rather than a patchwork of national systems. Similarly, if Hong Kong, Macao and Guangzhou in China could modernise and coordinate their air traffic systems, it would save 300,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

However, some of the critics are remorseless. One green activist organization calculates that on a return economy class flight from the UK to Japan in a Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet that is 80 per cent full, the passenger would consume 681 kilogrammes of fuel or 10 times the average person’s

weight, which is comparable to 17 light bulbs of 60 watts each burning for a year and emitting 6,352 kg of CO2 equivalent. “It would cost an extra £512 if tax and duty were charged at the same rate as on petrol in the UK,” the activists declared – which would

double the price of the ticket plus tax.This is not a scenario that IATA

recognizes. According to it, the newest aircraft, such as the Airbus 380 and the Boeing 787, will “use less than three

litres of fuel per 100 passenger/km. This compares favourably with small family cars, but at six times the speed.” IATA also says that “air transport pays entirely for its own infrastructure – a $42 billion annual bill. Airlines pay when they land, when they fly, and when they park. This is completely different from both road and rail.

“On top of that, air transport is a cash cow for many governments. In Europe, every rail journey is subsidized between 2.4 euros and 7.4 euros but every air journey contributes between 4.6 euros and 8.4 euros in government revenues and avoided expenditure.”

In July 2008, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC issued a challenge to UK business executives. “Is your journey really necessary?” he asked, suggesting that modern Internet videoconferencing technology rather than taking a flight was the answer to reducing executive carbon footprints. He was speaking live by videoconference link.

Such views will not be music to the ears of CEOs like Tyler, who rely on a regular stream of international business executives to fill up the front of their aircraft and keep their profits flying high. Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines have been largely profitable, though Tyler says that better returns would have been achieved by investing in other businesses. “Maybe by 2012 the sunlit uplands of airline economics will have been reached,” he says. “But having been in this business for 30 years and not having reached them yet, I am not holding my breath.”

It could be that videoconferencing will sound the death knell of the aircraft as the symbol of globalization.

“Airlines pay when they land, when they fly, and when they park. This is

completely different from both road and rail”

A high speed train in Germany (right). Rail travel has a tenth of the environmental impact of aviation.

NREL researchers (right) in the Micro Activity Test Station with Temperature Reactor and Catalysis Treatment , who are searching for alternative fuels based on algae.

© iS

tock

phot

o

© P

at C

orke

ry /

DO

E/N

REL

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Research

62

Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies (ADAM) is an integrated research

project running from 2006 to 2009, which is being coordinated by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom and funded by the European Commission. It entails 26 research institutions from Europe, India and China working together to support the EU in developing post-2012 global climate policies, to define the European mitigation policies needed to reach its 2020 goals, and to advise on the emergence of new adaptation policies for Europe with special attention to the role of extreme weather events. This article highlights just a few of the project’s interim results, focusing on global climate change mitigation and adaptation along with the international climate negotiations.

Putting a price on 2 degrees CelsiusEuropean climate policy is based on the long-term objective of limiting the global temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Recent studies exploring the relationship between the peak level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and increases in temperature show that only for a long-term concentration below 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (ppm CO2-eq) is there a better than 50 per cent chance that

the 2 degrees Celsius objective can be achieved. For that, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would need to fall to 50 per cent below 1990 levels. For greater chances of reaching the 2 degrees Celsius goal, net negative emissions would be required.

ADAM is exploring the implications of the 2 degrees Celsius target in terms of economic and technical feasibility, as well as institutional and policy

arrangements. Our results show that, at least theoretically, the potential of mitigation measures throughout the world is sufficient to achieve 60 per cent emissions reduction within five decades. The range of means of achieving this reduction is very wide: nuclear energy, renewable energy sources, energy saving and carbon sinks. Energy saving is an important option that can play a considerable role in the total reductions over the next decade. In the longer term, the transition to carbon-neutral systems will be increasingly important. An example of a technology that could, in principle, result in negative emissions

Supporting European climate policyby Henry Neufeldt /Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Understanding the myriad challenges and opportunities presented by climate change adaptation and mitigation policies is being made a little easier by a research project named ADAM.

is the combination of biofuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS).

To implement these scenarios an unprecedented worldwide effort is needed, requiring a rapid transition of energy systems. Comparison of five energy-economy models with very different economic structures and assumptions showed that all models were able to reach even a very low GHG stabilisation (400 ppm CO2-eq or a 75 per cent chance of reaching the 2 degrees Celsius goal) at less than 1.7 per cent of cumulative GDP loss until 2100. One model even showed overall gains due to extra investments generated from induced technological change, economies of scale and economic transformation. While there was no technological lock-in to reach a 550 ppm CO2-eq stabilisation (a 15 per cent chance of reaching the 2 degrees Celsius goal), stabilisation at 400 ppm CO2-eq required CCS and an expanded deployment of renewables, in particular biomass, whereas nuclear power played only a minor role.

There are other arguments in favour of decisive mitigation action to achieve very low stabilisation. Modelled damage costs are expected to rise dramatically with time in a business-as-usual scenario, and mitigation costs are only a fraction of the residual damage costs. Even under a moderate

The transition to carbon-neutral systems will be increasingly important

A 12-bedroom guesthouse is under threat in Happisburgh, Norfolk in the UK. The Happisburgh cliffs are eroding at a rate of approximately twelve metres a year due to global warming. Since 1990 more than 25 properties have been lost to the sea.

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


worldwide climate change scenario (550 ppm CO2-eq), only approximately 20 per cent of the total costs would be for mitigation by 2100, whereas 80 per cent of the costs would accrue for residual damages. The remaining 5 per cent account for adaptation costs, but they too make a big difference: with optimal adaptation, the model indicates that damage costs can be reduced by 30 per cent. However, mitigation costs aren’t evenly distributed globally and depend on the expected damages through climate change. While mitigation costs appear to be lower than damage and adaptation costs in most regions, in particular in Africa and South Asia, they are higher than the expected damage costs in the US and East Asia.

One rarely considered consequence of unchecked climate change is the displacement of people due to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as droughts. Some studies predict that more than 200 million people, largely in Africa and Asia, might be forced to leave their homes to seek refuge in other countries. While the reduction of vulnerabilities through sustainable development and more climate adaptive development assistance might reduce the numbers, the looming crisis calls for new governance. We have developed a blueprint for a global governance architecture for the protection and resettlement of climate refugees that is separate from the existing convention to

protect refugees under the UN Security Council. It includes a new funding mechanism and is built on the broad predictability of the future climate impacts and a long-term planned and voluntary resettlement programme.

A more mainstream proposal deriving from ADAM research is the assessment of innovative risk-spreading mechanisms, such as insurance policies that provide financial security against droughts, floods, typhoons and other weather extremes. Although the precise role those insurance instruments can play in a post-2012 adaptation regime is still largely undetermined, the

ADAM project has placed concrete options on the agenda, including the creation of regional climate insurance and adaptation facilities specialized in supporting public/private insurance initiatives. These facilities would not directly provide insurance to households, farmers or governments but, as multi-donor operations, they would offer capacity building and, if appropriate, financial support to nascent disaster insurance systems.

Reaching the targetsFor the European Union to achieve the 2 degrees Celsius target would require reducing Europe’s GHG emissions by around 80 per cent of present

emissions by the middle of this century and a convincing foreign policy that would strive for a maximum per capita emission of about 2 tonnes of CO2-eq by 2050. This is very ambitious since the self-proclaimed global leader in fighting climate change has struggled to fully implement its commitments of the Kyoto Protocol (minus 8 per cent relative to 1990 emissions). Based on a meta-analysis of 262 EU and member state climate policies, ADAM’s findings suggest that it was mainly the capacity of climate policies to deliver co-benefits, such as energy security or technological innovation, which enabled their adoption to date. Over the longer term, if more ambitious emission reduction targets are to be met, this problem framing may need to give way to a more radical one, with a greater degree of demand management and willingness to address established sectoral priorities. This would need to be implemented together with a precise design and interactions with other measures, a greater harmonisation across the EU, and flexibility to allow for ‘first-mover’ states and ‘late-comers’.

One striking conclusion of the analysis has been to show the weakness of the arrangements made thus far for the monitoring of many policy instruments. These will have to change to a more rigorous implementation and enforcement. Overall our analysis shows that although policies may not get it right first time, through monitoring and smart redesign it is possible to enhance their effectiveness. While these results are directed at Europe, many are valid more generally.

Many critical questions remain. At what rate can mitigation technologies be employed? What are the side effects (for instance, how will the increased use of biomass affect food consumption or tropical deforestation)? And how can the necessary changes be achieved politically and socially? The ADAM work will contribute answers to some of these questions during its final year. Together with a great number of reports and scientific articles, innovative policy appraisal tools such as a policy inventory database and a digital compendium of adaptation, ADAM will deliver a high-level synthesis book in time for the COP15 in Copenhagen.

To find out more information about the ADAM project, please visit us at the University of East Anglia’s exhibition stand at the COP or at www.adamproject.eu

One consequence of unchecked climate change

is the displacement of millions of people

Food distribution in Badakhshan, Afghanistan (below). The Afghan government and the UN have launched an appeal to feed 4.5 million people who are in need of aid as a result of rising prices, poor harvests and drought.

