Australian policy awaits Liberal leadership battle

The Liberal party is in turmoil over climate change and leadership. The Senate has delayed a final vote on the Government's Carbon Pollution Carbon Reduction scheme while those Liberals supporting the party's current policy to to vote in favour of the scheme seem to becoming increasingly outnumbers by those attempting to change the policy and the leader. A leadership vote is expected on 1 December.
30 NOvember News article
30 November The Age article
30 November Sydney Morning Herald article
27 November Reuters article

I have been waiting for this civil war since August 12, the night I went to dinner at the Cape Cod restaurant in Canberra. It's an excellent little seafood restaurant tucked into the Deakin shopping centre not far from Parliament House. It is also a haunt of Senator Nick Minchin. We dined together that night.
30 November Sydney Morning Herald commentary by Paul Sheehan

Too little action, too much compensation for polluters

The Government appears unwilling or unable to accept that an urgent whole-of-government approach is needed, with limits on population growth, a strategy to phase out brown coal power stations, huge investment in low-carbon energy sources and public transport, and regulations requiring dramatic improvement in energy efficiency.
27 November The Age commentary by David Karoly, who is a professor in the school of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and played a key role in a report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Sceptic says we'll be laughing stock

Australia will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, global warming sceptic Adelaide University professor of mining geology, Ian Plimer, said.
19 November AAP article through News

Sea levels threat

Nearly a quarter of a million homes along Australia's coastline could be submerged by 2100 unless action is taken to stop sea levels rising, a government report said.
19 November Reuters article

Cut quickly and deep or farewell the reef

Australia's Great Barrier Reef has only a 50 per cent chance of survival if global carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced at least 25 per  cent by 2020 and 90 per cent by 2050, according to the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.
17 November Australian article

Australia stuck while the world has moved on

Britain's new High Commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, has expressed surprise that Australians are still debating whether humans cause climate change and says other nations have long since ''moved on''. ''I have been surprised that the science itself is being questioned,'' she said. ''These are things where there have been debates over a long period of time in other countries and where we have reached conclusions and moved on."
13 November Sydney Morning Herald article

Four Corners exposes Liberal divisions

ABC TV Four Corners program broadcast on 9 November highlighted divisions within the Liberal Party on climate change. Four Corners has also commissioned a report on community attitudes to climate change, and on its website offers provides extended interviews with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and Shadow Minister for Resources Ian Macfarlane.
Link to Four Corners broadcast, extended interviews and other climate-change resources

The Opposition spokesman on emissions trading, Ian Macfarlane, has attacked the National Party's attitude towards rural Australia as he jettisoned any hope of the junior Coalition partner playing any constructive role in emissions trading scheme negotiations.
10 November Sydney Morning Herald article

Macfarlane goes cold on clean coal

The Opposition's emissions trading spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, says clean coal technology (carbon dioxide capture and geological sequestration) has passed Australia by and will probably never work. "The clean coal option has passed us by. Twenty years to wait before the technology is available. Thirty years before it is commercial. We will need to move on to other options by then," he said.
10 November ABC article

Funding for wave-power project

The Federal Government has awarded $66.46 million in funding to Ocean Power Technology and Leighton Contractors toward the cost of building a 19 megawatt wave-power project off the coast of Victoria.
6 November The Age article

Australia listed in  'worst policy scorecards'

A new international study of policies for improving energy use has highlighted Australia in its "worst policy scorecards" section for subsidising coal power and the aluminium smelting industry. Australia is listed also in the "smart policy" section for its Energy Efficient Homes Package. The study was commissioned by WWF International and E3G.
WWF statement
Briefing note
Scorecard

Sea-level policy criticised

Property groups have criticised a planning policy aimed at limiting development in coastal regions, raising fears it has the potential to prevent construction in huge areas.
6 November Sydney Morning Herald article

Lord mayors agree to cut emissions

Office workers will be packed tighter into workplaces, old buildings will be fitted with environmentally friendly lighting, and city streets will be lit up at night with efficient bulbs under an agreement between the lord mayors of every Australian capital city to reduce carbon emissions.
6 November Sydney Morning Herald article

Victoria puts its faith in 'clean coal'

