IBSA are the three States, India, Brazil, South Africa, who together with China, are the leading developing countries that emerged as serious global economic powers. The IBSA, jointly, will increasingly be demanding the world’s recognition of their new status and enhanced position in bodies the like of the UN Security Council. China obviously eclipses for now the other three, and does thus have on our website its separate button. China is also already a member of the UN Security Council. Germany and Japan are the other two contenders for space at the UN Security Council table, but geopolitical configurations, and their status as old members of the OECD, makes it more difficult for them, as time goes by, to aspire to permanent seats at bodies like the Security Council.
CIBS is the way it is expressed when one wants to emphasize that China is also connected to the IBSA in a group of four main Southern Engines of Growth - China, India, Brazil, South Africa.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 16th, 2007 An excellent article on the essence of the problem of ethics in global warming - past and present. THE WORLD By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Graphic Comment on this article at Dot Earth » The talks in Bali over the last two weeks were just the latest baby step in trying to make that happen. The Bali achievement? Two more years of talks. In the meantime, concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main climate-heating emission, continue the climb that began 250 years ago, as industrialization surged on a diet of fossil fuels. So, presuming the industrialized and industrializing nations are serious, who or what can realistically turn the carbon tide? As always, the fingers of many experts on energy and the environment point both west and east — to the United States and China. The established superpower arose riding a wave of fossil-fueled prosperity. The emerging one, sitting on a wealth of coal, sees few reasons not to follow suit; after all, it has only just caught its wave (with India and others in hot pursuit). Yet the tide can only be turned, a host of scientists and economists with varied perspectives agree, if China and other rising powers like India speed through the familiar path in nation building — resource extraction, industrial and economic growth, accompanying despoliation, and then environmental restoration and protection. If they don’t, their emissions will eventually swamp all other sources, according to many analyses. Richard Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, helped produce an ominous forecast: even if the established industrial powers turned off every power plant and car right now, unless there are changes in policy in poorer countries the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could still reach 450 parts per million — a level deemed unacceptably dangerous by many scientists — by 2070. (If no one does anything, that threshold is reached in 2040.) Libertarians say that once countries get rich, they’ll do the right thing for the climate. But critics of this view say the long life of carbon dioxide (and of sources like the coal-burning plants China is building at the rate of one a week) mean that waiting just compounds the problem beyond fixing. Theories abound over how best to help China embrace emissions-reducing policies. One way, many scientists and scholars say, is to make nonpolluting energy sources cheaper than the unfettered burning of abundant fossil fuels. Right now they are far more expensive. That is why several dozen top-flight climate and energy experts sent a letter this month to members of Congress and the presidential candidates seeking a tenfold rise in the federal budget for energy research, now about $3 billion a year. Some economists say the only thing that will speed the change is money, whether it is called aid, technology assistance, or something else. Representatives of developing countries have long made this point, noting that the established powers spent a century building the greenhouse-gas blanket. Speaking in Bali, Munir Akram, Pakistan’s United Nations ambassador, said: “What we have to do is to find a way to reduce emissions by those who can afford to reduce emissions.” But there are plenty of doubts about the willingness of Congress, particularly, to pay emerging economic competitors. Some experts see the best prospects for change coming from the ground up, pointing to efforts like MetroBus, a program involving the World Resources Institute that greatly expanded the use of mass transit in Mexico City. BinBin Jiang, a research associate in energy and development at Stanford University, sees similar opportunities in creating an efficient infrastructure for China’s exploding midsize cities. “That’s where you determine if you are going to leapfrog or go along the old Western path,” she said. But Ms. Jiang also stressed that meaningful change in energy and climate policy within the United States was critical, too. “China is clearly responsible for the largest wedge of emissions in the future, but the United States is still the biggest roadblock,” she said. “The U.S. is not going to be influential by telling China what to do. It has to lead by example.” Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 16th, 2007
By Charles Clover, Environment Editor,Telegraph.co.uk from Bali An extraordinary day began with a fresh text of the Bali “road map” which Indonesia’s Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar, as president of the conference, presented to delegates saying a “delicate balance” had been achieved. India’s ambassador immediately made clear that he was not prepared to go along without it being made clear that there was responsibility of industrialised nations to supply developing countries with clean technologies, finance and support to deal with them problem “in a measurable manner.” The crucial part of the agreement for developing countries had been rewritten overnight in a way that G77 countries said made it unclear that the supply of finance and clean technology, such as clean coal plants, had to be measurable reportable and verifiable. China piled in, then Pakistan, and it became clear that this was a full scale row. This Mr de Boer, in tears after two nights without sleep, later denied, to supportive applause. Mr Yudhoyono urged the conference not to allow “the planet to crumble because we can’t find the right wording.” Mr Ban said he was “disappointed at the lack of progress” and pointed out the conference was already due to have ended five hours earlier. This was at 1.20 pm local time.
