from:     sniakan at worldbank.org

date:    Thu, Feb 25, 2010
subject:    World Bank participates in the Africa Carbon Forum

Africa Carbon Forum – March 3-5, Nairobi, Kenya

The World Bank Group is pleased to support the Africa Carbon Forum taking place in Gigiri, right outside Nairobi on March 3-5. Bank staff will be participating in a number of plenary sessions as well as side events.
Furthermore, a press conference will be held on March 3, briefing media on the recently registered Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project. The press conference will take place at 1pm in the UNEP Press Room (Lower Library) in Gigiri – that is the location of the UNEP headqarters near Nairobi. Transportation from downtown Nairobi will be provided.

The Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project is located in Ethiopia and is Africa’s first large-scale forestry project under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It was recently registered under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The project, developed by World Vision, brings both economic and social benefits to poor communities in Ethiopia as well as environmental benefits, cutting an estimated 880,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years. The future sales of carbon credits will bring more than US$700,000 to the local communities over ten years.

At the press conference, the National Director of World Vision Ethiopia, Mrs. Tenagne Lemma, will present the project together with Ms. Ellysar Baroudy, the manager of the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund, which is purchasing a share of the carbon credits generated by this project.

For more information, please contact sniakan@worldbank.org by email.

For more information on the World Bank BioCarbon Fund, please see: http://wbcarbonfinance.org/Router.cfm?Pa…

For more information on World Vision, please see: http://www.wvi.org/wvi/wviweb.nsf

For more information on and registration for the Africa Carbon Forum, please see their website: http://www.africacarbonforum.com/2009/en…. Registration is free.

_______________________________________________
Isabel Hagbrink
Senior Communications Officer
Carbon Finance Unit
Environment Department, The World Bank Group
1818 H Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20433

Tel : 202 458 0422 Fax : 202 522 7432
email :  ihagbrink at worldbank.org
Web : www.CarbonFinance.org (See attached file: Africa Carbon Forum Events Booklet external.pdf)

The first wave of reporting was only  a rewrite of the UNFCCC Press release. Then came some further wording from an AP interview. Now we see the start of thinking journalism.

The bottom line seems to be: “Bickering at Copenhagen convinced many countries that the UN negotiating process must be reformed, and that agreement might be sought in other forums.” So, here goes that proverbial 192 UN Member States list or the 193 figure that appears when the UNFCCC is mentioned. We never understood why that discrepancy and assumed the fault is with us for not knowing where to put the EU, Taiwan, the Vatican, Puerto Rico, Palestine … and some other such preferred UN preoccupations.

Fiona Harvey of the Financial Times quotes an official of a developed country: "You have to wonder whether you could get moremovement by working in smaller groups." If you want to get results indeed – you must bring together the World’s biggest GHG emitters.

The New York City newspapers – The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal went over to the UN and got hold of Janos Pasztor, the potentially homeless head of the “in-Headquarter-house” climate-change team-head for UNSG Ban Ki-moon.

{On “homeless” – As we reported earlier: “The UN’s and Ban’s climate unit under Janos Pasztor, which was told there was no room for it in the UN’s Temporary North Lawn Conference Building where Ban has his office, is now looking at space in the Alcoa Building on 48th Street, Inner City Press is told. For now, they are left behind in the nearly empty UN skyscraper where asbestos removal has already begun.”}

According to the WSJ – Janos Pasztor said: “It does not matter what a senior UN civil servant does, ultimately – if governments are not ready to sign off on an agreement, then they will not sign off on an agreement;” Mr. Pasztor said that Mr. de Boer called Mr. Ban “two days ago;” to inform him of the decision. Mr. de Boer’s four-years appointment was going till September and he could have asked Mr. Ban to appoint him for another term, but we never came to that point, he said. Asked whether Mr. Ban would have reappointed Mr. de Boer, Mr. Pasztor said: ‘That we don’t know.”

Mr. Pasztor said further that Mr. Ban will begin looking for a successor for Mr. de Boer “extremely quickly;” he does not know who might be considered.

Neil MacFarquhar and John M. Broder ot the NYT did some further inquiries outside the UN.

Mark Kenber, the policy director for the Climate Group, an international organization involving industry that wants to see a climate agreement, said that it is probably the right time to get a fresh face in. It was a grueling two years of negotiations and a new face would re-spark the process.

Michael A. Levi, the climate change expert at the Council on Foreign Relations said that Yvo de Boer has put in a lot of time towards a very well-defined end, and the fact he resigns means that he did not see potential success on the horizon of COP 16, this year. Had he seen the possibility that there might be a positive outcome before the end of the year, he would have stuck with it so he would get credit for his work.

Others faulted the UN team for not having moved faster to find areas where agreement among those 190+ participating member states at Copenhagen, such as the preservation of rainforests, could have been agreed upon in smaller fora first. Another such topic could have been the taxing of livestock emissions that is being described in today’s FT that says FAO is ready to help review the meat industry.

So, after 48 hours since Yvo de Boer’s resignation, provided that the UN does not rush in with a Ban Ki-moon new appointment, but is ready to listen to possible new opportunities, this might turn out as a blessing in disguise – an opening for change – an actual new opportunity.

Some question the UNFCCC process itself – but we think that this is rather too much. It does not remember that the UNFCCC was born in Rio de Janeiro in the 1992 UNCED Conference – just because there was no agreement to have a full convention like it was the case with Biodiversity and in regard to Arid and Semi-Arid lands and Desertification.

Decreasing the size of the negotiation table, by bringing the number of participants down to those that are the most serious polluters, with delegations present from groups most seriously affected, could be more fit to help bring about the needed agreements.

————-

And From Canada – the host for the 2010 meetings of the G8 and G20:

from Shawn McCarthy, Ottawa — From Friday’s Globe and Mail reporting.
Published on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010
Mr. de Boer – who had worked tirelessly to reach a consensus at Copenhagen – said he was depressed for weeks after the summit ended with a vague, non-binding agreement among major emitters known as the Copenhagen Accord. Angry recriminations resulted from Copenhagen’s failure to produce a more substantial document, and the refusal of the participants to unanimously endorse even the more modest pact.

Mr. de Boer’s successor – to be appointed by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon – will not only have to reinvigorate the effort to achieve a treaty, he will need to revisit the UN process itself. The requirement for consensus may make it impossible to reach an accord in Mexico, even in the unlikely event that an agreement can be achieved among major emitters. Some critics suggest Mr. de Boer was part of the problem – bringing a rigid, bureaucratic approach to the international talks.

“I never had the sense that we were dealing with a person of vision, a person who could see the changes that were necessary in the international system to get a climate-change agreement,” said Robert Page, chairman of Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Mr. Robert Page suggested the new UNFCCC executive director will likely have to come from a major developing country – such as Brazil – and be committed to reforming the UN process.

In Denmark, a small group of countries blocked the conference as a whole from adopting the Copenhagen Accord, which had been brokered at the 11th hour by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is urging a reform that would see agreement based on a 75-per-cent majority, rather than unanimity. The Catch-22: The UN requires consensus to change the voting rules.

“As far as the process goes, we’re in a lot of trouble,” said John Drexhage, climate-change director for the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development and former Canadian negotiator.

“We need to have very realistic expectations for Mexico. I think it would be a mistake to push for a legally binding comprehensive agreement by Mexico. That’s just not going to happen with the current state of affairs.”

Indeed, Mr. Drexhage said Mr. de Boer’s successor faces a convergence of factors that will make it extremely difficult to regain momentum for the international talks.

Public skepticism about the dangers posed by climate change has risen, fuelled by incidents in which a few researchers manipulated data to get desired results, and the inclusion of non-scientific information in the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa, India and China – the so-called BASIC group – have made clear they will not subject their emission-reduction policies to international verification. Any commitments they have made are conditional on the developed world – notably the United States – taking strong action, and delivering promised financing to the developing world.

Mr. Obama faces major hurdles in getting a climate bill passed in Congress this year, raising questions about his administration’s commitment to reduce emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. And as the United States goes, so goes Canada.

World leaders have a couple of opportunities to advance the broad commitments of the Copenhagen Accord into a more robust agreement, including a May meeting in Bonn, Germany, and the Group of Eight/Group of 20 summits to be hosted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper this summer.

The G8 and G20 can deliver progress – especially the G20, which includes China, India, Brazil and Mexico. But it remains unclear whether Mr. Harper, who is hosting the meetings and influences the agendas, will make climate change a priority.

———–
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20…

Yvo de Boer’s successor has big footprints to fill: The former head of the UN’s climate body commanded great respect in a near-impossible job, but in the end, he failed. His successor must not.

Because De Boer took over from another Dutchman in 2006, there will be strong pressure on the UN to choose his successor from a developing country. “I would like to see someone from a developing country who can negotiate with those countries,” Seb Walhain, the head of environmental markets at Fortis Netherlands, told Reuters. Because so much is at stake and the talks are at such an advanced stage, the appointment is likely to be fiercely contested.

Get it right, and the new head of the UNFCCC will be celebrated as the man or woman who steered the whole world to a historic agreement that could save the planet from calamitous climate change. Get it wrong, and negotiations could be set back a decade.

The problem was the 51 cents/gallon of ethanol from sugar-cane tariff, the US imposes against imports from international producers of bioethanol – so they do not compete with US agro-ethanol.

We are cynics by nature and wonder if the release today has anything to do with Shell Oil Company having announced last weekend that they will invest over a billion dollars in the production of sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil. So, did we have to wait until an oil company steps heavily into this area – so we finally allow US door to be opened to a non-petroleum liquid fuel?

WE ARE VERY PARTIAL TO THIS TOPIC BECAUSE BACK IN 1978 AT UNIDO IN VIENNA, AND IN 1979 IN NEW ORLEANS, I WAS PERSONALLY INVOLVED IN BRINGING THIS SUBJECT TO THE ATTENTION OF THE LIQUID FUEL HUNGRY WESTERN WORLD. IN VIENNA WE SHOWED THE CUBAN EXPERIENCE AT A UN – AUSTRIA – SWEDEN EVENT. IN NEW ORLEANS THIS WAS “THE FIRST INTER-AMERICAN CONFERENCE ON RENEWABLE SOURCES OF ENERGY” THAT I HELPED ORGANIZE. OBVIOUSLY – TO LOUISIANA WE COULD NOT BRING THE CUBANS – BUT BRAZIL, ARGENTINA AND MANY OTHERS WERE PRESENT UNDER THE FRIENDLY EYES OF THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE. ETHANOL BECAME A RECOGNIZED FUEL, BUT US AGRICULTURE MADE SURE IT WILL BE US CORN AS FEEDSTOCK. WE COULD NOT EVEN GET PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR IMPORTS FROM FRIENDLY COUNTRIES BECAUSE OIL AND AGRICULTURE – SOME OF THE STRONGEST LOBBIES IN WASHINGTON – WOULD NOT ALLOW IT , EVEN AFTER THE INTERVENTION OF US REPUBLICAN SENATORS LIKE FRANK CHURCH, JACOB JAVITS, CHARLES PERCY – SO WHAT WILL IT BE NOW? WILL THOSE TARIFFS COME OFF?

—————-
EPA Reaffirms Sugarcane Biofuel is Advanced Renewable Fuel with 61% Less Emissions than Gasoline.
Brazil Sugarcane Update – Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Welcomes U.S. EPA’s Renewable Fuels Rules.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has confirmed that ethanol made from sugarcane is a low carbon renewable fuel, which can contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As part of today’s announcement finalizing regulations for the implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), the EPA designated sugarcane ethanol as an advanced biofuel that lowers GHG emissions by more than 50%.

“The EPA’s decision underscores the many environmental benefits of sugarcane ethanol and reaffirms how this low carbon, advanced renewable fuel can help the world mitigate against climate change while diversifying America’s energy resources,” said Joel Velasco, Chief Representative in Washington for the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA).

Sugarcane ethanol is a renewable fuel refined from cane that grows typically in tropical climates. Compared to other types of ethanol available today, using sugarcane ethanol to power cars and trucks yields greater reductions in greenhouse gases and is usually much cheaper for drivers to purchase. Brazil has replaced more than half of its fuel needs with sugarcane ethanol – making gasoline the alternative fuel in that country and ethanol the standard.  Many observers point to sugarcane ethanol as a good option for diversifying U.S. energy supplies, increasing healthy competition among biofuel manufacturers and improving America’s energy security.

The RFS2 will help the United States meet energy security and greenhouse gas reduction goals sought by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007 (EISA). The new regulations establish minimum biofuels consumption in the U.S. of more than 12 billion gallons (45 billion liters) in 2010, rising to 36 billion gallons (136 billion liters) in 2022, of which 21 billion gallons per year would have to be one of three types of advanced biofuels: cellulosic, biomass diesel, and “other advanced,” that meet required GHG reduction thresholds as determined by the EPA.

Today, EPA affirmed that sugarcane ethanol meets the “other advanced” category in the RFS2, although with a GHG reduction level that exceeds the requirement for all categories as well.  Specifically, EPA’s calculations show that sugarcane ethanol from Brazil reduces GHG emissions compared to gasoline by 61%, using a 30-year payback for indirect land use change (iLUC) emissions.

“We are pleased that EPA took the time to improve the regulations, particularly by more accurately quantifying the full lifecycle greenhouse emission reductions of biofuels. EPA’s reaffirmation of sugarcane ethanol’s superior GHG reduction confirms that sustainably-produced biofuels can play a important role in climate mitigation. Perhaps this recognition will sway those who have sought to raise trade barriers against clean energy here in the U.S. and around the world. Sugarcane ethanol is a first generation biofuel with third generation performance,” noted Velasco.