© U

N P

hoto

/WFP

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Front Line Focus – Bangladesh

64

From the air, the view is breathtaking. To the north is the white majesty of

the Himalayas, which the Moghul Babur dubbed the “Theatre of Heaven.” On a really clear day you can even see Mount Everest. Then the land descends steeply to a vast pancake-flat plain, where 230 rivers intermingle and crisscross like hundreds of snakes engaged in an orgy, carving up the land. As the sun plays games with the clouds and the water, the landscape changes from shining gold to a shimmering grey-green and thence to a fiery orange at sunset. It is a glorious spectacle that only a master painter might dare try to capture.

Down on the ground, there is no time to contemplate this vivid spectacle. People endure a dirty, disease-ridden daily struggle to make ends meet with the slender resources offered by a constantly capricious Mother Nature.

Tarnished Golden Bangladeshby Kevin Rafferty

For all its visual beauty, Bangladesh is one of the poorest and most beleaguered nations on Earth. It is the Ground Zero of climate change.

This is Bangladesh, one of the poorest places on Earth, teeming with 155 million people packed into an area the same size as Iowa or England and Wales combined. It is the true Ground Zero of the struggle against global warming. It is also a test of whether the world’s politicians and bureaucrats really care about climate change.

Bangladeshis say they are already experiencing climate changes and are being squeezed from both ends at once, by the melting snows and glaciers of the Himalayas and by the more frequent and more vicious storms whipping in from the Bay of Bengal.

The US Central Intelligence Agency laconically lists the issues facing Bangladesh in its Fact Book: “Many people are landless and forced to live on, and cultivate, flood-prone land; water-

borne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern and central parts of the country; soil degradation and erosion; deforestation; severe overpopulation.”

Nothing to live for?My introduction to this land came in 1970, immediately after the cyclone that whisked about 500,000 people – no one actually knows the precise figure – from the face of the Earth, as entire villages, houses, crops and livestock were literally blown or washed away. After much pleading, I managed to get two inches for the story on the front page of the Financial Times. “But these people never had much to live for,” said the news editor, explaining the lack of interest. In my dreams I can still see the bewildered faces of the survivors on Bhola Island, who had clung to the tops of trees that had bent but not broken in the storm.

155 million people are packed into an area

the same size as Iowa or England and Wales

combined

This satellite photograph (left) of northern India and Bangladesh demonstrates the dramatic contrast between the heavily polluted air over Bangladesh and the clean air north of the Himalayas.

In July 2007, heavier than expected monsoon rains filled the Brahmaputra, Padma and Meghna rivers in Bangladesh, leading to the flooding shown in this satellite photograph (above). The floods shown here stranded hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated nations. By August 3, approximately 20 million people had been displaced in Bangladesh, India and Nepal.

© Je

ff S

chm

altz

/NA

SA G

SFC

© N

ASA

GSF

C

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


Back the next year to see the fighting for the creation of Bangladesh out of East Pakistan, I watched a bearded old man clutching a small girl and pushing a cart laden with pots and pans, clothes and bedding away from India and towards the sound of distant gunfire as the Pakistan army retreated. “I am going home,” he said, softly crying. “This is all that is left of my family. Home is better than being a refugee.”

Bangladesh got its bloody freedom from Pakistan’s military in 1971. This was no thanks to Henry Kissinger, who threw US diplomatic might, along with that of China, in support of the Pakistan crackdown. Kissinger predicted that Bangladesh would become forever dependent on foreign handouts. But Bangladesh has survived – it is probably too much to say that it has flourished – thanks to aid, globalization that has brought about a lively garment industry and raised the spirits of the people. In spite of gross inefficiencies and power shortages, the country’s economic growth is almost 6.5 per cent a year and the per capita income is $1,400 measured by purchasing power.

Troubled watersBut the double whammy of global warming is evident. Government meteorologists report increases in the frequency and intensity of cyclones, in some years by up to 30 per cent as the

rising sea surface temperatures fuel the storms. The World Bank warns that sea levels are rising by 3 millimetres a year, with river erosion gobbling 19,000 acres of land a year and the tidal effect extending as far inland as Dhaka. The rivers are becoming increasingly saline, with damaging effects on crops and

livelihoods. Farmers say they’re getting more rain, but less in the dry seasons, and the rise in temperatures means that they don’t need blankets in winter.

Bangladeshis are resilient and have learned to cope with annual disasters with good humour and great adaptation. In the monsoon season, normal travel in the south is by boat, and people spend much of their lives on boats that do not have many carbon-consuming mod cons, such as gas or electricity.

But the pressures are increasing even on these basic lifestyles. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that Bangladesh could lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food production by 2050. Fakhruddin Ahmed, the head of the interim government, says that a one metre rise in sea levels would submerge a third of Bangladesh, uprooting 25 to 30 million people: “We are on the threshold of a climatic Armageddon.”

Atiq Rahman, a member of the IPCC, described Bangladesh’s plight as “climate genocide” caused by the carbon dioxide emissions of the west. He suggested: “For every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you.”

But in the middle of their own financial crisis, there is no evidence that the west understands the pain of one of the world’s poorest countries.

Government meteorologists report

increases in the frequency and intensity of cyclones

Children living in a shanty town in Dhaka (right), surrounded by polluted water. Their families earn less than US$2 a day, and there’s no medical aid or education.

Children on Bhola Island (below) wade through floodwater after a tropical cyclone hit the area in 1970, killing an estimated 200,000 to half a million people.

© E

xpre

ss N

ewsp

aper

s/G

etty

Imag

es

© iS

tock

phot

o

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Front Line Focus – Brazil

66

The hyperactive Carlos Minc, one of the founders of Brazil’s Green Party,

became his country’s environment minister in 2008 and immediately declared: “I am not a masochist.” But he conceded that it remains to be seen whether the promises he extracted from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will actually be fulfilled.

At particular issue is the preservation of the Amazon rainforests as one of

the world’s largest sources of oxygen and of biodiversity, and also of riches for the country’s powerful generals, politicians and farmers. It has yet to be decided whether the Amazon should be a giant park or a giant farm, a treasured preserve for the world or a source of income for Brazil and its powerful leaders.

New evidence emerged in 2008 that the forest is losing the battle to the

The battle to save the Amazon rainforestby Kevin Rafferty

When Carlos Minc became Brazil’s environment minister in 2008, he pledged to protect the country’s rainforests. If he fails, so do we.

politicians, ranchers and military, with the prospect that climate changes may make things worse. Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Center and his co-authors warned that without action the prospects are that, by 2030, the Amazon forests will reach a tipping point and that “approximately 55 per cent of the forests of the Amazon will be cleared, logged, damaged by drought or burned over the next 20 years, emitting 15-26 Pg of carbon (petagrammes, equivalent to 55.5 to 96.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide or up to 2.6 years of current worldwide carbon

emissions) to the atmosphere.” (Daniel C. Nepstad et al in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 363, February 2008)

The work followed a computer simulation in 2003 by Peter Cox at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research showing there would be significant “die-back” of the Amazon forests by mid-century and a virtual collapse of the ecosystem by 2100.

Minc produced a plan to cut net deforestation to zero by 2015. He patted himself on the back, declaring:

The plundering of the Amazon rainforest has upset the balance that exists between mankind and wildlife (left).

“The threat of deforestation is one of the greatest

problems facing Brazil”

The US based Cargill Corporation burns large areas of rainforest to prepare for soya plantations, as reported by Greenpeace on a trip to the Para State Amazon Rainforest.

© G

reen

peac

e/D

anie

l Bel

tr

© S

till P

ictu

res

AMAZONIA 2030

ForestDeforestedNon-forestLogged forestDried forest – normal conditonsDried/logged forest – normal conditionsDried forest – 10% reduction in PPT

Source: Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B 2008

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


“It’s a bold plan, with voluntary and sectoral targets that together represent the reduction by hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, be it through reducing waste, improving energy efficiency or the progressive reduction of deforestation and planting of native and commercial forests.”

He recognized that “The threat of deforestation is one of the greatest problems facing Brazil. About 60 per cent of its land, across six different biomes, is covered by forests. And society is increasingly recognizing their value, whether it be for the biodiversity they contain, the social functions they provide, the goods they can generate to meet peoples’ needs, or the invaluable environmental services, such as regulating the climate, that they bestow upon humanity.”

The lie of the landYet there are concerns, questions and potential loopholes. The Brazilian government is considering whether to allow landowners to count palm oil plantations as part of their forest reserve. Such plantations are deficient compared with natural forests in terms

of biodiversity and carbon storage. But they are attractive revenue earners. So are land clearances for cattle, which made Brazil the world’s largest beef exporter in 2004. Cattle from the Amazon are eaten in Brazil but not exported because the area has not been certified free of foot and mouth disease.

Reasons for concern were also emphasized not long before the minister announced his plan. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research released figures showing a sharp increase in deforestation, which had been curbed since Lula took power. In the 12 months to August 2008, there was a 69 per cent jump in the forest area razed for conversion to ranches and crops. The figures do not include degradation

A projection of Amazonia in 2030 (below), showing drought-damaged, logged and cleared forests assuming that the last 10 years of climate change are repeated.