Victoria will rely on fossil fuel for energy for decades, with leaked documents revealing the Brumby Government is set to take a multibillion-dollar gamble on ''clean coal''.
4 November The Age article

Irrigators 'on their own'

Irrigators have been warned by one of their own of a bleak future where they will be stripped of water for environmental needs. Laurie Arthur, who sits on the National Water Commission and chairs the National Farmers Federation water taskforce, laid down a harsh assessment at a conference on regional water policy of what the country's growers could expect. "There are no two ways about it; the environment needs more water and it's going to come from the irrigation sector," he said. "Irrigators are on their own." Mr Arthur has previously grown rice on the NSW side of the Murray River, but recently took the drastic step of leasing about 400ha near Kununurra, in the eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia, for the area's first commercial rice production.
29 October Australian article

Government considers farm deal

The Rudd government appears prepared to accept a Coalition demand to exclude agriculture from its emissions trading scheme but impose regulations to ensure the farm sector reduces greenhouse gases produced from livestock and crops.
28 October Australian article

Parliamentary report on coastal development

A federal parliamentary report has flagged new powers that would allow Canberra to block what it sees as inappropriate beachfront developments. The report says national guidelines should be drawn up for development in sensitive coastal regions, and calls for local councils to operate within these guidelines.
27 October Australian article

Uncertainty threatens jobs

With the Government still not spelling out detail of its proposed emissions trading scheme, the opposition still torn, and the likelihood of some negotiation between Government and opposition, uncertainty clouds emissions reduction in Australia. How does business account in the coming months for asset values, operational and capital costs, and investment strategies when one of the most serious impacts on their business cannot yet be properly defined? Uncertainty is likely to cost jobs.
16 October National Times opinion by Katie Lahey

Schools solar program axed

The Federal Government's $480 million "national solar schools" program was quietly suspended via a notice posted on the popular scheme's website. "The National Solar Schools Program has been suspended to any new claims in 2009-10. This suspension takes effect as of 3:00pm 15 October 2009," the notice said.
16 October The Australian article

'Forget nuclear'

On top of the perennial challenges of global poverty and injustice, the two biggest threats facing human civilisation in the 21st century are climate change and nuclear war. It would be absurd to respond to one by increasing the risks of the other. Yet that is what nuclear power does.
14 October National Times opinion by Mark Diesendorf

Coal industry contradicts itself

The Australian Coal Association’s campaign against the Government’s emission trading scheme has been undermined from the outset by the Association’s own website, which features material that directly contradicts the claims in its campaign, and by the CFMEU, which has attacked the campaign as “blatantly dishonest.”
29 September Crikey article

'Government little better than Opposition'

Listen to the Opposition and you'd think our problem wasn't that the world's getting hotter, the weather wilder and the sea level higher, but that playing our part in limiting those things may involve some unpleasantness. But the Government's little better than its opponents. Rudd has 100 top priorities, of which responding to climate change is just one. He can't resist playing politics. He advances the most timid policy at home, then jets off overseas to lecture other leaders on the need for concerted action.
23 September Sydney Morning Herald commentary by Ross Gittins

Australian's 'want action, but not early poll'

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's threat to call an early election if the Coalition blocks an emissions trading scheme in the Senate is backed by only one in five Australians, while a clear majority believes the Government should do a deal, according to Newspoll.
22 September The Australian article

Rudd undermines own argument

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has undermined his own argument that his emissions trading legislation must be passed before Copenhagen, admitting its defeat has not hampered his role in international climate-change talks.
22 September The Age article

Turnball faces party revolt

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull faces a revolt on emissions trading, with members of the Coalition warning him against striking a deal with Labor before the Copenhagen conference.
16 September The Age article
16 September Sydney Morning Herald article

Australia lags

Australia is behind Mexico and Argentina in terms of its ability to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets, according to a report from
The Climate Institute and European think-tank E3G.
14 September ABC article

'Fix the climate, but not at any price'

Research suggests that while Australians still want something done about climate change, they have rising concerns about the price they might be asked to pay.
26 August Crikey article

Deadlock on emissions trading laws

The Australian Government challenged conservative rivals to support deadlocked emissions trade laws after both sides reached agreement on a new national target to sharply lift the use of renewable energy.
21 August Reuters article