The killer blow came from the Harvard-educated representative of Papua New Guinea, Kevin Conrad, who used Mr Connaughton’s diplomatic gaffe of earlier in the week to humiliate the Americans. Mr Connaughton had said: “We will lead. We will continue to lead but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.” Mr Conrad said, to applause: “If you are not willing to lead, then get out of the way.” Miss Dobriansky finally pressed her button to speak again and said: “We will go forward and join the consensus.” After cheers and diplomatic congratulations, the president of the conference assessed that “we are very, very close”, then banged his gavel down on India’s proposal to mark that a consensus had been achieved. ——————————- By Charles J. Hanley, AP Special Correspondent Published on Guardian.co.UK, Saturday December 15, 2007 7:31 AM. BALI, Indonesia (AP) - The “Bali Roadmap” for new climate negotiations leads to one address and one date: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and Jan. 20, 2009. The faceoff played out again in Bali this past week, when the U.S. delegation blocked an effort to insert an ambitious negotiating goal for the next two years - emissions cuts of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. It was a repeat of what has happened consistently since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which mandated relatively small reductions but was rejected by the U.S. Time now may be on the side of emission cuts proponents. From California to New England, U.S. state governments are enacting their own mandatory caps on carbon dioxide and other industrial and transportation gases blamed for global warming. Scores of U.S. cities have adopted Kyoto-style targets, trimming emissions via “green” building codes, conversion of municipal fleets to hybrid vehicles, energy-saving lighting and other measures. Judging from recent opinion polls, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the southeastern U.S. drought and the California wildfires apparently are awakening more and more Americans to the potential perils of climate change. “The majority of the United States is with you,” California’s environment secretary, Linda Adams, told the hundreds of Bali conference delegates last week. “We know that climate change affects all of us.” In Washington, too, there’s movement after years of inaction. A Senate committee has approved the first legislation mandating caps on greenhouse gases and sent it to the full Senate. “What you see is a new direction coming,” said David Doniger, a veteran climate policy analyst with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “And this new direction is a very clear indication of where our policy is going in the future.” That policy will be set primarily by the new president, and the Democratic presidential candidates and at least two of the Republicans - Arizona’s Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee - have endorsed mandatory emissions caps. “I really hope that that is a discussion” - about emissions reduction levels - “taken up toward the end of that two-year debate,” he told reporters. Rising seas, expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melted land ice, are encroaching on low-lying island states, especially in the western Pacific. In these islanders’ minds, the roadmaps and new directions were needed a decade or more ago.
Climate Plan Looks Beyond Bush’s Tenure. NUSA DUA, Indonesia — The world’s faltering effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions got a new lease on life on Saturday, as delegates from 187 countries agreed to negotiate a new accord over the next two years — pushing the crucial debates about United States participation into the administration of a new American president. Many officials and environmental campaigners said American negotiators had remained obstructionist until the final hour of the two-week convention and had changed their stance only after public rebukes that included boos and hisses from other delegates. The resulting “Bali Action Plan” contains no binding commitments, which European countries had sought and the United States fended off. The plan concludes that “deep cuts in global emissions will be required” and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty since the Kyoto Protocol 10 years ago. But the White House, while calling the negotiating plan “quite positive” in a printed statement, said the problem lay elsewhere. It described “serious concerns” about the limited steps taken by emerging economic powers. Without citing China and India by name, it clearly singled them out, saying: “The negotiations must proceed on the view that the problem of climate change cannot be adequately addressed through commitments for emissions cuts by developed countries alone. Major developing economies must likewise act.” In the talks, China and other emerging powers did inch forward, agreeing for the first time to seek ways to make “measurable, reportable and verifiable” emissions cuts. But those countries showed no signs of agreeing to any mandatory restrictions any time soon, saying their priority remained growing out of poverty. The standoff started when developing countries demanded that the United States agree that the eventual pact measure not only poorer countries’ steps, but also the effectiveness of financial and technological assistance from wealthier ones. The United States capitulated in that open session, which many observers and delegates said included more public acrimony than any of the treaty conferences since the 1992 framework. The concession, though, came after a more profound shift by the Bush administration, which agreed during the two-week conference to pursue a new pact fulfilling the unmet goals of the original treaty; the pact would take effect in 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires. While many observers described the United States change as a U-turn, it was the culmination of months of movement by the Bush administration, which had for years insisted that the 1992 treaty was enough to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate. In 2005 talks in Montreal, for example, the American negotiating team walked out of one session, rejecting any talk of formal negotiations to improve on that pact. Still, while accepting on Saturday the need for a new agreement, the United States retained the flexibility that it had sought at the outset, fending off European attempts to set binding commitments on emission reductions. American negotiators said that was vital to gain global consensus. Andrew Light, an expert on environmental ethics at the University of Washington who was in Bali, criticized the Bush administration for insisting on those targets being sidelined, saying the United States had, in essence, rejected the foreboding climate projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which it had repeatedly praised in recent weeks. “We could have moved on from here with a confident range of future cuts,” Mr. Light said. “Instead we have to move on with the same continued uncertainty. At the beginning of the week I was really heartened by the public praise the U.S. delegation was giving to the I.P.C.C. and now I can’t help but think, was it all lip service?” Some environmental groups criticized Europe for not sticking to its guns. But it appeared