© S

till P

ictu

res

The golden-handed tamarin, one of the unique species currently under threat in the Amazon.

68

from logging. High prices for soy and beef have encouraged this new surge in forest clearance. In the period from 2000 to mid-2008, more than 150,000 square kilometres of forest were cleared in the Brazilian Amazon.

Minc himself is well aware of the powerful political connections of those who want to rip into the forest. His predecessor as environment minister, Marina Silva, resigned because she lost too many battles with other ministries. In particular she pointed her finger at Blairo Maggi, governor of Mato Grosso state and one of the world’s biggest soy producers. Before she quit, military leaders confronted Lula over his Amazon policy. The military government had begun opening up the

Amazon in the 1960s. Some reports said Lula had wanted to sack Silva but feared she would be treated as a martyr.

Minc promised that he would monitor the situation and would be

looking especially at soy producers. He accused Maggi of “wanting to deforest to plant soy until the Andean region.” He also pledged a better prosecution regime against those who break the law, and named the top 100 clearing culprits. Historically, one in ten out

of a hundred clearing prosecutions proceed to trial and only one to any punishment. Cláudio Maretti, WWF-Brazil’s conservation director, said that if the measures announced are actually implemented it would be a considerable improvement.

Sharing the burdenPresident Lula is particularly sensitive to the unfairness of Brazil having to shoulder the burden of preserving the forest for the world. The country has a set up a $21 billion Amazon Fund to preserve the rainforests. Norway promised to commit up to $1 billion depending on Brazil’s success in reducing deforestation.

In a report for WWF, Nepstad wrote about the importance of the Amazon rainforest, most of which lies within Brazil: “‘Amazon’ evokes in our minds a vast rainforest, the world’s largest river system, the profusion of life, cultural and biological diversity intermingled and interdependent. Locked away in the compounds of its plants and animals as yet undiscovered cures to diseases and components of the molecular technology which we will need to live more lightly on this planet.”

He added: “The Amazon forest complex is intimately connected to the world’s climate. It influences climate by acting as a giant consumer of heat close to the ground, absorbing half of the solar energy that reaches it through the evaporation of water from its leaves. It is a large, fairly sensitive reservoir of carbon that is leaking into the atmosphere through deforestation, drought and fire, contributing to the build-up of atmospheric heat-trapping gases that are the cause of global warming. The water that drains from these forests and into the Atlantic Ocean is 15 to 20 per cent of the world’s total river discharge, and maybe enough to influence some of the great ocean currents that are important regulators of the global climate system. Amazon forest conservation will be necessary to stabilize the world’s climate.”

But whether the Brazilian politicians are willing – or even able – to put ideology before profits is a question that remains unanswered.

“Amazon forest conservation will be

necessary to stabilize the world’s climate”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (left) delivers a speech as environment minister Marina Silva looks on. Silva later resigned after losing too many key government battles.

A view from the air (left) of an illegally logged area spanning 1645 hectares in the Amazon rainforest, which has been razed in order to plant soy.

© E

varis

to S

A/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es©

Gre

enpe

ace/

Dan

iel B

eltr

Dow JonesSustainability Indexes Member 2008/09

www.cemig.com.br

There’s the world of business and the world of people: we choose both.

Cemig, 9 years as the only Latin American power company in the DJSI World.

Cemig, the leading Brazilian power utility, has been selected for the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, DJSI World, for the ninth consecutive year. It is the only Latin American electricity company included in this index. Cemig is a group of more than 40 companies plus 7 consortia generating, transmitting and distributing electricity in Brazil and Latin America, and also operating in natural gas. The Cemig Group adopts world-class best practices in governance, management, operation and relations with people, the markets and the environment. While operating this policy, the Cemig group has achieved and maintained sustainable growth, providing high returns, and a stable future outlook for its investors. Our business is to produce electricity, with quality, for 17 million people. Creating value for stockholders, employees, clients, operating partners and the communities around us is the commitment of our 10.000 employees.

LISTED LISTEDLISTEDLISTED LISTED LISTEDLISTEDLISTED

GT_09_072_08T_AdR_210x297_ING.indd 1 11/7/08 11:13:14 AM

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

Dow JonesSustainability Indexes Member 2008/09

www.cemig.com.br

There’s the world of business and the world of people: we choose both.

Cemig, 9 years as the only Latin American power company in the DJSI World.

Cemig, the leading Brazilian power utility, has been selected for the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, DJSI World, for the ninth consecutive year. It is the only Latin American electricity company included in this index. Cemig is a group of more than 40 companies plus 7 consortia generating, transmitting and distributing electricity in Brazil and Latin America, and also operating in natural gas. The Cemig Group adopts world-class best practices in governance, management, operation and relations with people, the markets and the environment. While operating this policy, the Cemig group has achieved and maintained sustainable growth, providing high returns, and a stable future outlook for its investors. Our business is to produce electricity, with quality, for 17 million people. Creating value for stockholders, employees, clients, operating partners and the communities around us is the commitment of our 10.000 employees.

LISTED LISTEDLISTEDLISTED LISTED LISTEDLISTEDLISTED

GT_09_072_08T_AdR_210x297_ING.indd 1 11/7/08 11:13:14 AM


70

The heady days of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 are a

distant memory. The armies of environmental NGOs, government delegations and UN bureaucrats who cobbled together the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have moved on. The Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC aroused similar passions five years later. Some of the most committed remain to deal with the continuing challenge of halting or, if possible, reversing the inexorable progression of global warming, climate change and consequent sea level rise. As polar bears enter the list of endangered mammals due to the melting of their hitherto frozen habitat, others have joined to man the environmental barricades.

Over the years, the fact of climate change has been accepted by the international community, and even by the majority of the original sceptics. The reports of the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have increased their tone of urgency. Unfortunately, while the nature of the problem is understood, there are widespread and almost irreconcilable differences on how to deal with this threat.

Broad agreement exists that climate change is caused largely as a result of human activity, but the world continues

to spew out greenhouse gases and the planet has warmed to a level never experienced before.

At the core of the debate is the disagreement on the role of the developing countries in addressing the threat of climate change. So the principle of common but differentiated responsibility was developed. While it was recognized that all countries had a shared responsibility to deal with

climate change, it was emphatically acknowledged that developing countries could not be expected to share the burden of addressing this issue as they had played only a marginal role in contributing to global warming and climate change. Developing countries also recognized that they had a strong hand at the negotiating table. As Ambassador Das Gupta of India said in 1992: “For the first time, developing countries had something to negotiate with. Either we all survived this crisis together or we were all doomed together.”

Accordingly, developing countries were not obligated to reduce their

Back to the future by Dr Palitha Kohona

Look back to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and you find the same old arguments and excuses that are being voiced today.

emissions on the basis that their development process was required to continue. Unfortunately, many developing countries, specifically those such as China, India and Brazil, have progressed much faster since 1992 than anticipated at the time and have become major emitters of greenhouse gases although their per capita emission level remains low.

With the passage of time, the science became clearer, the arguments became more refined and the blame game became sharper. The US continued to insist that developing countries join the developed countries in making commitments to reduce emissions, while refusing to join the Kyoto regime itself. The intransigence of the US, which was clearly manifest at the Bali conference in December 2007 and which has generated much resentment among other developed countries, remains a major stumbling block in the negotiations on a follow up to the Kyoto Protocol.

The developing world argues that it bears no responsibility for the damage done to the environment since the Industrial Revolution in the west. While there is enthusiasm amongst them for adopting an approach to development that is environmentally friendly, they are also hindered by a lack of funding (money which is also required for capital investment, feeding populations, and improving health services and education), and inadequate access to modern technology, which is available

The intransigence of the USA remains a

major stumbling block

The explosion of industrial growth in the developing world – such as this textile company in Bangladesh (above) – has come at a hefty price to the environment.

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


only at a price. The technology that is available now, if widely deployed, could make a significant difference to the level of greenhouse gases emitted.

The US promoted a technology-based solution to the problem, at one time with the enthusiastic support of Australia (who had belatedly joined the Kyoto Protocol in December 2007 after having resisted for 15 years), and was encouraging countries such as China, the Republic of Korea and India to follow its lead. The Europeans and the major environmental NGOs were never keen on this approach.

Reaching a compromise... againA compromise that was originally struck during the negotiations on the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention on the Ozone Layer in London in 1990 may indeed provide a starting point in arriving at a solution acceptable to both the developing and developed countries. This formula was reflected in both the UN Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

According to the Montreal Protocol, developed countries which had made

a commitment to eliminate the use of ozone depleting substances also agreed to provide the technology and the requisite incremental funding to enable any developing countries to phase out the use of these substances too. This process was to be carefully

monitored through an ozone secretariat established under the umbrella of the United Nations Environmental Programme in Nairobi. Assistance was to be provided to countries in order to comply with their commitments to reduce and eventually eliminate completely the use of a range of ozone depleting substances, and funding

was made available under the Global Environmental Facility.

Of course, it is acknowledged that the problem posed by global warming and climate change is much more complex and not as readily understood by the wider electorate as the direct threat of skin cancer – a consequence of the thinning of the ozone layer caused by the widespread use of ozone depleting substances. Obtaining public support for the eminently manageable deal under the Montreal Protocol was relatively easy.

