Should we try to change their minds? Send me your thoughts.

There’s no time like now to be an activist!

Eighty-one tons of mercury is emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of electric power generation. Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

Here it comes … 

Every second, 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the US. Each year, Americans use 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides.

Wait for it … 

Every two seconds, a human being starves to death. Every 46 seconds, a woman is raped in America. Every day, 29,158 children under the age of five die from preventable causes – every single day.

We’re almost there … 

Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean and 80 percent of the world’s forests are gone. Each day, 200,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed, over 100 plant and animal species go extinct, and 13 million tons of toxic chemicals released across the globe.

What an amazing time to be an activist … 

No, I’m not being cynical. I’m simply listening to the sound of opportunity knocking … kicking down the damn door, you might say.

When else in all of human history has there been a time when we were in better position to shape the future? Ecosystems are screaming for mercy and our land base is practically an endangered species. What we do (or don’t do) in the next few years could quite possibly tilt us all toward either the point of no return or a far more sane form of society. In other words, each and every one of us can take part – right now – in creating the most important social changes ever imagined. Here’s how:

1. How to Be a Good Organizer

a) Spend some time thinking about trees.
b) Imagine what clear cutting looks like, sounds like and feels like.
c) Remind yourself that 80 percent of the world’s forests are gone.
d) Be a good organizer.

2. How to Find Like-Minded Comrades Ready to Start Right Now

a) Go to the beach.
b) Smell the salty air and listen to the waves.
c) Remind yourself that 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone.
d) Find like-minded comrades ready to start right now.

3. How to Plan a Protest That Does More Than March

a) Remind yourself that 200,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed each day. Picture a planet devoid of rainforests. Picture a human body without lungs.
b) Remind yourself that a woman is raped every 46 seconds in America. Visualize the terror and trauma of these experiences.
c) Remind yourself that 29,158 children under the age of five die from preventable causes each day. Imagine the feelings of grief, sorrow and loss.
d) Plan a protest that does more than march.

4. How to Give a Rousing Speech That Results in Immediate Direct Action

a) Find a quiet place.
b) Close your eyes and breathe deeply.
c) Think about animals in slaughterhouses and laboratories. Think about humans in prisons. Think about civilians in a war zone. Think about someone you love dying of cancer caused by corporate-created toxins.
d) Give a rousing speech that results in immediate direct action.

5. How to Bring Down the Dominant Culture

a) Ask yourself if you’re content with your relatively high quality of life being possible thanks to the poor quality of life of so many others elsewhere.
b) Ask yourself if you’re content with your relative freedom being possible thanks to the oppression of so many others elsewhere.
c) Accept that we are all accomplices to the perpetual global crime called “civilization.”
d) Bring down the dominant culture.

This isn’t about skin color, gender, or what parcel of geography you happen to have been born on. I’m not talking about party affiliations, incremental reform or what sky god you’ve chosen to worship. It’s all about recognizing a crisis and taking the appropriate measures.

We’re on the brink of economic, social and environmental collapse. What an extraordinary time to be alive. How lucky are we? We’ve been trusted with the most vital mission of all time: survival.

China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter

Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.

“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.

Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.

The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.

Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.

Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.

General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.

Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.

The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.

The increase in oil and coal-fired electricity consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent for that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.

President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.

China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.

The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.

For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.

But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.

Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.

Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.

Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.

Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.

“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”

To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.

China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.

China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.

But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.

Source New York Times

Writing in the journal Nature, analysts at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany say a rise of at least 3C by 2100 is likely.

The team also says many countries, including EU members and China, have pledged slower carbon curbs than they have been achieving anyway.

They say a new global deal is needed if deeper cuts are to materialise.

“There’s a big mismatch between the ambitious goal, which is 2C… and the emissions reductions,” said Potsdam’s Malte Meinshausen.

“The pledged emissions reductions are in most cases very unambitious,” he told BBC News.

In their Nature article, the team uses stronger language, describing the pledges as “paltry”.

“The prospects for limiting global warming to 2C – or even to 1.5C, as more than 100 nations demand – are in dire peril,” they conclude.

Between now and 2020, global emissions are likely to rise by 10-20%, they calculate, and the chances of passing 3C by 2100 are greater than 50%.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this implies a range of serious impacts for the world, including

• significant falls in crop yields across most of the world
• damage to most coral reefs
• likely disruption to water supplies for hundreds of millions of people.

Chances of a 3C rise are higher than evens, the team calculates (simplified from Potsdam Institute’s Nature paper)

More than 120 countries have now associated themselves with the Copenhagen Accord, the political document stitched together on the summit’s final day by a small group of countries led by the US and the BASIC bloc of Brazil, China, India and South Africa.