that, in the end, the Europeans followed a path recommended in a speech last Monday by former Vice President Al Gore, fresh from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. He advised Bali negotiators to look beyond the Bush administration, whose tenure ends in one year. Beyond the histrionics and the politics, there were deeper reasons for the continuing clashes: in particular, the huge wave of industrialization and economic growth sweeping Asia. The United States and Europe were largely responsible for taking the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, to its current concentration of 380 parts per million from 280, a level which, until the industrial revolution, was not exceeded in at least 650,000 years. But the growth in emissions for decades to come will largely be driven by developing countries, where some two billion people still cook on firewood or dung and crave the comforts and prosperity that come with abundant energy. According to a recent analysis led by economists at the Electric Power Research Institute, if rich and poor countries do not together divert from “business as usual,” the concentration by 2040 could exceed 450 parts per million, a threshold that many scientists say could set in motion harmful changes for centuries to come. Europe prevailed over the United States in one area, insisting that the next two years of talks proceed on two tracks: one for those countries, including the United States, not committing to mandatory limits, and a second building on the Kyoto Procotol, the 1997 update to the original treaty that requires emissions reductions in 36 major industrialized nations, but has been rejected by the United States. The United States team in Bali had fought against that, demanding that a new agreement encompass the world’s major polluters and have sufficient flexibility, and no hard targets, to do that. But in the end the United States had to agree to two tracks to avoid a total breakdown of the talks. That is important, environmental campaigners said, because it guarantees work toward new mandatory gas restrictions in 2012, when the limits under the current Kyoto accord expire. It also sustains a mechanism that, in theory, the United States could join under a new administration — if Congress becomes less insistent that the biggest developing countries move in lockstep. That demand is reflected in some language in the current climate bill moving forward in the Senate, which demands “comparable” action from such countries. Kevin Conrad, the negotiator from Papua New Guinea, rebuked the American delegation. “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us,” he said. “Please, get out of the way.” He was alluding to remarks made by an American official, James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, last week to a Reuters reporter, who quoted him as saying, “The U.S. will lead, and we will continue to lead, but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.” That statement had become a sore point to many delegations. A few more statements were made, but none of America’s traditional allies came to its defense. Finally, Paula Dobriansky, the lead American negotiator, spoke. “We came here to Bali because we want to go forward as part of a new framework,” said Ms. Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs. “We believe we have a shared vision and we want to move that forward. We want a success here in Bali. We will go forward and join consensus.” The delegates erupted in lengthy applause, realizing that a deal was finally at hand. Thomas Fuller reported from Nusa Dua, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York. Peter Gelling contributed reporting from Nusa Dua. Related ——————- The World - As China Goes, So Goes Global Warming. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, December 16, 2007. {Dot Earth - A New York Times blog about climate change, the environment and sustainability. Join the discussion. Comment on this article at Dot Earth } The talks in Bali over the last two weeks were just the latest baby step in trying to make that happen. The Bali achievement? Two more years of talks. In the meantime, concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main climate-heating emission, continue the climb that began 250 years ago, as industrialization surged on a diet of fossil fuels. So, presuming the industrialized and industrializing nations are serious, who or what can realistically turn the carbon tide? As always, the fingers of many experts on energy and the environment point both west and east — to the United States and China. Yet the tide can only be turned, a host of scientists and economists with varied perspectives agree, if China and other rising powers like India speed through the familiar path in nation building — resource extraction, industrial and economic growth, accompanying despoliation, and then environmental restoration and protection. If they don’t, their emissions will eventually swamp all other sources, according to many analyses. Libertarians say that once countries get rich, they’ll do the right thing for the climate. But critics of this view say the long life of carbon dioxide (and of sources like the coal-burning plants China is building at the rate of one a week) mean that waiting just compounds the problem beyond fixing. Theories abound over how best to help China embrace emissions-reducing policies. One way, many scientists and scholars say, is to make nonpolluting energy sources cheaper than the unfettered burning of abundant fossil fuels. Right now they are far more expensive. That is why several dozen top-flight climate and energy experts sent a letter this month to members of Congress and the presidential candidates seeking a tenfold rise in the federal budget for energy research, now about $3 billion a year. Some economists say the only thing that will speed the change is money, whether it is called aid, technology assistance, or something else. Representatives of developing countries have long made this point, noting that the established powers spent a century building the greenhouse-gas blanket. Speaking in Bali, Munir Akram, Pakistan’s United Nations ambassador, said: “What we have to do is to find a way to reduce emissions by those who can afford to reduce emissions.” But there are plenty of doubts about the willingness of Congress, particularly, to pay emerging economic competitors. Some experts see the best prospects for change coming from the ground up, pointing to efforts like MetroBus, a program involving the World Resources Institute that greatly expanded the use of mass transit in Mexico City. BinBin Jiang, a research associate in energy and development at Stanford University, sees similar opportunities in creating an efficient infrastructure for China’s exploding midsize cities. “That’s where you determine if you are going to leapfrog or go along the old Western path,” she said. But Ms. Jiang also stressed that meaningful change in energy and climate policy within the United States was critical, too. “China is clearly responsible for the largest wedge of emissions in the future, but the United States is still the biggest roadblock,” she said. “The U.S. is not going to be influential by telling China what to do. It has to lead by example.” ———————– ECONOMIC VIEW - A Carbon Cap That Starts in Washington.