Until a global compromise is reached to deal with climate change, the developing world has demanded that the carbon adaptation fund under Kyoto be enlarged to enable threatened developing countries to adapt to climate change. This has become critical in view of the threat of sea level rise to millions of people living in low-lying areas and the possible displacement of millions. The poor of the world are likely to be more affected by sea level rise than the inhabitants of Miami. The prospect of waves of environmental refugees flooding neighbouring countries is becoming increasingly real.

With a view to raising much needed funding for adaptation, Sri Lanka has proposed that tropical rainforests be

With the Arctic ice floes thinning and dwindling as a result of climate change, the polar bear (below) has been added to the list of endangered species.

The technology that is available now, if widely deployed, could make a

significant difference

Australian PM Kevin Rudd (above left) ratifies the Kyoto Protocol with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

© iS

tock

phot

o

© U

N P

hoto

/Eva

n Sc

hnei

der

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

72

leader in water conservation and its responsible use. China has substantially reduced its emissions by using less coal for home heating and adopting stricter controls on cars. Wind farms have been established in India and China. Eighty per cent of Brazil’s fuel needs are met by ethanol derived from sugar

cane. There is greater use of alternative energy sources such as hydropower, solar panels, wind farms and biofuels in the developing world, but the lack of funding inhibits wider reliance on them. Some countries, such as Bhutan and Nepal, are generously endowed with hydropower potential that could be exported. The World Bank insists on an environmental impact assessment when providing development assistance, and

attributed a carbon value which could then be traded in the carbon market. Tropical rainforests serve a valuable function in carbon fixing. Papua New Guinea has advocated a similar approach. Sri Lanka has also advanced the concept of environmental justice, which demands that the small amount of harm done to the environment by developing countries, by the very fact of their being underdeveloped, be treated as a credit for the purpose of carbon trading.

Other assistance programmes targeting developing countries in their efforts to grow in a sustainable manner exist, but fall short. The European Commission provides some assistance to European companies to establish themselves in developing countries while complying with global environmental standards. But this may not be enough to encourage large-scale eco-friendly development of the Third World. Japanese companies have, on a moderate scale, used the Joint Implementation Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol to undertake environmentally consistent operations in developing countries, including in Papua New Guinea. Likewise, many industries in developing countries have adopted eco-friendly approaches as a means of becoming more acceptable in developed country markets.

Sri Lanka’s clothing industry has pioneered this approach and has become eligible to market its products under the slogan Garments Without Guilt. Hayley’s of Sri Lanka is a world

development projects that are funded or assisted by the International Finance Corporation (which forms part of the World Bank Group) are subject to its Equator Principles.

These pragmatic measures will help developing countries to adopt an eco-friendly approach to development while a bigger compromise is being negotiated. Undoubtedly, not all developing countries have the same concerns relating to climate change or the same needs. For example, the Association of Small Island States’ biggest concerns are about rising sea levels. But overall there is a meeting of minds on the key elements.

A bigger deal is needed urgently so we can all breathe easier. This might mean approaching the problem sector by sector – shipping, aviation, forest conservation, transportation and so on.

The current global financial climate will be a critical factor in negotiations. Threatened with economic hardship at home, higher unemployment, inflation, the credit crunch and the crash of the housing market, donor countries may find it difficult to justify generous deals to their own electorates. This would be particularly true given the absence of immediate and tangible impacts of global warming and climate change on most individuals in industrialized countries. The old arguments and excuses are likely to surface again.

But with time running out, we need to focus on saving the planet for future generations, and that includes those in the developing world. Bold measures must be taken in the face of this unprecedented threat.

The combination of devastation wrought by cyclone Sidr and subsequent high tidal waters in Southkhali in Bangladesh (right) made relief efforts doubly difficult.

A bigger deal is needed urgently so that we can

all breathe easier

The advances in water conservation being pioneered by Hayley’s of Sri Lanka (above) have resulted in them becoming the world leaders in this field.

© H

ayle

ys W

ater

Con

serv

atio

n

© Jo

erg

Boet

hlin

g/St

ill P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Call To Action


I periodically wake up and read another call for young people to save

the world, from world leaders, Nobel Prize winners, or famous journalists. They claim that only young people are free from the toxic cynicism that cripples those with power. It is darkly ironic that those with the financial or political capital to enact major change pass the buck to their children and then berate us for the failure to act. If I had the choice, I would tell them what they could do with their suggestions and it wouldn’t be polite. But I don’t. We no longer have the option of fits of pique in the face of our changing world.

Put bluntly, we are rapidly running out of time to act.

Global warming is the overarching challenge of this generation, one inextricably linked to development and poverty, health, energy and security. Young people under 25 make up close to half of the world’s population and are more vulnerable to the impacts of climatic destabilisation, dirty energy and economic upheaval. Children are up to four times more likely to die from disasters or famines, and developing

lungs and immune systems are more susceptible to pollution and disease.

However, the voices of the young are under-represented in media outlets, governance structures and decision-making bodies. Young people are the most vulnerable half of the world’s population and must be given a critical and essential voice in the fight to construct a clean energy economy

for a more just world. This is an issue of intergenerational justice, with the risk that one generation plunders the future prosperity of its own children for fleeting prosperity now.

The 20th Century was painted in blood, with the development of ever more sophisticated engines of death, from the Holocaust to the nuclear bomb. But there always seemed to exist the promise of peace and prosperity, atoms for peace, and trade

Grow up and act alreadyby Richard Graves

Richard Graves is the founder of Fired Up Media and the editor of ItsGettingHotinHere.org, so he regularly issues ‘dispatches from the youth climate movement.’ While he would not presume to speak for an entire generation, his views certainly echo the thoughts of those who will have to deal with the consequences of their elders’ policies.

eliminating war. Yet, the reliance of our economic model on fossil fuels and the corruption of our governments by easy money have created a subtler engine of destruction. With the best of intentions, our economic model is dragging us into a 21st Century that could end up making the 20th Century look like a Golden Age.

It does not have to look like this.

Youth matters The greatest power of youth is it ability to redefine the future in a transformation that redeems the mistakes of the past. We have seen it happen again and again, with young people standing up to oppression and corruption, whether in the Freedom Riders travelling the American South or in Red Square facing off against the repression of the Soviet Union.

Young people are demonstrating that our economy is an obsolete model that treats resources and people as disposable. Through a groundswell of campus and community activism, they are at the forefront of efforts to address climate change. Young people are developing frameworks for clean energy investment, creating green collar jobs, pioneering models of sustainable development, and seeking to transform the political structures that chain decision-making to short-term thinking. Religious youth are stepping

Our economy is an obsolete model that treats resources and people as disposable

The hungry children (above) queuing at the World Food Programme’s Pabbo camp in Uganda aren’t the only youngsters who are clamouring for a new deal.

© S

till P

ictu

res

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

74

up and reminding us “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

In the United States, almost 50 youth organizations, ranging from evangelical to indigenous youths, have pooled their resources to act in unison. Through the Campus Climate Challenge, 582 colleges and universities have committed to go carbon neutral. Last year, over six thousand young people, from almost every congressional district, came together in the largest lobby day in US history, to call for strong climate action. This winter, they will return to greet president-elect Barack Obama, with over ten thousand participants and the signatures of a million young people calling for No Coal, Clean Energy, Green Jobs and Climate Justice.

Stand up and be counted While world leaders dithered, the youth of the world called for action. Young people from the United States, Australia, and Indonesia addressed world leaders in Bali, saying: “Our future is at stake. As climate change accelerates, and your decisions unfold, we will look back at this moment, this conference. History will judge whether you did enough to give us a planet worth living in... We

cannot wait any longer. If you lead us on the wrong path, we have no time to find our way back and undo your decisions.”

Young people across the world understand the urgency of the crisis but remain focused on solutions to climate change. The hands-on work that young people have done around the world

has shown that there is opportunity here. We can end our reliance on declining dirty energy resources and embrace a prosperous, sustainable society. Business students stand ready to launch new sustainable industries, engineering students to design new clean technologies, and young people from all backgrounds are lining up for green collar jobs.

We need a commitment from our leaders to support us, take responsibility for the climate crisis, and fund the future. We need a global resolve, with strong science-based targets and commitments based on historical responsibility that invests in the solutions that solve our problems rather than create new ones. Our economy is entering a rocky period and many will counsel caution. However, inaction in the face of danger is cowardice. Investment in a new clean energy economy provides the greatest opportunity to create new jobs and industries.

Crises precipitate change. Yet we lack the leadership, particularly in the developed nations outside the EU, to steer this change in a hopeful direction. Young people stand ready and willing to build a clean energy economy, but we lack the levers of governmental, corporate and civil society power to trigger the transformation.

I find myself in the position of calling on our leaders to grow up and act already, as the rest of us young people have been forced to.

You can check out more dispatches from the youth climate movement at www.itsgettinghotinhere.org

A group of idealistic high school students in the United States galvanize action for clean energy reforms through the power of a democratic vote and pledge.

Many will counsel caution... However, inaction in the

face of danger is cowardice

More than 40,000 young demonstrators fill Red Square in Moscow (right) during a rally on behalf of the democratic platform, protesting the 28th and final congress of the Soviet Communist Party in July 1990.

