World must reduce greenhouse gases by AP / The Guardian / UN News 2:49pm 24th Sep, 2007   28.09.2007    President Bush"s Climate Speech Disappoints Europeans. (Deutsche Welle)    Europeans expressed disappointment at US President Bush"s speech on climate change in which he urged the world"s worst polluters to cut emissions but stuck to his opposition to mandatory targets on global warming.    Speaking at a two-day US-led conference on climate change in Washington on Friday, Sept. 28, President Bush called for a "strong and transparent" way for nations to measure progress on fighting climate change but said that each country should set its own approach.    Bush also called for the creation of a new global fund that would help developing nations pay for clean-energy projects. The conference was the first in a series of talks among major polluting nations that Bush has called for.    The US is the world"s largest emitter of greenhouse gases though experts believe China may soon surpass it.    The US president"s speech didn"t convince many European officials who remained skeptical that the conference hosted by Bush at the State Department would help key UN climate talks in Bali in December.    The Bali talks will aim to launch a successor to the Kyoto Protocol which sets limits on industrial nations emissions and which expires in 2012.    "This here was a great step for the Americans and a small step for mankind," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told journalists in Washington. "In substance, we are still far apart."    Bush"s emphasis on voluntary approaches rather than the firm targets pushed by many European countries raised considerable concern.    A long-term goal for reducing global warming was needed, Bush said, but added that "each nation will design its own separate strategies for making progress toward achieving this."    "One of the striking features of this meeting is how isolated this administration has become. There is absolutely no support that I can see in the international community that we can drive this effort on the basis of voluntary efforts," John Ashton, a special representative on climate change for the British foreign secretary, said in an interview.    "I don"t think that this meeting by itself moves the ball very much at all. The much more significant meeting this week was at the UN where there was a sense of urgency."    Bush"s proposal to expand nuclear energy to fight climate change and his statement that carbon dioxide emissions would be much higher today if it weren"t for the 439 nuclear power plants worldwide was sharply criticised by Germany"s Gabriel.    "I don"t it"s particularly clever to give the world the message: build new nuclear plants," Gabriel said. "First you urge people to expand nuclear energy and then you send in NATO to bomb the nuclear power plants because they did the wrong thing -- that isn"t particularly intelligent politics."    September 25, 2007    UK calls on US to adopt binding aims on emissions. Julian Borger. (The Guardian)    The British environment secretary, Hilary Benn, yesterday called on the US to agree to mandatory goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the alternative was dangerous climate change.    Mr Benn made his appeal at a climate change summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The summit, attended by more than 80 heads of state and government, was intended to bolster international resolve to come to an agreement in principle on a new international global warming pact in December in Bali.    President George Bush was not at the meeting, but was due to attend a post-summit dinner last night. He has called his own conference of "major emitters" for Thursday this week, at which he is expected to promote his preference for a looser global accord in which nations set their own non-mandatory targets.    Mr Benn said that approach would not work. "The only way forward must involve developed countries taking on binding emissions commitments because a voluntary approach ... isn"t going to do the job," he said. "And that means all of us, including the largest economy in the world, the United States - taking on binding reduction targets. It is inconceivable that dangerous climate change can be avoided without this happening."    A British official said there was a sense that the debate in the US was shifting towards taking climate change more seriously. He thought that the Bush administration"s attempt to take over the global climate change agenda to push it towards a non-mandatory agreement to replace the Kyoto accord was running out of steam. British officials do not believe the Bush administration will do a U-turn in Bali, but point out that when a new climate change agreement is laid down in detail and signed, in Copenhagen in 2009, Mr Bush will no longer be in office.    September 23, 2007    President Bush to be No-Show at U.N. Climate Summit. (Associated Press)    Leaders of some 80 nations converge on the United Nations on Monday for a summit on the warming Earth and what to do about it.    The unprecedented meeting comes just days after U.S. scientists reported that melting temperatures this summer shrank the Arctic Ocean’s ice cap to a record-low size.    “I expect the meeting on Monday to express a sense of urgency in terms of negotiating progress that needs to be made,” said the U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer.    U.S. President George W. Bush, who has long opposed negotiated limits on the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, will not participate in the day’s meetings, but will attend a small dinner Monday evening, a gathering of key players hosted by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.    On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Bush will host his own two-day climate meeting in Washington, limited to 16 “major emitter” countries, the first in a series of such gatherings that environmentalists fear may undercut the global U.N. negotiating process.    