One goal of a tradeable permit system is to force consumer prices for goods to reflect the harm that the production of those goods causes the planet. For example, if a television were made using a high-emission process, the factory would have to buy many carbon permits, driving up the TV’s price. A television made in a low-emission factory would require fewer permits, lowering its relative price. Consumers, of course, would have an incentive to choose the TV from the low-emission factory, and all factories would have an incentive to lower emissions. A problem would arise, however, if a producer needed to buy permits to make televisions in a country with a carbon cap, while no permits were required in a country without a cap. The television from the country without the cap would be cheaper, consumers would prefer it, and there would be no economic incentive to cut emissions. Environmentalists call this the “leakage problem”: just as a balloon squeezed at one end will bulge at the other, emissions caps applied in only some economies will lead to emissions surges in others. A provision in the current version of the Climate Security Act links responsibility to carbon consumption, not production. This idea derives from a joint proposal by the American Electric Power Company and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The provision requires that importers of goods from countries without carbon caps obtain permits for the emissions resulting from the goods’ production. While this requirement could be used to protect American jobs from foreign competition, if handled equitably, it could provide an elegant solution to the leakage problem.
The carbon consumption provision will face scrutiny under current trade agreements, but there is sound logic for including it in any emissions legislation. Most important, it would eliminate an excuse for doing nothing. ———————- OP-ED COLUMNIST - It’s Too Late for Later. The negotiators at the United Nations climate conference here in Bali came from almost 200 countries and spoke almost as many languages, but driving them all to find a better way to address climate change was one widely shared, if unspoken, sentiment: that “later” is over for our generation. “Later” was a luxury for previous generations and civilizations. It meant that you could paint the same landscape, see the same animals, eat the same fruit, climb the same trees, fish the same rivers, enjoy the same weather or rescue the same endangered species that you did when you were a kid — but just do it later, whenever you got around to it. If there is one change in global consciousness that seems to have settled in over just the past couple of years, it is the notion that later is over. Later is no longer when you get to do all those same things — just on your time schedule. Later is now when they’re gone — when you won’t get to do any of them ever again, unless there is some radical collective action to mitigate climate change, and maybe even if there is. There are many reasons that later is over. The fact that global warming is now having such an observable effect on pillars of our ecosystem — like the frozen sea ice within the Arctic Circle, which a new study says could disappear entirely during summers by 2040 — is certainly one big factor. But the other is the voracious power of today’s global economy, which has created a situation in which the world is not just getting hot, it’s getting raped. Throughout human history there was always some new part of the ocean to plunder, some new forest to devour, some new farmlands to exploit, noted Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, who came to observe the Bali conference. But “now that economic development has become the prerogative of every country,” he said, we’ve run out of virgin oceans and lands “for new rising economic powers to exploit.” So, too many countries are now chasing too few fish, trees and water resources, and are either devouring their own or plundering those of neighbors at alarming rates. Indeed, today’s global economy has become like a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck, and we’ve lost the key — so no one can stop it from wiping out more and more of the natural world, no matter what the global plan. There was a chilling essay in The Jakarta Post last week by Andrio Adiwibowo, a lecturer in environmental management at the University of Indonesia. It was about how a smart plan to protect the mangrove forests around coastal Jakarta was never carried out, leading to widespread tidal flooding last month. This line jumped out at me: “The plan was not implemented. Instead of providing a buffer zone, development encroached into the core zone, which was covered over by concrete.” You could read that story in a hundred different developing countries today. But the fact that you read it here is one of the most important reasons that later has become extinct. Indonesia is second only to Brazil in terrestrial biodiversity and is No. 1 in the world in marine biodiversity. Just one and a half acres in Borneo contains more different tree species than all of North America — not to mention animals that don’t exist anywhere else on earth. If we lose them, there will be no later for some of the rarest plants and animals on the planet. And we are losing them. Market-driven forces emanating primarily from China, Europe and America have become so powerful that Indonesia recently made the Guinness World Records for having the fastest rate of deforestation in the world. Indonesia is now losing tropical forests the size of Maryland every