Winemaker prepares for warming

Stuart McNab, head of Australian wine production at Foster’s Group Ltd, is planting Spanish varieties such as Tempranillo and cooling vines with sprinklers to combat one of the industry’s biggest threats: climate change.
21 August Bloomberg article

Senate passes renewables bill

Australia’s Senate passed a bill requiring that the nation derive 20 per cent of its power from renewable energy by 2020, less than a week after rejecting broader legislation that would have introduced carbon trading.
20 August Bloomberg article
20 August Reuters article

The Renewable Energy Target was 'topped up' to allow existing waste coal mine gas projects to generate Renewable Energy Certificates.
17 August Minister's media statement

Biodiversity at risk

Australia's Biodiversity and Climate Change: a strategic assessment of the vulnerability of Australia’s biodiversity to climate change, a study commissioned by the Federal Government,confirmed that Australia’s iconic natural areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu Wetlands were particularly at risk.The report also shows Australia has a high proportion of species — about 85 per cent of terrestrial mammals, 91 per cent of flowering plants and 90 per cent of reptiles and frogs found only in Australia that will potentially be at risk from climate change.
17 August media statement and link to download the report

Snow cover dwindles

The average snow cover at Australia's highest altitude snow course, Spencer's Creek in the Snowy Mountains, has declined by 30 per cent to 40 per cent in the past 50 years. And the cost of man-made snow is also likely to increase as more water and electricity are required.
17 August AAP article through News

It's not just drought, it's climate change

Drought experts have for the first time proven a link between rising levels of greenhouse gases and a decline in rainfall.A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed that the drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.
16 August Sydney Morning Herald article

Senate rejects emissions trading

The Australian Senate defeated the Rudd Government's attempt to limit climate change with a carbon emissions trading scheme and 10 related bills.
14 August Guardian article
14 August Environment News Service article

Australia 'faces security threat'

Australia faces more intense and frequent heatwaves, wildfires, cyclones and floods, with climate change becoming a threat to national security, with the impacts of global warming already making themselves felt, much faster and with greater ferocity than anticipated, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said.
11 August AFP article

UN calls for Australia and pacific climate cooperation

Australia's regional role in climate talks is under scrutiny with the head of the United Nations' climate agency saying that it's in the interests of our Pacific neighbours to work with Australia to negotiate a global climate deal.
31 July ABC article

Warning on Australia's wine future

Author of the Australian Wine Companion 2010 writes that the global recession, wine glut, exchange rate fluctuations, drought and the prospect of climate change is making the "future of the Murray Darling almost impossible to predict".  He says the annual crush should be permanently reduced by up to 400,000 tonnes.
27 July Herald Sun article
27 July The Australian article

No delay for climate negotiations

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the Government is not prepared to delay a vote on the issue after the Coalition outlined its nine principles for negotiating over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has promised to bring his party with him if the Government is willing to change the legislation.
27 July ABC article

Grants for the Climate Ready Program
  
The Government will be granting $13.4 million to 22 businesses for projects supporting around 180 green jobs under the Climate Ready Program which offers matching grants from $50,000 to $5 million to help develop innovative solutions to climate change.
22 July Pace article
23 July EcoGeneration article

Australian carbon capture and storage goes global

The new Australian led Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI) is backed by 22 governments, including all G8 nations, the European Commission and more than 100 companies. Its new advisory panel includes Lord Nicholas Stern, Claude Mandil (former executive director of the International Energy Agency) and the executive director of the Indian Energy and Resources Institute, Leena Srivastava.
22 July TCEtoday article
10 July The Australian article
PM Interview

Carbon outlook not all black

The Australian opposition leader this week reversed the coalition’s stance and said it may support amended legislation to tackle climate change when the bill comes before parliament next month.The bill needs the support of at least seven lawmakers from the Liberal-National coalition to pass the draft laws in the upper house.
19 July NASDAQ article
22 July Bloomberg article

Australian companies not ready yet

According to research released by KPMG and the Australian Industry Group over 62 percent of the almost 400 companies surveyed are yet to take any steps to reduce their emissions or energy use. Inaction is mainly blamed on confusion about the implications of emissions trading for their business sector.
20 July The Australian article
21 July The Age article
Report

