Citing the "historical responsibility" of rich countries for causing climate change, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other developing countries want to maintain the original obligation established in the 1992 UNFCCC that only developed countries are required to do anything about man-made climate change. In the agreement reached at Warsaw, the developing countries, including the largest and fourth largest emitters of greenhouse gases—China and India—forced the rich countries to drop their insistence that all countries make "commitments" to address climate change. Instead, countries will now make vague nationally determined "contributions" toward addressing man-made global warming.
The United States and European negotiators in Warsaw had sought an agreement in which each country would use a common transparent framework for calculating its emissions reductions. In the new Warsaw agreement, countries set their own baselines and define their own reduction strategies, thus making comparisons between countries' efforts far less transparent and harder to calculate.
The developed country negotiators also wanted all countries to put forward their initial commitments no later than the first quarter of 2015. That deadline would make it possible for the initial commitments to be critiqued before the 2015 Paris conference. The goal of the pre-Paris scrutiny would be to see if they were collectively adequate to keep the world on track toward restraining future global temperatures to an increase of no more than two degrees centigrade. Instead, countries will announce their contributions only when they were good and "ready to do so."
The poor countries also demanded that the rich countries make commitments to establish a new bureaucratic mechanism under the UNFCCC to compensate them for the loss and damage caused by climate change. For their part, the rich countries did not want to create a new international agency that would be empowered to make them legally liable for weather damage anywhere in the world. The Warsaw agreements reached a compromise in which a Warsaw mechanism for loss and damage will be set up under the existing institutions that are supposed to fund projects that help poor countries to adapt to climate change. That decision, however, will be reviewed after three years.
In 2009, at the Copenhagen climate change conference, the rich countries committed to "mobilizing" $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries to cope with climate change. At Warsaw, the poor countries sought to get the rich countries to pledge that they would hand over $70 billion per year by 2016 as an interim measure. The developing countries also wanted to make it clear that the climate change financing should be "mobilized" from public, not private funds. At Warsaw, the rich countries refused to make specific interim financial commitments, although they did agree to file biennial reports outlining what their plans are for funding climate change adaptation for poor countries between now and 2020.
So the Warsaw conference ended with no firm commitments on either greenhouse gas emissions or on finance. The diplomats and the activists will convene to do it all over again next year in Lima, Peru.
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]]>"For the third year in a row the (member) countries have found a new way to say absolutely nothing," asserted Oxfam director Winnie Byanyima, as the U.N.'s annual climate change conference limped inconsequentially to its end on Saturday in Warsaw. The 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) to the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) was supposed to set out a roadmap toward completing a global treaty that would bind all countries to some kind of commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions after 2020 at the Paris COP-21 in 2015. No commitments were made and no clear roadmap was adopted at the Warsaw talks. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks forward to achieving similar results when the U.N. climate change conference convenes next year in Lima, Peru.
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-"This COP is already locked in failure," declared Anjali Appadurai at a press briefing as the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) of the U.N. Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) slouched toward its close on Friday night. She added, "This COP has delivered nothing." As it happens, Appadurai was one of the activists who participated in the "massive" walkout of self-styled civil society at the conference on Thursday, but there she was on the podium at as representative of the Third World Network. Never mind. The environmental ministers and diplomats are still at it trying shape some kind of deal.So what would "success" look like to Appadurai and other climate change activists here at the Warsaw conference? First, the rich countries would have to admit their historical responsibility for damaging the climate and commit to cutting their greenhouse emissions by 40 percent below what they emitted in 1990. Currently, developed nations have committed to cuts amounting to about 18 percent by 2020.
Second, it is not enough that the rich countries promised in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate change conference to "mobilize" $100 billion per year in climate change funding for poor countries beginning in 2020. Meena Raman, another representative of the Third World Network, cited the demands from the Like-Minded Developing Countries for $70 billion in climate change funding by 2015. The poor countries are also adamant that the billions "mobilized" by rich countries should not come from the private sector: that's just way too uncertain. Poor country governments will accept only public funds in the form of grants.
Citing the awful devastation wreaked on the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan, the poor country negotiators claim is that it's far too late to mitigate or adapt to climate change. It's now time to pay for the effects of climate change. So the third demand from poor countries is that the rich countries set up a separate funding mechanism in addition to the annual $100 billion already promised to compensate poor countries for the loss and damage caused by climate change.