Last year, UNICA submitted comments to EPA with abundant scientifically credible evidence showing that – even including indirect emissions – sugarcane ethanol has a reduction of GHG emissions of 73-82% compared with gasoline, on a 30- or 100-year time horizon respectively. The RFS2 requires the use of at least 4 billion gallons (over 15 billion liters) of “other advanced” renewable fuels a year by 2022. In 2010, the RFS requires 200 million gallons of this type of advanced renewable fuels.

“While we are reviewing the final rule, it is clear that EPA has incorporated many of the comments that UNICA and other stakeholders made during the public process. EPA should be congratulated for the way it upheld the Obama’s goals of transparency and scientific integrity in the environmental rulemaking. And we hope that other governments should take note of the manner that EPA has handled this process,” concluded Velasco.

Brazil is a leader in the production of sugarcane ethanol, which is widely considered as the most efficient biofuel available today. In 2009, Brazil produced over 7 billion gallons of sugarcane ethanol, most of which is used in Brazil in flex fuel vehicles. As a result of Brazil’s innovative use of sugarcane ethanol in transportation and biomass for cogeneration, sugarcane is the leading source of renewable energy in the nation, representing 16% of the country’s total energy needs. In fact, gasoline has become the alternative in Brazil, reducing the country’s dependence on fossil fuels lowering emissions. A recent study in the November 2009 edition of the journal Energy Policy indicated that since 1975, over 600 million tons of CO2 emissions have been avoided thanks to the use of ethanol in Brazil.

———

ABOUT UNICA. The Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA) represents the
top producers of sugar and ethanol in the country’s South-Central region, especially the
state of Sao Paulo, which accounts for about 50% of the country’s sugarcane harvest
and 60% of total ethanol production. UNICA develops position papers, statistics and
specific research in support of Brazil’s sugar, ethanol and bioelectricity sectors. In 2008,
Brazil produced an estimated 565 million metric tons of sugarcane, which yielded 31.3
million tons of sugar and 25.7 billion liters (6.8 billion gallons) of ethanol, making it the
number-one sugarcane grower and sugar producer in the world, and the second-largest
ethanol producer on the planet, behind the United States.

—————-

Brazil Hopes Shell-Cosan Can Boost Ethanol Exports

Date: 04-Feb-10, Reuters from Brazil
Author: Inae Riveras – Analysis

SAO PAULO – Brazil’s ethanol industry, which invested heavily to boost output of the cane-based biofuel, is counting on a tie-up between sugar and ethanol producer Cosan and Royal Dutch Shell Plc to revive its prospects after exports fell short of expectations.

“Shell chose ethanol as the renewable fuel they want to be in and it chose Brazil. Whether this will mean more exports will depend on a series of circumstances beyond the companies’ control,” said ethanol expert Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho.

The slow rate of growth for ethanol exports has disappointed Brazil, where more than 450 mills joined the ethanol sector’s expansion drive in recent years.

Some analysts say any growth in ethanol exports will depend on oil prices more than other factor.

“The deal itself does not raise or reduce the economic viability of blending anhydrous ethanol in gasoline. This will be determined by the oil market,” said sugar and ethanol analyst Julio Maria Borges, director at Job Economia.

In 2008, when oil prices reached record highs of $147 per barrel, Brazil exported 5.1 billion liters of ethanol, up sharply from 3.5 billion liters the previous year. Countries simply bought more of the fuel to replace gasoline.

But oil prices tumbled as the global credit crisis intensified, and there was a similar decline in foreign interest for the cane-based fuel. Brazilian ethanol exports in 2009 slipped to 3.3 billion liters despite extremely low prices on the Brazilian market.

STEADY SUPPLIES, TARIFFS

If ethanol is economically viable compared to oil, however, Brazilian ethanol exports should benefit from Shell’s global infrastructure, commercial relationships and know-how.

Shell, with distribution centers and 45,000 filling stations around the world, will have access to annual supplies of 2 billion liters of Cosan ethanol.

“Shell will be able to strike long-term deals with clients around the world, something that currently hardly exists, as it will be backed by a big provider,” Borges said.

“It’s difficult to predict (when exports could rise)… but the strategic meaning of a company the size of Shell to invest here is the most important point,” Carvalho said.

The EU refuses to see the multi headed Hydra it has become and expects President Obama to play along. Reality calls – EU please get serious at becoming some sort of one headed entity! The US President is a busy man now with all that US Jazz.

It slowly starts sinking in – we said it a long time ago!

Battling the ‘Multilateral Zombie’ – EU climate strategy after Copenhagen.
LEIGH PHILLIPS

February 3, 2010, http://euobserver.com/9/29354/?rk=1,
 http://old.norden.org/analysnorden/defau…

EUOBSERVER / ANALYSIS – “The EU’s post-Copenhagen strategy should be
just to have a strategy, any strategy,” quips one Brussels think-tank
wag during an interview.

The rough hip-check Europe received in the Danish capital in December,
sidelining the bloc during the eleventh-hour huddle between major
powers that produced the Copenhagen Accord, has produced a wave of
despondency and cynicism amongst Brussels politicians, green
lobbyists, and analysts – and carbon traders across the continent to
boot. They’re all having a crack at how poorly the EU played its hand
during climate negotiations.

For the last three years, if it hasn’t been the institutional reform
of the Lisbon Treaty, it’s been the bloc’s obsession with climate
change that has dominated the EU agenda. Even if the EU is well off
the at least 40 percent cut in emissions that science demands if we
are to avoid catastrophic climate change, it remains the case that as
a result of its 2008 climate and energy package, Europe remains the
most advanced rich-country power on the planet in terms of its binding
CO2 reduction commitment.

With its climate boy-scout badge afixed to its sleeve, Brussels headed
off to Camp Copenhagen expecting at least to see its self-proclaimed
leadership reflected in winning something along the lines of a broad
commitment from other powers to at least a 20-percent cut in carbon
emissions below 1990 levels by 2020.

But in the end, the EU ended up the goody-two-shoes pupil who’s top of
the class, but yet, when he invites all the other kids over for a
party, glumly watches as they end up playing among each other instead
of with him. It was the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa that
cobbled together the last-minute three-page-long Copenhagen Accord
without the EU even in the room, while most of the developing world
complained throughout the two weeks that Brussels was at best just a
cat’s paw for Washington.

Denmark’s Connie Hedegaard, now incoming EU
climate commissioner, was repeatedly attacked for favouring rich
countries over the developing world.

“It was the strangest conference I have been at in my life, from all
points of view,” Mr Barroso told a pow-wow of the leading European
think-tanks in early January.

Typical of the initial EU reaction were comments from Swedish
environment minister Andres Carlgren, who, when meeting in Brussels in
late December with his EU counterparts to debrief after the UN summit
and begin the discussion of what to do next, slammed the result as a
“disaster.”

“It was a really great failure and we have to learn from that,” he
said at the time. { but the gentleman forgot to say whose failure it was!}

Glass half full!

However, after the holidays, a clutch of pollyanna-ish EU officials
have since fervently urged everyone to consider the Accord’s silver
lining. Both President Barroso and the bloc’s chief climate
negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, in various venues have emphasised
that many of the things the EU had been pushing for were contained in
the final result – developed countries agreed for the first time a
concrete sum for climate finance, a target maximum average global
temperature increase of two degrees was embraced and a review,
allowing for a ratcheting up of targets if necessary, is foreseen for
2015.

At the same time, EU member states that have never been comfortable
with the bloc’s climate ambitions have used the opportunity to delay
or block European plans to boost its CO2 emissions reduction
commitment from 20 percent on 1990 levels to 30 percent. On 18
January, environment ministers met in Seville, to assess, for the
second time, the reasons for the failure in the Danish capital. UK,
France, Germany, Belgium and Spain continued to push for the increased
pledge, while Italy and Poland said now was not the time given the
poverty of ambition by other states at Copenhagen.

As of this week, the consensus in the bloc is to maintain its target
of 20 percent and conditional offer of 30 percent if other powers make
comparable efforts – in other words exactly the same position the EU
has held for the last year, although Ms Hedegaard has publicly said
she hopes to see a move to 30 percent “by Mexico,” meaning the next UN
climate summit in the Central American nation at the end of 2010.

At the same time, the commission itself is in the ‘twenty-percenter’
camp, pushing this position in Copenhagen, “afraid to be naked” with
nothing left to put on the table in the game of climate strip poker.
Moreover, crucially, the executive’s goal of a transatlantic emissions
trading system is unworkable with cuts pledges that are wildly
divergent and without legally binding commitments from Washington.

The US is looking to a 17 percent emissions reduction on 2005 levels,
which works out to be just three percent when using the same 1990
baseline year as the EU. Watch for the US, if legislation gets
through, at some point to somehow nudge up its cut to 20 percent and
the EU to stick to the same figure, dressed up in language about how
the two targets are now comparable, with a fudge over the differing
baseline years.

Support unravelling:

Separately, four of the five architects of the Accord, Brazil, South
Africa, India and China, have themselves gone lukewarm on the project,
smarting from accusations from much of the rest of the developing
world that these four richest of the poor countries had broken ranks
after a year of unprecedented global south unity.

“The two-track negotiating process …is the only legitimate process
to reach a legally binding treaty in Mexico,” he added.

Meanwhile, the cornerstone of the Accord, an understanding that
however limited America’s commitment, Washington would at least be
able to deliver on this promise.

But with the surprise election to the US Senate of Massachusetts
Republican Scott Brown on an anti-climate-bill ticket, killing the
Democrat’s filibuster-proof majority, the country’s climate
legislation is threatened. A defeated or heavily watered down bill
only engenders further reservations in the minds of Chinese, Indian
and even European leadership about promising tough reduction targets.

For all the public talk of Latin American, Chinese and African climate
“villains” blocking the process in Copenhagen, privately, there is
frustration with Washington as well. A senior EU policy official
speaking to EUobserver described President Obama’s position as the
same as that of George Bush. “We are willing but only if others move,”
the official said, attributing the position to both the current and
former US leaders.

One EU climate voice {?}

A popular post-Copenhagen analysis from the Brookings Institute, the
centrist US think-tank, that has made the rounds of officialdom and
NGO-land warns of a slow-motion failure scenario similar to the Doha
round of WTO talks, a process it describes as a “multilateral zombie”
in which climate negotiations “stagger on piteously, never making much
progress while never quite dying either.”

Nevertheless, despite the dark days and the cynicism of some
onlookers, we can already begin to sense the outlines of a European
strategy.

EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy has already said he hopes to
see a common climate strategy emerge from an 11 February extraordinary
EU summit originally scheduled to deal with the economy. Angela
Merkel, as well, has upgraded a climate meeting in Bonn in June from
expert to ministerial level and the European Commission is preparing a
series of proposals that it is to put to the member states.

While this sort of member-state activity is likely to continue, the
Lisbon Treaty has given the commission a powerful new diplomatic
weapon it intends to use to the fullest.

Sidelining the UN:

Related to this, the major task will be to break the remarkable unity
shown by developing nations. The UNFCCC’s principle dating back to
Kyoto of “common but differentiated responsibility,” is understood by
developing nations to mean that those countries that caused the
problem should pay for solving it and make binding commitments to CO2
reductions.

The third world has said that it would be happy to develop along a
low-carbon path itself, but that the rich north will have to pay for
this and that their emissions cuts should in any case be voluntary.
The World Bank, unhelpfully, has estimated the cost of all this to be
$400 billion a year. Meanwhile, wealthy nations, would rather that the
developing world, but specifically China and to a lesser extent India,
agree to binding, verifiable CO2 cuts without the price tag.

The key advantage of the Copenhagen Accord for rich countries is that
it “weakens or even does away with the principle of common but
differentiated responsibilities,” as the South Centre, a Geneva-based
think-tank close to developing world governments, warns – another
reason why the Basic countries, upon reflection, have taken a distance
from the deal.

In many ways, Copenhagen was a victory for the developing world, in
that it managed to hold off against pressure to junk the Kyoto
Protocol and in the end ensured that the Copenhagen Accord was only
“noted” by the UN plenary instead of endorsed, making it a document
floating in a legal limbo.

Border tariff:

It should also be remembered that many other major powers were
sidelined at Copenhagen. Japan and Russia were also absent from
Copenhagen’s endgame. In many ways, the EU’s limited influence has
been largely a product of its own climate success. Although Europe is
the world’s third largest emitter, this will likely change in the near
future. Ironically, if the continent isn’t going to be as much of a
problem in absolute (as opposed to per capita) terms as China or India
by 2030, it doesn’t have much of a bargaining chip. Washington was
always going to be far more interested in Beijing.

Copenhagen was very much the US and China show, but it won’t always be.

——–

This feature was originially written for the Nordic Council’s Analys
Norden website.

{ We wonder at the last sentence of the article because we think that unless the EU does in fact unite under  one leadership it will not amount to much when the US continues to deal with the BASICs – I mean the countries that are form the basic future. The EU should aim at becoming the G3 to be added to China and the US in future global negotiations that will include also the IBSA and one or two more states. See please next article.}

——————————————————————————-

US blames Lisbon Treaty for EU summit fiasco. Mr Obama – the Madrid summit decision is being seen as a diplomatic snub to Spain.
by ANDREW RETTMAN from Brussels.

February 3, 2010, http://euobserver.com/9/29398/?rk=1
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS  writes -  The US State Department has said that President Barack Obama’s decision not to come to an EU summit in Madrid in May is partly due to confusion arising from the Lisbon Treaty.

