Copenhagen // Current

U.S. to Propose Emissions Cuts Before Copenhagen

WASHINGTON — The United States will propose a near-term target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, a senior administration official said Monday. President Obama, the official said, will announce the specific target “in coming days.”

The announcement of a target will take the current legislative stalemate over a climate bill into account, the senior official said, and thus might present a range of possible reductions rather than a single figure.

The lack of consensus in Congress puts Mr. Obama in a tricky domestic and diplomatic bind. He cannot promise more than Congress may eventually deliver when it takes up climate change legislation next year. But if he does not offer some concrete pledge, the United States will bear the brunt of the blame for the lack of an international agreement.

The official also said the president would decide shortly whether and for how long he might attend the December climate meeting, which runs from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18. He repeated the president’s assertion that he would consider attending if his presence could be a useful impetus to a deal.

Paul Bledsoe of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy said the president’s hands were tied by Congressional inaction. “The U.S. cannot negotiate at Copenhagen above the targets in domestic legislation without risking support for that legislation in the Senate,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “If European demands continue above the U.S. domestic targets, they set up an impossible dynamic for the administration.”

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Mr. Obama could credibly tell delegates to the climate conference that the United States intended to reduce its emissions by 17 percent to 20 percent, based on the legislation that has been approved by the House and the Senate environment committee.

“It’s important for the president to exert that leadership with consultation with Congress,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview late last week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/science/earth/24climate.html?hpWASHINGTON — The United States will propose a near-term target for reducing... more

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Getting up to speed on the climate talks

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Avaaz Climate Action Factory - Europe's photostream

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Water tops climate change as global priority

As the world turns its eyes toward Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Conference in December and how to engage the public on these massively complex issues of planetary survival, it might look to water as a universal solvent. According to our new Circle of Blue GlobeScan public opinion survey, WaterViews, we now know that people globally care most about water.

This seems like commons sense. Water flows through each of world's most significant challenges of the 21st century, from drought and food supplies, health and pandemics to economic despair and sustainable development. And, of course, we'd simply die without water.

This comprehensive and independent global public opinion survey on attitudes about fresh water sustainability, management and conservation finds that people around the world view water issues as the planet’s top environmental problem, greater than air pollution, depletion of natural resources, loss of habitat and even climate change. We published the results Tuesday at World Water Week in Stockholm. (Circle of Blue is the independent, nonpartisan journalism, science and communications organization I direct that's reporting the global water crisis.) The data is fresh and we didn't know the outcome until the numbers were in little more than a week ago.

My colleague Keith Schneider writes:

The fierce impediments to clean water and sanitation, and the millions of premature deaths from water-related disease, are seen as having a greater influence on quality of life and the planet than air pollution, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, loss of habitat and climate change.

Opinion is powerful stuff, and it may be catching up to present-day reality. The encouraging news for those working on water issues is that people — a high 93 percent — want to be empowered with more information to do something about the crisis.

What does this mean? Simple. As an issue, climate is gravely urgent. But it's a surpassingly complicated story built on scenarios and slow fuses. If it can be broken down into its concrete impacts on such things as water, then it becomes understandable and real.

We surveyed 1,000 people in each of 15 countries, and probed 500 in each of the following countries on specific questions: Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. (We are awaiting data from ten more countries.) Water pollution and fresh water shortages ranked first and second while climate ranked sixth.

A closer look at the results shows that people around the world view water pollution as the most important facet of the fresh water crisis, and that shortages of fresh water are very close behind.

end of excerptAs the world turns its eyes toward Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate... more

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Obama vows to seek climate action in Copenhagen

BEIJING - President Barack Obama, with China's leader at his side, lifted his sights Tuesday for a broad accord at next month's climate conference that he said will lead to immediate action and "rally the world" toward a solution on global warming.

Obama and President Hu Jintao talked of a joint desire to tackle climate change, but failed to publicly address the root problems that could unravel a deal at the 192-nation conference in Copenhagen: how much each country can contribute to curb greenhouse gases and how the world will pay the billions of dollars needed to fight rising temperatures.

Hu said nations would do their part "consistent with our respective capabilities," a reference to the now widely accepted view that developing nations — even energy guzzlers like China, India and Brazil — should be required only to set goals for reining in greenhouse-gas emissions, not accept absolute targets for reducing emissions like the industrialized countries.

Nonetheless, the symbolism of the world's two largest polluters pledging no half-measures in an agreement during the Dec. 7-18 conference took the sting out of the admission by Obama and other leaders over the weekend that Copenhagen would be only a way station rather than the endpoint envisioned two years ago when negotiations for a new climate treaty began.

Using language that went further than before, Obama said the aim of the summit "is not a partial accord or a political declaration, but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations, and one that has immediate operational effect."

He said an all-encompassing agreement "would be an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution to our climate challenge."

Obama did not elaborate. But the United Nations and the European Union have called for a fund of at least $10 billion annually in the next three years to help poor countries draw up plans for moving to low-carbon economies, slow deforestation and take emergency steps against the effects of climate change.

The agreement is meant to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut emissions an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but which made no demands on rapidly growing economies like China's.

The Copenhagen agreement would require developing countries to curb their emissions growth, but it was unclear how their plans would be enshrined in the accord and what would happen if their promises were broken.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34001621/ns/us_news-environment/BEIJING - President Barack Obama, with China's leader at his side, lifted his sights... more

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Obama Urged to Attend Climate Summit With Bipartisan Senate Plan in Hand

An environmentalist and a retired vice admiral made the case Thursday that President Obama should personally attend the Copenhagen climate-change summit next month and bring with him two substantial signs that America is serious about curbing global warming: the sweeping cap-and-trade bill already passed by the House, and a bipartisan framework for getting a climate bill through the Senate.

Carter Roberts, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, said that would send other countries a clear signal that the United States is ready to lead on climate change, and they therefore would be willing to make commitments in Copenhagen to restricting the carbon emissions that cause global warming. A framework is enough, he said, if enough senators are on board.

Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham have published a proposal for a bipartisan climate bill. In private conversations, Roberts said, a number of other senators have said they will sign on to "the right compromise." In the case of Arizona Sen. John McCain, he said, that would mean including nuclear power as a component of the bill.

Roberts and retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn, speaking at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, said the United Nations summit in Copenhagen needs to produce a legally enforceable agreement so countries won't abandon their commitments to reduce emissions.

McGinn said international agreements always raise concerns about national sovereignty, but in some cases -- like nuclear agreements and the prospective climate-change pact -- they are worth it because they allow us to sleep better at night. "There are good binding international agreements in our past," he said. They're not perfect, he added, but they are subject to constant adjustment.

McGinn and other defense experts have been bringing national security concerns to the debate over climate change, pointing out the intensified instability that floods, drought and other global-warming consequences could bring to places that are already riven by ethnic, religious and other conflicts. I have written about their research here. Click here to read my interview with former Republican senator John Warner, a former Navy secretary, who has traveled the country with McGinn to discuss the national security implications of climate change.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/11/12/obama-urged-to-attend-copenhagen-climate-summit-with-bipartisan/An environmentalist and a retired vice admiral made the case Thursday that President... more