Robert Hill to chair Australian Carbon Trust

The Australian government set aside $76 million to establish the Brisbane-based Australian Carbon Trust which will promote ways for households and businesses to tackle climate change. Two key projects, Energy Efficiency Savings Pledge Fund and the Energy Efficiency Trust will provide a web-based calculator for energy use and the resulting dollar savings.
21 July Brisbane Times article
21 July The Australian article

Australia's influential climate role

Addressing Safe Climate Australia, a newly-formed research and action coalition of concerned scientists, community and business leader, Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore said Australia can play an influential global role as a path-breaking, innovative 'early responder' to climate change.
16 July ScienceAlert article

Faster change and more serious setbacks

A new Federal Government report of recent scientific research found changes in ocean temperatures, sea levels and Arctic sea ice were all at or beyond worst-case forecasts. As a result, Australia faces a greater risk of recurring severe droughts and more heatwaves, floods and bushfires.
9 July ABC article
10 July The Age article
Report

Australia 'very hopeful' of strong climate deal

Australia's emissions trading laws look more likely to pass a hostile Senate after U.S. Congressional support for a similar climate bill eroded political opposition in Australia to carbon trading. Both the Rudd government and the opposition have promised cuts of between 5 and 25 per cent by 2020, conditional on the ambition of any global deal.
2 June Reuters article
9 July Sydney Morning Herald article
10 July The Australian article

Australian emissions trading vote delay

The Australian government's carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) hangs on a package of 11 bills, which face defeat or delay in parliament's upper house Senate. A finalised vote on carbon trading was expected to give certainty for business planning and strengthen international negotiations.
22 June Reuters article
23 June The Australian article
25 June The Australian article

Senator seeks climate clarity?

Sceptical senator Steve Fielding, yet to be convinced rising carbon emissions are responsible for global warming, met with Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. The government is facing an upper house blockade of its emissions trading scheme.
20 June The Australian article
18 June Canberra Times article
17 June Brisbane Times article
10 June Canberra Times article

Australian senate reports released

An Australian Senate economics committee has issued the report from its inquiry into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 and related bills and a climate committee has issued the report from its inquiry into climate policy.
16 June Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Report
Climate Policy Report

America and Australia not so far apart

U. S. and Australian proposed carbon trading policies have been compared in a briefing paper on the US Waxman–Markey climate change bill. The bill’s centrepiece is an emissions trading scheme (ETS) and also includes complementary and reinforcing initiatives on clean energy and energy efficiency.
15 June Wotnews article
Report

Misleading in the worst case

The Australian Conservation Foundation has called for the investigation of 14 statements made by Rio Tinto, Woodside, Xstrata, Boral, Caltex and Blue Scope Steel about the possible impact of the Federal Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme, saying the companies may have misled investors and the public to maintain share price.
15 June ABC article

Australia rallies for carbon

National Climate Emergency Rallies have called on Australia to take the lead at the UN environment summit in December in Copenhagen. Amid warnings that Australia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of a shifting climate, calls were made to end Australia's dependence on cheap and plentiful coal.
13 June BBC article
14 June SMH article

Abrupt solar switch

Federal Environment Minister announced an abrupt end to applications for a household rebate to put solar panels on their roofs, taking some in the solar industry by surprise. The $8,000 solar rebate is being scrapped in favour of a market-driven system of solar credits to begin in 2010.
9 June News.com article
4 June SMH article

ETS net positive

The Victorian government is investing in new, renewable forms of energy, looking to make the proposed national carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) have a net positive impact for the state, seeing more jobs not less. This would not apply uniformly and losses are expected in the coal-reliant Latrobe Valley.
3 June ABC article
4 June The Age article
Victorian Climate Change Green Paper

Wind power building

Australia's biggest wind farm, to be built near Broken Hill in New South Wales, has planning permission for the first phase of development. One of the world's largest onshore wind farms, it will eventually cover more than 32,000 hectares with almost 600 turbines to generate enough electricity for more than 400,000 homes.
3 June The Australian article
9 June BBC article