State department spokesman Philip J. Crowley told press in Washington on Tuesday (2 February) that the treaty has made it unclear who the US leader should meet and when. { that sounds very clear to me.}

“Up until recently, they [summits] would occur on six-month intervals,
as I recall, with one meeting in Europe and one meeting here. And that
was part of – the foundation of that was the rotating presidency
within the EU. Now you have a new structure regarding not only the
rotating EU presidency, you’ve got an EU Council president, you’ve got
a European Commission president,” he said.

“We are working through this just as Europeans themselves are working
through this: When you have a future EU-US summit meeting, who will
host it and where will it be held?” he added. “All of this is kind of
being reassessed in light of architectural changes in Europe.”

The Lisbon Treaty came into force on 1 December, 2009. It created the post
of a new EU Council president and EU foreign relations chief in order
to give the union a stronger voice abroad.

It kept the institution of the six-month rotating EU presidency as
well, with the member state holding the chairmanship to do the bulk of
behind-the-scenes policy work in Brussels.

The Spanish EU presidency is being closely watched to see how the EU
manages the transition to the new power structure. The EU Council
president has so far taken charge of summits in the EU capital. But
Madrid was to share the limelight with a few top-level events at home.

The state department’s Mr Crowley said the US and Spain have been in
touch “directly” to discuss Mr Obama’s decision after Madrid learned
about it through the media on Monday.

“Obviously, there’s been some disappointment expressed by the
government of Spain, and we understand that and we’ll be working with
them on that,” he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and Mr Obama are both
expected to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on
Thursday. But no bilateral meeting has been announced so far.

Mr Zapatero, a centre-left secularist, has taken flak for his trip in
Spanish media, with the El Pais daily calling his decision to attend
the prayer event “shocking.”

Just back from a breakfast at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a New York firm active in Brazil for 30 years – Mergers & Acquisitions and Private Equity, Bankruptcy and Restructurings, Project Finance and Capital Markets – in short – the works.

The topic was – BRAZIL: ECONOMIC, INVESTMENT and POLITICAL OUTLOOK.

The Breakfast Seminar was organized by the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc. (BACC) - www.brazilcham.com, Chaired by Paulo Vieira da Cunha, Partner & Head of Research – Emerging Markets at Tandem Global Markets Fund, and Chairman, Banking and Capital Markets Committee, BACC.

His panel included Lisa Schineller, Director, Sovereign Ratings, Standard & Poor’s; Tony Volpon, Senior Economist, Nocura Securities International Inc.; Geoffrey Dennis, Managing Director and Global Emerging Markets Strategist Analyst, Citigroup (CIRA); Demian Reidel, Founding Member of QFR Capital Management, LP with previous important positions at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, background in Petroleum and Nuclear strategy in Argentina and economics at Harvard, who replaced as speaker the Founder of QFR, Jose Luis Daza; and Chris Garman, Managing and Practice Head, Latin America, Eurasia Group.

As expected, there was lots of talk about macroeconomics, how Brazil moved in the last years to the point that assets exceed debt; how Brazil survived well this last World Crisis. The present low indebtedness with a combination of FDI and equity and great export markets stretching from Asia to the US and the EU. They have managed very well the newly found oil wealth and the hope is that they can continue to manage it well and not open the country up too much to the international oil companies.    A main key is not to start to increase, without solid plans, the expenditures so they get addicted to that oil money as it happened in Mexico. The presentations were informative and very calculated as expected. But I really did not come for this.

What brought me to this early morning event was the expectation that there will be a presentation of the Political Outlook, specially as Brazil will have Presidential Elections this year – and I had my fill in the last presentation – the one by Mr. Garman.

As I am keeping coming back to it on our website – Brazil is the only “BRICS” from Latin America, actually in this world the third BRIC in size – after China and India. Brazil may not be able to match their 1,3 billion population each, but it clearly has more Natural Resources then either of them, and being in the Western Hemisphere, it is the one and only BRIC that shares space with the US – albeit – at quite a distance – and that is an advantage. If you wish – you may see this as sort of an anti pod to the US – about equal in size and potential and tied – even though the US is slow to admit – in a future love-hate relationship that will be main factor of the development of both countries the moment the US has realized that its addiction to Afro-Asian oil has lead to its downfall. Past mischief North Americans have committed in Brazil is hopefully over, and solid and wise cooperation could be in the cards with the people in that room as potential movers of the economic links.

{Facts: On October 3, 2010, Brazilian citizens eligible to vote will choose the successor of current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party. If none of the candidates receives more than a half of the valid votes, a run-off will be held on October 31, 2010. According to the Constitution, the President is elected directly to a four-year term, with a limit of two terms. Lula is not eligible, since he was elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. This will mark the first time since 1989 that he will not run for President.

Lula is backing his Chief of Staff Dilma Rousseff of his Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – her main opponent is Sao Paulo State Governor Jose Serra, of the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB). Usually elections in Brazil are very lively and the event is third in importance to the Carnival and a good soccer game.}

Now to the Garman presentation: Actually for 15 years, even with changes in Government, Brazil showed an amazing continuity that led to the present growth.There is low inflation for the last 7 years and all of this came about with industrial policy and macroeconomics that made President Lula get approval ratings of 80%. Had he been able to run again the Brazilians would have gone for him, but in his absence, they still would like with an 80% majority to see his policies continued. Nevertheless, there is a problem with his choice for his replacement – it is not a strong choice – so there is not going to be a coronation but an election. This allows for the possibility that Brazilians might decide to take more risk then expected under Lula. This is more risk at fiscal policy. Thanks to the discovery of the pre-salt oil deposits there is more fiscal room and the Government driven policy of Petrobras might loosen up.  So – it is now clear that actually the elections do matter, and the contest has to be watched. The real question is – what do the voters want? Or let me put it differently, are they so bored with success that they want change?

Now I had my chance and ceased it without thinking twice. When the time for questions came, my question was right there. “Could foreign policy have an impact on the outcome of the elections in Brazil? With Brazil trying to get a seat at the UN Security Council and with its economic situation and growth having become a BRIC, would it not be the right thing for President Lula to suggest Brazil take a leadership position on the Haiti issue. Brazil is actually already involved with troops in Haiti – has even taken loses – why not claim the leadership position. There are many points of similarity in background, sugar cane etc.?”

So, having written earlier that “Brazil could lead if asked” this turned now into “Brazil should ask to lead in order to do good not only to others but also to its own Administration.” Even economic analysts of Brazil can see that this makes sense.

Rush of Medical Aid to Haiti Follows History of Suffering.

Andrew Schneider
Senior Public Health Correspondent, aol

Washington (Jan. 15) — Along with all the horrors it wrought, Tuesday’s
earthquake brought a bitter irony to Haiti: The crumbled, chaotic
country will soon have more physicians, medics and operating hospitals
than ever in its tormented history.

But while the medical teams from around the world will close wounds
and set shattered bones, there will be less they can do to stem the
preventable deaths that have always plagued this hemisphere’s poorest
country.

Soon, enough mobile hospitals, medical personnel, equipment, medicine
and supplies will be in place in Haiti to treat 20,000 or more of the
injured, according to interviews late Thursday with the World Health
Organization, the Pentagon, the United Nations, FEMA and several
embassies in Washington — a rainbow of uniforms operating under tent
canvas, inside inflatable structures or aboard ships. And more
reinforcements could arrive shortly.

On Friday morning, the U.S. Public Health Service and Homeland Security sent notice to the volunteer members of the National Disaster Medical System that they should be ready for possible deployment.

Thousands of Haitians died in the collapse of poorly constructed
buildings, but the bodies being crammed into family crypts built atop
the cracked ground or dusted with lime and buried in mass graves
represent just the first wave of casualties, health experts predict.
Physicians from the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization say
that the deaths that will surely continue for months or even years
will not come from untreated trauma but, rather, untreated water.

Diseased water has long been Haiti’s most aggressive killer, far more
lethal than even its high rates of AIDS and tuberculosis. (Incidents
of malaria and dengue follow right behind.)

An examination of the country’s public health and medical system makes
the problem clear. According to the Haitian Institute for Statistics,
water supply and sewage treatment systems are unheard of among the
majority of the country’s 9 million people. What’s more, with a
fertility rate of almost five children per woman, infant mortality
soars, due to diarrheal disease caused by bad water and the lack of
adequate health care.

Haiti’s health ministry reported in 2008 that there were just 39
hospitals and about 70 other inpatient facilities for the entire
country. But even that scant health care is unevenly divided: Private
for-profit hospitals treat the country’s wealthy and some foreign
business and embassy workers. Then there are the handful of public
hospitals and clinics — most of them falling apart — which are
ill-equipped and badly understaffed. The poor, who represent more than
80 percent of country’s population, also rely on the missionaries and
nongovernment volunteer groups, who sometimes offer superb medicine,
but only for those patients who can get to them.

There are very few ambulances in the countryside, and no 9-1-1 to
call. So Haitians fend for themselves.

The mainstay for the sick and injured are Voodoo clinics. In a country where medicine is hard to
come by unless you are among the elite, their traditional herbal medicines fill the void.

And so it was in the immediate aftermath of the quake: On Thursday, a
government health source said that a United Nation’s peacekeeper
relayed that the first organized medical care in Cite Soleil, the
capital’s vast slums, came from groups of Voodoo practitioners.

Early Friday, a senior officer at the 82nd’s headquarters in Fort
Bragg, N.C., said half the people in the division’s supply chain had
been scrambled for a critical part of the relief effort. Their
mission: to round up clean drinking water to bring to the Haitians.

———————-

Clinton Pledges Cooperation in Haiti Relief Effort.

Jennifer Kay, AP

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 16) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton met Saturday with Haitian President Rene Preval and
promised that U.S. quake relief efforts would be closely coordinated
with local officials.

Clinton’s remarks appeared designed to counter any notion of a
too-intrusive American involvement in the aftermath of the quake,
while also assuring Haitians the humanitarian mission would continue
as long as it’s needed.

“We are here at the invitation of your government to help you,” she
said at a news conference at the Port-au-Prince airport. “As President
Obama has said, we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time
ahead. And speaking personally, I know of the great resilience and
strength of the Haitian people. You have been severely tested. But I
believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the
future.”

Clinton, the highest-ranking Obama administration official to visit
since the magnitude-7.0 quake struck Tuesday, arrived in a Coast Guard
C-130 transport that carried bottled water, packaged food, soap and
other supplies. She was accompanied by Rajiv Shah, the U.S. Agency for
International Development administrator who is acting as the top U.S.
relief coordinator.

Clinton also met with U.N. officials and U.S. civilians and military
personnel working on the relief effort. She said she and Preval
discussed his government’s priorities: restoring communications,
electricity and transportation.

“And we agreed that we will be coordinating closely together to
achieve these goals,” she said, adding that she and Preval would issue
a communique on Sunday outlining cooperation between the two
countries.

Preval said he was encouraged to see former presidents Bill Clinton
and George W. Bush together with President Barack Obama at the White
House earlier Saturday in a joint plea for international assistance to
Haiti.

He noted that U.S. aid has already arrived, and he told reporters he
met a survivor who was pulled from the rubble Saturday and receiving
care from American medical teams. He thanked Clinton for her visit and
for Obama’s continued support of Haiti.

“Mrs. Clinton’s visit really warms our heart today,” he said.

During the news conference, officials noted the clatter of military
helicopters landing and taking off nearby.

“That’s a good sound,” Clinton said. “That means that good things are
going to the people of Haiti.”

In Copenhagen, well meaning NGOs demanded the outlawing of internal flights because of the CO2 emissions air travel is causing. In effect air travel causes just as much GHG as automotive transportation, and until now air transport was not taken into account, and was not part of the content of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC. It was supposed to be picked up for the second stage of Kyoto, but as Kyoto has fallen by the wayside as of now, these discussions also led nowhere.

OK, we came back pleased with President Obama’s performance on the international negotiations on climate change. We followed with interest his trip to China and the State Visit of the Indian Head of State to the White House. We knew that the President is right in leading to some sort of agreement between the major emitters – China and the US – to be supported by next line of evolving strong economies – the IBSA. We know those three leaders met with China separately from the Obama trip to Beijing. An agreement between the emitters is clearly much more valuable then agreements between lesser emitters, and Kyoto is just the great tub that says there was no wash for ten years.

Now, let us be honest. With eight years of GW Bush/Cheney government very little has been achieved in emissions reduction by the US federal government, but some States imposed rules and even laws that caused people to start changing behavior. But that was not all – in effect the increase of price of oil led people to drive less and to move to smaller cars. I know that there are still Hummer affectionados even in New York City, but I also see tiny cars on the street, I know about hybrids that I dislike, but also of electric cars that are coming on the market very soon. Our website is following this closely. We just posted about “Better Place” and “Balqon.” Our postings on the metal Lithium that will be used in batteries are among the most read postings.

OK – so money saving talks to people. But not just money – think also of convenience. In the 1970’s when people were scared of shortages in fuel, they changed to CNG and moved to more efficient vehicles – but they also wanted electric cars, hoping that if they lived in a suburb they will be able to “refuel” in their own garrage at home, without ever having to visit a supplier. The automotive industry killed that early thought because they make one third of their profit from parts and repairs – and their horror dreams – electric motors have no moving parts and need no repair.

People think nothing of taking a taxi to the airport and catching a flight – but thanks to our enemies we will have now to spend three and four hours before we can get on that half hour flight from New York to Washington. In effect we will be making better time catching a train. Then, after the “shoe bomber” we were made to take off our shoes in good Muslim fashion, when on our way to the plane, but after the “underwear bomber” we will yet have to prove that our underwear is clean – and watch the face of the agent that will be made to check them. That is more then what we are ready to bear – so we will be pushed by those Islamists, to cry out – WE WANT GOOD, FAST, AND CHEAP TRAINS – if the Chinese can have them we want them also!