The accord “recognises” the 2C target as indicated by science. It was also backed at last year’s G8 summit.

Many of those 120-odd have said what they are prepared to do to constrain their greenhouse gas emissions – either pledging cuts by 2020, in the case of industrialised countries, or promising to improve their “carbon intensity” in the case of developing nations.

Some of the pledges are little more than vague statements of intent. But all developed countries, and the developing world’s major emitters, have all given firm figures or ranges of figures.

The EU, for example, pledges to cut emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020; China promises to improve carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 compared against 2005; and Australia vows an emission cut of 5-25% on 2000 levels by 2020.

The Potsdam team concludes that many of the detailed pledges are nowhere near as ambitious as their proponents would claim.

They calculate that the EU’s 20% pledge implies an annual cut of 0.45% between 2010 and 2020, whereas it is already achieving annual reductions larger than that.

The Potsdam team calculates that the EU’s emissions have fallen on average by 0.6% per year since 1980

During 2009, emissions from the bloc’s power sector alone fell by 11% owing to the recession

Consequently, the current 20% by 2020 pledge equates to 0.45% per year – less than the historical average

China’s 40% minimum pledge also amounts to nothing more than business as usual, they relate; and among developed countries, only pledges by Norway and Japan fall into the 25-40% by 2020 range that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends as necessary to give a good chance of meeting the 2C target.

Hot air

Whereas many countries, rich and poor, have indicated they are willing to be more ambitious if there is a binding global deal, the Potsdam team notes that in the absence of a global deal, only the least ambitious end of their range can be counted upon.

Writing in the BBC’s Green Room this week, Bryony Worthington from the campaign group Sandbag argues that the EU can easily move to its alternative higher figure of 30% – and that it must, if it wants to stimulate others to cut deeper.

“Many countries are looking to Europe to show how it is possible to achieve growth without increasing emissions,” she said.

“Only when they see that this is possible will they be inclined to adopt absolute reduction targets of their own.”

An additional factor flagged up in the analysis is that many countries have accrued surplus emissions credits under the Kyoto Protocol.

Countries such as Russia and other former Eastern bloc nations comfortably exceeded their Kyoto targets owing to the collapse of Communist economies in the early 1990s.

Without a binding global agreement preventing the practice, these nations would be allowed to put these “banked” credits towards meeting any future targets – meaning they would have to reduce actual emissions less than they promised.

These “hot air” credits could also be traded between nations.

Stern words

This is not the first analysis of the Copenhagen Accord pledges, but it is one of the starkest.

Lord Stern’s team at the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London has also run the figures; and although their conclusions on the numbers are similar, they do not see things in quite such a pessimistic light.

“You cannot characterise an emissions path for a country or the world by focusing solely on the level in 2020 or any other particular date,” said the institute’s principal research fellow Alex Bowen.

“It is the whole path that matters, and if more action is taken now to reduce emissions, less action will be required later, and vice versa.”

The Potsdam team acknowledges that if emissions do rise as they project, it would still be possible to have a reasonable chance of meeting 2C if very strict carbon curbs were applied thereafter, bringing emissions down by 5% per year or so.

“In an ideal world, if you pull off every possible emission reduction from the year 2021 onwards, you can still get to get to 2C if you’re lucky,” said Dr Meinshausen.

“But it is like racing towards the cliff and hoping you stop just before it.”

They argue that positive analyses may “lull decision-makers into a false sense of security”.

The UN climate process continues through this year, with many countries saying they still want to reach a binding global agreement by December.

But stark divisions remain between various blocs over emission cuts, finance, technology transfer and other issues; and it is far from certain that all important countries want anything more binding than the current set of voluntary national commitments.

Source BBC News

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Speaking in an unusually candid manner during a European Parliament hearing on Wednesday (14 April), De Boer said the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen last year had been dominated by a sense of “suspicion”.

The December UN conference ended with a loose agreement, the Copenhagen Accord, which left Europeans “disappointed” because it contained no firm commitment from world nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“A lot of the reason why this process has been moving so slowly is because of suspicion, especially on the part of developing counties,” said De Boer, who will step down from the UNFCCC in July to take an advising role at consulting firm KPMG.

“Trust just isn’t there.”

European leaders routinely refer to the EU’s 2020 target to reduce emissions by 20% on 1990 levels as the most ambitious in the world.

But the UN climate chief suggested that the target will in fact be easy to achieve, raising suspicion from developing countries that it is only a smokescreen.