year, and the carbon released by the cutting and clearing — much of it from illegal logging — has made Indonesia the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, after the United States and China. Deforestation actually accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars and trucks in the world, an issue the Bali conference finally addressed. I interviewed Barnabas Suebu, the governor of the Indonesian province of Papua, home to some of its richest forests. He waxed eloquent about how difficult it is to create jobs that will give his villagers anything close to the income they can get from chopping down a tree and selling it to smugglers, who will ship it to Malaysia or China to be made into furniture for Americans or Europeans. He said his motto was, “Think big, start small, act now — before everything becomes too late.” Ditto for all of us. If you want to help preserve the Indonesian forests, think fast, start quick, act now. Just don’t say later. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 11th, 2007 “We are introducing to the world a new energy matrix in the fuel sector. Should the world adopt it, then we will have much less pollution, much less gases emitted into the atmosphere, especially those that cause greenhouse effect. I am convinced that Brazil has things to teach the developed world about how to avoid emission of gases that lead to the greenhouse effect,” said president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the radio show “Café com o Presidente” (’Breakfast with the President’).” (Agência Brasil, December 3) Brazil Energy Summit in New York City June 23, 2008. The Waldorf=Astoria Hotel, New York City Please click here to download the registration form or click here to register online. Chamber Executive Director, Sueli Bonaparte, at (212) 751-4691 or e-mail: Sueli at brazilcham.com Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc. website: www.brazilcham.com Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 11th, 2007 The Commission on Sustainable Development Is It A Moribund UN Body Or Will It Be Revived Because It Is Needed After The Re-Engagement Hoopla That Happens Now At Bali? We had experience starting from before the Brundtland Commission of 1987, we were engaged at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, and we wrote the “Promptbook on Sustainable Development for The World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002. In short we are strong believers that if the UN CSD were not created in 1994, we would have had to create it now. Why that? Simply, because as it is crystal clear now that the development of tomorrow cannot go on by rules of the development of yesterday - and this was given, right today, full global recognition in Oslo, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the scientists of the IPCC, and to Al Gore - whatever will come out from the Bali-Poznan-Copenhagen process will be clearly a final global landing on the runway that was built in Rio for Agenda 21. And as we keep saying - this will be a joint Sustainable Development for North and South, East and West. It will be a world were those that have the needed technologies will share them with those that are only trying out for their own National development. This will not be done because of altruism - it will be rather because of self interest that comes from the simple fact that we are all residents of planet earth, and we understand that we have caused the planet to be on a path of destruction that harms the continuation of life as nature or god created. After UNCED, The UN created a Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development and Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Gali appointed Mr. Nitin Desai, at the Under-Secretary-General level to head the Department. 1994-1998 Joke Waller-Hunter from the Netherlands was the first Director of the Division for Sustainable Development and the head of the Commission on Sustainable Development - so the Commission itself dates back, for all practical purpose, to 1994 - even though it officially was started in 1992. In May 2007 we witnessed the CSD 15 (that is counting back to 1992!). In 1997, Secretary-General Kofi, in an effort to reduce the number of UN Under-Secretary-Generals, consolidated three economic and social departments and created UN DESA (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and eventually put Mr. Desai as head of DESA where he was until he was replaced in 2003 with Mr. Jose Antonio Ocampo, the former Finance Minister of Colombia; the new Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-moon, brought in, July 2007, Mr. Sha Zukang, the previous China Ambassador in Geneva. In 1998 Ms. JoAnne DiSano, with a background of having worked for the Canadian Government, and then for 11 years with the Australian Government, became the Director of the new Division of Sustainable Development within DESA. She held this position until September of 2007 and since then the position is VACANT, and it looks as if the UN does not care. Ms. Joke Waller-Hunter, left her position with the CSD in 1998 in order to become the Executive Secretary of the of Bonn based UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) where she remained untill her death in 2006. She was replaced there in 2007, by Mr. Yvo de Boer, appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Yvo de Boer is also from the Netherlands, where he was Director for International Affairs of the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment. He was in the Past Vice-Chair of the Commision