The bottom line for this article is thus – we thank the unsuccessful bomber for making us do what we were not ready to do otherwise – to call for a high speed line from Washington to Chicago and make sure that the air connection is eliminated. This so that we buy less oil from the home country of that bomber, and from any other country that suports with our oil-money his agressive coreligionist brothers and sisters in arms.

The lesson from the Christmas day attack, less then one week after the Copenhagen meeting, and exactly one week since the NGOs there demanded it – air transport for the civilized world will be reduced to only where absolutely necessary – like in Washington – Beijing traffic.

And think for a moment – on December 22nd we thought that waiting in an airliner on the tarmac was the major problem, and the Administration decreed a very serious penalty on those airlines that keep the passengers cooped inside the plane. See how much more serious can be the problems imposed on the industry by outsiders. But then, the delays showed us that even in best of conditions it makes no sense to fly short distances.

————

Chinese Harmony Train Sets Speed Record.
By UCN on December 28, 2009

China streaked ahead of its western and Asian rivals at the weekend by unveiling the world’s fastest longdistance passenger train service.

The Harmony express raced 1,100km in less than three hours on Saturday, travelling from Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, to the central city of Wuhan. The journey previously took at least 11 hours.

The improvement illustrates how China’s huge investment in infrastructure is dramatically shrinking the country, yet the economics of the new service, which runs 56 times a day, remain unproven amid a build-it-and-they-will-come approach to transport.

“China has focused on building expressways but that is an American method,” said Zheng Tianxiang, a Guangzhou-based infrastructure expert and government adviser.

“Expressways are not suited for China, which has large numbers of people but little space to spare. China should learn from Japan and Europe.”

The Harmony express, which reached a top speed of 394km per hour in pre-launch trials, travelled at an average rate of 350km per hour on its debut. This compared with a maximum service speed of 300km per hour for Japan’s Shinkansen bullet trains and France’s TGV service. In America, Amtrak’s Acela “Express” service takes 3½ hours to trundle between Boston and New York, a distance of only 300km.

According to state media reports, the government spent $17bn (€12bn, £11bn) on the Harmony express line’s construction over 4½ years. Wuhan invested $2.4bn in a new Frenchdesigned train station, which boasts 20 tracks and 11 platforms. Officials this weekend declined to confirm project costs.

Ticket prices have been set at Rmb780 ($115, €80, £72) for first class and Rmb490 for second. The country’s airlines, which like the railway are mostly state-owned, have responded by slashing fares to undercut those for the new train, with China Southern Airlines, based in Guangzhou, offering tickets for advance purchase starting at Rmb250 and introducing hourly flights.

Huang Xin, head of passenger services for Guangzhou Railway Group, said on the inaugural ride that pricing might have to be adjusted.

Even the second-class fares may prove too rich for the biggest pool of potential passengers for the line, the estimated 20m workers in the Pearl river delta manufacturing belt around Guangzhou who hail from inland provinces. About half of them usually return home during the Chinese new year holiday in the world’s biggest human migration. The round-trip express fare is priced at about two-thirds of an average factory worker’s monthly wage.

Most passengers on the sold-out debut run were middle-class leisure travellers drawn by the journey’s novelty value. “We are not staying in Wuhan,” said Qiu Chaoyue, a Guangzhou resident who tried out the new rail link with a group of friends. “We’re going to take the next train back to Guangzhou.”

Another disadvantage of the new service is that the stations at each end of the line are at least an hour’s drive from their respective city centres.

The railways ministry intends to complete 18,000km of high-speed rail lines by 2012, allowing travel between most Chinese provincial capitals in eight hours or less.

One reason for the enormous construction outlay for the Harmony express was difficult terrain. The train travels along 713km of elevated tracks and tunnels, accounting for about 70 per cent of its length.

Police were posted along the route to guard potential sabotage points, while burly railway security personnel monitored each passenger car. The police outside were often joined by farmers, who stopped to watch the Harmony express rush by their rural homes.

In spring and summer, the train will travel through a lush agricultural breadbasket, especially in the rice-growing areas of southern Hunan province. But in the dead of winter, it traverses a bleak, monochrome landscape of fallow fields and dirt roads that turn to mud in the rain.

From the December 27, 2009 issue of the Japan Times online and our comments:
 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fe20…

 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20…

 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20…

 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20…

The main article is utterly ridiculous, written not by a UK citizen writing for Japan and readers overseas, who usually writes well, but not in this case.He does not even realize that he mentions 192 and 193 as the number of participating nations without even blinking at this discrepancy. We are appalled by the the use of Japan for whatever else Mr. Stephen Hesse might have had in his mind – or is he plainly unaware of what went on before Copenhagen, and of the hard work that President Obama did put in before this one day trip to Copenhagen?

Also, we think it is worthwhile to see the juxtaposed other three links for articles in this same Japan Times online issue we posted. One deals with Japan being #19 among the OECD counties when noting GDP/capita, another dealing with the Japanese pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai fair, and the fourth plainly speaking of the December unusual yellow sand Western Japan got from China.

In light of these four articles, we think, Japan better review its standing in a G2 World plus IBSA where it is being left as an outsider alongside an Un-united Europe, while President Obama tries to work with what he can actually work with. We suggest to Japan to start reading carefully our website because it is very much about what Japan is losing when it might continue to line up with the wrong half of the US.

———-

On the other hand we have:

from KURASHI – THE “ECO-BLOG” – BY MARTIN J FRID
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2007

Stephen Hesse in The Japan Times

If you live in Japan, you are probably reading Japanese newspapers like The Japan Times, The Asahi, The Yomiuri or The Mainichi to get your daily fix of news, culture and comics from back home. Plus sports and job ads and whatnot… The Japan Times has the best coverage of environmental issues, as far as I am concerned. Stephen Hesse is one of their regular contributers. You know how it works. You see a headline on the web, and if the byline (the name of the writer) is familiar, you tend to read the rest of the story.  http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/f…

You can read his columns (Stephen Hesse) here: Our Planet Earth, and the story that caught my eye today was a narrative of how Mr. Hesse was inspired by a bunch of Junior High School students. A good read.

The Japan Times: Homeroom Truths: ‘Gore’s Nobel Prize is wonderful’

The day after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Gore and the IPCC, I visited Hiroo Gakuen in Tokyo, a combined junior- and senior-high school, for the school’s autumn festival — this year themed “Earth’s Happiness is Our Happiness.”

A friend whose daughter graduated from the school thought I might like to see what young people these days are thinking about environmental issues.

I was immediately struck by how Japan has changed. Today, junior- and senior-high school students are studying dioxins, the ozone layer and “corporate social responsibility.” When I first began teaching environmental issues in Japan 17 years ago, first-year university students would identify old men on bicycles and bad breath as pressing environmental concerns. . . .

OK – so Stephen Hesse is a good journalist writing from Japan on environmental issues – he is among the best – but the following just is not one of his best examples.
———–

Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009

OUR PLANET EARTH: COP15 farce: There’s always more time, till there isn’t

By STEPHEN HESSE
Post-conference analysis of the Copenhagen COP15 has ranged from despair and disgust to guarded optimism that 2010 will bring a new and better agreement.

The truth is, Copenhagen was a circus of geopolitical bickering among self- absorbed leaders representing powerful and powerless nations, of politicians made ineffectual by corporate interests, of civil society groups being arrested and excluded, and of senseless process taking precedence over essential substance.

As one American climate campaigner, Ken Ward, observed, “An event that was to crown 10 years of international effort produced utterly useless language, unenthusiastically scrabbled together in hours by five out of 192 nations, and this . . . pathetic half-effort got exactly one day of our president’s time.”

At least Japan can say “Don’t blame us, we were willing to do our part.”

Not only did Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama pledge that Japan would reduce its emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, putting Japan in line with the policies of European nations, but his administration agreed to provide ¥1.3 trillion to help developing nations reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and deal with the impacts of climate change.

Neither promise is sufficient in terms of the cuts and help needed, but at least Tokyo had the good sense to offer substantial commitments in good faith.

In the end it was not surprising that national leaders failed to put planetary health above politics, but it was disappointing. Just as when athletes gather for the Olympics, one hopes that world-class competition and the adrenaline of the moment will bring about nearly impossible feats of sportsmanship.

Sadly, in Copenhagen a team representing the world’s people turned in a performance that was as embarrassing to each individual as it was to the gathering as a whole.

The essential goal is simple. Greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced dramatically and massive funding must be marshaled for mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of climate change that is already under way.

On both counts, government negotiators failed miserably.

There is no scientific doubt that climate change due in part or predominantly to human activities is occurring. However much fanatic nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and self-aggrandizing contrarians harangue to the contrary, our global, fossil-fuel-based economy is undermining the bio-geological stability of our planet.

Nevertheless, governments remain unwilling and unable to act.

The United States is shackled by oil and coal interests greedy for multibillion- dollar annual profits and a Chamber of Commerce that believes America and Americans are not capable of rising to the challenge of a new energy society.

China, with its centralized political system, could make tougher choices, but its juggernaut development is spurred on by more than a billion souls hungry for what Americans and Europeans have had for decades.

India faces the most challenging dynamic of all: the combination of a democratic political system and development needs that rival China’s.

As is so often the case on the international stage, national interests, political will, and environmental reality are nearly irreconcilable, and the decision-making machinery of the United Nations is barely up to the complex task of making the hard choices needed to deal with burgeoning populations, divergent political interests, and our steady degradation of the planet.

So what did Copengagen produce?

The Copenhagen Accord, drafted by five of the 193 nations present (Brazil, China, India, South Africa and the U.S.), is simply a political statement. It was not approved unanimously by the nations present, and thus is not a legally binding agreement.

The Accord states that our leaders have “strong political will to urgently combat climate change in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” — meaning some nations are more to blame than others and some are more capable of action.

The drafters’ claim to “strong political will” is clearly not borne out in the rest of the document, nor in the meeting’s final outcome. Perhaps someone at the table had an ironic sense of humor.

The Accord further states that nations will “stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthro- pogenic interference with the climate system,” based on scientific consensus that any increase in “global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius.” Yet no specific cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions were noted or agreed to.

The Accord states, too, that developed countries will provide funding and investments to help vulnerable developing nations adapt to and mitigate climate change. How much is not clear, however, and the text simply calls for funds “approaching” $30 billion over the next three years.

The developed countries also promise further funding of “$100 billion a year by 2020,” but the source of these monies is unclear, and few if any of those sitting around that table will be in power 10 years from now. In contract law, this kind of language would be voided for vagueness.

The Accord also calls for a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund, a financial mechanism to support projects, programs and activities in developing nations, as well as monitoring progress reports.

The final paragraph mentions an assessment of the Accord’s implementation by 2015 — something we can hope is rendered unnecessary because long before that our leaders will have replaced the Copenhagen Accord with a coherent, binding agreement.

That agreement needs to be a science-based, long-term roadmap that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off, ensuring greenhouse-gas emission cuts of 80 percent by 2050 and guaranteeing massive funding for climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

No one ever said saving the planet would be easy.

In fact, what we really need is a transformation in human thinking.

We need a global commitment among all nations to take part in a worldwide transition to alternative, non-carbon- based energy generation.

We need to stop classifying nations as simply developing or developed, terms that are increasingly used for finger pointing and for hiding from planetary responsibility.

We need unprecedented political and economic cooperation led and financed by developed nations and burgeoning economies that are fueling production and consumption worldwide, especially China.

We need to ensure a long-term, sustainable balance between the health of our environment and the needs of human society, requiring that nations adopt a precautionary approach in dealing with the global impacts of human activity on the planet’s bio-geological ecosystems.

We need to stop seeing Beijing, Delhi, Tokyo or Washington as our only home and recognize that what our neighbors on the other side of the planet are doing will make or break our own children’s future.

Above all, we need to ensure that civil society has a meaningful role in all negotiations — and that politicians understand that “political will” means more than empty promises.

Is this too much to ask?

Stephen Hesse can be reached at  stevehesse at hotmail.com

Thursday, July 9, 2009

G8 ITALY SUMMIT.
G8 summit gets off to rough start – Hu’s exit damages climate talks as emerging economies challenge the industrialized powers

By JUN HONGO
Staff writer, The Japan Times online. – Japan Time – Thursday, July 9, 2009.

ROME — With the relevance of the Group of Eight being challenged by emerging powers, the G8 leaders got down to business Wednesday addressing climate change and what their next move might be when and if the global recession subsides.

But the launch of the three-day G8 summit in L’Aquila was spoiled even before it began, with Chinese President Hu Jintao returning home to get a handle on the ethnic riots tearing apart the restive city of Urumqi in the northwest.

A shadow also grew over the climate change issue as chances appeared slim that the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, or MEF, would be able to hammer out long-term greenhouse gas emissions cuts, Japanese diplomatic sources said.

The key multinational emissions forum was to meet Thursday on the sidelines of the summit in the Italian mountain town.

The sources said MEF preparatory negotiations failed to bridge the gap between members of the industrialized and developing countries, effectively dashing hopes of achieving a substantial agreement.
Hu’s absence exacerbated the MEF discord, the sources said.

An initially prepared MEF draft declaration pledged a global emissions reduction of 50 percent by 2050, with industrialized countries promising an 80 percent cut in the same time frame, they said.

The 17-member MEF was established in March under the initiative of U.S. President Barack Obama to complete the groundwork for forging a new international carbon-capping framework to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Along with the G8, major greenhouse gas emitters China, India and Brazil are also members of the MEF.

Despite the forum’s apparent inability to produce tangible results, the G8 was nevertheless expected to issue a joint statement on climate change later in the day, in addition to discussing the global economy, the sources said.

