tagged w/ Kyoto Protocol
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Canada has pulled out of the 1997 anti-global warming Kyoto protocol, saying the treaty is 'not working'. The departure comes a day after further climate talks in South Africa led to a new agreement, which is set to replace Kyoto by 2015. Piers Corbyn, the founder of the Weather Action Foundation, hopes Canada withdrawal will lead to the collapse of "useless" Kyoto protocol.
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Thank you astrophysicist Piers Corbyn for schooling us how weather and climate really works.Canada has pulled out of the 1997 anti-global warming Kyoto protocol, saying the... more
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Newt Gingrich is a promoter of the global warming "theories" (emphasis on theories), thus global warming promoters should be in favor of having him as president since he supports their causes
What was it that convinced you that global warming was a real and pressing problem?
Oh, I think the weight of evidence over time [convinced me] that it's something that you ought to be careful about. As a conservative, I think you ought to be prudent, and it seems to me that the conservative approach should be to minimize the risk of a really catastrophic change.
And when did you come to that?
Well, I thought over the last eight or 10 years it was useful to move in that direction. I was strongly opposed to Kyoto treaty the way it was written; I think it was written by the Europeans as an anti-American document. I also think it doesn't get the job done because it excludes China and India. But I felt that was a lost opportunity to talk about: How do you design a pro-science and pro-technology strategy that lowers the amount of damage the human race does to the planet? ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154&feature=player_embeddedNewt Gingrich is a promoter of the global warming "theories" (emphasis on... more
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Fury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama administration's deliberate agenda to block the construction of new coal-fired plants, as local energy companies struggle to meet Americans' power demands amidst some of the coldest weather seen in decades.
- As we reported yesterday, four hospitals in Texas reacted furiously after they were hit with planned outages despite being promised they would be spared even as power to Super Bowl venues remains uninterrupted.
- Thousands in New Mexico have been left without natural gas as Gov. Susana Martinez on Thursday declared a state of emergency. "Due to statewide natural gas shortages, I have ordered all government agencies that do not provide essential services to shut down and all nonessential employees to stay home" on Friday, Martinez said after meeting with public safety personnel in Albuquerque," reports the Associated Press.
- Borderland residents have been asked to limit their use of natural gas as the Texas Gas Service asks that larger commercial facilities voluntarily close their doors to save supplies.
- People in Tucson have been asked to limit their use of hot water and moderate their thermostat levels to save on energy.
- Shortages of natural gas in San Diego County has forced utility companies to "cut or reduce the gas supplied to some of their largest commercial and industrial customers," reports North County Times.
- In El Paso, "Hundreds of thousands of electricity customers continue to face periodic blackouts, and nearly 900 gas customers still have no heat," reports the El Paso Times, with El Paso Electric resorting to using generators in a struggle to meet demand while still having to implement forced outages.Fury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama... more
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The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
By JUSTIN GILLIS
PART ONE…
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.
They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.
The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.
Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.
Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.
The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.
Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.
But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.
Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.
One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”
But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.
“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”
As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.
“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
CONTINUED…The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning... more
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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The most recent round of United Nations-led climate change negotiations began this week in Cancun, and although international expectations are muted this year, the stakes are still high. As Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard explains,”The 2010 meeting could make or break the future of global negotiations.”
This is the sixteenth Conference of the Parties, convened by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After the tepid results of last year’s conference in Copenhagen, when a last-minute, backroom deal produced a non-binding accord, participants and observers of the negotiations are beginning to question whether it is the best forum for these sorts of conversations. Central to the progress, or lack thereof, on international climate change policy is the United States’ intransigence. As one of the world most proliferate carbon spewers, it’s essential for the United States to commit to dramatic reductions in its carbon emissions.
But if American negotiators have always been reluctant to make those promises, even if they did this year, their promises would ring empty. The results of the 2010 midterms mean there’s little chance Congress would ratify a treaty. Republicans just eliminated a special House committee on global warming. They certainly aren’t interested in making the sorts of concessions that international negotiators want and need to convince their own governments to move forward.