on SD and Vice-Chair of the COP of the UNFCCC. Both, the CSD and the UNFCCC are outcomes of the 1992 UNCED. Ms. Joke Waller-Hunter’s departure from New York may have had something to do with the 1997 UN reorganization that replaced the Department of SD with a Division of SD within DESA. She may have sensed that her presence at UNFCCC will further SD goals easier then at the new Division of SD - that its creation caused in effect a demotion in her position. The present vacancy at the nerve-center of the CSD, at a time the CSD is needed indeed, following the latest push at the UNFCCC, on matters of climate change, that causes our renewed interest in the UN CSD and in the UN Division that was established specifically in order to run the CSD. We are afraid that it will be difficult to see progress on the UN level, in matters of climate change, without a functioning office that deals with sustainable development. Now to be honest, our interest is not just because of curiosity - but rather because of the worry that we understand very well the reasons for the slow demise of the CSD - the factors that got it to start on what may be a path to extinction. At CSD 9 it was decided that the CSD will discuss specific topics in cycles of two years. So the first cycle was Water for CSD11-CSD12, the second cycle Energy for CSD14-CSD15, the third cycle Land Use for CSD16-CSD17. So 2006-2007 was the Energy cycle, and as in UN fashion it was supposed to be the turn to have a chair from Asia, it was the Asians that suggested Qatar to chair the energy subject. Now Qatar is a producer of gas rather then oil. Above was nothing yet when compared with what happened in the last day of CSD 15. As always, there are elections for the next CSD membership - the membership is held at 53 countries elected according to a regional key - and then there is the election of the “bureau” and the new chair. The turn according to UN habit was that next chair will be from Africa, and as said, the topic for CSD16 in 2008, and for CSD17 in 2009, will be Land Use. The Africans decided to put forward Zimbabwe as their choice and campaigned with the G77 that this is their wish. The UK did not want any part of this, and specially since the land policies of the Mugabe Government have run Zimbabwe agriculture from being a large agricultural exporter to becoming a starving nation, with an economy that was totally destroyed, a monetary situation that shows astronomic inflation rate, and human rights problems that clearly make it ineligible for a UN leadership position, it is this obstinacy that reduced the CSD to plain irrelevancy. We were there that night of Friday May 11, 2007, in room 4 in the UN basement, and watched in disbelief how the distinguished, low-key German Ambassador, head in New York of the EU presidency, with the German Minister of the Environment next to him, simply told the CSD Chair from Qatar that the EU cannot work with this sort of CSD. If by any way I exaggerate now, 7 months later, please forgive my memory, but see what I, Pincas Jawetz, Inner City Press journalist Matthew Rusell Lee, and the EUobserver from Brussels, wrote about this - the references on the www.SustainabiliTank.info web are: - EUobserver on the 5/11 Crash of CSD15 (May 14th, 2007) - A First Analysis: From The Ashes of the CSD, Will We See A Rising Phoenix? A Brundtland II, To be Called - “OUR COMMON GROUND” ? (May 13th, 2007) - The UN General Assembly Resolution of September 30, 1974 against South Africa was not Premised On Apartheid’s Threat To Security, But On Its Serious Violation Of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. WHY DOES - 9/11 and 3/11 Have Become Symbols of what Oil Money Can Cause To Those Who Insist On Buying The Oil, Will 5/11 Become The Symbol of Awakening at the UN? This Because Of May 11, 2007 Late Evening Happenings At - At the UN, Zimbabwe Elected 26-21 to Sustainable Development Chair for CSD16, As EU and Others Reject Final Text of The Chairman from Qatar of CSD15. (May 12th, 2007) I took then the 5/11 date and in ways of exaggeration tried to compare this with 9/11 in New York and 3/11 in Madrid. Was it really an exaggeration? Could we say that the backing Zimbabwe got from States with unresolved problems from colonial days, and oil states that think, completely wrong, that they have anything to gain from derailing the concept of sustainable development, sustainable energy, global warming, climate change…, from efforts to improve the life of billions of people? Further, the UN recognizes three groups of States with greater needs - these are the Least Developed States (LDCs), the Small Island Independent States (SIDS), and the Landlocked States. These are the States within the UN system that are most in need of help via sustainable development. Why did the UN take them out from being under the Under-Secretary-General who heads DESA, and put them under a separate Under-Secretary-General? Does this not cause waste and decreased efficiency? Would they not be served better within a well functioning unified economic organization that takes, for instance, in account the interests of Island States when it comes to the subject of the effects of global warming/climate change? Now, I was not going to allow myself to lose my hope for a functioning CSD. The articles I refer to above are actually articles of hope - that is I hope that from the ashes the CSD will rise, as a Phoenix, under the leadership of Brundtland II. The CSD expects Germany to fund the bringing to New York of youth representatives from the developing countries. A main topic