© P

asca

l Le

Segr

etai

n/C

orbi

s Sy

gma

Running head praxis semibold



The Earth’s climate is changing so rapidly that some influential

scientists fear it is already outrunning the ability of political and business leaders to orchestrate changes in people’s lifestyles to bring global warming under control. Can science lend a hand to forestall the damage that the daily life of industrialized countries is doing to the planet?

Evidence of the growing concern comes in the plethora of new ideas that are being suggested not only by respected scientists, but also by forward-thinking engineers and designers. These go far beyond conventional thoughts of investing bigger sums in cleaner sources of energy, such as nuclear, wind and solar power, to take the strain from fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide. What some scientists are suggesting is re-engineering the planet or geo-engineering.

Among the new ideas that are being suggested are:

• Wrapping Greenland’s glaciers in blankets to protect them from the sun’s rays (from Jason Box, a glaciologist at Ohio State University)

• Dropping tens of thousands of tree seedlings from aircraft to reforest large areas of Earth from the air (scientist Mark Hodges)

• Developing a new wind turbine that will produce energy from winds at 1,000 feet above sea level (Fred Ferguson, a Canadian engineer)

• Deploying wave powered pumps in the North Pacific to revive the phytoplankton that convert carbon dioxide into living matter (Brian Von Herzen of The Climate Foundation and two distinguished oceanographers, David Karl of the

University of Hawaii and Ricardo Letelier of Oregon State University)

• Spraying micron-wide particles of seawater into the air to make clouds whiter so they reflect more light (John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and Stephen Salter, an Edinburgh University engineer)

• Sending thousands of satellites into space to gather the energy of the sun and beam solar energy to Earth as microwave energy, which can

Engineered to surviveby Kevin Rafferty

Will the speculative science of geo-engineering play an essential role in saving the planet? A growing number of scientists are beginning to think that it will – including Professor Brian Launder FRS.

be collected by antennae on the ground and converted to electricity – this would aim to achieve a double whammy of cutting carbon emissions and supplying never-ending power (NASA scientist John Mankins)

• Diffracting the power of the sun by placing trillions of lenses into space, in effect to create a 100,000 square mile sunshade (astronomy professor Roger Angel)

• Scrubbing the carbon dioxide from the air with a giant 400-foot high machine that will suck ambient air into one end, spray it with sodium hydroxide solution and then expel clean air out the other end (Canadian professor David Keith)

Many of these ideas are moving from the imagination of ‘mad’ scientists to mainstream discussions. The Discovery Channel in its Project Earth television series has chosen the schemes listed above for practical tests on prototypes or models. Thus, for example, a 10,000 square yard, reflective geo-textile blanket will be deployed against a hurricane force ice storm to test Jason Box’s ideas as to whether a blanket would prove indestructible in the tough Arctic climate.

Science fiction or science fact?Some scientists would like to go out into space to solve the problem by playing with the atmosphere on neighbouring planets such as Mars, to make them hospitable for human migration. Mars, of course, has very little carbon dioxide

Many of the ideas are moving from the imagination of ‘mad’

scientists to mainstream discussions

Glaciers (above) in the southern part of Greenland.

© S

till P

ictu

res


76

© N

ASA

/JPL

/Mal

in S

pace

Sci

ence

Sys

tem

s

A photograph of the polar icecap on the planet Mars (left). Some scientists have recommended using the planet for advanced experiments in geo-engineering, attempting to modify the atmosphere in order to make it capable of supporting human life.

and has average temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius – unlike Venus, which is closer to the sun, and has a thick atmosphere containing 96 per cent of carbon dioxide and average temperatures of plus 420 degrees Celsius, notes Manchester University professor Brian Launder, who is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was, until recently, regional director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University.

The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific body and about to celebrate its 350th birthday, is also beginning to take geo-engineering seriously. The society this year devoted an issue of its Philosophical Transactions (PhilTrans) to examining geo-engineering and some of the schemes.

Geo-engineering still flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dismissed geo-engineering as “largely speculative and unproven and

with the risk of unknown side effects.” But Launder and Michael Thompson of Cambridge University write in the Introduction to the PhilTrans papers that: “While such geoscale interventions may be risky, the time may well come when they are accepted as less risky than doing nothing.” Launder, who is a mechanical engineer, says it is important to fully research and develop the new technologies, but he admits that: “At the moment it’s almost like talking about how we could stop World War Two with an atomic bomb, but we haven’t done the research to develop nuclear fission.”

Alice Bows of Manchester’s Tyndall Centre adds that: “I’m not a huge fan of messing with the atmosphere in a geo-engineering sense because there could be unpredictable consequences. But there are also a lot of unpredictable consequences of temperature increase. It does appear that we’re failing to act [on emissions]. And if we are failing to act, then we have to consider some of the other options.”

Her paper, written with Kevin Anderson, now Tyndall’s regional director at Manchester, accuses politicians of underestimating the climate challenge. The scientists say global carbon emissions are rising so rapidly that they would need to peak by 2015 and then decrease by up to 6.5 per cent each year for atmospheric CO2 levels to stabilize at 450ppm, which might limit temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Even a goal of 650ppm – way above most government projections – would need world emissions to peak in 2020 and then to fall by 3 per cent each year.

Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, justified the PhilTrans issue: “It’s not clear which of these geo-engineering technologies might work, still less what environmental and social impacts they might have, or whether it could ever be prudent or politically acceptable to adopt any of them. But it is worth devoting effort to clarifying both the feasibility and any potential downsides of the various options. None of these technologies will provide a ‘get out of jail free card’ and they must not divert attention away from efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Reducing emissions would mean sacrificing luxuries such as flying in unseasonal produce to stores (below).

© iS

tock

phot

o

UNFCCC Poznan 2008



A satellite photograph showing plankton blooming off the coast of Norway (left). Some geo-engineers have proposed an experiment to fertilize the ocean with iron to encourage the growth of plankton, which could then be used to absorb high levels of carbon dioxide.©

ESA

/AFP

/Get

ty Im

ages

Brian Launder admits that he has been heavily influenced in his thinking by “the very steep rise of temperature with time and how it aligns very closely with CO2 emissions. That, more than anything else, I find entirely persuasive. I find it difficult to understand that still some people brush it aside.” He notes that for all the fine words and

promises: “I am not convinced (that Kyoto is bringing CO2 emissions down.) Think particularly of Britain. We are an insignificant player but perhaps not altogether unrepresentative. (Former prime minister) Tony Blair posted a claim that we would be reducing our CO2 emissions by something like 10 per

Playing with fireThere is still a lot of hand-wringing in the papers. James Lovelock, self-styled geo-physiologist and proposer of the Gaia hypothesis, compares would-be geo-engineers to pre-1940 doctors operating in “overwhelming ignorance” of the problems they are trying to cure.

Stephen Schneider of Stanford University recalls that, in 1992, he was on a panel of the US National Academy of Science that agreed to discuss geo-engineering as a last-ditch solution in its climate report “provided that it had enough explicit caveats that the committee could not possibly be interpreted as advocating near-term use of such schemes.” But in his PhilTrans paper, Schneider has become a reluctant cheerleader, endorsing research and development in geo-engineering schemes.

cent by 2012. But the evidence is that despite exporting our manufacturing industries, which are large generators of CO2, our CO2 emissions have somewhat gone up over this period. So, whilst around the world there a few bright spots that seem to be taking the need more seriously, the whole pattern of 21st-century life is not changing.

“I still get 20 cheap flight emails a day hitting me. One’s neighbours go out and buy their patio heaters to bring Mediterranean warmth even on a spring or chill autumn day. We fly in winter vegetables and fruit from other continents. As internal combustion engines become more efficient, cars get bigger, so that you don’t achieve 80 or 90 miles per gallon, you are still only getting 30.”

He admits that he has a new grandfather’s perspective on the world: “If we don’t take action now, there won’t be a future in the way we understand it for our grandchildren. Having become a grandfather relatively recently, that really brings it home.”

He has made some adjustments of his own: “I don’t want to brag about it but I had a secondary home in Provençe that I have sold. I now commute mainly by train rather than by car. I make gestures but I would not say I am exemplary. I am only squaring my own conscience. I don’t feel that I am saving the planet.”

Launder confesses to having an amount of scepticism about economics: “I suppose it is because I am an engineer. I have little faith in economic strategies. I am someone who tends to look to engineering or scientific ways of overcoming the problem. Eventually one would hope that diffusion would come along, but that seems to recede at about the same rate that we are going forward in time. For the last 20 years, it has seemed to be 50 years away.”

He has hopes for solar power, “by which I mean large-scale solar power, not these silly little photovoltaic cells that appear everywhere at 55 degrees north. I can envisage electricity plants going up in the Sahara. As far as storage is concerned, I don’t see that as a major problem. During the day, you can use the electricity generated to produce hydrogen or whatever you use in other means. There are various other

The Royal Society is also beginning to take geo-engineering seriously

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

78

quasi-storage mechanisms, and I would have thought that converting to hydrogen is quite an attractive one.”

Launder says that the process of editing the PhilTrans papers has reinforced his engineer’s view of what could and should be done: “There are some proposals which are both actually and metaphorically too far out. I do not favour at the moment our considering schemes involving putting mirrors, lenses and so forth into outer space. But, on the other hand, more down to Earth schemes certainly seem worth exploring, worthwhile economically and able to be developed in a relatively short time.