Signing off
It’s unclear, at this point, if the UNFCCC framework will ever produce a worthwhile results. Inter Press Service’s Kanya D’Almeida reports that “the meeting in Cancún is foreshadowed by a deep pessimism.” D’Almedia offers, for instance, this take from Nigel Purvis, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States:
“Global climate talks have begun to resemble a bad soap opera,” Purvis wrote in an essay entitled ‘Cancún and the End of Climate Diplomacy. “They seem to never end, yet seldom change and at times bear little resemblance to reality. This is why climate diplomacy as we know it has lost its relevance.”
The last landmark climate treaty—the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States never signed onto—will expire in 2012. The Copenhagen Accord, the agreement that came out of last year’s negotiations, does not bind countries to their commitments, as Kyoto did.
The next major step in tackling climate change could be for countries across the world to re-up their commitments to reducing carbon emissions through a Kyoto-like (i.e. legally enforceable) pact. The alternative is to base global action on an agreement along the lines of the one produced at Copenhagen, with less stringent standards for accountability.
Kyoto v. Copenhagen
Tina Gephardt writes at The Nation that “Serious tensions threaten to derail the UNFCCC process entirely. At the heart of these skirmishes are two camps: those nations who want to extend the Kyoto Protocol and those nations, including the United States, who want to ram through the Copenhagen Accord.”
The Accord’s mechanism for oversight and enforcement relies on countries monitoring each others’ progress on carbon reductions, but as Mother Jones’ Sheppard reports, an early point of disagreement in this year’s session centers on how important it is to agree how that monitoring will happen.
Stubborn Americans
What does seem certain is that if, at the end of this session, international climate negotiations have become so messy and tangled the world abandons them, and starts over, much of the blame will lie with the United States. Tom Athanasiou lays out the case in Earth Island Journal:
It’s the US, after all, that reduced the Kyoto Protocol to a non-starter, and the US that led the Copenhagen charge to abandon top-down emissions targets in favor of bottom-up “pledge and review.” It’s the US that, in the words of chief negotiator Todd Stern, is looking for a “new paradigm for climate diplomacy” that asserts a world in which the developed countries are no longer presumed to bear the overarching, if inconvenient, obligations of the rich and the responsible.
It’s not that American leaders aren’t aware of the problems the world could face (although some on the right continue to deny they exist). As Nancy Roberts points out at Care2, “Up to one billion people could be displaced by rising sea levels this century.” To a certain extent, the United States is insulated from the impact of climate change. As this map, which ColorLines highlighted a few weeks ago, illustrates, America is not particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But it’d be foolish for American leaders to ignore the security and economic implications wrought by the migration of one-sixth of the world’s population.
Reaction
But Washington has shown time after time that it is willing to look past problems until they become unavoidable. The consequences of that attitude have been devastating in recent years. The BP oil spill is only the most recent example. This week the Obama administration announced it would not open up new coastline areas in the southeastern U.S. for offshore oil drilling—a decision that came only after it became clear just how much havoc a drilling disaster could cause (and would likely cause again).
With climate change, however, the tons of carbon already in the atmosphere can’t be mopped up or “dispersed,” or forgotten, within months. The consequences will linger on, and by the time they become clear, it will be too late to act, and international negotiators won’t be talking about emission levels, but food, water, and refugee crises.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The most recent round of United... more
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Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading – the only purpose for which it was founded – this year.Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated... more
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The President of the world's largest polluter and energy consumer, which consumes 25% of global energy with 5% of the world's population, has called the spillage "an affront to the American people". Is there a double standard at play here? Read the article for more information.
http://talkingskull.com/article/bp-american-double-standardsThe President of the world's largest polluter and energy consumer, which consumes... more
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Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market after Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets The lack of progress at Copenhagen has meant some banks are stalling on lending to carbon emissions-offsetting projects.
Banks and investors are pulling out of the carbon market after the failure to make progress at Copenhagen on reaching new emissions targets after 2012.
Carbon financiers have already begun leaving banks in London because of the lack of activity and the drop-off in investment demand. The Guardian has been told that backers have this month pulled out of a large planned clean-energy project in the developing world because of the expected fall in emissions credits after 2012.