Geothermal growth reported
The Australian geothermal industry has experienced significant growth in the number of companies that have joined the search for "Hot-Rock Energy," fuelled by the rapidly increasing demand for renewable energy. In the nine months since the launch of the world's first Geothermal Reporting Code, six companies have reported large geothermal energy reserves.
2 June Energy Current article

Don't get your coal wet

CSIRO are working on a project partly funded through the Victorian Government’s Energy Technology Innovation Strategy (ETIS) to change from wet to dried coal with the potential to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions although it represents a challenge for existing combustion systems.
2 June ScienceAlert article

Australia carbon aim is 450 parts per million

The Australian government emission target and timeline for achieving it has been questioned before a senate committee. Minister Wong affirmed that 450 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere is still the goal but said that including a timeline to get to this by mid century was a mistake.
29 May ABC article

Historic emissions trading scheme bills tabled

The Labour Federal Government has introduced Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills to parliament and is trying to convince the Opposition and the crossbench senators to support its emissions trading legislation. Neither the Nationals party nor the Greens have given support.
13 May Sydney Morning Herald article
14 May ABC article

Finding funding for new power processes
Despite the ravages of the financial crisis and the massive deficit, the Australian Government found $3.5 billion in its new budget for projects to prove the viability of carbon capture and storage and large-scale solar energy generation, introducing new legislation to get the necessary funding.
12 May Wall Street Journal article
13 May The Australian article

Climate impacts will force Indigenous Australians to leave land

Human Rights Commission’s 2008 Social Justice and Native Title reports warn that climate change will further marginalise Australia’s Aboriginal communities, forcing them out of their traditional lands, destroying their culture and significantly affecting their access to water resources.
8 May IPS News article
Reports

Government seeks compromise on emissions trading

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced substantial changes to Australia's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (emissions trading system), including delaying the introduction of the scheme by one year to 1 July 2011, for the first year an unlimited number of permits will be available at a cost of $10 per tonne, and the price will then be fully floating, with a new "global recession buffer" for emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries.
Transcript of PM's media conference
4 May The Australian article
4 May Sydney Morning Herald article
9 May Sydney Morning Herald article

Bargain renewable energy?

Australian and New Zealand wind farm development assets were purchased by Infigen for less than $20million, just days before the extension of the 20 per cent renewable energy target to 2030 and an increase in fines paid by utilities not meeting renewable energy obligations.
4 May The Australian article

Emissions targets to be tougher, later

Australia's government still aims to push the emissions trading laws through parliament this year but announced a one-year delay to the start of its carbon emissions trading scheme, While promising more support to big industry they are opening the door to a tougher 2020 target in a bid to win approval.
4 May Reuters article
4 May BBC article
4 May The Age article

Australian carbon plans under pressure

Australia's leading climate scientists and representatives of heavy polluting industries have squared off over the future direction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as industry and workers asked  more than $9 billion for heavy polluting industries while CSIRO scientists warned of worsening threats from carbon emissions.
20 April The Age article
26 April The Age article

China slams Australia on climate

A senior Chinese delegate told a joint Australia-China climate conference in Canberra that Australia's 2020 emissions target was "insufficient". He argued that developed countries needed to take the lead in tackling climate change.
15 April News.com article
16 April The Australian article

Current targets won't protect planet

Senior Australian scientists have made calls in a submission to a Senate select committee into climate change, urging deep cuts to coal-fired electricity and tougher carbon reduction targets. They say climate protection targets must be at minimum 5-10 per cent by 2020 and 70-80 per cent by 2050 on 2000 levels.
12 April The Age article
16 April Sydney Morning Herald article

Australia the image of climate change

The world looks to Australia as an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world, showing examples of the things that climate change models are predicting for other countries. They cite the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness.
9 April Los Angeles Times article

Australian Water Summit

The UN's senior adviser on water issues said that Australia is investing with "cult-like faith" in flawed technology to avert the national water crisis and the price for this lack of vision was being paid by ordinary Australians and farmers. She accused federal and state governments of having "no overall plan" to save Australia's water heritage.
2 April The Australian article

