Spokane7
61°
December 16, 2011 in Opinion
No more excuses on climate
“You’ve been negotiating all my life,” Anjali Appadurai told the plenary session of the U.N.’s 17th “Conference of Parties,” or COP 17, the official title of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Appadurai, a student at the ecologically focused College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, addressed the plenary as part of the youth delegation. She continued: “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before.”
After she finished her address, she moved to the side of the podium, off microphone, and in a manner familiar to anyone who has attended an Occupy protest, shouted into the vast hall of staid diplomats, “Mic check!” A crowd of young people stood up, and the call-and-response began:
Appadurai: “Equity now!”
Crowd: “Equity now!”
Appadurai: “You’ve run out of excuses!”
Crowd: “You’ve run out of excuses!”
Appadurai: “We’re running out of time!”
Crowd: “We’re running out of time!”
Appadurai: “Get it done!”
Crowd: “Get it done!”
That was Friday, at the official closing plenary session of COP 17. The negotiations were extended, virtually nonstop, through Sunday, in hopes of avoiding complete failure. At issue were arguments over words and phrases – for instance, the replacement of “legal agreement” with “an agreed outcome with legal force,” which is said to have won over India to the Durban Platform.
The countries in attendance agreed to a schedule that would lead to an agreement by 2015, which would commit all countries to reduce emissions starting no sooner than 2020, eight years into the future.
“Eight years from now is a death sentence on Africa,” Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International, told me. “For every one-degree Celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level.” He lays out the extent of the immediate threats in his new book about Africa, “To Cook a Continent.”
Bassey is one among many concerned with the profound lack of ambition embodied in the Durban Platform, which delays actual, legally binding reductions in emissions until 2020 at the earliest, whereas scientists globally are in overwhelming agreement: The stated goal of limiting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will soon be impossible to achieve. The International Energy Agency, in its annual World Energy Outlook released in November, predicted “cumulative CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions over the next 25 years amount to three-quarters of the total from the past 110 years, leading to a long-term average temperature rise of 3.5 [degrees] C.”
Despite optimistic pronouncements to the contrary, many believe the Kyoto Protocol died in Durban. Pablo Solon, the former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations and former chief climate negotiator for that poor country, now calls Kyoto a “zombie agreement,” staggering forward for another five or seven years, but without force or impact.
On the day after the talks concluded, Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada was formally withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. Expected to follow are Russia and Japan, the very nation where the 1997 meeting was held that gives the Kyoto Protocol its name.
The largest polluter in world history, the United States, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and remains defiant. Both Bassey and Solon refer to the outcome of Durban as a form of “climate apartheid.”
Despite the pledges by President Barack Obama to restore the United States to a position of leadership on the issue of climate change, the trajectory from Copenhagen in 2009 to Cancun in 2010 and now to Durban reinforces the statement made by then-President George H.W. Bush prior to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the forerunner to the Kyoto Protocol, when he said, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.”
The “American way of life” can be measured in per-capita emissions of carbon. In the U.S., on average, about 20 metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere annually, one of the top 10 on the planet. Hence, a popular sticker in Durban read “Stop CO2lonialism.”
By comparison, China, the country that is the largest emitter currently, has per-capita emissions closer to 5 metric tons, ranking it about 80th. India’s population emits a meager 1.5 tons per capita, a fraction of the U.S. level.
So it seems U.S. intransigence, its unwillingness to get off its fossil-fuel addiction, effectively killed Kyoto in Durban, a key city in South Africa’s fight against apartheid. That is why Anjali Appadurai’s closing words were imbued with a sense of hope brought by this new generation of climate activists:
“(Nelson) Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’ So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column. Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!”
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Jeffrey_Grey on December 16 at 4:46 a.m.
By this time anyone following my comments on this topic should know what a die-hard climate change believer and advocate I am.
But I have to say; enough already with these fluff pieces from Amy Goodman. I really don’t care how many impressive - at least to her apparent way of thinking - names she can drop or how many over-wrought statements of some non-expert personal opinion she can quote.
FACTS… hard data … hard statistics… THEY ARE OUT THERE. In abundance. And if they’re presented in a straightforward way, they’re persuasive.
Enough circus. Leave that to the fading OWS crowd.
Let’s get real.
mmspowaus on December 16 at 5:24 a.m.
Let’s focus on real solutions for the world’s energy needs; not stop gap band aids that enrich scum bags at the public expense.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/solyndra-scandal-emails-energy-department_n_1097701.html
It is time to focus and solve the energy problem once and for all. Let’s treat it as a national priority; like we did when we decided to put a man on the moon. By the time this decade is out let’s have viable nuclear fusion technology plants and or superconductor transmission lines perfected.