“I think one ought to favour carbon capturing devices to sunlight reflection devices, because those are the options. If you are going to chuck lots of CO2 out into the atmosphere, either you have to take it directly out of the atmosphere – which is what Klaus Lackner of Columbia University suggests with his artificial trees – or, if you can’t do that, you have to ensure that less energy reaches us from the sun to keep our temperature under control.”

But, cautions Launder, experience has shown that there is often an

immense gap between such grand ambitions and the rather more limited achievements that occur in practice. He cites Lackner: “He basically says that you find some deserted area and put up huge structures coated with things like leaves that, as the wind blows, they simply capture the CO2 involved. His daughter had a school project and he demonstrated that you could do this by bubbling air through sodium hydroxide

solution. Of course, yes, a little bit gets absorbed. But he says that each ‘tree’ could remove 10,000 kilogrammes per hour. That is not credible. He is wrong maybe by a factor of a thousand.”

Launder adds that “even at one tenth of the rates Lackner claimed, the scheme would be worth considering.” Lackner was confident enough to form a company to develop his ideas commercially, but success so far has been limited. “They built a prototype three metres high,” says Launder, “and they removed 50 grammes a day.”

Launder recognizes two major issues affecting re-engineering schemes: one

is that real life does not always meet the ambitions of the imagination; the other is that initial success may trigger subsequent problems, so you have to re-engineer the re-engineering. This is the case with trying to get rid of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by putting it in the ocean. “How do you get it out of the atmosphere?” asks Launder. “The process is known as a diffusion process: you have got CO2 in the atmosphere and you have got very low CO2 in the ocean, so gradually it will diffuse into the ocean. However, once it has diffused, the concentrations in the ocean goes up, so less goes in – so what you want is some means of getting it into the surface layers of the ocean. The idea is that you grow lots of plants, effectively growing the phytoplankton and, once the plants die, they will sink or maybe things will come along and eat the plants and they’ll die and sink.” One way of helping the process is to go far down into the ocean to find nutrient-rich materials, using the natural motion of the waves going up and down and a crude pump driven by the waves to force the nutrients to the top.

Other scientists in the PhilTrans papers suggest fertilizing the ocean with iron, which has been shown to

Some geo-engineers have proposed using seawater to make clouds whiter and thus more reflective (below).

What some scientists are suggesting is re-

engineering the planet

© iS

tock

phot

o

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


This strategy would effectively be perverse to the point of being malign because it would actually try to increase the amount of pollution in the atmosphere by introducing sulphur compounds, something that governments have been trying to combat for decades because such compounds cause acid rain. But some scientists have suggested increasing the sulphur content of jet fuel to 5 per cent – or between 10 and 100 times the refined jet kerosene used today – and use its emissions to lower temperatures.

Down to EarthLaunder prefers “a strategy that is much closer to the ground. John Latham and Stephen Salter are behind this. Latham works in the USA now, though he isn’t at all American. Latham is the scientist. He suggested that if you could enhance the number of droplets in low level maritime clouds that you find off the coasts in certain areas of the planet, you could greatly enhance the reflectivity by making lots of much smaller tiny droplets and then simply reflect more of the incoming sunlight back into space.”

If you look at satellite photographs of certain busy shipping channels, you can see bright white streaks, which arise from sea traffic, oil freighters and cargo ships. The exhausts from their chimneys have fine particles in them and eventually, as these particles are carried further upwards into the atmosphere, they provide sites for water to condense.

“What I like about this approach,” comments Launder, “is that if something goes wrong with it, you just stop spraying these drops and things will return to normal. How are you going to get the drops up there?

make plankton bloom. Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and Wajih Naqvi of the National Institute of Oceanography in India plan to conduct experiments in the South Atlantic next year to see what happens when the ocean is fertilized by iron. In particular, they will look at diatoms, single-cell algae that seem to absorb carbon dioxide when iron is added to the ocean. There is reason for caution: fertilizing the ocean with iron can easily be done with available technology, but there is always the risk that the chain reaction might not be benign.

The strategy of reducing the Earth’s incoming sunlight also has dangers of setting off perverse chain reactions. Launder concurs that “it would be frightening putting things into outer space, because if you suddenly find that, instead of 2.5 per cent of the incoming sunlight, you are deflecting 15 per cent of it, then you would have a disaster on your hands and would need somehow to work out how to get these things back.

“There have been quite serious proposals made there, but what I find most persuasive in not wanting to consider them is that one of the formerly main proponents of these outer space devices is someone who is now going for stratospheric seeding. Stratospheric seeding is really trying to imitate what happens when you have a big volcanic eruption. Dust goes up to 100,000 feet and it covers quite a large proportion of the planet and, on a number of occasions, there has been a marked reduction in the temperature by on average one or 1.5 degrees.”

Stephen Salter says that it will be done by pilotless ships. Because it is very difficult to radio control a sailing ship, this will be done using a Flettner rotor. These cylinders rotate and, when the wind blows past them, the fact that they are rotating gives a strong thrust and it effectively propels them.

“The Flettner rotors act very much like the sails if it was a sailing ship. They are much better controlled, and underneath the ship you have got something like a propeller. In a sense, it is the reverse of a propeller because the wind is pushing the ship. Thus, as it moves through the water, it turns around and generates the spray and ejects it vertically.

“The idea is that you would have a fleet of a thousand or so of those. Costs have been done. Stephen Salter says one or two million pounds per vessel. It looks like a total cost of a very small number of billions of pounds – one or two – which is negligible when set against the cost of fighting in Iraq.”

Although pilotless, the vessels would be highly sophisticated and able to report sea and air temperatures, humidity, solar input, the direction and velocities of winds and currents, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, plankton count, aerosol count, salinity, radio reception and could even rescue yachtsmen in distress.

“A problem with all of these programmes that reflect sunlight rather than capture the CO2 is that the level of CO2 goes on increasing unless we do finally put in place measures to reduce emissions, so you just have to keep upping the number of vessels. (The advantage) is that it is close to Earth and one can easily stop it.”

Latham and Salter’s idea is already moving forward to the next step. The Discovery Channel is building and testing a prototype of the vessel to see whether it lives up to its promise. However, the entrepreneurial initiative of the TV network highlights a key problem with all of the geo-engineering suggestions, which is that they always need support, funding, organization, management and permissions from the communities and from governments.

Launder concedes: “I would have to say that isn’t something that is being addressed by the geo-engineering community. I am reminded of the Tom Lehrer song where he quotes Werner von Braun as saying ‘When the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department’.”

One geo-engineering project under consideration is the building of solar power plants in desert regions (above) and then storing the energy generated during the day.

© A

rthu

r Te

ng/W

orld

Illu

stra

ted/

Phot

osho

t

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Review

80

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L FriedmanPublished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 448 pages; $27.95Reviewed by Kevin Rafferty

Government ministers from almost 200 countries, each accompanied

by dozens of assistants and joined by hundreds of business leaders and lobbyists from more than a thousand non-governmental organizations, along with anyone else who just want to make a difference to the future of this fragile planet, are converging on the 1,200 year old Polish city of Poznan to try

to lay the foundations for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

In the hot air of the meeting, it may seem to those attending that Poznan is the ‘do or die’ epicentre of the future. It will either signal the hopes of the beginning of a new brighter and cleaner world, or mark the doomed gasping breaths of a polluted planet where global warming will stifle the Earth and ultimately everyone on it.

In reality, a successor agreement to Kyoto may be an important foundation stone if the US, China and India can all be engaged to make their best

Reading between the lines endeavours. But it will by no means guarantee success or the safety of the planet. Governments like to think they can exercise their sway by laws and edicts. But these government officials and ministers have not reached agreement and are squabbling bitterly over everyone’s right to enjoy a 21st-century lifestyle. Even when – or if – they can reach agreement, they will find that the laws of Nature may not bow to their will.

It is tempting to ask if Tom Friedman has measured his carbon footprint in doing the research for this book, whether he will now go on foot everywhere, live by natural light or the energy that he can generate from his own treadmill, and eat only homegrown vegetables. He has been almost everywhere and talked to a diversity of people on every continent to produce this book. He travelled to Africa, the Amazon, Australia, Bali, Brazil, China, Dubai and almost right through the alphabet. One shudders to think of the cost, let alone the number of trees Friedman would have to plant, to make up for the damage he caused.

And yet it is a worthwhile and timely book, written with an infectious enthusiasm and great love of the planet and especially of his homeland, the United States of America.

Having claimed in 2005 that globalisation had made the world flat – not the most inspired word, I have to say – Friedman now sees a world in danger from climate change, overpopulation

A clean water supply (left) should not be a luxury of life.

The Trans-Alaskan pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez accounts for 25 per cent of US oil production annually.

© S

till P

ictu

res

© G

iaco

mo

Piro

zzi/P

anos

Pic

ture

s

UNFCCC Poznan 2008


and bad government policies, especially those of his own country. His tone is positively evangelical, as he travels the world, talking not only to the great and the good, but also to ordinary people who are suffering most from the hurt that the Earth is beginning to endure.

