"Climate Change Tourists" Go Home!

The Nairobi global warming conference grinds to an end

Ronald Bailey | November 17, 2006

(Page 2 of 7)

And perhaps some rethinking has been going on. Halldor Thorgeirsson, deputy executive secretary of the UNFCCC, mentioned that a South African delegate had made interesting observation. The South African turned the usual formulation of "what can we do to pursue development under the constraints imposed by climate change" on its head to "what can we do to address climate change under the constraints of the need for development and poverty eradication?"

p> span class="c1">Poverty eradication is a massive problem. Just how massive was made clear by the vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank, Katherine Sierra, when she pointed out in speech to the delegates that developing countries need annual investment for electricity supply of $165 billion through 2010 and afterwards investment needs would increase at 3 percent per year. The real heartbreaker came when she noted that the current energy supply investments planned for Africa "will increase poor people's access to energy in Sub-Saharan Africa from 23 percent today to 47 percent by 2030." In other words, half the people in Sub-Saharan Africa still won't have access to modern energy supplies in 25 years! Half! Frankly, it's hard to imagine that climate change projected for the next five decades can wreak as much havoc on the lives of poor Africans as the lack of modern energy supplies does today. International bureaucrats also myopically worry that as climate worsens, that a lot of overseas development aid will have to be channeled away from development into disaster relief. How about growing economies so that poor people like Sharon Looremeta in impoverished countries don't need development aid because they have created their own   resources which would enable them to bounce back from whatever disasters assault them?   Now that would be some interesting rethinking. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p>

Some surprising rethinking may also be taking place among America's climate negotiators. The leader of the US delegation at the conference, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, reportedly said that the Bush Administration is closely watching the how California and nine Northeastern states reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). "We welcome the pursuit of these different strategies and we want to see how they evolve," she said to the Associated Press. She even didn't rule out the possibility that the Bush Administration could end its resistance to mandatory limits on greenhouse gases (GHG).

p>Meanwhile, three senators—Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Joseph Lieberman (CFL-Conn.) issued a letter saying "the US must move quickly to adopt economy-wide constraints on GHG emissions and then work with the international community to forge an effective and equitable global agreement." These senators believe that the global warming will be an election issue in 2008. And it may be, especially if some weather disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina sails in during the campaign. A post-election Zogby poll found that a