Anthony Hobley, partner and global head of climate change and carbon finance at law firm Norton Rose, said: “People will gradually start to leave carbon desks, we are beginning to see that already. We are seeing a freeze in banks’ recruitment plans for the carbon market. It’s not clear at what point this will turn into a cull or a rout.”
Paul Kelly, chief executive of EcoSecurities, which develops clean energy projects, said that while markets had not expected a definitive post-Kyoto Protocol deal at Copenhagen, they had expected some progress.
Photograph: Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images
http://electricbrave.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/copenhagen-dampens-banks-green-commitment/Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market after Copenhagen failed to reach... more
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This video recap is my best attempt to explain in simple terms, "What is COP15 in Copenhagen supposed to accomplish? What was the Kyoto Protocol? And why are the talks at COP15 breaking down?"
This turned out to be my final video update from inside the Bella Center in Copenhagen, before NGO access to the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Kyoto Protocol was once and for all revoked "for security reasons" despite largely peaceful, coordinated marches which, frankly were mislabeled "protests" and would have been more properly called "support rallies."
Anyway you can see my shiny forehead (sorry.. long day) at around 10pm on December 14th, after a day that started 14 hours earlier with crowded lines in the snow, followed by waiting... then rumors of the breakdown of the talks... more waiting... and then the confirmation of the G77 "threatened" walkout. Finally, my interview with negotiator Felix Dayo from the Nigerian delegation inside the African delegation offices helped shed light on what was going on behind the scenes.
It's still hard to find out what really happened inside COP15 the last few days. This is my best recap of what went wrong there while I was still able to access the negotiators.
I recorded this and all my videos with a cool little gadget called QuikPod. It's a hand-held mono-pod that attaches to any camera where the tripod goes, and lets you extend the camera an additional 18" and record yourself, allowing for better shots than a simple arm's length. Thanks http://quikpod.com for the lightweight solution.
Evan Kopelson is president of Green Media Consulting Inc and founder of http://GreenMediaNews.com He advises on sustainability, CSR reporting, corporate transparency, and personal responsibility for climate change action. Evan lives in Venice, CA in a pod made from reclaimed materials in a communal living environment focused on sustainability and permaculture.This video recap is my best attempt to explain in simple terms, "What is COP15 in... more
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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 14, 2009
Developing countries have walked out on the Copenhagen climate talks, but one of the primary reasons as to why nations like China and India have boycotted the summit is being hidden by the corporate media – namely the fact that the negotiations were doomed once poorer countries learned of the globalist’s neo-colonial agenda as a result of the Danish text leak.
“Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation,” reports the BBC.
“Delegations were angry at what they saw as moves by the Danish host government to sideline talks on more emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol. As news spread around the conference centre, activists chanted “We stand with Africa – Kyoto targets now”.
However, the media has completely failed to highlight the real reason behind the walk out – the fact that funds from climate financing, originally allocated to go to the UN and then be doled out piecemeal to third world nations, would instead be paid directly into the coffers of the World Bank and IMF, organizations that have made a habit out of looting poorer countries with crippling debts that cannot be paid back, forcing such countries to hand over their entire infrastructure to globalist loan sharks.
CtPatriot… We can only Hope they will defeat themselves… I for one am not ready, nor do I believe a Global Government would work for America… Since we are/were the strongest we would get punished the most… and last i heard Obama was elected President of the United States of America… Not the world… I used to think this New World Order … Global Government was BS… but here it is, For real, in Our Faces…. And President Obama , like Henry Kissenger said..”Obama is the perfect President for the New Wolrd Order”
Full story and Videos...http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/the-real-reason-behind-the-copenhagen-walk-out-developing-nations-discovered-neo-colonial-agenda-behind-globalist-carbon-tax-scam-shocker-copenhagen-climate-negotiations-suspended/Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 14, 2009
Developing... more
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A controversial new report says carbon offsets are a dangerous gimmick.
From the international Kyoto Protocol to the recent energy bill that passed the US House of Representatives, carbon offsets have been a centerpiece of policies designed to make countries responsible for the amount of CO2 they’re allowed to produce.
The general idea behind carbon offsets suggests US polluters send money overseas in exchange for promised - and often pretend - pollution reductions elsewhere.