The rich countries have been resisting all three of these demands. Instead, they are focusing on how to reach some kind of binding global treaty at the COP in Paris in 2015. Under that agreement all countries, rich and poor, are supposed to make nationally determined mitigation commitments. That is, each country is supposed tell the rest of the world how and by how much they plan to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions after the new treaty comes into force in 2020. Poor countries counter that they will not make any such commitments until the rich countries make firm climate change funding commitments.
The rich countries led by U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern would count the conference a "success" if it achieved two things. First, negotiators would establish uniform greenhouse gas mitigation performance standards that could be compared directly across all countries. Second, the conference would adopt a timetable in which each country is expected to make its initial mitigation pledges public and available for criticism, preferably by late 2014 or early 2015. The rich countries also do not want to create a new loss and damage bureaucracy, but have those issues handled under the already existing adaptation provisions of the UNFCCC.
The COP was supposed to close at 6 pm (CET) but the negotiations continue and are expected to run well into the night. My final dispatch from the Warsaw climate conference, reporting on what it delivered, if anything, will appear on Monday
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]]>Yesterday, a bunch of environmental and social activists staged what they were pleased to call a "massive" walkout from the UN climate change conference venue in Warsaw. I watched it take place and took some cell phone photos, and then reported that perhaps a 100 activists, or to be really generous, maybe 150, had "massively" walked out.
I returned on Friday to the conference where I hear it repeated numerous times by various remaining members of "civil society" that 800 activists had actually joined the walkout. Then I start googling around and find that some news outlets had reported that number as being factually so, e.g,. Reuters, Environment News Service, and Grist. Really?
Amusingly, as I walked into the National Stadium today, I overhead the following conversation between two young activists while we three waited to hand over our coats at the cloakroom:
He: I walked out yesterday, did you?
She: Yes, but I had to walk back in almost immediately because we had meeting with a delegation.
I kid you not.
When I was a reporter in Central America, I was introduced to the concept of "lying for justice" by some supporters of the Sandinistas who explained to me that sometimes one had to tell lies in order to be heard.
Reports exaggerating theatrical performances of this sort are a disservice to readers, listeners, and viewers of the news.
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]]>At the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), one of the better ideas for lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases is to eliminate consumer and producer fossil fuel consumption subsidies. The International Energy Agency estimates that consumption subsidies amounted to $544 billion in 2012. Ending subsidies would encourage consumers and producers to cut back fossil fuel use, which in turn would reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And would save taxpayers a great deal of money.
On Thursday, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) held a session on reducing nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide is a long-lived gas that has a global warming potential of 310, meaning one molecule traps over 310 times more heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. The amount of nitrous oxide put into the atmosphere is equivalent to about 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide, which approximates the emissions of half of the world's entire vehicle fleet. In addition, nitrous oxide depletes the stratospheric ozone layer that shields the earth's surface from damaging ultraviolet light. So preventing nitrous oxide emissions is a twofer—cutting it lowers the temperature and protects the ozone layer.
Nitrous oxide exists naturally in the atmosphere, but, as a result of human activities, its concentration has increased by 20 percent over pre-industrial levels, making it the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane. The new UNEP report, Drawing Down N2O, outlines several ways to cut emissions.
Two-thirds of human emissions come from agricultural activities, e.g., using nitrogen fertilizer or livestock waste management. It is not an exaggeration to say that the invention of a process to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer made the modern world possible, as fertilizers boost crop yields as much as 50 percent. Nitrogen fertilizer that isn't taken up by plants boosts input costs to farmers. However, farmers have to make tradeoffs between a number of different costs for fuel, equipment, seed, labor, fertilizer, and so forth in order to make a profit, and managing nitrogen fertilizer is usually not at the top of the list for improving the bottom line.
That being said, if it's economic and ecological madness to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels, it's just as barmy to subsidize agriculture in the amount of $300 billion annually. The World Bank reported in 2012 that fertilizer subsidies in India amounted to 2 percent of that country's GDP. Agricultural subsidies clearly encourage farmers to overuse fertilizer, which in turn produces nitrous oxide emissions that harm the ozone layer and raise global temperature. The UNEP report notes that research and development can help improve nitrogen use efficiency. As it happens, private seed growers have already developed crop plants that use half of the nitrogen of conventional plants.
Another UNEP report reckons that, in order to remain on a path that keeps the average increase in global temperatures below 2 degrees centigrade of the pre-industrial level, the world must close a "gap" in what countries have pledged to cut under the UNFCCC by an additional 8 to 12 gigatons of greenhouse gases by 2020. The UNEP nitrous oxide report estimates that by 2020 it should be possible to cut those emissions corresponding to about 0.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Such a reduction would represent about 8 percent of the cuts needed to close the emissions gap and it would also help protect the ozone layer.