The eight leaders were expected to share views on how not to jeopardize the “green shoots” of recovery being seen in some areas, as well as “exit strategies” for reversing the heavy fiscal stimulus that many countries embraced to revive their economies, the sources said, adding that how to stave off global unemployment was also on the agenda.

During a working dinner, the G8 was expected to focus on political matters, including domestic unrest in Iran and North Korea’s nuclear threat.

Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, who agreed Tuesday to reduce the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, were expected to lead the discussion on global denuclearization.

For Prime Minister Taro Aso,denuclearization and how to end North Korea’s nuclear threat are expected to be key concerns.

Earlier this month, Foreign Ministry officials in Tokyo listed five key themes for this year’s summit: Iran, North Korea, global denuclearization, the Middle East peace process and the war in Afghanistan.

The L’Aquila summit concludes Friday after assistance to Africa is discussed. But with emerging economic powers like Brazil and India being kept outside the discussion framework, critics say any talks held within the G-8 alone are incapable of resolving global economic issues.

In that sense, the Thursday meeting with the emerging powers will have more relevance than the G-8 itself, they said.

But Japanese officials defended the G-8 framework, saying its agreements are still influential in forming the base for discussions with other economic powers.

The G-8 includes the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, France and Russia.

——————

www.SustainabiliTank.info take on the Wednesday-Thursday-Friday July 8-10, 2009 meetings follows:

President Obama of the US came to Rome after having achieved an agreement with the Medvedev/Putin leadership of Russia on what concerns nuclear arms reduction and certain aspects of non-proliferation. Those issues allow thus for US leadership at the G8 meeting. On the other hand, at the Obama created G-16 + the EU and the UN meeting on climate change, the fact that the US is well behind Europe on the main issues on Global Warming, the US is really not in position of leadership.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK is in very weakened internal position so he is no great asset at the G8 table.

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper leads now a weak minority government and does not radiate influence either.

Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso is just as weak at home as Messrs. Brown and Harper and thus not really in a leadership position either.

Italy’s Berlusconi, thanks to his personal peccadilloes, is rather an international joke, even though his countrymen may think his behavior charming. His country-women – that is those that did not profit from his closeness – may think differently.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is in best position of them all when it comes to the issues of climate change, but in what concerns applying stimulus packages in Europe she is just slow or lacks interest as she saw that this might not have brought in the US the results that the Obama administration was promising to Americans and the world. She clearly has no intention to cooperate in what she is not convinced that it works, and is also critical of the US lack of progress in alternatives to the old fossil-fuels based economy. We do not think that President Obama will be able to convince her to change her mind during the three days of these meetings.

France’s President Nicolas Sarcozy is strong politically at home – so here no problems – but when it comes to evaluating his two years in office, one has difficulty finding his international agenda – thus another non-leader for these events.

Russia’s double-headed eagle – President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin – will rest on the perch and don’t expect them to lead either.

Looking at the above and at the ruins of the earth-quake damaged Italian age-old city of L’Aquila, one can only hope for reconstruction if the world is going to see a better economy in the future and in the process also create a program of what to do with the pesky issue of climate change. Let us face the reality that there is little chance to achieve progress at the   July 2009 meetings.

***

Thursday there is the meeting of 17 members that is the G16 + the EU – or actually the G8 + G5 (Brazil, India, China,   Mexico, South Africa) + Australia, Indonesia, Korea,   and the EU.

Those are the 17 that were invited to participate at the State Department building, in Washington DC, meeting for climate talks under the Major Economies Forum (MEF) April 27, 2009. That meeting was organized by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Later there was also a meeting in Mexico City and in September 2009 they will have yet another meeting in Pittsburgh. The intent was to come up with an agreement to be presented before the Copenhagen climate meeting this December.

OK – so where are we now? Did the US and China formally agree on how to proceed jointly on the effort to find a G2 solution? But really we will not find out if this is the case on Thursday, July 9, 2009. Chinese President Hu Jintao returned home today to deal with the ethnic riots tearing apart the restive city of Urumqi in the Muslim Northwest Province of Xinjang, and without him present there is little sense for the Thursday meeting. India also does not seem to be ready to let the OECD countries of the hook so indeed setting only long term targets without well funded immediate action will not do this time. India just released its budget plans and worldwide there are reactions that the government did not plan enough as stimulus packages either. Indeed, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton will be going mid July to India like she did go to China at the start of her taking over at State. Will she be able to come up with better understanding with India, while it seems to the Indians that the US is back to a pre Bush China-first policy?

Also Indonesia will not be there as President Yudhoyono just was having a reelection campaign that it seems he won.

***

Friday is the last day and it is dedicated to the provision of funds for Africa. OK – this subject will get some figures and it will be $15 Billion that President Obama pushed for – as aid for poor farmers – and when President Obama will be on Saturday in Ghana he will be able to present those figures to his African hosts.

Our prediction is thus that from L’Anquila the main product of these meetings will be a new promis for Africa. Will it be funded this time in reality – that is something to check upon later. But then a serious review regarding Africa is really in the making indeed. The key is to be henceforth less reliance on food aid from subsidized produce in the US and the EU, and more investments and help in order to build up local agriculture in Africa – as the future economy of Africa. Some of the African NGOs have finally spoken up that the relliance on food hand-outs has destroyed Africans’ potential to feed themselves.

***

Will the real legacy of L’Anquila be that the G8 has lost its relevance in a world where most of the so called great economies are indeed dependent for their well being on some of the members of the lesser G5? With China, India and Brazil not part of the august post-World War II group is there any reason for the separate G8 pow wow? Would not going directly to a more updated group have been more effective? Then what about the EU? Could it not be practical to letthe member states finally decide that they could speak with one voice? If that is not the case why litter the G16 with an added presence at a time that the UN is rightly not mentioned at all?

——-

G8 must galvanise talks on warming.
The Financial Times, July 8 2009

The summit meeting of the Group of Eight industrialised nations that opened in Italy on Wednesday looks increasingly like an event in search of a purpose. The more broadly based G20, including China and India among others, is the place where deals on the global economy are being done. So what is the point of the G8?

The answer should be: to galvanise the debate on climate change. A consensus is needed between the rich and poor for a new deal to slow down global warming. It is supposed to be finalised by the United Nations at Copenhagen in December. But to have any hope of progress there, the leaders gathered in L’Aquila this week must give a clear sense of direction.

The European Union has been consistently in the lead in setting ambitious targets to cut emissions. The good news now is that the US president is engaged and enthusiastic. Barack Obama will co-chair Thursday’s meeting of the 17-member Major Economies Forum, including both China and India. The bad news is that Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, has gone home to deal with the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. But that should not give an excuse for indecision.

The first ominous sign is that the two sides have not agreed on a target of halving global emissions by 2050. That is the minimum necessary to ensure that the rise in global temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, the danger level agreed by scientists. It would require the developed economies to cut their emissions by 80 per cent, to allow developing economies to pollute more as they grow faster. But China is not prepared to sign up to the target until there are more concessions on the table. It is hard to understand, as China stands to be a big beneficiary.

India is also playing hard to get. Delhi will not move on a complete package until there is more money on the table, with rich countries paying the poor to mitigate the effects of global warming, and adapt to them. Such an attitude could scupper any deal.

The G8 leaders can and should do more. In particular, they should start work on a commercial mechanism via the cap-and-trade system to finance bigger transfers from rich to poor. That would be politically more acceptable than straight handouts. The EU might also unilaterally increase its target to cut emissions in 2020 from 20 to 30 per cent. Both the US and Japan need to set more ambitious targets for 2020 as well as 2050. But in the end, a deal on climate change is not just for the rich to do. The poor will suffer most if it fails.

———–

Nations agree to steeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
By Fiona Harvey in London, and Guy Dinmore and George,Parker in L’Aquila
Published: July 9 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 9 2009 03:00
The Group of Eight industrialised countries yesterday agreed to more stringent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than ever before.

The G8, meeting in Italy, pledged to take on the lion’s share of the emissions reductions scientists say are needed, with cuts of 80 per cent by 2050 for developed countries. This would contribute to a hoped-for target of halving emissions globally by the same date.

They also resolved to try to hold global temperature rises to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, which scientists regard as the limit of safety.

This is the first time such a target has been formally adopted in a leading international forum. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, hailed the deal as “historic”.

But British officials said there was “no chance” that these targets would also be agreed by a wider group of countries, including emerging economies, meeting today on climate change.

Leaders of 16 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitting countries are meeting at the G8 at the request of Barack Obama, US president.

He called the meeting, known as the Major Economies Forum, which he is co-chairing with Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister, to break the deadlock in climate change talks aimed at producing a successor to the Kyoto protocol at a conference in Copenhagen in December.

It is the first time leaders of all the big emitters have held a summit on climate change. The United Nations secretary-general held a meeting for world leaders in 2007, but George W. Bush, then US president, turned up only for the dinner at the end.

However, China and India have so far refused to agree to the target of halving global emissions by 2050, despite assurances that the G8 will take on the largest slice of the burden.

The early departure of Hu Jintao, China’s president, from the meeting yesterday made any change in position even less likely.

One of the aims of the MEF was to bring leaders of the main emitting countries together so that they could allow their environment ministers – who attend the UN negotiations – greater latitude in making a deal.

Anantha Guruswamy, Greenpeace programme director, said China and India had refused to sign up to the global target because the G8 club of rich nations had not put forward proposals for financing emissions cuts and measures to adapt to climate change in poor countries.

“It is up to Obama to show leadership on this,” he added.

Beijing and Delhi also want rich countries to agree higher targets on cutting emissions by 2020 than they have come up with.

The 16 countries in the MEF produce 80 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. The European Union and Denmark, as host of the Copenhagen conference, also attend its meetings.

***

to be a bit more exact the first 9 out of the 16 – CO2 emissions in billions of metric tons, 2006 are as follows – and if you wish it is about 75% just for the first 8 total and they are not the old G8.

China     6.0

US           5.9

Russia     1.7

India       1.3

Japan       1.3

Germany     0.9

Canada         0.6

UK               0.6

S. Korea       0.5

———-

CLIMATE CHANGE
Obama insists world climate accord possible.
By George Parker and Guy Dinmore in L’Aquila and Fiona Harvey in London
The Financial Times,   July 9 2009

Barack Obama, US president, insisted on Thursday there was still time for the world to agree binding commitments to cut greenhouse emissions, in spite of stalemate at the G8 summit in L’Aquila.

Mr Obama takes centre stage in the Italian town on Thursday when he chairs a session on global warming, bringing together 17 rich and emerging economies, including China and Brazil.

US diplomats say there is no chance that the countries will agree to cut world emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 – from a still undecided baseline of 1990 or later. They are however likely to agree on an aspiration to stop temperatures rising more than 2 degrees centigrade compared with pre-industrial levels.

The early departure of Hu Jintao, China’s president of China, from the meeting made any change in position on cuts even less likely.

But Mr Obama believes an agreement on binding intermediate targets – for a deadline sometime before 2050 – can be reached before a UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.

Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman, said Mr Obama told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil that “there was still time in which they could close the gap on that disagreement in time for that important [meeting]“.

Mr Obama is seen as a pivotal figure in reaching any Copenhagen agreement, but months of tense negotiations lie ahead.

India, China and other big emerging economies want to be sure the west is serious about meeting medium term targets for cutting emissions before they commit themselves. They also want money to help them clean up their industries.

The credibility of the G8 on climate change was challenged by Russia, which had earlier signed up to a communique by the group committing wealthy nations to an even more ambitious 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 – again with a still undecided baseline. The Russian delegation however has questioned whether such a long-term target is meaningful.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, said progress on climate change at the G8 was so far “not enough”. He added: “This is politically and morally [an] imperative and historic responsibility … for the future of humanity, even for the future of the planet Earth.”

————–

Further – the UN travelog:

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
8 July, 2009 =========================================================================

SECRETARY-GENERAL EN ROUTE TO ITALY TO MEET WITH G8 LEADERS

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is heading today to the Italian city of L’Aquila, where he will meet with the leaders who are attending the annual summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations, after wrapping up his first official visit to Ireland.

On development, the Secretary-General urged the G8 to outline how donors will scale up aid to Africa over the next year to fulfil the commitments the Group made at its summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005.

Mr. Ban departed for Italy from Ireland, where he met today with Irish Defence Minister Willie O’Dea. They travelled to the McKee Barracks, where the Secretary-General met with a group of veteran UN peacekeepers from Ireland and also took part in a ceremony paying respect to Irish peacekeepers that made the ultimate sacrifice while serving the Organization.

The UN chief is scheduled to travel again next week to attend the 15 July Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where he will deliver an address encouraging the group to build on its leadership role to address some of today’s challenges, including disarmament, the economic crisis and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The eight MDGs – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education – have a target date of 2015, as agreed by world leaders in 2000.  

The G8 and climate change: towards Copenhagen – Andrew Pendleton, July 8, 2009.
A coherent focus on low-carbon technology is the missing ingredient in the world’s climate-change strategy, says Andrew Pendleton.

Andrew Pendleton is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) in London

John D Podesta, president and CEO, Center for American Progress, USA   is the soul behind the study mentioned in the attachment.

No nation wants a global climate-change deal this year more than Denmark. Its capital, Copenhagen, plays host on 7-18 December 2009 to the next big United Nations summit on global warming – which marks the end of two years of increasingly fraught negotiation to reach agreement.

The global stakes are high; and for the modest Danes, the event holds out the prize of a new, international accord bearing the name of their capital city – the “Copenhagen protocol”, perhaps.