Emissions trading scheme 'too costly' during economic crisis

Big business groups are claiming the Rudd Government's plans for an emissions trading scheme will cost too much, and say the Fair Pay Commission should avoid delivering a significant increase to workers' minimum pay. The Australian Industry Group -- which has split from employers advocating a total pay freeze but wants only a small increase in the minimum wage of $8 a week -- claims the carbon pollution reduction scheme will add $8 billion to business costs in 2010-11.
31 March The Australian article

Wong warns US on tariffs

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, has warned the United States against introducing "carbon tariffs" to protect American industry, an idea floated earlier this month by the US Energy Secretary, Steven Chu. Ms Wong said Australia had a "consistent position on trade policy and that is, as a small and open economy, we support open trade".
31 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

NSW Govt trials electric car

The New South Wales Government will trial an electric car in a plan to make its fleet emissions free. The car will be available at the Department of Environment and Climate Change for staff to provide feedback.
30 March ABC News online article

Reports of white lemuroid ringtail possum's extinction premature

A rare possum said to be the first Australian species wiped out by global warming appears to be clinging to survival, if still vulnerable, in north Queensland's tropical rainforest. Last year, the white lemuroid ringtail possum was reported to have vanished from high-altitude rainforests in north Queensland. It was the first Australian mammal extinction attributed to climate change.
28 March The Australian article

Kevin Rudd gives pessimistic analysis of climate outlook

Kevin Rudd has given his most pessimistic forecast yet of getting the world to agree to climate change policies while economies collapse. “The degrees of difficulty have got greater,” he said. The Prime Minister said pushing an agreement through concerns about the global recession would be difficult, although Australia still believed it had to be done.
27 March The Herald Sun article

Rudd gives emissions trading advice in US

As the United States debates an emissions trading scheme, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has talked to America's Senate leaders about Australia's experience. Australia is further along the road in developing an emissions trading scheme than the Obama administration, and Mr Rudd has discussed with the US Senate leadership the complexity involved in designing such a scheme.
26 March ABC News online article

US to work with the world

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has expressed relief that under President Barack Obama, the United States will work with all the world's governments to solve the environmental and economic challenges of climate change.
24 March Environment News Service article

Bushfire pollution deaths to rise

Bushfires worsening in south-eastern Australia due to climate change will cause more deaths and illness through air pollution, a CSIRO study has shown. Mick Myers and a team from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research examined air quality data from monitoring stations in Melbourne during the 2006 bushfires and found a big jump in air pollution.
26 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

ETS may shrink regional growth

Secret NSW Government modelling shows regional economies could shrink by more than 20 per cent over the next 40 years under the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme, although nationwide economic effect of the ETS would be modest.
26 March The Australian article
26 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Climate plan 'waste of money'

The Federal Government's emissions trading scheme will have too many permits and will not reduce carbon emissions, a think tank says. The scheme has been criticised by the head of the Australia Institute before a Senate committee considering the Government's draft legislation for its carbon pollution reduction scheme.
26 March The Canberra Times article

Climate change could be harmful to your health

A combination of climate-change-induced temperature rises and increasing levels of air pollution could exacerbate the harmful effects of heat stress experienced by people living in Sydney, according to new research by CSIRO scientist, Dr Martin Cope.
25 March CSIRO media release
25 March Reuters article

Australia's climate reputation 'damaged'

Australia will be a minor player in international climate change talks unless it lifts its own carbon reduction targets, a parliamentary inquiry has been told. Professor Clive Hamilton, from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, says the government's planned emissions trading scheme has damaged Australia's reputation on climate change.
25 March ninemsn article

Delaying ETS 'would create market uncertainty'

Delaying an emissions trading scheme would create uncertainty for the financial markets, a Senate committee has heard. The financial sector also wants the Federal Government to ensure the scheme is enshrined in law to ensure market confidence.
25 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Change starts at the top

A range of government programs are designed to make us more energy efficient, writes Owen Thomson.
24 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Climate deal failure could cause tariff war: Garnaut

The head of the Federal Government's climate change review, Ross Garnaut, warned that Australia was likely to face a world tariff war driven by Europe and the US over greenhouse gas emissions unless there was a strong global agreement to prevent climate change.
24 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Ditch compo in ETS: Garnaut