will be “Drought and Desertification and Africa” - this means effects of climate change that helped cause warfare in Africa. Will the world allow Africa to commit suicide through obstinacy, or is the world obliged to look into the mirror and say we cannot continue on this path? Mr. Baroso bit his lip and made an effort. We assume the EU will continue to try to find a way to keep the Commission in business, if at least the UN Secretariat helps reestablish a CSD Secretariat - and at the minimum there must be a functioning Director of the CSD Secretariat. That is the closing of the three month old vacancy that was created with the departure of Ms. JoAnne DiSano. African States: 12 besides Zimbabwe. They are - Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo/Kinshasa, Djibouti, Gambia, Guinea, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, Tanzania, Zambia. Asian States: 11 - Bahrain, China, North Korea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kuwait, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Thailand. Eastern Europe: 6 - Belarus, Croatia, Czech Rep., Poland, Russia, Serbia. Latin America and Caribbean: 10 - Antigua and Barbuda (the incoming head of G-77), Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Haiti, Peru. Western European and Others: 13 - Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Monaco, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK, US. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on December 4th, 2007
Professor Antonio D’Avila presented results from his Green Tech Environmental Technology Laboratory that at UFRJ has now 200 patents and since 2005 is involved in a biodiesel plant — Agropalma. Professor Giuseppe Vasopollo from the University of Salento at Lecce, Italy, enlarged on the ecological foot-printing of a generation for Sustainability with Green Chemistry and Clean Chemistry as promoted now by Italy. They work on capturing CO2 with chemicals and work since 1993 by the Italian INCA consortium that involves now 30 universities and predated the ACS and IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) involvement. He pointed out that erosion is created by buildings, bridges, roads, dams, strip-burning, inadequate agricultural practices. He wants to see Green Chemistry and Sustainable Development being seen as one subject - something that was then picked up at the roundtable. Professor Claudio Oller Nascimento, from the University of Sao Paulo works on photochemical treatment of wastewater on the Restoration of the Cubatao area that was one of the most polluted areas of the world. Professor Bernd Engels from Wuerzburg, Germany, presented Green Chemistry from a theoretical physicist’s point of view. Professor Rita Hoyos spoke about work at Cordoba, Argentina, and Dr. Lucas Leite from EMBRAPA and Dr. Regis Lima Verde from CENEA, on enlarging Biomass Future Supplies as in turning biomass into carbohydrates that can be developed further. Tropical developing countries have more land availability and higher yields, but technology is in the north. They also complained of the higher subsidies in the north that work to the detriment of the marketability of the products of the south and to clear distortion also from an environmental point of view. The reality is that basically, the world production of biofuels is still centered only on Brazil and the US. Biofuels are starting in Europe but Europe is dependent on imports. The world use of biomass is 10.5% of energy use, but in Brazil it is 26.7%. Problems arise when there is no concern in the survival of the forests. The BIOREFINERY CONCEPT is when we produce food and fuel in the process using the biofuel feedstock. Dr. Jennifer Young from the American Chemical Society Washington Headquarters, Green Chemistry Institute, presented the US summer school programs to students announcing the 2008 program in Colorado and a meeting June 24-26, 2008 in Washington DC. They are also promoting in US Congress a Green Chemistry Research and Development Act. There is already a Green Chemistry Initiative in California, and a Massachusetts Toxic Reduction Initiative. Michigan has an Executive Directive in place since June 2006. EPA still thinks in terms of voluntarism. Dr. Alberto Oliveira Fontes Jr. presented the Petrobras interest in bio-ethanol and bio-diesel. They are building ships for exporting these materials. Professor Carioca, Professor Vasapollo and Dr. Selma Mazes spoke of the production of Cardinal from cashew nuts and building a whole series of products from this first material. Then Professor Ami Ben-Amotz from the Weizman Institute in Israel presented a very attractive new type of ocean-side-agriculture - the production of Bio-fuels from Algae. This topic has hit finally the National Geographic Magazine in the October 2007 issue. Professor Ben-Amotz is also director of a Japanese owned industrial plant in the sea of Eilat, that uses Dr. Ben-Amotz patents to manufacture food supplements produced by algae. His Dunaliella algae prosper in very salty water and they absorb CO2. Dr. Ben-Amotz was able to convince the management of a coal-fired power plant to open two holes in the exhaust chimney of the plant in order to channel some of the CO2 to his pond with algae and found that the system works. He does not say that this can solve all the problems with CO2 emissions, but it surely can become a way to capture some of this CO2 in a recycling scheme. From the algae he can produce bio-diesel. Professor Adrian Pohlit from INPA in Manaus, Amazonia, followed by Professor Ney Pereira Jr, spoke of