From the perspective of early July, however, there is a long way to go. As leaders of the world’s major economies – which are also its biggest greenhouse-gas emitters – gather for the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, on 8-10 July to try to add urgency to the search for a Copenhagen deal, it is clear that profound and fundamental disagreements on critical issues persist. How to break the deadlock? Most commentators will seek the answer in the headline issue of emissions-reduction targets. But the relatively neglected area of negotiations on transferring technology and finance to developing countries to support a radical shift in their model of industrial growth is of equal importance.

The technology fix

When the climate debate was coming of age, the “numbers game” – which country will cut what quantity of greenhouse-gas emissions by when and relative to what baseline – was at the top of everyone’s list of priorities. Logically, since the problem is precisely about the quantity of gas being pumped into the atmosphere, setting targets to reduce emissions was the best way of understanding the structure of the problem. But targets do not lead to emissions cuts: policies and actions do.

I am not for a moment arguing that industrialised countries should be excused their responsibilities; they must take on ambitious, legally-binding commitments as part of a new deal. But the fight against climate change will not be won without a technology revolution – yet technology is still the poor relation of other issues in the negotiations.

The promise – and the frustration – lie in the fact that many of the technologies needed to fight climate change are within our grasp. But to seize this opportunity, a much better understanding of why we have not yet managed to harness their potential – of why low-carbon technologies of even the most rudimentary nature remain underexploited – is desperately needed.

The Global Climate Network – a prestigious alliance of influential think-tanks in countries key to successful international action, of which the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) is a founder member – publishes a joint study on 8 July 2009 that examines the barriers in the way of much wider use of low-carbon technology. The results are surprising; if they are taken on board they could help leaders of G8 countries and the rich states grouped in the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) to bridge the gap between reality and aspiration.

—

Three lessons

Our research involved speaking to more than 100 leading businesspeople, government officials and academics in eight countries – Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Nigeria, South Africa and the United States. Three conclusions emerged:

- The first is that a “low-carbon technology revolution” will not happen by itself: it requires government intervention. A major block to the wider use of low-carbon technology is the lack of coherent policy at the domestic level, in both industrialised and developing countries. This, we conclude, requires industrial activism of the like that – over two decades of neo-liberal hegemony in the developed world – became unfashionable. Will the current economic crisis lead to a long-term reversal of the trend?

The case that government should have a strong role in driving new, low-carbon technology is compelling. This is clear in the way that each individual policy-shift has much larger implications. For instance, if electric vehicles are to become the norm in big cities, then recharging-points will have to be installed, parking facilities will have to be altered and vehicle design will have to be driven in this direction. If this kind of initiative is not led by governments, then who else will lead it?

That said, activism by governments has to be executed with a light touch so as to unleash and not stifle low-carbon entrepreneurial spirit. Furthermore, the subsidies and other favours that carbon-intensive industries still enjoy – an issue raised by some of the interviewees in our study – will have to be phased out.

- The second conclusion is the inescapable need for finance. Almost all of those whom we interviewed in our study identified the lack of upfront cash, and in some cases (carbon-capture technology [CCS], for example) higher running-costs as among the obstacles to low-carbon technology. Here a public-private partnership seems essential: the private sector may well ultimately be the main source of finance for the low-carbon technology revolution, but governments will have to lead to make new technologies cheaper and less risky. The existing United Nations climate agreement requires developed countries to be the major contributors to this effort.

The financial crisis may make it harder for sovereign governments to contemplate helping global and not just national decarbonisation. Barack Obama’s championing of greater energy independence and of job-creation through green expansion is a good example of a progressive national project at work. But there has also to be greater clarity about the all-round benefits of the process – by projecting the low-carbon narrative onto the international sphere and linking it to the reality of global economic interdependence.

After all, it is also in the interest of the US, Europe and Japan to expand the markets for low-carbon technologies in India,   China and across continental Africa – for they are currently the main inventors of these technologies.

The shared advantages of the low-carbon revolution must be understood more widely. The danger, however, is that every nation will want to be both producer and consumer of everything; a great deal more intergovernmental collaboration, as well as the unleashing of low-carbon entrepreneurial spirit, will be needed to resolve this.

- The third conclusion from our research is the need for an “international technologies initiative”. This idea, endorsed by Britain’s ex-prime minister Tony Blair, could help accelerate the collaborative development of new technology and realise the brightest and best ideas from the difficult demonstration stage through to full commercial production and deployment. The so-called “valley of death” in which many great ideas perish for want of finance must not be allowed to kill off potentially important low-carbon innovations.

The current financial constraints reinforce more routine difficulties in technological cooperation. But the message of our research to the G8 and the Major Economies Forum is to take a direct route and circumvent these as much as possible by:

* putting technology at the heart of negotiations

* rewarding robust national low-carbon development strategies

* pooling resources to invest in research & development and demonstration

* focusing on know-how as much as equipment

* sharing knowledge and propagating skills.

—

A time to commit

There is even more to be done. All the countries represented at the L’Aquila summit are doing something to encourage low-carbon technology – and some are doing a lot. But none has a coherent low-carbon growth or development strategy. This wider strategy advocated by the   Global Climate Network would include tough carbon standards for specific products or sectors; tax incentives to drive investment in low-carbon energy; structural changes to energy markets to encourage greater efficiency and renewable energy and government support for research, development and deployment.

The chances of success at the Copenhagen summit in December are already in the balance. They depend on reaching consensus in all of the key areas of the climate negotiation – emissions-reduction targets included. But the collective need for a technology revolution to fight climate change and achieve the necessary reductions is overwhelming. A clear commitment by G8 countries to find finance for this endeavour and agreement at the MEF to collaborate on the development of new technology could yet lay the foundations for agreement. A turning-point protocol that will benefit the world – and please the Danes too. The prize is too great to let slip away.

——

attachment:

The Global Climate Network is an alliance of nine influential think-tanks in countries key to successful international action on climate change. Its secretariat is based at the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) in London. Its prominent representatives   are:

John D Podesta, president and CEO, Center for American Progress, USA

Rajendra K Pachauri, director-general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India; chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Jiahua Pan, executive director of the Research Centre for Sustainable Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China

Rubens Born, director, Vitae Civilis, Brazil

Manfred Fischedick, vice-president, Wuppertal Institute, Germany

John Connor, chief executive, The Climate Institute, Australia

Lisa Harker and Carey Oppenheim, co-directors, ippr, UK

Andrew Gilder, director, IMBEWU Sustainability Legal Specialists, South Africa

Ewah Eleri, director, International Centre for Energy, Environment and Development, Nigeria.

EU ministers shirk third-world climate finance.
by LEIGH PHILLIPS, EUobserver, Brussels, March 3, 2009.

Poorer countries have been left hanging by EU environment ministers, who at a meeting in Brussels failed to produce any clear funding commitments to help the developing world tackle climate change.

Ministers from the 27 member states were in the European capital on Monday (2 March) to discuss proposals published in January by the European Commission on what stance to take at the upcoming UN conference in Copenhagen in December.

The developing world will be hit much harder by climate change than the wealthy north.

It is too early to reveal what offers will be put on the table, the ministers argued, particularly as the US has yet to make public its negotiating stance.

“We were not quite able to reach consensus on the financing mechanism. This is an issue where the [European] Council will need more discussion time,” said EU environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, also in attendance at the ministers’ meeting.

Recognising that northern industrialised nations are responsible for 75 percent of global warming, these countries have committed to making the bulk of CO2 reductions.

The expected grand bargain in Denmark would be that if the EU and US stump up significant chunks of cash for cutting emissions and climate adaptation, developing countries will commit to considerable CO2 reductions in return.

Specifically, the EU is hoping for a commitment from the global south – with the exception of the least developed countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa – of CO2 reductions of between 15 and 30 percent on 1990 levels.

However, despite the speed with which the EU and US found €2.6 trillion to bail out financial institutions over the course of 2008, coming up with funds for third-world climate measures is now proving much more elusive.

At their Monday meeting, the environment ministers kicked the topic up to the level of EU heads of state, due to meet in Brussels on 19 and 20 March, meaning any decision must be taken unanimously. Prior to that, on 10 March, EU finance ministers are also to discuss the issue.

Environment ministers did however endorse the sum that the commission had suggested in its January proposals would need to be spent by all countries around the world to combat climate change – roughly €175 billion annually by 2020, with half of that having to be invested in the developing world.

–=–=–=–

Paris vs. Warsaw

The two issues of how much of that half would come from the EU and, crucially, how much from each EU member state are at the heart of debate between the ministers.

According to the commission’s proposals, EU financing for the developing world would come either through an annual financial commitment on the basis of an agreed formula, or by a percentage of monies coming from revenues produced by the creation of a carbon market across all wealthy countries similar to Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

If the EU opts for the fixed commitments, the formula to share out the burden would involve a calculation based on a member state’s GDP, its emissions in comparison to GDP, and the size of its population.

Paris wants added to this formula a consideration of the amount of emissions per capita.

France likes this idea because it has the lowest emissions per capita in the EU. Poland, meanwhile, is not such a great fan because of its dependence on coal, an extremely dirty source of energy.

Green groups and development agencies said they were getting impatient with the EU on the question of climate finance.

“While billions of taxpayers’ money is being used to prop up failed banks and carmakers, not one eurocent is being pledged to help the developing world tackle a problem that Europeans helped create,” said Joris den Blanken, a campaigner with Greenpeace, which is calling for annual contributions by the EU of around €35 billion for climate adaptation measures in the developing world.

“The EU needs to put money on the table now. Treating poor people’s lives as a bargaining tool in climate negotiations is both immoral and misguided as a negotiating strategy,” said Katia Maia, with Oxfam in Brazil.

—————

30 percent not enough:

At the same time, many of those reductions committed to by the EU will not really be performed domestically, as a large chunk of the 20 or 30 percent will come from so-called carbon offsets – essentially where wealthy countries pay poorer ones to make their carbon cuts for them.

From:                      gmail.com
Subject:       Latest columns by Shashi Tharoor
      Date:                     November 17, 2008

Awakening India

by Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed novelist and commentator, is a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Are India and China doomed to Great Power rivalry? Is the “moral” foreign policy of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru obsolete? Will Bollywood replace Hollywood as a source of “soft” power? Is India now a de facto ally of the United States and Japan? Will democracy help or hinder its long-term growth?

The world’s largest democracy is also, to outsiders, the most perplexing. For years, India puttered along, its economy weighed down by the regulations that made up the “license raj” bequeathed by Gandhi and Nehru, producing only a feeble “Hindu” rate of growth. But, over the past 15 years, India has transformed itself into a billion-strong rival to China and a showplace for liberalization whose strength has come to play an irreplaceable role in fueling the world economy.

And yet India’s impressive achievements are more fragile than they may first appear. Indian businesses and Bollywood films have become world beaters, but many obstacles to sustained success remain – from a government that depends on Communist support to the tenacious hold of the caste system, chronic power shortages, and rigid labor laws.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and the author of acclaimed novels such as Riot, The Great Indian Novel, and Show Business, is one of today’s most knowledgeable and provocative observers of India’s global rise and of the myriad perplexities and effervescence of its everyday life. How will India’s increasingly international companies confront stiffening resistance in the West? Why can’t a country that excels at cricket field a decent Olympic team?

In Awakening India, written exclusively every month for Project Syndicate, Tharoor captures and deciphers the multifaceted complexity of the ambitious country that India has become: one where there is much more hope – but also more frustration – than ever before.

Will your readers awaken to India’s new dawn?

–
Holly Ellis Assistant to Dr. Shashi Tharoor Afras Ventures 230 Park
Avenue Suite 2525 New York, NY 10169-0005 646-292-8456 Office
212-661-2153 Fax  Tharoor.Assistant at gmail.com

Postpone UN climate summit, suggests former Irish president.
Former Irish president Mary Robinson has said that a crucial UN climate change summit due to take place in Poland in December should be postponed until after Barack Obama is inaugurated as US president.

Speaking at a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, Robinson, now vice president of the Club of Madrid, an organisation of former world leaders, said, “It would make more sense to postpone the summit until 20 January. It can’t possibly be led by a lack of understanding for the kind of change that Obama wants.

“This summit, which sounds great and sexy, is happening at the wrong time.”

Also speaking at the event, held to publicise the ‘Road to Copenhagen’ initiative – which refers to the UN climate meeting due to take place in 2009 in the Danish city – was commission vice president Margot Wallström.

She said, “The election of Barack Obama has sent a forceful positive signal to the EU. We see it in terms of negotiating a post-Kyoto agreement.

“We find it hugely important that Obama – with his strong statements on climate change – will be president.

“If we can have a signal from America that they are willing to sit down and talk, it will affect China and India.”

The ‘Road to Copenhagen’ project, which Robinson and Wallström are spearheading along with former Norwegian prime minister and UN special envoy on climate change, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was created to give the general public, industry, politicians and NGOs a say in the UN climate negotiations.

The Poznán summit in Poland this December is due to lay down the formal agenda for the whole process, but the decisive summit will be held in Copenhagen next year.

Robinson, Wallström and Brundtland were joined at the press conference by the Icelandic singer Björk, who has started her own climate campaign to find eco-friendly options for Iceland’s rich natural resources.

—————–

Unless postponed until the change in US Administration, Poznan will end up in a ditch and better to postpone it then let it derail the following Copenhagen meeting.

The Road to Copenhagen is a very bright idea if there is a productive Poznan meeting – otherwise Copenhagen will turn naturally into Poznan II and not into a Kyoto II as the UN professionals hope, or a Copenhagen I as an agreement between the US, China, India, Brazil would entail. Poznan is thus a make or brake event on the road to Copenhagen, and a US represented by Paula Dobriansky will just push the rest of those present into the ditch.