Michael Despines, Climate Resilience Campaign Coordinator for the US chapter of Friends of the Earth.
For example (in) the United States, our per capita emissions is still about 19 tons per person. The world average is only 4 tons per person and in the developing world, it’s only about 2 tons per person. So we’re still emitting much, much higher than our fair share and with offsetting, it sort of locks that unfair ratio in place.
According to their report, Friends of the Earth recommends the US clean it’s own house by reducing emissions by 40% by the year 2020 before paying for the cleanup of our neighbors.
For a look at the full report and extended interview with Michael Despines, click here.
Illustration by Will Etling.A controversial new report says carbon offsets are a dangerous gimmick.
From the... more
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The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster, and if you haven’t heard much about its poor record, you’re not alone. Compared to power plants, cars and even commercial aviation, shipping has drawn little scrutiny ─ it gets few mentions in the media, and activist groups tend to focus their attention elsewhere. Seen as little more than an expensive tourist option or a humdrum conveyor of goods, the modern sea vessel is a mystery to the average person, either a love boat or a floating tractor trailer. If there were no pirates or seasick honeymooners, the shipping industry would barely register in the public consciousness.The shipping industry is an invisible and nearly unregulated environmental disaster,... more
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Later this year Copenhagen will host the final meeting on international climate policy at the government level before declaring the Copenhagen Protocol—a follow up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
The summit will focus on what the “global community” can do to reduce carbon emissions—but the real agenda is to have the United States sign on, and ratify, the Protocol which they refused to do in 1997. The United States had determined that the proposed restrictions were too costly and therefore did not ratify the Protocol which they had been so active in formulating.
Policy makers, including President Bush, were fearful that many large industrial companies would face massive financial penalties and that the Protocol would cause an increase in taxes while limiting industrial growth. The cost of ratifying the Protocol was simply not worth the short term gains.
If the Copenhagen Protocol is just a new name on the same “cap and trade” product that resulted from the Kyoto Protocol then we’ll find many nations regulating a handful of industrialized nations (Kyoto was ratified by 141 nations but only limited emissions from 35 industrialized countries). Developing countries like China and India were excluded from the stringent regulations proposed by Kyoto to give them “time to catch up” with the rest of the industrialized world.
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.alisterpaine.com/copenhagen.htmlLater this year Copenhagen will host the final meeting on international climate policy... more
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Hemp is the Arthur's Sword which has bin drawn from the stone... Not made from Hardened steel but Gods own creation, a gift to us ALL, a Plant that is going to Heal us, Feed us, Cloth us, Mend the Earth and provide all the Energy we need for ever. This Earths last Revolution is Not going to be fought with weapons but the TRUTH. Ethics contra Morals - Truth contra Falsehood - Light contra Darkness - Human Rights contra Suppression - Consciousness contra Corruption - Clean Nature contra Pollution and Destruction - Prosperity contra Depression - Natural Healing contra Deadly Chemical Drugs - Pease contra War and LIFE contra Death. All this and much more Will this “Sword” of Nature give us. Let us join hands around the world and unite for Pease and Universal Harmony.
How?, might your question be, Ask your self witch of those oppositions mentioned above, would You like in your and your families lives? The answer lays within you.
J.BjarmarsHemp is the Arthur's Sword which has bin drawn from the stone... Not made from... more
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A two-year march toward a new treaty to combat global warming is pausing briefly in Bonn to give negotiators from 182 countries their first crack at tackling a rough draft of an agreement.
Despite differences over some difficult issues, there is cautious optimism that negotiators could make progress especially now that the US is playing what many see as a more constructive role than it did under the Bush administration.
Over the next two weeks, country representatives will debate and overhaul as much of a 53-page “negotiating text” as they can to get a draft pact ready for government ministers to consider in December at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) annual “conference of the parties” in Copenhagen.
The ultimate goal is to produce a new agreement that will cover developing as well as developed countries and will pick up where 1997 Kyoto Protocol leaves off. The protocol’s first – and so far, only – enforcement period ends in 2012. The protocol, which formally took force last year, calls on industrial countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a combined average of 5.5 percent below 1990 levels.