“Many of the discussions that you have in Europe are not terribly private,” he said. “And the rest of the world knows that the European Commission said to EU countries that achieving the minus 20% was a piece of cake and that achieving minus 30% isn’t going to ruin the European economy.”

“So countries in the rest of the world are asking themselves: ‘If that’s true, then why is this minus 30 now being taken off the table?’”

EU divided over move to 30%

The WWF’s Stefan Singer says the EU will easily reach its 20% objective for 2020, thanks mainly to the de-industrialisation that has taken place in ex-Soviet states since the fall of communism and offset projects in developing countries (EurActiv 14/04/09).

Moreover, emissions dropped steeply last year – by 11% – due to the economic recession, making the 2020 objective that much easier to attain (EurActiv 2/04/10).

But the EU’s possible move to a 30% reduction target for 2020 is causing internal divisions among the 27 member states, with Eastern European countries saying the EU must first analyse how other countries’ pledges compare before making a decision.

By contrast, the European Commission and most Western EU member states including the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, argue that the move to 30% will stimulate green economic growth and innovation, creating new jobs along the way.

“If Europe is a strong believer in the green economic growth story, then those targets are imperative to achieve that sense of change of direction,” De Boer stressed.

‘Climate-wash’

De Boer said another major point of contention relates to the 100 billion dollars in annual climate aid that industrialised countries pledged for poor nations in Copenhagen.

“Is that going to be climate-wash or real and additional finance?” he asked. “Quite frankly, the track record is not quite there [to prove it],” he said.

Under existing arrangements, developing countries were asked to produce technology need assessments in their effort to fight climate change, De Boer explained. But these were rarely followed up and the promised funding was kept under wraps for the most part.

“Many among developing nations feel, with some justification, that these financial resources are not being provided. And that if financial resources are provided, they are often ‘climate-wash’,” he said, meaning development assistance re-labelled as climate aid. “So the money that was originally intended for poverty eradication now magically becomes climate change money.”

To break the deadlock, De Boer suggests giving developing countries responsibility for managing the aid. “What they would really like to see is that these huge sums of money are going to be distributed according to the priorities of the countries rather than according to the priorities of the donators.”

His proposal is to create a financial governance mechanism at the next UN summit in Cancún “that will really give developing countries the feeling that they are in control or in co-control of the money that is intended to help them green their economic growth”.

According to the Dutchman, developing countries are ready to accept that the money will be channelled through existing institutions like the World Bank, regional development banks or cooperation agencies.

Kyoto pledges not met

Speaking in the European Parliament, De Boer said the sense of suspicion had been heightened by the fact that industrialised nations had shown little willingness to meet their emission reduction pledges under the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

“The first suspicion relates to the fact that, yes, although Europe as a whole is on track to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, there are individual countries within the European Union which are having a little more difficulty – at least for the time being – achieving their targets under Kyoto.”

Although the EU as a whole is set to overshoot its collective emission reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, a recent report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) showed the ‘older’ EU-15 member states will fall short of their targets without new policies or offset credits (EurActiv 13/11/09).

Moreover, under the UNFCCC, rich countries were supposed to return their emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, De Boer said. “But in fact, only four individual countries met that goal,” he pointed out.

De Boer singled out Canada, which announced it will not meet its Kyoto target but nevertheless refuses to withdraw from the treaty. Developing countries have not heard any reaction to that statement, De Boer said, adding to their suspicion. 

“So there is not that much confidence that industrialised countries will meet their targets under the Kyoto Protocol,” he explained.

Source Euractiv

Pledges Post Copenhagen Unlikely to Keep Temperatures Below 2 Degrees Celsius by Mid Century

UNEP Year Book Also Launched Today Outlines Growing Governance Challenge from Climate to Chemicals

Bali (Indonesia), 23 February 2010 - Countries will have to be far more ambitious in cutting greenhouse gas emissions if the world is to effectively curb a rise in global temperature at 2 degrees C or less.

This is the conclusion of a new greenhouse gas modeling study, based on the estimates of researchers at nine leading centres, compiled by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The experts (see notes to editors) suggest that annual global greenhouse gas emissions should not be larger than 40 to 48.3 Gigatonnes (Gt) of equivalent C02 in 2020 and should peak sometime between 2015 and 2021.

They also estimate that between 2020 and 2050, global emissions need to fall by between 48 per cent and 72 per cent, indicating that an ambition to cut greenhouse gases by around three per cent a year over that 30 year period is also needed.

Such a path offers a ‘medium’ likelihood or at least a 50/50 chance of keeping a global temperature rise at below 2 degrees C, says the new report.