He outlines five basic global trends that concern him: • A lack of supply of energy and natural

resources to meet the exploding demand as China, India and other developing countries become economic powers

• The massive transfers of money to what Friedman calls “petrodictators”

• Flashing red lights warning of rapid climate change

• Energy poverty, in which more and more people are falling off the grid

• Biodiversity loss as economic development, road building, natural resource extraction and urban sprawl devour lands and forests, despoil clean water, disrupt ecosystems and bring on the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate.

Friedman says that January 1, 2000 was not simply the end of a millennium (strictly speaking, the millennium did not end until December 31, 2000) but

that it was “the end of the period we called the Common Era”, and that it marked the first day of a new era.

“It was day one, year one, of the Energy-Climate Era.

“It was 1 ECE”Yes, he does sometimes resort to that

infelicitous, American schoolmarmish way of talking down to his readers. He also loves his alphabet soup. That is acceptable when the letters form

pronounceable acronyms, such as NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – or even the faux organisations created for the comedy movie The Naked Gun 2 1/2 : The Smell of Fear, such as SMOKE – The Society for More Coal Energy – and KABOOM – The Key Atomic Benefits for Mankind nuclear

A display of new televisions at a Costco store in California (below). In the near future, the levels of an electrical product’s emissions will become as critical as its price.

The headquarters of the Russian company Gazprom (right), the largest extractor of natural gas in the world.

© S

till P

ictu

res

© Ju

stin

Sul

livan

/Get

ty Im

ages

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

82

group. But it gets a bit much when Friedman suggests his “winning formula” of REEFIGDCPEERPC – a Renewable Energy Ecosystem For Innovating, Generating, and Deploying Clean Power, Energy Efficiency, Resource Productivity and Conservation – is greater than TTCOBCOG – The True Cost Of Burning Coal, Oil and Gas.

Friedman is rightly worried about rapidly growing developing countries catching the dread disease of “affluenza” from the US, the love of wasteful consumer spending. He quotes Tom Burke, co-founder of the green consultancy E3G (Third Generation Environmentalism) who coined the term “Americum” to represent the unit of energy expended by any group of 350 million people with a per capita income above $15,000 and a penchant for consumerism. From just two Americums at the turn of the century (the US itself and Europe), by 2030 there will be eight or nine.

The world will creak and crack and die under the strain. Just to take oil alone. If the Chinese and Indians end up consuming as much oil as Americans do, world consumption would be more than 200 million barrels a day, not the mere 85 million barrels of today.

Where will it come from? At what price?

Yet who is to deny China, India and any other rapidly developing countries their new affluence or to demand that they pay for the clean-up of global greenhouses gases historically spilled by the west? Friedman quotes an Egyptian cabinet minister as saying: “It is like the developed world ate all the hors d’oeuvres, all the entrees, and all the desserts and then invited the developing world for a little coffee ‘and asked us to split the whole bill’.”

The Kyoto Protocol has only seven references in Friedman’s index, fewer than biodiversity, climate change, deforestation, global warming, poverty, population growth and renewable energy, let alone electricity, energy and oil. That is because, for all the political energy that will be expended in Poznan and beyond, the world is richer and the threats are wider, more widespread and varied than the ministers and their advisers and experts can comprehend in the 12 days of the meeting.

Friedman rightly scorns the peddlers of popular books on how to “green” your life in 10 or 12 or 20 or 100 easy steps. There is nothing easy about the task ahead, he says. Indeed, he complains that America today is having “a green hallucination, not a green revolution. Because we are offering our kids and ourselves a green vision without the resources – without a systemic response shaped by an intelligent design and buttressed by market forces,

higher efficiency standards, tougher regulations, and an ethic of conservation that might have a chance of turning that vision into reality. We have willed the ends, but not the means.”

The book suffers slightly from being US-centric. Friedman writes that: “The crucial question of this book is actually two questions: ‘Can America really lead a green revolution?’ and ‘Can China really follow?’ Everything else is just commentary…” (His ellipsis) What about India, which will have a larger population than China in 15 years? And what about Europe, which is bigger than the US?

Yet Friedman is an optimist. He says, “To paraphrase Archimedes: Give me a green America and I shall green the Earth.” (His optimism is reflected in the extract from his book that follows)

One wonders if he is too optimistic. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, who will trust markets to get things right or giant monopolies like the utilities and the oil majors to play by market or any other rules, or the regulators to enforce the rules even when they have a clue what is going on?

For all this, Friedman has written a book that is readable and worth reading, and should help the policy makers of the world to grope their way towards some of the solutions. Now if he can only get to his treadmill and crank out the electricity, he’ll deserve all our thanks.

A view of the Shanghai cityscape (below). There is a danger that China could end up rivalling the United States as an oil consumer within the very near future.

© iS

tock

phot

o


UNFCCC Poznan 2008

Extract from Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L Friedman After you showered and ate breakfast, you decided to head to the office for your first meeting. This involved taking a short walk – about 20 paces – down the hall to your home office, holding your Smart Card in your hand. Your Smart Card, which is sponsored by Visa and United Airlines Mileage Plus, looks just like a credit card, only slightly thicker. You start your workday by putting it into the docking bay of the Sun Ray terminal, by Sun Microsystems, on your home office desk. That Sun Ray terminal uses only four watts, compared to 50 watts or more in your standard PC. The reason is that there is no hard drive sucking up energy. The Sun Ray terminal is just a screen with a slot beneath it, but as soon as you put the Smart Card into the slot, it connects you to the “network cloud”, where all your software programs, email, Internet applications, and personal files are located. The “cloud” is a data center, packed with servers, that is located close to a dam on the Columbia River, which is providing it with clean hydropower to run all your programs (and those of millions of other people) and to cool all those servers.

The smart lights in your office, triggered by motion sensors, went on as soon as you walked into the room, as did the air conditioner. No electricity is consumed in the room when you are not there. Every device, every new home, and every new building is now built with steadily rising efficiency standards from day one. In the 2007 energy bill, President George W Bush effectively outlawed the Edison incandescent light bulb, phasing it out by 2014, because it converts 90 per cent of its energy into wasted heat – which we all noticed when we burned our fingers trying to remove a bulb before it cooled down. It has been replaced by a smart compact fluorescent. With one-fourth of the electricity consumption, it not only reduces the energy required to produce light, but also reduces the energy required to cool your office, which was being warmed by the excess heat emanating from all your incandescent bulbs.

On your desk, next to the Sun Ray terminal, you have a six-watt desk lamp. That’s right, only six watts – because this lamp uses a light-emitting diode and little mirrors to give you intense focused light, the equivalent of 100 watts, but at 6 per cent of the energy use. The same is true for the appliances throughout your house. Your refrigerator is so efficient

that it represents the electricity equivalent of a 20-watt light bulb. Your television, TiVo unit, and treadmill all shut down completely, no longer draining power when not in use.

Normally, your company encourages you to work from home as much as possible. But today, on the Sun Ray terminal, you found a message from your boss saying that a teleconference would be held downtown at 10.30 am between your management team and your colleagues in Chennai, India, where your company is involved in a huge real estate development. At 9.45 am, your get in your Ford Mustang RESU. It is a plug-in hybrid electric that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are like regular hybrids but with larger batteries and the ability to recharge from a wall

take the bus to work. It’s all part of the new congestion-pricing system that has dramatically reduced the number of cars coming into the city and thereby created more room for electric buses and other forms of mass transit, which can now take more people to more places faster than ever before. Your city’s new mayor actually won the election with the motto “Price the road and clear the traffic.” You do not need to be a rocket scientist, said the mayor: “If you want fewer CO2 emitters, charge people money for emitting CO2. If you want fewer cars on the road during certain hours, charge people money for using them.” It works everywhere it has been tried.

When you arrived at the office, you docked your car at a parking ramp where you can both charge your car battery and sell electricity into the grid. There is

outlet. As a result, all your local travel is electric, but you always have a gas tank backup. The battery is charged every night, or whenever it needs juice, and, like your dryer and other appliances, automatically interacts with your electric utility to buy the lowest-cost electrons available during the depths of nighttime off-peak hours.

As you set out to the office, the GPS map in the car flashed a message that there was an accident on the highway that you normally use to get to the office and proposed an alternative route.

To enter into the downtown area, you had to pass through an electronic gateway, which automatically charged you $12 for entering the city between 10 am and 2 pm (it costs $18 at rush hour). This is another reason you work from home as often as you can, carpool or

a universal two-way plug in every home and parking lot in America now. You decided to park at this ramp after it won a bidding contest against the parking ramp around the corner. These bidding contests between parking ramp owners are now very common. Your ramp won by throwing in four free-parking days a month and a car wash every Friday.

Why does the ramp owner want you to park there so badly? Because you will be sharing with him the money you earn from selling extra electrons back to the grid. The entire roof of the parking ramp consists of solar panels that create clean electrons, which are then sold to the batteries of all the cars on the ramp. The owner calls it “e-gasoline”. The parking

© B

ettm

ann/

Cor

bis

Inventor Thomas Edison (above) exhibits a replica of his first successful attempt to build an incandescent lamp.