Barak Obama cannot speak up before January 20, and obviously cannot have his negotiator vetted by US Congress before he takes over as US President. He said clearly that he works under the rules of the US Constitution that says there is only one President at a given time. Pushing for keeping the Poznan date under these conditions is rather like saying that it is imperative for those opposing the notion that the world must be kept addicted to petroleum and other fossil carbons in their self-interest must have the day.

Barak Obama could appoint his Climate Change negotiator on January 20, 2009, right there at his inaugural speech, and Congress could approve his selection, the speediest, within a month – so, a Poznan meeting in March 2009 is the earliest it makes sense to hold this meeting if you are positively inclined to do something about climate change. We keep saying so for over a year, this even before we had an inkling of who might be next US President. We kept pouring cold water on the UN euphoria with their debate time-line. We are afraid that UN talk is very expensive – it allows people to fly around freely but is not intended to come up with results. Statements by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on how much he wants to see results from the climate change negotiations, and rosy pronunciations from the Executive of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, cannot change the reality that in the end – it is the US President that holds the keys for a positive outcome of the Climate Change negotiations. It is in the promise of the US and the response from the Brazil, China, India, that an effective plan will be born.

See please also:

The Columbia University World Leaders Forum, September 26, 2008, Became The Podium For Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark To Make Known A Roadmap To The December 2009 Climate Change Meeting in Copenhagen. The Prime Minister Is Keenly Interested That The Copenhagen Event Becomes The Turnaround Point From Our Present Descent Towards Global Environmental Disaster, and He Negotiated This Week A Roadmap With The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and The Two Candidates For The US Presidency. We Wished Him All The Luck He Needs; Nevertheless We Expressed Some Skepticism.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 27th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

At a Summit of India, Brazil, South Africa, they ask the rich countries to consider their input on how to manage the current global financial crisis without jeopardizing the development of emerging economies.

“WE are the victims of a crisis generated by the rich countris,” daid Brazilian President Lula at this meeting that is intended to develop a strategy to deal with effects of the crisis.

India’s humble rickshaw goes solar.
by Elizabeth Roche Mon Oct 13, 2008.   NEW DELHI (AFP) – It’s been touted as a solution to urban India’s traffic woes, chronic pollution and fossil fuel dependence, as well as an escape from backbreaking human toil. A state-of-the-art, solar powered version of the humble cycle-rickshaw promises to deliver on all this and more.

The “soleckshaw,” unveiled this month in New Delhi, is a motorised cycle rickshaw that can be pedalled normally or run on a 36-volt solar battery.

Developed by the state-run Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), prototypes are receiving a baptism of fire by being road-tested in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk area.

One of the city’s oldest and busiest markets, dating back to the Moghul era, Chandni Chowk comprises a byzantine maze of narrow, winding streets, choked with buses, cars, scooters, cyclists and brave pedestrians.

“The most important achievement will be improving the lot of rickshaw drivers,” said Pradip Kumar Sarmah, head of the non-profit Centre for Rural Development.

“It will dignify the job and reduce the labour of pedalling. From rickshaw pullers, they will become rickshaw drivers,” Sarmah said.

India has an estimated eight million cycle-rickshaws.

The makeover includes FM radios and powerpoints for charging mobile phones during rides.

Gone are the flimsy metal and wooden frames that give the regular Delhi rickshaws a tacky, sometimes dubious look.

The “soleckshaw,” which has a top speed of 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) per hour, has a sturdier frame and sprung, foam seats for up to three people.

The fully-charged solar battery will power the rickshaw for 50 to 70 kilometres (30 to 42 miles). Used batteries can be deposited at a centralised solar-powered charging station and replaced for a nominal fee.

If the tests go well, the “soleckshaw” will be a key transport link between sporting venues at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

“Rickshaws were always environment friendly. Now this gives a totally new image that would be more acceptable to the middle-classes,” said Anumita Roychoudhary of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.

“Rickshaws have to be seen as a part of the solution for modern traffic woes and pollution. They have never been the problem. The problem is the proliferation of automobiles using fossil fuels,” she said.

Initial public reaction to the “soleckshaw” has been generally favourable, and the rickshaw pullers have few doubts about its benefits.

“Pedalling the rickshaw was very difficult for me,” said Bappa Chatterjee, 25, who migrated to the capital from West Bengal and is one of the 500,000 pullers in Delhi.

“I used to suffer chest pains and shortage of breath going up inclines. This is so much easier.

“Earlier, when people hailed us it was like, ‘Hey you rickshaw puller!’ Police used to harass us, slapping fines even abusing us for what they called wrong parking. Now people look at me with respect,” Chatterjee said.

Mohammed Matin Ansari, another migrant from eastern Bihar state, said the new model offered parity with car, bus and scooter drivers.

“Now we are as good as them,” he said.

Indian authorities have big dreams for the “soleckshaw.”

India’s Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal who hailed the invention for its “zero carbon foot print” said it should be used beyond the confines of Delhi.

“Soleckshaws would be ideal for small families visiting the Taj Mahal,” he told AFP.

At present battery-operated buses ferry people to the iconic monument in Agra — but their limited numbers cannot cope with the heavy tourist rush.

CSIR director Sinha said he hoped an advanced version of the “soleckshaw” with a car-like body would become a viable alternative to the “small car” favoured by Indian middle class families.

“Greenhouse gas emissions are showing an increasing trend year on year and 60 percent of this comes from the global transport sector.

“In the age of global warming, the soleckshaw, with improvements, can be successfully developed as competition for all the petrol and diesel run small cars,” Sinha said.

VIII conferência internacional da Datagro
Sobre açúcar e álcool

VIII international Datagro
Conference on sugar and alcohol

Neste ano, mais uma vez a DATAGRO realiza a sua VIII conferência internacional da DATAGRO sobre açúcar e álcool nos dias 27 e 28 de outubro de 2008, no Hotel Grand Hyatt São Paulo, à Av. Nações Unidas 13301.

Realizada em ambiente agradável, a conferência já se tornou tradicional centro de referência dos principais temas e preocupações do setor para os integrantes de sua cadeia produtiva, proporcionando também ótima oportunidade de networking. O evento contará ainda com ótima infra-estrutura de serviços e tradução simultânea português-inglês-português.
Na edição passada a Conferência Internacional da DATAGRO sobre açúcar e álcool reuniu mais de 530 participantes de 30 países, tendo sido um dos maiores e melhores encontros das maiores autoridades mundiais do setor sucro-alcooleiro. Distinguiu-se promovendo debates e levantando questões de suma importância para o desenvolvimento e crescimento do setor.

Para fazer sua inscrição on-line acesse o site www.conferencia.datagro.com.br ou envie um fax para (0XX11) 4195-6659. Outras informações pelo telefone (0XX11) 4133-3944, com Sr. Alyson.

Again this year, DATAGRO is organizing its VIII international DATAGRO conference on sugar and alcohol on October 27th and 28th, 2008 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel grounds, São Paulo-Brazil?. Held in a pleasant environment, the conference became a traditional center of reference on sugar and alcohol for the production chain members. Also, it provides a good opportunity for networking with the global leaders of these industries. The conference will offer outstanding infrastructure of services and will be available simultaneous translation Portuguese/English/Portuguese.

In the last edition, the international DATAGRO conference on sugar and alcohol attracted more than 530 participants from 30 different countries and was one of the biggest major encounters of the top global authorities in the areas of sugar and alcohol, distinguishing itself by promoting debates and pointing high important questions about the sector growth and development.

Please visit the conference website www.conferencia.datagro.com.br where you will find the conference program, hotel information, and online registration. For more information call us at (5511) 4133-3944 or send a fax to (5511)4195-6659.

Palestrantes Confirmados:
Confirmed Speakers:

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter Baron – Diretor Executivo da International Sugar Organization (ISO) – U.K.
Alexis Duval РTereos РFran̤a
Dr. Bruce Babcock – Director, CARD – Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University –   USA
Charlote Opal – Coordinator, Roundtable on Sustained Biofuels – Switzerland
Cláudio Piquet Pessoa – Diretor, Glencore Importadora e Exportadora S/A, Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
Douglas Newman – International Trade Commission – Washington, DC.
Edson Menezes da Silva – Superintendente de Abastecimento, ANP – Agencia Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis, Rio de Janeiro – Brasil
Eduardo Pereira Carvalho – ETH Bioenergia – Brasil
Guilherme Nastari – DATAGRO – Brasil
Ingo Kalder – Sugar Division, Cargill Agricola S/A – Brasil
Jonathan Kingsman – Kingsman & Co – Lausanne, Switzerland
Joseph Schmidhuber – Senior Economist – Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – Italy
Manoel Ortolan – Presidente CANAOESTE – Brasil
Manoel Vicente Bertone – Secretário de Produção e Agroenergia, Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) – Brasil
Michael Betenson – Diretor Comercial da CRYSTALSEV – Ribeirão Preto, Brasil
Dr. Pedro Valls – Professor   Doutor, Fundação Getulio Vargas – Brasil
Dr. Plinio Mario Nastari – Presidente DATAGRO – Brasil
S̩rgio Trindade РSE2T РEUA
Stephen Kanitz – Articulista Revista Veja

Presidentes dos Sindicatos das Indústrias do açúcar e do álcool

André Luiz Baptista Lins Rocha – Goiás
Anísio Tormena – Paraná
Antonio Jose de Sousa РMaranḥo
Eduardo Ribeiro Coutinho – Paraíba
Jos̩ Pessoa de Queiroz Bisneto РMato Grosso do Sul
Luis Custódio Cotta Martins – Minas Gerais
Marcos Jank РṢo Paulo
Pedro Rob̩rio de Melo Nogueira РAlagoas
Piero Vicenzo Parini – Mato Grosso
Renato Pontes Cunha – Pernambuco

Impasse: Are We Nearing the End of the Corporate Globalization Era?
By Deborah James, AlterNet. Posted August 21, 2008.

The failure to expand the WTO shows that the ideology of “free trade” has lost its luster.

When the history of the seismic shifts occurring today in the global economy is written, the failure in July 2008 of corporate interests and some governments to expand the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Doha Round will stand as a watershed moment.

It was in this lakeside town where negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies, to which the majority of governments have said “no”, time and time again (in Seattle in 1999, Mexico in 2003, and Geneva in 2006). WTO Director General Pascal Lamy attempted a last-minute push to conclude a Doha deal by calling for an exclusive, invitation-only mini-Ministerial of around 30 of the WTO’s 153 members in Geneva last month, despite wide divergences in political positions within the areas of negotiation, and despite the fact the Bush administration has no authority to sign any potential deal.

And since it wasn’t enough of an abrogation of democratic process to exclude four-fifths of the WTO’s membership from the so-called “Green Room” negotiations, when talks failed to converge amongst those 30 countries, Lamy continued negotiations with a mere seven members, including almost all of the developed world, yet excluding all of Africa — in a round that proponents still shamelessly refer to as a “Development Round.” Many developing countries such as Bolivia and Kenya and even the host, Switzerland, raised significant process concerns about their exclusion from the meeting, but their concerns were dismissed by Lamy.

Were Africans allowed to participate in the secret discussions, they would have demanded resolution on issues such as the reform of U.S. cotton subsidies to 20,000 domestic producers, which encourage overproduction and erode the income of 10 million African cotton farmers in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, driving many of them out of business and reducing revenues key to health care and education budgets for the poor. Some observers have highlighted Africans’ strong stand on development issues when they were allowed at the table. Many have even argued that rich countries’ desire to avoid key African issues such as cotton is actually what led to the collapse, but this part of the story seems just too ugly to have been repeated in the U.S. press.

Recent coverage in the United States of the talks’ failure has focused on the negotiating positions of various countries, particularly blaming India and China. But when one delves into the underlying issues, it becomes clear that much more was at stake in the negotiations than “trade,” and that the collapse was due to forces far greater than individual countries’ positions — including issues surrounding the food, climate, and financial crises — as well as the lack of progress on development due to the failure of neoliberal policies to actually promote growth or reduce poverty. Given the changes in international political dynamics as well as the global agenda, the collapse in the current negotiations will have far-reaching impacts beyond just the WTO.

Food Sovereignty or Food Crisis:

Take agriculture, for example, the issue cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse. India, supported by the vast majority of developing countries, fought for the right to be allowed within the WTO to protect its farmers, food security, and rural development from the volatility of the commodity markets. Surges of subsidized imported products have so devastated local agricultural producers, who represent three-fifths of the workforce in a population of 1.1 billion people, that it is said that over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in recent years. However, U.S. negotiators wouldn’t allow for the protections, and demanded increased access to poor countries’ markets for its agribusiness exports, while refusing to reduce the cap on domestic subsidies below twice their current rate.

It is not a coincidence that the talks fell apart over issues related to agriculture, in a year where countries from Haiti to Pakistan and Mexico to Cameroon have seen riots break out over food prices. While commodity prices are fortunately on a slight decline, the food crisis is eroding allegiance to the free trade dogma in agriculture. Many developing countries that used to be able to take care of their own food needs are now heavily dependent on imports. Two-thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. Decades of IMF and World Bank-mandated structural adjustment policies, coupled with “free trade agreements” as well as WTO policies, have forced developing countries to reduce tariffs — which, combined with high levels of permitted subsidies in rich countries — has eviscerated the productive capacity of many developing countries. WTO policies have also contributed to the erosion of the family farm in the United States and other rich countries. Further WTO expansion would exacerbate, not solve the food crisis, no matter the claims of Lamy.

Another key factor at play in the negotiations in Geneva was the continued mobilization against the expansion of these failed policies by civil society worldwide. For example, farmers in India have been organizing massive protests over the last many years against the WTO. Their anger sharpened as they witnessed the harsh pressure their government was subjected to during the talks, including at least three personal calls from President Bush to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the negotiations.