The new study, launched on the eve of UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum taking place in Bali, Indonesia, has analyzed the pledges of 60 developed and developing economies.

They have been recently submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) following the UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen in December.

The nine modeling centres have now estimated how far these pledges go towards meeting a reasonable ‘peak’ in emissions depending on whether the high or the low intentions are met.

“The expected emissions for 2020 range between 48.8 to 51.2 GT of CO2 equivalent based on whether high or low pledges will be fulfilled,” says the report.

The report, as noted earlier, says that in order to meet the 2 degree C aim in 2050, emissions in 2020 need to be between 40 Gt and 48.3 Gt.

Thus even with the best intentions there is a gap of between 0.5 and 8.8Gt of CO2 equivalent per year, amounting to an average shortfall in emission cuts of 4.7 Gt.

If the low end of the emission reduction pledges are fulfilled, the gap is even bigger-2.9 Gt to 11.2 Gt of CO2 equivalent per year, with an average gap of 7.1 Gt says the report How Close Are We to the Two Degree Limit?

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: “There are clearly a great deal of assumptions underlying these figures, but they do provide an indication of where countries are and perhaps more importantly where they need to aim.”

“There clearly is ‘Gigatonne gap’ which may be a significant one according some of the modelers. This needs to be bridged and bridged quickly if the international community is to pro-actively manage emissions down in a way that makes economic sense,” he added.

“There are multiple reasons for countries to make a transition to a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy of which climate change is a key one. But energy security, cuts in air pollution and diversifying energy sources are also important drivers,” said Mr Steiner.

“This week at the UNEP GC/GMEF we will also shine a light on the opportunities ranging from accelerating clean tech and renewable energy enterprises to the climate, social and economic benefits of investing in terrestrial and marine ecosystems,” he added.

Some of those multiple opportunities for action are showcased in the UNEP Year Book 2010 which is being presented to ministers responsible for the environment who are attending the meeting.

These include Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) which gained political support at the Copenhagen climate change meeting.

REDD, which involves supporting developing countries to conserve rather than clear tropical forests, could make an important contribution not only to combating climate change but also to overcoming poverty and to a successful UN International Year of Biodiversity.

. The Year Book estimates that investing $22 billion to $29 billion in REDD could cut global deforestation by 25 per cent by 2015.

It also highlights a new and promising REDD project in Brazil, at the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve in Amazonas.

. Here each family receives US$28 a month if the forest remains uncut, one potential way of tipping the economic balance in favour of conservation versus continued deforestation.

Renewables are also gaining momentum: although still very low compared to the huge potential of renewable energy, the global installed wind generation capacity has grown at the rate of 25 per cent per year over the past five years.

. In China, for example installed capacity has nearly doubled every year since the end of 2004 – and the report notes that the wind energy potential under perfect conditions has been estimated at up to 72,000 GW, nearly five times total energy demand. Probably 20 per cent of this energy potential could be captured in the future, representing almost 15 000 GW.

Managing a response to climate change also echoes the challenge of International Environment Governance, a key theme at this week’s GC/GMEF.

Governance also underpins the international response to other challenges highlighted in the UNEP Year Book 2010.

Read more on this from the United Nations Environment Program

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How can everything have gone so wrong so quickly? A year ago, the prospects for successful climate change regulation were bright: a new US president promised positive re-engagement with the international community on the issue, civil society everywhere was enthusiastically mobilising to demand that world leaders “seal the deal” at Copenhagen, and the climate denial crowd had been reduced to an embarrassing rump lurking in the darker corners of the internet.

Now there seems to have been a complete reversal. Obama is held hostage by a deadlocked Senate, which will agree to neither domestic climate legislation nor US participation in a new legally binding treaty.Copenhagen was a disaster from start to finish, and even the face-saving Copenhagen accord is winning at best lukewarm support even from the countries that helped draw it up. To add to the sense of crisis, the climate denial lobby is suddenly resurgent, and the conspiracy theories that underlie the hacked climate emails controversy are in danger of becoming popular received wisdom.

These are dark times. And the resignation of Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the UN climate change secretariat today only compounds the sense of gathering crisis. De Boer has been a steady pair of hands guiding the international negotiations through some very rocky periods — not least the dramatic episode in Bali two years ago where he himself burst into tears on the plenary stage — and his trustworthy, solid presence will be sorely missed. Despite the official denials, there can be little doubt that this resignation indicates his frustration at the general unravelling of the process that was so depressingly evident at Copenhagen.