The compensation proposed for polluting industries under Australia's emissions trading scheme will contribute to the dangerous global rise of green protectionism, Ross Garnaut has warned. The Rudd Government's climate change adviser said the Australian climate change debate had been captured by "private interest, the ignorant, the myopic and the excessive". Professor Garnaut argued the Government should agree to ditch its hard-negotiated compensation regime if international rules could be set to prevent countries that moved early in setting a carbon price from being disadvantaged.
24 March The Australian article

Plan to curb savanna wildfire carbon emissions

The Federal Government is providing $10 million for research into how Indigenous communities can reduce carbon emissions by controlling fires on savannas in northern Australia.
23 March ABC News online article

Beautiful one year, flooded the next

The top government scientist advising on how to adapt the nation to climate change warns that Australia will be forced to abandon some coastal communities in a "planned retreat" because of rising sea levels caused by global warming.
23 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Govt to spend $20m on climate research

A $20 million science program will help Australia's neighbours understand the impacts of climate change on the region, Minister Penny Wong says. She opened a national greenhouse conference in Perth announcing the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.
23 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Green trade war a threat to Australia

Fears are rising of a global green trade war if Copenhagen climate change talks fail, after US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu suggested the Obama administration would consider "carbon tariffs" against countries that had not put a cost on pollution when the US introduced its emissions trading regime. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said protectionist carbon tariffs could be "very costly for a small, open economy like Australia" and would in any event be very difficult to administer.
20 March The Australian article

New supercomputers to track climate change

A deal has been signed to create two new supercomputers in Australia to forecast weather and track climate change. The Australian National University and the Bureau of Meteorology will build the new computers at the ANU campus in Canberra and in Melbourne.
19 March ABC News online article

Exodus fears for Murray towns

Northern Victorians are in danger of becoming Australia's first climate change refugees, according to a top Brumby Government water official. Speaking at a water conference in Melbourne, Department of Sustainability and Environment executive director Campbell Fitzpatrick said the human aspect of climate change in the Murray-Darling Basin must not be forgotten amid the heated debate over water reform.
18 March The Age article

Green energy firm pledges 1200 jobs

Renewable energy company Pacific Hydro has challenged claims the Government's climate change policies will cost jobs, saying it will create at least 1200 new positions at Hydro over the next five years if they are implemented. Pacific Hydro chief executive Rob Grant said any potential job losses in coal mining would be offset by the construction and operation of four wind farms once legislation for an emissions trading scheme and a 20 per cent renewable energy target were passed. Two of the wind farms would be in Victoria, creating 600 jobs.
18 March The Age article

'Act on climate or kill future generations'

One of the country's top scientists has told politicians to act quickly on climate change or devastate the lives of unborn generations. Penny Sackett, the Government's Chief Scientist, delivered her blunt message to politicians at a dinner at Parliament House. Professor Sackett warned the actions of this generation "may deny the next generation the prosperity that we have enjoyed and endanger the lives of millions".
17 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Labor heartland turns on ETS as modelling shows greater regional impact

The mayors of three of the nation's biggest mining cities have demanded Kevin Rudd delay introducing carbon emissions trading, warning it will smash jobs and seriously damage key regional areas. The managing director of Frontier Economics, Danny Price, who conducted still-secret modelling for the NSW Treasury on the Rudd Government's plan, said the impact of the scheme across industrial regions, including central Queensland, the Hunter and Illawarra in NSW and Victoria's Gippsland, would be "very high" and "very severe".
17 March The Australian article
17 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Emissions trading linked to jobs

Malcolm Turnbull has linked emissions trading to thousands of feared job losses in Queensland, claiming three Townsville metal smelters will close, the state's coal industry will face a "carbon bill" of $2.4 billion over five years and even green jobs will be threatened by the Rudd Government's scheme.
18 March The Australian article

Carbon output falls as car use drops

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions fell over summer, apparently because fewer people relied on cars to get around. But the fall was slight because the drop in car use was mostly cancelled out by the increasing amount of carbon released by coal-fired power stations.
16 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Nick Xenophon declares emissions trading scheme doomed in Senate