Farmers from Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and other countries lobbied their representatives in Geneva while keeping civil society at home up to date about the state of play in the negotiations. They pressured their governments to resist the anti-development demands, and helped ensure the victory of the collapse.

Kicking Away the Ladder of Development:

A similar dynamic emerged in the other major pillar of the negotiations in Geneva, regarding tariffs on industrial goods. Tariffs are essentially taxes that corporations pay to governments for the privilege of selling their goods, and making a profit, in another country. Strategic use of tariffs has been a core strategy of any industrialization policy; governments increase tariffs to protect infant industries from foreign competition to promote domestic jobs and development, then lower tariffs when those industries are competitive, to save consumers money. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang illuminates, the U.S. had the world’s highest tariffs at the turn of the century, during our industrialization. Now, rich countries are essentially saying, “Do as I say, not as I did,” arguing that developing countries should reduce their tariffs, because rich countries now have lower tariffs and are richer. This amounts to the proverbial Kicking Away the Ladder of development (PDF).

In the WTO this plays out in the area of negotiations called “Non Agricultural Market Access,” or NAMA in WTO-speak. Both developed and developing countries have agreed to reduce tariffs, within the Doha mandate of Less Than Full Reciprocity. This means that developing countries are supposed to gain more “market access” to developed countries (and hence reduce their own tariffs by a lesser percentage) than vice versa. However, in the actual negotiations, rich countries demanded that developing countries slash their bound tariffs by an average of about 60 percent, while only offering to cut their own tariffs by half as much (about 28 percent.)

According to the International Trade Union Confederation, these tariff cuts would result in tens of thousands of lost jobs in newly-industrializing developing countries, in the midst of a crisis of poverty and lack of development progress in many countries. In addition, the Third World Network has pointed out that the cuts will also foreclose the possibilities for industrial development for many of the poorest countries. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that tariff losses (which provide for a significant portion of health and education budgets in many developing countries) would amount to nearly four times the small projected “gains” for developing countries from the Doha Round.

Fortunately, trade unionists from South Africa, India, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other countries have become increasingly vocal about their concerns, and traveled to Geneva to lobby their governments, raise their voices in the media, and ensure that workers at home were putting pressure on their capitals to defend their interests. While the issue of industrial tariff cuts was not reported as being the deal-breaker this time, it is clear that it will remain a primary objective of the rich countries in the negotiations.

WTO Expansion would Exacerbate, not Solve, Climate, Financial Crises:

Agriculture and jobs-and-development are not the only arenas in which it is becoming increasingly evident that the WTO is a contributor to, rather than a solution to, present global crises. The global climate crisis will also require new, innovative solutions. Unfortunately many of those ideas will clash with WTO prohibitions on regulatory policies that could, in some way, unintentionally restrict trade. We already know that shipping products tens of thousands of miles across the world so that corporations can take advantage of cheap labor in some countries, weak environmental standards in others, and developed consumer markets in yet a third, contributes significantly to global warming. Do we really want our ability to preserve life on our planet to be constrained by the WTO?

No issue has dominated headlines this year more than the global financial crisis, now widely agreed to have been facilitated by a lack of adequate regulation in the financial markets. Yet in the WTO negotiations on services, further deregulation and liberalization of the financial markets are sought by rich countries, representing the interest of their financial industries. It is without logic that the WTO Director General, Pascal Lamy, has called for a conclusion to the WTO expansion agenda as a solution to the global financial crisis, when its actual policies would, by any sensible estimation, contribute to further instability.

While negotiations on services were not much in the headlines, they were a key part of the WTO agenda in July. While the chair of the services negotiations attempted to pressure countries to expand the current level of services liberalization to the “maximum extent possible,” a group of countries — Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — successfully rejected the maneuver. But going further, they also circulated a proposal to remove health care, education, water, telecommunications, and energy from the WTO, on the basis that these essential public services are human rights which governments have an obligation to provide, and should not be treated as tradable commodities. These efforts were immediately supported by over 100 civil society organizations around the world within 36 hours
Doha at an Impasse: Where do we go from here?

Many fear that the collapse of the multilateral talks will lead to increased pressure for bilateral and regional deals using the same (and often even more extreme) policies as the WTO. As well, each time the Doha Round has “collapsed” it has also been called forth from the dead, and negotiations resumed. And of course, irrespective of the collapse of the attempted expansion, the WTO will continue to regulate global trade in favor of corporate profit and against the interests of workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment.

However, this time is different. Confidence in the particular policies of corporate globalization has eroded significantly since the founding of the WTO, due principally to the abysmal failure of these policies to promote growth, equity, and sustainable development in countries of both the north and the south in the last three decades (and the failure of the WTO to do the same since 1995). As well, studies projecting “gains” from a Doha Round, having been greatly exaggerated by WTO proponents, shrank over time and remained paltry — about one penny per day per person in the developing world. (The best recent summary of the gains and losses is examined here (PDF).)

At the same time, some governments are increasingly experimenting with alternative policies, such as regional integration, resource nationalization, South-South trade, and increasing budgets for health and education, which are delivering growth and prosperity far more effectively. Just to give an example, the increased growth above the Latin American average growth of just Argentina and Venezuela over the last four years has brought combined gains of $140 billion to those two countries. This real economic growth dwarfs the projected gains of $16 billion for all developing countries combined (according to the most recent World Bank projections for a likely Doha conclusion; both figures in constant 2001 dollars.)

Just as importantly, global politics have re-aligned since Doha was launched. Developing countries are far less likely to accept policies handed down by the governments of rich nations, many of them having gained freedom from the economic dictates of the IMF in recent years. And while Brazil, India, and China may be the most oft-cited emerging market powerhouses, developing countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia are increasingly demanding a stronger voice in international fora.

And in the United States, Herculean efforts are being made to ensure that our next Congress and president actually implement the fair trade policies demanded by citizens who have suffered from lost jobs, stagnant real wages, and corporations gone wild for far too long, including through the new TRADE Act.

Civil society organizations have for years developed a number of ideas for a different paradigm for expanding global prosperity and sustainable development, through policies that would establish global financial stability, contribute to solving rather than exacerbating the climate crisis, and that promote countries’ ability to feed their populations, among other goals. In defeating WTO expansion one more time, the political space has been created in which these alternative policies and paradigms could flourish. That space could also shrivel up, if civil society does not keep working to ensure that the negotiations do not resume.

What is needed now is the continued organizing to keep that political space open, coupled with the political will convert the innovative policymaking already in motion into a new economic paradigm globally that can discipline harmful corporate practices while actually increasing growth, reducing poverty, and expanding sustainable development globally. Only then may the victims of that fourth, most neglected crisis — the one in which over a billion of our fellow human citizens today suffer from extreme, often lethal poverty — ever find hope for a better future.

Deborah James is the Director of International Programs for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a Board member of Global Exchange.

VIII conferência internacional da Datagro Sobre açúcar e álcool

VIII international Datagro Conference on sugar and alcohol

Neste ano, mais uma vez a DATAGRO realiza a sua VIII conferência internacional da DATAGRO sobre açúcar e álcool nos dias 27 e 28 de outubro de 2008, no Hotel Grand Hyatt São Paulo, à Av. Nações Unidas 13301. Realizada em ambiente agradável, a conferência já se tornou tradicional centro de referência dos principais temas e preocupações do setor para os integrantes de sua cadeia produtiva, proporcionando também ótima oportunidade de networking. O evento contará ainda com ótima infra-estrutura de serviços e tradução simultânea português-inglês-português.

Na edição passada a Conferência Internacional da DATAGRO sobre açúcar e álcool reuniu mais de 530 participantes de 30 países, tendo sido um dos maiores e melhores encontros das maiores autoridades mundiais do setor sucro-alcooleiro. Distinguiu-se promovendo debates e levantando questões de suma importância para o desenvolvimento e crescimento do setor.

Para fazer sua inscrição on-line acesse o site www.conferencia.datagro.com.br ou envie um fax para (0XX11) 4195-6659. Outras informações pelo telefone (0XX11) 4133-3944, com Sr. Alyson.

Again this year, DATAGRO is organizing its VIII international DATAGRO conference on sugar and alcohol on October 27th and 28th, 2008 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel grounds, São Paulo-Brazil.

Held in a pleasant environment, the conference became a traditional center of reference on sugar and alcohol for the production chain members. Also, it provides a good opportunity for networking with the global leaders of these industries. The conference will offer outstanding infrastructure of services and will be available simultaneous translation Portuguese/English/Portuguese.

In the last edition, the international DATAGRO conference on sugar and alcohol attracted more than 530 participants from 30 different countries and was one of the biggest major encounters of the top global authorities in the areas of sugar and alcohol, distinguishing itself by promoting debates and pointing high important questions about the sector growth and development.

Please visit the conference website www.conferencia.datagro.com.br where you will find the conference program, hotel information, and online registration. For more information call us at (5511) 4133-3944 or send a fax to (5511)4195-6659.

Palestrantes Confirmados:
Confirmed Speakers:

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter Baron – Diretor Executivo da International Sugar Organization (ISO) – U.K.
Manoel Ortolan – Presidente CANAOESTE – Brasil
Plinio Mario Nastari – Presidente DATAGRO – Brazil
Rui Lacerda Ferraz – Presidente da CRYSTALSEV – Brasil
Manoel Vicente Bertone – Secretário de Produção e Agroenergia, Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) – Brazil
Dr. Pedro Valls – Professor   Doutor, Fundação Getulio Vargas – Brazil
Guilherme Nastari – DATAGRO – Brazil
Eduardo Pereira Carvalho – ETH Bioenergia – Brazil
Dr. Bruce Babcock – Director, CARD – Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University –   USA
Ingo Kalder – Sugar Division, Cargill Agricola S/A – Brazil
Joseph Schmidhuber – Senior Economist – Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – Italy
S̩rgio Trindade РSE2T РEUA
John Mathews – MacQuarie? University – Australia
Charlote Opal – Coordinator, Roundtable on Sustained Biofuels – Switzerland

Presidentes dos Sindicatos das Indústrias do açúcar e do álcool

Anísio Tormena – Paraná
Eduardo Ribeiro Coutinho – Paraíba
Jos̩ Pessoa de Queiroz Bisneto РMato Grosso do Sul
Luis Custódio Cotta Martins – Minas Gerais
Marcos Jank РṢo Paulo
Renato Pontes Cunha – Pernambuco
André Luiz Baptista Lins Rocha – Goiás

India’s Temples Go Green.
Monday, July 7, 2008 By MADHUR SINGH, Time Magazine.
 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0…

The Tirumala temple, in the south Indian city of Tirupathi, is one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines. Over 5,000 pilgrims a day visit this city of seven hills, filling Tirumala’s coffers with donations and making it India’s richest temple. But since 2002, Tirumala has also been generating revenue from a less likely source: carbon credits. For decades, the temple’s community kitchen has fed nearly 15,000 people, cooking 30,000 meals a day. Five years ago, Tirumala adopted solar cooking technology, allowing it to dramatically cut down on the amount of diesel fuel it uses. The temple now sells the emission reduction credits it earns to a Swiss green-technology investor, Good Energies Inc.

Like Tirumala, dozens of holy places across India are moving quietly towards green energy. Muni Seva Ashram, in Gujarat, which combines spiritual practice with social activism, is working to make its premises entirely green by using solar, wind and biogas energy. A residential school for 400 students is already running exclusively on green energy. Starting this year, the ashram will also sell three million carbon credits. A similar movement is afoot at the revered Sai Baba Temple in Shirdi, Maharashtra. “Our aim is to avoid pollution in every way,” says Raghunath Aher, the temple’s chief engineer. “A holy place should be pure and completely in harmony with nature.”
It’s not surprising that religious groups are in the vanguard of India’s green movement: India is the birthplace of four of the world’s largest religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, all of which revere nature and preach conservation. But the country’s environmental practice hasn’t always matched that preaching, leaving its air and water woefully polluted. According to the World Bank, emissions increased 57% in the decade following the India’s economic liberalization.

Now, however, religious groups, keen to marry spirituality with sustainability, are leading the push to reverse that trend. Deepak Gadhia, founder of Gadhia Solar Energy Systems, which provided solar cooking technology to Tirumala temple, says more and more religious organizations have approached him in recent years. “With most businesses, the first question is of economics,” he says, “But spiritual organizations look at larger issues. They want energy that is spiritually positive.”
Art of Living, for instance, a 25-year-old spiritual organization that claims nearly 30 million followers in India, focuses on returning to “the way of life espoused in the ancient Hindu scriptures,” according to spokesperson Mamta Kailkhura. The group is working with the government of Uttaranchal state to clean up the Ganges River and devise a waste disposal system for the holy city of Rishikesh. In the villages near Art of Living’s ashram in Bangalore, a program to teach farmers organic methods and ancient water harvesting techniques is afoot. The ashram itself uses biogas for part of its lighting requirements, and recycles all of its water. Of course, it all makes sound economic sense: with the government subsidizing up to 50% of the costs of installing green technology, temples like Tirumala can make steady returns selling the resulting carbon credits.

And India’s faith-based organizations are also helping spread the gospel of green.

The UK-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation, which works with the UN to involve religious groups in environmental outreach, is working on a conservation campaign in the holy city of Vrindavan, as well as pushing India’s 28,000 Sikh temples to convert their kitchens to green technology. The combined potential of such efforts is limitless. India’s religious groups have sizable incomes, own vast amounts of land, and have enormous influence on public opinion through their educational institutions. Indeed, with 99% of Indians professing to one faith or another, the country’s green movement might not have a prayer without them.