Whether de Boer himself should shoulder any of the blame for the Copenhagen debacle is arguable. Most of the responsibility for the conduct of the negotiations, which were marked by poor organisation, suspicion, bitterness and almost absurd levels of chaos on the final night, rests with the hosts Denmark. But the secretariat also appeared powerless to navigate past procedural blocking tactics employed by Sudan and other retrogressive developing nations, suggesting a creeping lack of confidence on the part of the UN. De Boer seemed to be losing his touch.

Even after Copenhagen was finally over, things continued to deteriorate. It was unclear what, if any, legal standing the accord actually had given that it was only “noted” by the Conference of Parties rather than adopted as a decision. And a 31 January deadline for countries to decide whether they wanted to be “associated” with the accord was allowed to slip, while governments continued to be confused as to what, if anything, they were supposed to be sending the secretariat.

In the meantime, the prospects for a legally binding new treaty being agreed at Cancun, at the next major UN climate meeting in December, seem to recede by the day. The only countries that support a new round of Kyoto targets are those that would not be bound by them — namely the developing countries.

Even the EU, Kyoto’s most stalwart supporter during the Bush era, is now backing away. The more logical idea of tying the world’s biggest emitters – China, the US, the EU, Russia and India, in descending order – into a single, fair framework for emissions reduction seems even less plausible, given the current political mood.

All in all, the next few months look grim. There is now no serious prospect of Obama getting legislation through the Senate, this year, or possibly ever. Following the sustained attack by climate deniers on both individual scientists and the IPCC, public confidence in climate change as an urgent issue is also steadily eroding, further reducing the room for manoeuvre by politicians. The next round of intermediate negotiations,due to start in Bonn on 31 May, look set to take place in a poisonous atmosphere of bitterness and rancour.

No wonder Yvo de Boer wanted to get out.

Source Mark Lynas Guardian

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Source Climate Safety

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His decision is not expected to further derail U.N.-led climate talks to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, divided over sharing the cost of cutting carbon emissions.

De Boer will leave on July 1 to join KPMG, the Secretariat for the U.N. framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) said in a statement. He had led the agency since 2006 and his contract was expected to be extended in September.

“It was a difficult decision to make, but I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,” de Boer said in the statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will make the final decision on a replacement, a U.N. spokesman said.

“Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen,” de Boer said.

In advance of the December summit in Denmark, de Boer had said anything less than agreement on emissions caps for individual developed nations would count as failure.

De Boer, born in 1954, was a senior Dutch environmental official who has been far more outspoken than previous heads of the Bonn-based Secretariat. He had often criticised developed nations for what he called a lack of ambition in setting out cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

But he also told developing nations not to get their hopes up too high. In the run-up to Copenhagen, he told African nations and small island states that their calls for deep cuts by the developed world represented “too heavy a lift”.

At a marathon U.N. meeting in Bali in 2007, de Boer left the room in tears after a Chinese delegate criticised the Secretariat for starting a key meeting before all delegates were present.

“It wasn’t that surprising … I would like to see someone from a developing country who can negotiate with those countries,” said Seb Walhain, head of environmental markets at Fortis Netherlands, of de Boer’s departure.

Carbon markets depend on the U.N. talks and a Kyoto successor after 2012 to continue global trade in carbon offsets. “It won’t have any effect on the carbon market,” said Walhain.

Source WBCSD

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Their comments after EU ambassadors met in Brussels confirmed the 27-nation bloc’s commitment to unilateral target carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels over the next decade.

Some EU countries such as Poland, Italy, Cyprus and Malta had opposed making the more ambitious conditional offer because of concerns that it would be too costly for industry.

“Italy and Poland said at the meeting that they were concerned but they wouldn’t stand in the way,” an EU envoy said.

Before United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen in December, the EU offered to deepen its cuts to 30 percent of 1990 levels if other rich countries made similar efforts.

Ambassadors agreed the EU should sign up to the accord with the 20 percent cuts in a letter to be sent to the U.N. on Thursday, but that the 30 percent conditional offer should still be made, even if the conditions behind it are far from being met.

The meeting in the Danish capital ended without agreement on binding cuts to climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions, leaving countries until January 31 to submit their own plans.

Experts say the total cuts offered there by rich countries amount to no more than 18 percent and fall far short of the 25-40 percent that U.N. scientists outline as necessary to avert dangerous climate change.

The world is on track for temperatures to rise to 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century, which would bring catastrophic melting of ice sheets and rising seas, some scientists say.

Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands were among the countries that defended the 30 percent offer.

“The UK remains committed to the conditional offer of 30 percent to stay on the table to ensure that we do not lose the momentum that has been generated over the last few months,” said an official from Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Source Reuters

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