The timetable and topics the new treaty must cover were set out at global climate talks in Bali in 2007. The Bali Roadmap envisioned a draft treaty that would be ready for consideration in Copenhagen, but now, UN officials speak in terms of an “agreed outcome” or talks leading to “a result” in the Danish capital.
Still, negotiations that began today in Bonn “represents a significant new step in the talks,” said Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC’s executive secretary, at a briefing Monday. “Governments have on the table for the first time real negotiating text, which can serves as the basis for drafting an agreed outcome in Copenhagen.”
How would he define success at December’s meeting? First, an agreement must be clear about how much industrial countries aim to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020, Mr. de Boer said.
Then, it must be clear on what major developing countries – China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa – will do to limit the growth of their emissions. It must be clear about providing stable and predictable sources of money for adaptation measures in the developing world and for aid in buying the green technologies that will help those countries meet their emissions goals. And it must be clear on how the financial institutions that provide that money will be governed.A two-year march toward a new treaty to combat global warming is pausing briefly in... more
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A vital meeting in Copenhagen this weekend that will help shape the agenda for the most important climate change talks since the Kyoto protocol has been hijacked by some of the biggest polluters in the world, critics claimed today.
Among those attending the World Business Summit on Climate Change is Shell, which has just been named by environmentalists on the basis of new research as "the most carbon-intensive oil company in the world".
There is concern that the big energy companies will be pushing carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a way of keeping the oil-based economy running.
At the meeting yesterday, the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and Nobel prize winner Al Gore urged more than 500 business leaders – including the chief executives of PepsiCo, Nestlé and BP – to lend their corporate muscle to reaching a global deal on reducing greenhouse gases.
Read more via the link.A vital meeting in Copenhagen this weekend that will help shape the agenda for the... more
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The third and most far-reaching objective of President-elect Obama’s administration will be to enforce an initiative for the United States to combat global warming.
"The Obama proposal includes a banking and credit trading mechanism to allow providers of cleaner burning fuel to trade allowances to other producers or bank allowances against future carbon reductions."
On the surface, this trading mechanism seems to be very similar to the system that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proposed, as reported by the Australian.
"My ambition is to build a global carbon market founded on the EU emissions trading scheme and centred in London."
This is part 3 of a 3 part series I wrote on how President-elect Obama's battle to combat global warming and global climate change will fit in with the the global new world order agenda.The third and most far-reaching objective of President-elect Obama’s... more
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Mayor Richard M. Daley announced a plan Thursday to dramatically slash emissions of heat-trapping gases — to three-fourths of 1990 levels by 2020 and to one-fifth of 1990 levels by 2050 — as part of an effort to become one of the greenest cities in the nation.
The plan calls for making buildings more energy efficient, finding clean and renewable energy sources, improving transportation and reducing industrial pollution. Daley was one of 800 mayors who agreed in late 2006 to cut emissions in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol.
Officials say Chicago emits 34.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year; including the six surrounding counties, that climbs to 103 million metric tons per year.
If Chicago does not reduce emissions, summer heat indexes in the city could climb as high as 105 degrees — similar to those in Mobile, Ala. — by the end of the century, according to researchers from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and the University of Illinois who were commissioned by the city to study climate change.
Since 1980, Chicago's average temperature has risen approximately 2.6 degrees, 4 degrees in the winter.
"What stands out to people is, how likely will you see a 1995-like heat wave again in the future?" said Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech geosciences researcher. "We don't want to suggest that type of future is inevitable because it's not, but if we wait until that happens, then it is inevitable."
During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the mercury spiked at 106 degrees and about 600 people died.
In similar research, scientists with the Netherlands Meteorological Institute found earlier this year that by the end of the century, high temperatures in Chicago would reach 115 degrees.
The city concedes that it won't be able to avoid future climate change entirely. The plan lists ways Chicago will deal with any coming climate change, including implementing a heat warning system, reducing summer energy use, improving air quality, preparing for increases in rainfall and flooding, reducing erosion along Lake Michigan's shoreline and planting vegetation that can adapt to climate change.Mayor Richard M. Daley announced a plan Thursday to dramatically slash emissions of... more
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