Racing to the bottom.
Yahoo news says 190 nations seek to bridge policy gaps on climate,
The May 15-16 “dialogue” will involve around 40 rich nations which are capping emissions of heat-trapping gases under the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, as well as outsiders such as the United States and developing nations.
“Scientific evidence of the dramatic effects of human-induced climate change is becoming stronger,” said Richard Kinley, acting head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat which will host the meeting in a Bonn hotel.
After the two-day dialogue among all 190 members of the U.N. Climate Convention, backers of Kyoto will meet from May 17-25 for a round of related talks about how to extend cuts in emissions from power plants, factories and cars beyond 2012.
Meanwhile Reuters are reporting from the conference where India says to tackle poverty before global warming.
India said on Tuesday that rich nations must lead a fight against global warming, telling a 189-nation U.N. conference that developing countries should instead give priority to ending poverty.
“Removal of poverty is the greater immediate imperative” than global warming, Prodipto Ghosh, Secretary of India’s Environment Ministry, told talks in Bonn trying to work out new ways to fight climate change.
He said that industrial states had to do most to reduce emissions from power plants, factories and cars. He urged a “significant strengthening” of cuts in emissions by almost 40 nations which support the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol.
So what is to be done? The ‘developing’ world wants to burn more energy to meet developmental goals, and the ‘developed’ world is showing no signs of wanting to curb its energy use. New technologies are still in the pipe-dream phase for the most part and, without the economic incentives provided by cap-and-trade schemes such as proposed by the Kyoto Protocol, will not be developed at all, let alone in time to save hundreds of millions of people from death and dislocation.
“Global joint efforts are needed in the coming decades,” the European Union said in a statement, saying Kyoto backers “will not be able to combat climate change effectively on their own.”
It said Kyoto backers accounted for only about 30 percent of all emissions in 2000. Among outsiders, the United States is the biggest source of emissions on 24 percent, ahead of China on 12.1 percent and India with 4.7 percent.
Given that the Kyoto nay-sayers account for more emissions than Kyoto backers, India’s position seems reasonable. Indeed the developing world has been systematically pillaged by the developed world for hundreds of years and rightly feels as if it should not now have to pay for those who have looted their wealth. But bringing the whole world up to the energy consumption levels of the USA or Europe will only exacerbate problems for the whole world. It’s more a question of efficiency now however.
India also said that its energy use was low, and that India was more productive than Sweden or the United States when judged by how much energy it used per dollar of economic output.
Even with strong growth, use of new technologies such as solar power and greater energy efficiency, India will use less energy per capita by the 2030s than the world average from 2003, said Surya Sethi, an adviser to India’s Planning Commission.
There is no doubt that more energy efficient technologies need to be used worldwide. Cleaner sources of energy must be exploited and the developed world must commit to powering down gracefully. India is rapidly becoming a world leader in the creation of carbon credits, and these are bought by European and other Kyoto countries to offset their excess emissions. This cap-and-trade mechanism is explicitly designed to benefit the developing world.
Kyoto obliges rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
What happens after 2012 is the key. We are pretty confident that the cap-and-trade system will be tightened up and the carbon economy will quickly become integrated into the wider economy. — DS
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