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Climate talks need a dose of top-level political will
Written by: Sven Harmeling
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Some 500 activists from the joint NGO campaign 'tcktcktck' form a human exclamation mark reading 'Yes You Can', calling for progress in international climate negotiations, Bonn, June 6, 2009. REUTERS/Handout
The latest round of U.N. climate negotiations, which took place at the beginning of June in Bonn, marked the start of the negotiating countdown to Copenhagen. The session focused on the first discussions of the 50-page draft negotiating text for a Copenhagen Agreement, which was published two weeks prior to the session. Bonn II did not bring much substantial debate on the content of this text, but countries raised their reservations, which helped identify gaps in the positions. They were also invited to add text where they felt their views weren't adequately reflected. As many countries made extensive use of this offer, the text has now grown to 199 pages, which - honestly speaking - is a non-negotiable text. Also, more redundancies have been added than new substance, leaving the process with the challenge of cutting down the text again before starting the negotiations on technical details. The Bonn talks were characterised by the stamp of new scientific findings. These show more clearly than ever the dangers of self-accelerating changes in the climate system and emphasise the need for comprehensive global emissions reductions of 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. The increase in developing country demands - already seen in Bonn in March - continued. Alongside the small island states and the least developed countries (a total of more than 80 nations), China is now also demanding that developed countries reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 - a target demanded by the science but which developed countries have yet to live up to. BARRIERS TO PROGRESS The lack of an ambitious "official" aggregate emissions reduction target for developed countries as a basis for negotiations continues to be one of the impasses. Another is the critical issue of financial and technological support. According to different scientific studies, the scale of ambition needed to steer the developing world onto a low-carbon and climate-resilient development path is estimated to be in the order of more than 100 billion euros ($141 billion). The EU finance ministers addressed this topic during the negotiations, but mentioned neither the scale of the financing to be provided nor the central instrument for raising it - namely the auctioning of industrialised countries' emissions permits. This continues to hinder progress in the negotiations, since developing countries are reluctant to put offers on the table without knowing how much support they can expect. The next round of negotiations, Bonn III, will take place from August 10-14. The expanded negotiating texts will not be changed again until the next round, so that all countries have time to firm up their positions. At the technical level, much progress can be expected at the summer meeting. However, the large keystones - mitigation, financing and technology cooperation - will not be laid through technical negotiations. These will ultimately be decided on the last night of the crucial December meeting in Copenhagen. Before then, top-level political will must grow at meetings bringing together heads of government, including the G8, the G20, the Major Economies Forum and the U.N. General Assembly. By the end of September we will have a much clearer idea of the scale of ambition for the Copenhagen deal. Will these meetings decide on vague benchmarks or on a new, path-breaking agreement? Without much more pressure from civil society the stronger option will not happen. In this regard, June's Bonn meeting was a good but small beginning.
For further information, contact Sven Harmeling: harmeling@germanwatch.org. Christoph Bals, executive director of policy at Germanwatch, also contributed to this article.
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5 responses to “Climate talks need a dose of top-level political will”
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06 Jul 2009 12:12:44 GMT
What is needed is NOT more leaders signing on to the absolutely ridiculous global warming band wagon. The planet has been cooling for 8 years. The kyoto accords had an ANNOUNCED goal of letting Asian and other countries "catch up" with the US and other western countries by allowing them to keep developing coal and petrol resources without limit while the western countries did not. Notice that the "new scientific findings" are only referenced in vague and non-specific ways, never names of studies and specific authors in hard science publications -- because they do not exist. Quite the opposite. However in the tradition of "the big lie" practiced by totalitarian propagandists for a century the emission goals get more and more extreme. 20 percent of 1990 emissions? Puh-leeze.
06 Jul 2009 12:13:26 GMT
No, what climate change talks need are a healthy dose of scientific debate by people who don't have financial or other conflicts of interest, like Al Gore, who stands to make a mountain of Green.
Question: Why was Al Gore allowed to testify before Congress, and Lord Monckton refused the day before he was scheduled to testify to counter Gore? When you can answer that question, then you'll know what 'climate change' is really all about. It in fact has far more in common with religion than science. In what other scientific field are skeptics called 'deniers'?30 Jul 2009 13:31:58 GMT
Bad news. The climate is changing, it always has, and always will. There is nothing the power and money hungry politicians and rogue individuals can do to stop climate change.
Question: What is the "ideal" climate? Is it one that is most beneficial for human creature comforts, one that is most beneficial to other animals, one that is most beneficial to plants, or a arbitrarily selected climate that politicians manufacture? Do we really want a static climate? Since climate is the cumulative affect of daily weather a static climate would require static weather. If the weather is the same day after day after day what affect will that have on biological diversity? If static weather and climate are imposed which season will be selected and for which hemisphere? Who determines the season? The preponderance to new and CURRENT climate studies data indicate the global warming, if any, peaked approximately 10 years ago. CO2 levels have continued to increase, yet temperatures have not track CO2 levels as all the 'chicken little' models used by the IPCC and its adherents predicted. The total destruction of America's Atlantic and Gulf Coasts predicted by Al[l] Gore following 2005's Katrina have failed to occur. How will Cap and Trade reduce global emissions? Buying and trading pieces of paper CAN NOT and WILL NOT reduce the ACTUAL emissions.04 Aug 2009 11:07:39 GMT
We(earth people) constantly rearranging the earth's upper layers... trains, planes, animal kingdom, Marine life, all move and respond to change. But, the solar system is also rebalancing and changing forces, let alone occasional visitors from space .. near earth objects etx. the only thing we can be sure of is CHAOS and CHANGE. All the compute power in the world cannot model the future.
05 Sep 2009 10:17:38 GMT
Only a fool would think we can dig up a thousand barrels per second of oil, plus mountains of coal and clouds of natural gas, and burn them without causing disruption to the weather patterns that make agriculture possible. And the know-nothings never want to talk about disruptions to agriculture, receeding glaciers, calving icebergs, warm climate species moving to previously colder places, warmer winters that lead to forest dieoff (especially in higher elevations in the Rocky Mtns, among other places), to cite a few examples.
Most of those who claim climate change is not real, or at least not related to digging up a hundred million years worth of fossil carbon, do not know anything about growing food, which requires stable, predictable climate patterns, whether tropical or temperate agriculture. But it's also hard to trust the politicians who shed crocodile tears for the climate as they continue to fund highway expansion, more airports, military spending and wars, and pretend that we can continue to grow forever on a finite planet. The reality is we will cut carbon emissions by 2050 regardless of the policies that are made - because the oil will be mostly gone by then. Even "Peak Coal" is likely somewhere around 2020. The mass media, politicians and most environmental groups do not want to ask why our society largely ignored the warnings about climate change. Few of them also consider how Peak Oil and global warming are two ways of looking at the same problem of overconsumption, since our monetary system is predicated on ever increasing growth. The best analyses of Peak Oil and of global warming each conclude that the problem would have to be addressed a decade or two before it manifests at full strength - yet both problems are here, now. Perhaps the truth is that the shadow government (corporations and the military industrial complex) did not want to deal with these problems because the solutions are inherently decentralized and would require relaxation of centralized power control systems. Since we missed the opportunity to solve these issues as gently as possible, governments are instituting a global surveillance police state to suppress dissent as the oil that runs the show becomes more scarce and expensive, and climate change reduces available food and water supplies. http://www.oilempire.us/