In a half step forward for rationale international climate change policy, Kyoto Protocol signatories have agreed to a plan for setting new targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions beyond current commitments to 2012. However, they failed to agree upon a timetable for deciding the level of those cuts. No amount of technology can obviate the need to cut the absolute volume of greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere. Bottom line is all countries are going to have to cut their emissions; and to be fair, the already rich and over-developed countries responsible for the current climate crisis are going to have to make more dramatic cuts than countries with populations struggling to meet basic needs. Again, if the Earth's atmospheric system is to be salvaged, and the global ecological system to remain functional, there is no substitute for rapid and dramatic greenhouse gas reductions. The human family simply must find a way to make this deeply difficult transition to a low-carbon way of living if it is to have a civilized future.
May 2006 Archives
The United States and China are deciding the global climate's fate as they meet energy demands by constructing coal-fired electricity plants that will release billions of tons of carbon dioxide. China alone is building at least one dirty coal plant a week. The coal industry's massive PR machine would have you believe that coal is becoming a clean energy source, which is the lie that may destroy the Earth's atmospheric system. While progress has been achieved in removing other pollutants from coal emissions, not so for carbon dioxide. Plans to bury carbon are unproven and decades from large scale implementation. The article notes that essential policies such as carbon taxes and energy efficiency sometimes fail on a cost-benefit analysis. But climate change - in its potential to devastate whole societies - is a moral issue as well.
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President Bush has shown throughout his Presidency little inclination to address looming climate change. Nonetheless, with perhaps only a decade left to fully implement in earnest the policies necessary to avert abrupt, run-away and potentially deadly climate change; his administration remains the greatest obstacle to a coordinated international policy response.
The extent and rapidity of global warming is now so severe that we simply cannot wait for over two and a half years for new American leadership. In order to maximize the likelihood of humanity having adequate time to confront the global warming emergency, all enlightened global citizens simply must confront President Bush and seek to break through his oilman's denial.
Researchers at the Leeds Earth and Biosphere Institute are studying the vicious cycle of rainforest loss and climate change. Global warming as a result of burning of fossil fuels and release of other greenhouse gases is causing tropical rainforests to convert to tropical savannah landscapes which hold less carbon. Rainforests are also being lost as a result of habitat destruction from logging, agriculture and other industrial development. This rainforest loss has traditionally and continues to release huge amounts of carbon from dead vegetation, which in turn is causing more climate change. This is one example of a positive feedback that may cause global warming to become abrupt, runaway and deadly. And it is why the Climate Ark and Ecological Internet's Rainforest Portal and Forests.org web sites are dedicated to ending deforestation.
Canada appears poised to abrogate emission-reduction targets for the Kyoto Protocol's second phase. They have already all but quit efforts to meet the modest current Kyoto emission reduction goals. Failure of the international community to set aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets would set back international climate change policy-making - such as it is - by decades. There is no reason to believe that voluntary pledges to reduce emissions can deliver the 60-70% reductions necessary to stop the global climate from undergoing abrupt, run-away and deadly change. The new Canadian Conservative government has followed the Bush oil oligarchy in obstructing international efforts to address the gravest threat facing humanity. Lots of conservatives are going to answer to their children as the world's climate brings down mayhem and suffering upon our future. Shame on Canada.
The Washington Post notes that the cost of the Iraq war - now in excess of $300 billion - equals estimated costs of the U.S implementing the Kyoto Protocol. The best estimate is that it would take $325 billion over decades for the United States to implement Kyoto. This seemingly high figure led the Bush administration to argue that the benefits of the agreement did not justify its costs, unlike the Iraq war apparently. When one factors in already apparent damages from rising seas, extreme weather and ecosystem collapse; it becomes apparent that risks associated with abrupt and runaway climate change is not being properly computed and mitigated against. We can pay the price in terms of renewable energy, energy efficiency and emission reduction investments now or we can pay through the nose later, perhaps with our lives.
Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose will chair a UN international climate change meeting even as Canada reneges on Kyoto pledges. It is shocking that Canada be allowed to take a leading role in climate change negotiations when it has no plans for meeting its own Kyoto commitments, Canadian emissions are far above targets, and they are gutting government programs to reduce emissions. Canadian environmentalists are calling for Ambrose to resign from the post, given her negative views on Kyoto which could harmfully influence other countries that are in favour of setting tougher targets for the protocol's second phase. It is one thing for Canada to renege on Kyoto, or for America and Australia to fail to ratify, but obstructing other countries working for a constructive solution is truly appalling.
The Bush administration has again obstructed the working of international climate change science. This time it was leaking drafts of the secret fourth report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The draft report which is to be finalized in February of 2007 finds that global warming is likely to have increased the severity of tropical storms and that greenhouse gas concentrations are at their highest atmospheric level in 650,000 years. It is hypothesized that the Bush administration leaked the document on a government web site to discredit IPCC findings with which it frequently disagrees, or that it is trying to mute the significance of the findings by dragging out their release. In any case the Bush oil cabal has sunk to new depths of duplicity in obstructing science and policy to avert a global climate crisis. Shame, shame, shame on Bush.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN grouping of the world's leading climate scientists, states in a partial draft of their much anticipated fourth report that the world can expect to warm by 3C by 2050 - a level that has been termed "dangerous" by other studies. The IPCC is a traditionally conservative, cautious body whose findings are viewed as definitive. The draft report is more confident of human's role in climate change. The pattern of warming ocean, increased temperatures and melting polar ice make it "highly unlikely (less than 5%)" that these are natural changes. And dire climate change impacts are predicted to include drought and famine for 400 million people. The draft report was made public in an unusual fashion by the Bush administration in an attempt to defuse its impacts. The oil oligarchy obviously knows no shame.
There have been several developments in climate change science this week. A U.S. government commissioned scientific report concludes there is "clear evidence" of human caused climate change [more | more2]. The study removes uncertainty regarding variance in recorded temperature increases between the Earth's surface and the troposphere, an issue frequently used by skeptics and the Bush administration to resist climate change policy actions. Meanwhile, the NOAA reported that in 2005 greenhouse gases continued their inexorable rise. And there is that pesky matter of Pacific air currents weakening, threatening to disrupt weather patterns over much of the globe.
The tightening of the Brazilian ethanol market for use as a biofuel clearly demonstrates there is no way enough biomass could ever be grown to meet a significant portion of current, much less anticipated, world energy needs without causing great environmental harm. Biofuels "fight for space in the environment, they fight food production... [t]hey are not the answer to the energy crisis." Locally produced biofuels may help move local economies towards relocalized sustainability, but on the international agro-industrial scale which they are being proposed they are certain to further degrade land and water ecosystems without appreciably contributing to solving the energy and climate crises.