It is time to Manhattan project nuclear Fusion and STP superconductor research. Dump the dog and pony show solar dry hole failed technology research. (The yields are not there anyway and EVERYONE with a brain already knows this.)
TRUE environmentalist should be all over these ideas. They reduce CO2 emissions, reduce pollution, reduce cost and are UNLIMITED.
More importantly, it uses oil for better applications like plastics and chemical manufacturing versus burning it for an energy source…. Not to mention the economic crippling effect on antagonistic oil nations…
MOST importantly of all it puts the kibosh on the shrill ninny naysayer column prospects of faux journalist like Amy Goodman ….
Jeffrey_Grey on December 16 at 5:57 a.m.
Jeeze, mms! This distraction AGAIN?
Practical, large-scale, commercial fusion power is decades in the future. A multi-national consortium is already spending large sums on it’s development, producing significant gains at what all the experts say is a realistic pace appropriate to the challenges faced.
Meanwhile, the very same experts on the cutting edge forefront of that research say that fusion will never be the one single solution to our world’s energy needs - that it will be just one valuable alternative among all the other green alternatives you are apparently in such a hurry to dismiss.
Alternatives that are actually producing energy today - not just promises for the future.
(emphasis mine)http://www.iter.org/faq
(emphasis mine)http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/Why_fusion.aspx
JBlim on December 16 at 6:58 a.m.
The article says “20 metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere annually”
Aren’t you going to challenge that, mmspowaus? Last time that claim was made you said it was absurd because we’d all suffocate from the C02. Heh, heh. You don’t know the first thing about it, yet you claim to have all the answers… .
WillyPeter on December 16 at 7:47 a.m.
Sooooo, Jeff, apparently you can clear up the rumor; is Amy Goodman really ‘hangin’ in the Al Gore mansion’s basement? When she’s not living in her Central Park tee-pee that is……
And does she secretly have dinner with George Bush and that T. Boone Pickins guy?
Jeffrey_Grey on December 16 at 8:00 a.m.
I don’t pay much attention to irrelevant crap like that WP. As I say; I’m far more interested in concrete facts and hard data than I am in gathering fodder for sneering character attacks.
WillyPeter on December 16 at 8:21 a.m.
^…… that’s evidently because you’re too full of yourself, Jeff.
Jeffrey_Grey on December 16 at 8:27 a.m.
^–— character attack.
MatthewRoot on December 16 at 8:43 a.m.
Jeffrey, I appreciate your insistence on sticking with the climate science. Keep up the good work.
EdubU on December 16 at 8:32 p.m.
Keep at it Jeffrey. It’s a serious issue.
gmorton on December 16 at 8:57 p.m.
Jeffrey_Grey wrote,
“FACTS… hard data … hard statistics… THEY ARE OUT THERE. In abundance. And if they’re presented in a straightforward way, they’re persuasive.”
Yes, they are. That hard data shows that the IPCC’s models have failed to correctly predict global temps for the last 11 years (since the models runs were done). They have predicted more warming than has occurred, and the difference is statistically significant.
Here is the latest:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/TrendsSince2000.png
mmspowaus on December 17 at 3:26 a.m.
Let’s do a Gedankenexperiment.
The largest economic pie on the planet is energy. Everybody needs energy and it’s consumed readily. No energy, no food, no goods no military. Corner the market on how it is generated and your nation gets unimagined wealth and a big fat say in world affairs.
Let’s say your nation has run things in the past but over the last hundred and fifty years or so it has lost its prestige; thanks in part to a talented upstart former apprentice nation across the big pond. Your nation has been usurped as THE world leader.
Now this upstart nation is very clever and resourceful. If you shared your outlook and technology with them, this upstart could know what you know and nothing changes. If however you could mislead the upstart nation into spending its vast resources on researching technologies that will be quickly rendered obsolete by technology your nation is refining…. Why not????
Let the yanks work on ‘green energy’ solutions. What’s the harm? It’s only money…their money….
(Looking to Europe for leadership is like looking to Jimmy Carter for how to be president…..a PROVEN BAD IDEA…. )
We as a nation need to FOCUS our resources on solving the problems with nuclear fusion like we FOCUSED our resources going to the moon a generation ago. We should SOLVE this energy problem once and for all.
(With apologizes to JFK…)
“We choose to go to solve the problem of nuclear fusion. We choose to solve the problem of nuclear fusion in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… “
The clear answer is NUCLEAR FUSION. Not nuclear fission, oil or impractical solar and wind technologies. The potential energy yields clearly yields the answer folks….
Bedsides, how many more Obama buddy Solyndra scandals do we need to endure while the Europeans keep plugging away solving at the final energy answer of nuclear fusion?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/solyndra-scandal-emails-energy-department_n_1097701.html