84

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

lot’s name is Bill’s Artificial Oil Field. So the lot owner is both in the parking and the energy-generating business. At 2.32 pm, when the temperature hit 87 degrees, your car, which still had most of its electrons from last night’s charge, made a calculation that energy prices had moved up on the smart grid to a point where it was time to sell some electrons. Your smart car calculated how many electrons you would need to drive to your normal Wednesday after-work chores – to take the kids to soccer practice and stop at the grocery store – and saved 10 per cent more just in case you altered your routine. Then it put a sell bid of 40 cents a kilowatt-hour out to the utility. SoCalEd bought 5 kilowatt-hours off your car battery through the universal plug. This helped the utility meet its peak load demand and keep

its load profile flat, while you and the garage owner both made money. In this case, you made $2. The parking lot operator, who provided the solar panels and the plug connecting your car to the grid, also got a small cut of that. So far this month your car battery has earned you $24 selling and buffering electricity. At the same time, it cost you only $47 this month to charge your car with electricity, because you were usually charging at home at night at low off-peak rates and selling it during the day at peak rates. It means you are driving for the equivalent of about $1.50 per gallon. People still drive less and use more mass transit – because congestion pricing, which funds better mass transit, induces

people look and sound just like they do in person, offering life-size images of each meeting participant, high-definition video, and spatial audio, which creates the dynamic of voices coming directly from the participants. It is so realistic you all felt as if you were at the same table in the same room, even though you were half a world apart. In fact, it was all so realistic, and the images so life-size that when the meeting ended you got up and tried to shake hands with someone on the screen, eliciting laughter all round.

After the meeting, you returned home and docked your car back in the garage, around 4pm. As you were mowing the lawn with your all-electric mower, your kids came home on their hybrid electric school bus, just another big rolling energy storage unit that actually makes money for the school

them to do so, rather than high oil prices that fund petrodictators.

While at the office, your boss gathered together the entire management team responsible for designing smart housing for a new suburb in Chennai. You met with your six Indian counterparts in Chennai for three hours to go over everything from financing to architectural problems. Once, such business would have had to be conducted face-to-face with at least some of you flying over to Chennai, expending considerable time, money, and energy. Not any more.

This three-hour meeting was held virtually through Cisco Systems’ TelePresence system, over the Cisco network, in which your team sat in a studio and the other team was vividly illustrated on a wall-size TV screen in 3-D. The Cisco TelePresence makes

district by storing and selling clean electrons the way you do.

The neighborhood school is now a dual-use education and commercial center – a DUECC. That is, the school kitchen, as soon as it is finished serving lunch, is taken over by Einstein Bros Bagels. Instead of building their own new bakery, the bagel company uses the school’s kitchens from 3pm until 6am the next morning to bake bagels and deliver them to their outlets and grocery stores throughout the city. Dual-using has become a huge trend, saving enormous amounts of electricity, land, and new construction, and, by the way, earning the school extra cash to hire more teachers. Domino’s Pizza also uses idle school kitchens during after-lunch hours for making and delivering pizzas throughout the city. Domino’s has not leased or built a new commercial kitchen in years.

The school is also a net-zero building. It was designed and built so that all the parts – walls, windows, the lighting system, the water-handling system, the air-handling system – are both individually and collectively super-energy efficient. At the same time, the external roof and walls of the school building are a mini-utility – a combination of solar panels, solar thermal generation, and passive lighting through smart windows that let maximum light in during the day to replace bulbs. As a result, during working hours, the school is a net energy producer, and it sells its excess electrons into the grid. At night, when Einstein is cooking the next day’s bagels in the kitchen, the school buys whatever electricity it needs from the grid at low, off-peak rates. At the end of each month, its utility bill reads “net zero”. You cannot get a building permit in your city any longer unless your building is energy “net zero”.

Why are net-zero buildings, and dual use, such a big deal? Well, here’s a fun fact: the production of cement worldwide – the heat that has to be generated to roast the limestone and the CO2 that is emitted in the process – releases almost as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the passenger cars in the world. So just throwing up dumb cement buildings is a huge energy drain and a carbon dioxide generator. Once we realized how much of both we could save from smarter cars AND smarter buildings, building standards became as important as mileage standards.By kind permission of Tom Friedman.

Coca-Cola Japan’s new e-40 vending machine (above) uses a smart card embedded within a mobile phone.

© T

oshi

fum

i Kita

mur

a/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es

UNFCCC Poznan 2008: Epilogue


Greetings from a place so many of you do not believe exists! I confess

I too had my doubts until I arrived here, all those years ago, worn out as I was from battling with those Americans about the post-War world economic order and how to spread the financial burden of that war and its aftermath.

I refer, of course, to World War Two, which, for younger readers, took place between 1939 and 1945. Come to think of it, it did for older readers too… but you know what I mean. In any event, the war in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq took place well after my time, and both involved considerable financial as well as human cost.

How do I know? We keep closely in touch with mundane matters up here. We have the Galactic Gazette and Stellar Radio, and you have no idea – or perhaps you have – of the speed at which news travels around this universe of ours. And we care, even in the afterlife. Many younger people on Earth wonder why their elders, almost on their deathbeds, worry about the future of the planet when they won’t be there themselves to enjoy it.

Well, when they are older they will understand that strange, atavistic feeling of paternalism and concern for future generations that hits one at a certain age – even if, as in my case, one has no children of one’s own.

Which brings me to global warming, and a conversation that took place here just the other night.

I had decided to wander over, as is my wont, to the Paradise Hotel for a cocktail – or rather, in my case, a glass of champagne. My famous last words are supposed to have been “I wish that I had drunk more champagne.” I can’t remember ever uttering them, but have always been happy to accept expert evidence.

Anyway, it’s quite a good line, don’t you think?

So there I was, on the steps of the Paradise Hotel, wondering whether to go into the Ambrosia Lounge, where the dead economists tend to gather (you may recall another line of mine: “In the long run we are all dead”) or the Nectar Bar, where I often bump into Bert Einstein, who is occasionally accompanied by Galileo.

The decision was taken for me by Bert himself, who came bounding through the other door of the entrance and shouted “Timing! Good to see you Maynard. I’ve had an idea.”

Letter from Heavenby John Maynard Keynes*

So off we went to the Nectar Bar...

Keynes: Capital, Bert. So what’s your brilliant idea?Einstein: It’s your turn to buy the drinks.Keynes: OK, Bert, but I rather wondered whether you were going to say something about the big problem down there.Einstein: Down there, Maynard?Keynes: On Earth, my dear Bert.Einstein: Oh, Lord, what are they worrying about now?Keynes: Something called global warming – surely you have heard of it?Einstein: Global warming? The last time I interested myself in global temperatures, they were worried about global cooling.Keynes: But Bert, I can hardly believe it. What on Earth have you been up to these last few years?Einstein: Catching up on my non-scientific reading. You know the kind of thing: Proust, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky… it all takes time. It’s kind of embarrassing when one meets these people up here and one hasn’t read their works.Keynes: (aside) Well, you’re the expert on time. (aloud) Bert, you must be having me on.Einstein: Of course I am Maynard.

“The last time I interested myself in temperatures

they were worried about global cooling”

© G

etty

Imag

es

86

But what the hell – if you’ll excuse my language – can I do about global warming from up here? Tell the Great Man to cool the sun a little?Keynes: Don’t laugh, Bert, but I was rather wondering whether you couldn’t send a message back to Earth, encouraging them to take global warming more seriously.Einstein: Hang on a minute, Maynard. Oh, by the way, I will have another. Oh, wait a minute, it’s my round.Keynes: I’ll get you another if you promise to take me seriously.Einstein: The things I’ll do for a free drink. OK.Keynes: Keep the change, waiter. Now, Bert, as you know people like ourselves tend to be egotists…Einstein: Speak for yourself. I believe, if I may say so, that I had a reputation on Earth for being a modest man.Keynes: All right. Let me come straight to the point. If you remember, I actually wrote once that, in the not-too-distant future, man would have solved

the economic problem, in that the combination of technological progress, economic growth, and enlightened economic policies ought to produce a world where the real problem would be what to do with one’s leisure…Einstein: Like it is with us up here…Keynes: Sort of... Unfortunately things didn’t work out quite like that, what with wars, pestilence, not to

mention a Malthusian explosion in population growth, and so on.Einstein: So?Keynes: Now we – or rather they – are faced with the prospect that global warming may get in first, putting an end to my goal of a world of happiness.Einstein: They can always come here.Keynes: Bert, this is no time for levity.

Be serious. I think the global warming effort needs another voice.Einstein: You mean…Keynes: Yes, Bert, I mean you have one more earthly task. The fact of the matter is that your earthly reputation is intact. Most of us famous people up here have our detractors, but your reputation reigns supreme. Even those scientists who have refined your theories think you are peerless.Einstein: Where is all this leading? I don’t understand. I am nothing but a humble scientist.Keynes: Down to Earth, Bert. You’ve got to go back down there and convince them that this is serious.Einstein: How?Keynes: Just travel back in time. Surely you can adapt your famous theory to make that possible?Einstein: God, you economists! Tell me, Maynard, just how much did you have to drink before you got here?

*As imagined by William Keegan

“You’ ve got to go back down there and convince them that

this is serious”

© G

etty

Imag

es

UNFCCC Poznan 2008

COP 14: United Nations Climate Change Conference

Documents

Transcript of COP 14: United Nations Climate Change Conference