What is being discussed under the U.N. umbrella is an effort, focused on December’s annual climate treaty conference in Bali, Indonesia, to launch negotiations for an emissions-reduction agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.    The 1997 Kyoto pact, which the U.S. rejects, requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases - emitted by power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources - by an average 5 percent by 2012.    “A breakthrough is absolutely essential” at Bali to advance uninterrupted from Kyoto to a new, deeper-cutting regime, de Boer told reporters.    Monday’s event here, designed to build political momentum for the Bali talks, will feature California Gov. Schwarzenegger as one opening speaker, representing local governments worldwide. The Republican governor and his Democrat-led legislature have pioneered state-level greenhouse-gas caps in the United States, with a law phasing in mandated 30-percent cuts in vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009.    Former U.S. Vice President Gore, who gained prominence as a climate campaigner after the 2000 presidential election, will be a keynote speaker.    The U.N. summit and Bali conference will cap a year in which a series of authoritative reports by a U.N. scientific network warned of temperatures rising by several degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and of a drastically changed planet from rising seas, drought and other factors, unless nations rein in greenhouse gases.    “What is particularly significant is the acceleration of the increase of temperatures in recent years,” Indian climatologist Rajendra Pachauri, head of that U.N. panel, told reporters here.    To try to spur global negotiations, the European Union has committed to reducing emissions by at least an additional 20 percent by 2020.    The Bush administration has shown no sign of ending its opposition to internationally-mandated targets under a binding treaty. Mr. Bush has said he believes Kyoto-style mandates would damage the U.S. economy, and they should have been imposed on fast-growing poorer countries, such as China and India, as well as on developed nations.    The U.S. administration has instead urged industry to reduce emissions voluntarily. But environmentalists say mandatory emissions reductions are a necessary incentive for industry to buy such clean technology.    At the Washington meeting, the Bush administration will likely advocate “some kind of vague aspirational voluntary stuff,” said David Doniger, a veteran climate campaigner with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. “That will interfere with the serious discussion of limits.”    De Boer, the U.N. climate chief, sounded a more positive note, pointing out that the Washington sessions will involve China and India, nations that all sides agree must eventually accept emissions limitations. But the U.S. would have to accept commitments, too, he said, or a Bali breakthrough would prove “very difficult” to achieve.    20 September 2007    Businesses must support emissions reduction, says Yvo de Boer. (UN News)    The private sector must support industrialized countries’ serious emission reduction commitments to curb climate change and maintain the momentum of the system of exchanging emissions on the ‘carbon market,’ the top United Nations climate change official said today.    “Without binding commitments and the resulting downward pressure on greenhouse gas emissions, there is no carbon market. What’s worse, we might fail in our battle against climate change, and that would result in costs that are much higher than the cost of action now,” UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said at this year’s Carbon Finance World conference in Chicago.    Last year, the international carbon market – spawned by the 1997 UN-backed Kyoto Protocol – was worth more than $30 billion, triple its size in 2005, and is expected to grow significantly this year.    The carbon market “can help us achieve the necessary shifts to green investment and contribute to the additional hundreds of billions of dollars that are estimated to be needed to address this problem,” Mr. de Boer noted.    Emissions trading and other Kyoto-inspired and market-based systems, such as the clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries to earn certified emission reduction credits, engage the business world and create low-cost opportunities to cut back emissions.    The CDM has grown considerably, with nearly 800 projects in 48 developing countries. It has “provided developed countries with a degree of flexibility in how they meet their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol,” the Executive Secretary said. “For the CDM to be truly effective, however, it must be scaled up substantially. This also applies to the carbon market as a whole, and for any other market mechanism Parties might choose to create as part of a post-2012 agreement.”    In a related development, the head of the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) today said that the debate on combating climate change must not only focus on mitigation, but also on adaptation.    Speaking in advance of the high-level informal dialogue to be convened by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 24 September, WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said that all socio-economic sectors – influenced in some way by weather and the climate – will be impacted by the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as droughts and floods brought on by global warming.    Mr. Jarraud also called on the international community to step up support for countries without the necessary technology or resources to allow them to make the most optimal decisions on infrastructure building possible given the most current and accurate weather information.    Next week’s high-level meeting will set the stage for a major December summit in Bali, Indonesia, which will seek to determine future action on mitigation, adaptation, the global carbon market and financing responses to climate change for the period after the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
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