Biopharmaceuticals. and Professor Roberto Rossi from Cordoba spoke on Stanum organic compounds. Professor Vasif Harsici from The Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey spoke of biodegradable bio-polymers and Dr. Alberto Oliveira Fontes Jr. made a second presentation on uses of oils by Petrobras. They got involved in the oil production from nuts in the Amazonas region because it is not allowed to grow sugar cane in those areas. He mentioned that the production of plastic materials takes only 4% of the global use of petroleum. Professor Eduardo Fallabella, also from Petrobras, spoke of the production of liquid fuels via gasification processes - a way that is well known and can be viewed as a future use of biomass. Professor Horst Friedrich, from the German Aerospace Program, spoke on Motor Vehicles and their use of biofuels, and Professor Emilio La Rovere from UFRJ enlarged on biodiesel production including social aspects. Professor Paulo Carvalho, from UFC in Fortaleza spoke on the production of dielectric oils for the needs of transformers - a clear success story that saves on mineral oils. He was followed by a presentation of Professor Luiz Horta Nogueira from Bello Horizonte, Minas Gerais, on Bioenergy trends in Brazil in general - talking of boilers and other uses. Professor Rainer Jonas, of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany, spoke on polylactic acid, a biodegradable biopolymer. Here I had the opportunity to speak on Sustainability in General - the title was “Global Sustainability” which I redirected to “Sustainability Requires Significantly Decreased Dependence on Fossil Fuels - and Nuclear Power Is Of No Help Either.” My statement started by saying that the “How” has been presented by the previous speakers and I intend to deal with the “Why” in order to strengthen their hands. I used my half hour in order to pick points that in term of policy did not seem to me to have been presented sharp enough in the two and a half days that went on prior to my talk. I said that Climate is an energy issue - energy is an infrastructure issue thus climate is an infrastructure issue. We have to change the way we think about energy. I explained the balance between sunlight and earthlight that when disturbed by decreased capacity of energy being returned to space because of the Green-House Gasses Effect, we get global warming. But we get also global warming without CO2 emission when we bring out energy stored in the atom - in using nuclear power as an energy supply. Thus even without emitting cO2, nuclear power is sort of a fossil fuel as it releases energy to the atmosphere that was stored underground. I explained the system of the Biorefinery concept as something that can commercialize corn by selling every component except the “squealing of the pig.” A bio-refinery is thus not a petroleum refinery that uses bioethanol and biodiesel - something that I seemed to have heard in one of the exchanges. Further, the valorization of the co-products decreases also the food versus fuel dilemma because, like in the case of soy-beans, the material left after the extraction of the oil for biodiesel, is a high protein valuable food supplement - that in many cases is just what is needed - so the fuel was obtained in a process that produced the food we wanted - and this negates much of the contrived food versus fuel issue. I touched on the issue of peak oil and on the fact that renewable energy and alternate fuels are imperative. Thus the idea that Green Chemistry is tied to Sustainability is the way to go - further, we must incorporate also clean chemistry as part of the Green concept because aspects like creating energy systems that conserve energy or decrease the need for energy by increasing efficiency, are environmentally desirable or “green” even if not involving green plant matter. After all, even Professor Ami Ben-Amotz algae are not always green. I managed also to include policy issues related to subsidization of agricultural commodity production by taking land out of production. Thus there is a potential here to make the connection between farm policy and energy policy while finding both the farmland and the money needed to create new fuel. This is specially important in highly subsidized French agriculture and the Polish agriculture in its integration with the EU. There were several further points, and I was gratified hearing some echo of what I said in the few remaining presentations. Thus, Dr. Norbert Keutgen from the University of Bonn, Germany, Institute of Crop science and Resource Conservation (INRES) spoke about Photosynthesis and Bio-productivity on Bio-energy Yields, and Dr. Flavio do Couto Cavalcanti from OXITENO of Sao Paulo on Oil Chemistry. Their presentations included farm policy aspects. Dr.Hamilton Moss from CEPEL, which is the Alternative Energy and Environment Center of Research into Electric Energy belonging to ElectroBras, and his partners from UFC/CENEA, Professors Carvalho and Filho, spoke on the obvious Alternative Electricity - all renewables. We were reminded of the fact that the State of Ceara has some excellent sites for wind-power. Obviously also a lot of sun. Professor Nei Pereira from UFRJ spoke on Lignocellulosics Biorefinery Context and Professors Cesar Abreu and Henrique Baudel from the Federal University of Pernambuco at Recife, spoke on Chemical and Biofuels from Lignocellulosics. Professor Claudio Mota from UFRJ spoke on New Products and Processes from Glycerol - A Renewable Feedstock for The Chemical Industry. The Concluding remarks were that the concept of Green |