Finally, cutting back on the emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) as refrigerants would help lower projected future increases in the mean global temperature. HFCs were introduced in the 1990s to replace chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants whose emissions were damaging the ozone layer. Under the Montreal Protocol in 1987 countries began a phase-out of CFCs, a project I agreed with, as explained in my book Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. CFCs were also powerful greenhouse gases and eliminating them avoided emissions equivalent to 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year between 1990 and 2010. With respect to keeping the mean global temperature down, the effects of cuts in CFC emissions are calculated to have been four times greater than the carbon dioxide reductions achieved under the UNFCCC's Kyoto Protocol.
While the HFCs that replaced CFCs do not harm the ozone layer, they do have very high global warming potentials. For example, a molecule of HFC 134a, which is often used in home refrigerators and car air conditioners, has a global warming potential that is 3400 times greater than a molecule of carbon dioxide. HFCs already represent about one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have been pushing to phase-out HFCs under the Montreal Protocol, which would lead to a 2.2 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, with cuts eventually amounting to the equivalent of 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.
Ironically, carbon dioxide is a cost-effective replacement for HFCs in large-scale refrigeration in grocery stores and warehouses. Amusingly, environmentalist proponents of using carbon dioxide as a coolant coyly refer to it as "natural" refrigerant. In other applications, Dupont and Honeywell have developed a new refrigerant, hydrofluoroolefin (HFO-1234yf), which is a near drop-in replacement for HFC refrigerants in automobile air conditioners. The new HFO refrigerant has a global warming potential of less than one. Of course, transitioning away from HFCs will not be costless, but if man-made global warming turns out to be a problem, reducing their emissions would likely be less costly than cutting the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Next: The Warsaw climate change conference wraps up. The diplomatic teams are negotiating face-saving texts in the back rooms while various environment ministers take their turns at the podium in the half empty plenary hall to deliver five minutes of platitudes on the importance of what they are doing. Meanwhile, poor country envoys have walked out of the negotiations over charging rich countries climate change loss and damage and activist groups self-styled as "civil society" staged a "massive" walk out of the conference yesterday. My final dispatch will detail what has been agreed to by the remaining diplomats.
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]]>It's crazy to pay people to burn more fossil fuels if one is concerned about man-made global warming. At the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw, one of the best ideas for lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases is to eliminate billions in consumer and producer fossil fuel subsidies. Eliminating agricultural subsidies would lower the emissions of nitrous oxide that also contribute to global warming. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey points out that cutting these enormous subsidies would not only help reduce any future global warming, it would definitely cut tax bills.
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]]>The activist groups who flock to the United Nations' annual climate change conferences are pleased to style themselves as "civil society." These self-chosen representatives of the planet's people, frustrated that they are not being allowed to reorganize the entire world's energy economy yet, staged a "massive" walkout today at the Warsaw conference. From the Greenpeace press release:
In regards to the massive NGO walk-out today from the UN climate negotiations, Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International said:
"The Polish government has done its best to turn these talks into a showcase for the coal industry. Along with backsliding by Japan, Australia and Canada, and the lack of meaningful leadership from other countries, governments here have delivered a slap in the face to those suffering as a result of dangerous climate change. The EU is being shackled by the Polish government and its friends in the coal industry, and must resume leading on the climate agenda if Paris is going to deliver a treaty that matters." …
"We believe in this process. We will never give up on it, because people around the world desperately need a global treaty on climate change. But a new treaty must also be meaningful. Warsaw has simply not been good enough. As civil society, we will be back next year with still more voices behind us, with more determination and with more ambition to succeed. We expect governments to do the same."
Setting aside Naidoo's grandiloquence, can a walkout of perhaps 100 white t-shirted people truthfully be characterized as "massive"?
The number of journalists covering the event very likely equaled the number of perambulating activists.
Still, I expect Naidoo and his fellow travelers to fulfill their threat to return in higher numbers when the next climate change meeting convenes in Lima in 2014.
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]]>The annual U.N. climate change meetings are always all about money. The 19th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw is no exception. The latest ploy by poor countries to guilt money out of rich country governments is to claim that it's far too late to mitigate or adapt to climate change, it's now compensation time for loss and damage already occurring from climate change. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks into the claims and how much money may be involved.
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