Key crossbench Senator Nick Xenophon has called on the Government to accept that its proposed emissions trading scheme is doomed in the Senate. The South Australian independent has hardened his rhetoric on the ETS after Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull toughened his line. "It should be pretty clear to the Government now that in its current form this legislation won't pass the Senate," Senator Xenophon said.
16 March The Australian article
16 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Greens want ETS changes as carbon scheme start looks doomed

Kevin Rudd's pledge to start an emissions trading scheme next year looks doomed after the Greens vowed to oppose the scheme unless the Prime Minister makes fundamental changes. Chances of Senate approval for the proposal plunged after Malcolm Turnbull declared the Coalition would not support the scheme's present form and timetable. The Opposition Leader's move has pushed the Rudd Government into the arms of the Greens and independents, whose support is needed to push the scheme through the Senate.
16 March The Australian article

Opposition grows to Australia's CO2 trade scheme

Major political opponents to Australia's carbon trading plans have hardened their stance, adding pressure on the government to make radical changes to get the scheme passed by parliament. The ruling Labor party needs either the support of two independent and five Greens senators or the main opposition Liberal party to pass the emissions trading laws in the Senate.
15 March Reuters article

Marsupials at risk if temperatures rise

Polar bears and penguins are not the only animals at risk of climate change: much of Australia's fauna, including several species of kangaroos and wallabies, may be threatened, a new report says. Climate change and species, by Tammie Matson, highlights just how vulnerable many animals are to even small changes in global temperatures and rainfall.
14 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Economists fiddle while climate burns

According to a growing band of economists, we'd be better off using a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not the emissions trading scheme the Rudd Government introduced to Parliament this week. My opinion? Don't believe it. It may be a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. Whichever way the Government had jumped there'd be a bunch of economists arguing that the other way would have been better.
14 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Coalition calls for economic modelling on emissions trading

The Coalition has challenged the Rudd Government to model the short-term economic and job consequences of its emissions trading scheme, and of alternative schemes, before the Senate is required to vote on the issue. It is understood the Pearce Review -- an independent study commissioned by the Coalition to help it finalise its climate-change position and expected to be released imminently -- highlights the absence of data on which to base critical decisions.
14 March The Australian article

Call for carbon tax gets lukewarm response

Claims by a top climate scientist that a carbon tax is the only way to rapidly cut greenhouse emissions have met a mixed response from Australian experts. Speaking from a major International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Dr James Hansen told the press that a global emissions trading system would take too long to negotiate.
13 March ABC Science analysis

Climate change to hit Kakadu

Climate change will threaten Kakadu's key attractions with "devastating" implications for tourism in the world-heritage listed national park, new research warns.
12 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Fielding urges delay on emissions trading

The Government's chances of getting its emissions trading system through the Senate by the middle of the year took another hit when the Family First senator Steve Fielding confirmed that he believed the scheme should be delayed.
12 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Emissions trading scheme hits turbulence

Three separate parliamentary investigations will be held into the Federal Government's emissions trading system, including one that threatens to derail the timetable for the legislation's passage. The draft legislation setting up the scheme includes the commitment to reduce Australia's emissions by between 5 and 15 per cent by 2020.
11 March The Sydney Morning Herald article

Australia affirms carbon emissions target amid growth concerns

Australia’s government maintained its targets for reducing carbon emissions, resisting calls to delay plans that will detract from growth as the economy heads for a possible recession. Draft legislation to introduce carbon trading aims to cut emissions by between five and 15 percent of 2000 levels by 2020, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said. This would help Australia meet its goal of a 60 percent reduction by the middle of this century, she said.
10 March Bloomberg article

Climate change still on the radar: survey

A study says Australians still consider climate change a major concern and believe it should be dealt with alongside the country's other major concern, the global economic crisis. The Climate Institute commissioned an online survey of 1,400 people to get their opinions on climate change.
9 March ABC News online article

Environment Business Australia calls for strong action on climate change

Build new markets, new industries, new jobs - that's the way to tackle climate change. And now is the time to invest in creating hundreds of thousands of high quality 'carbon-light' jobs says Environment Business Australia. Imagine Australia being a regional 'hub' for minerals processing and manufacturing and having 100% of electricity from renewable energy by 2030. We can do that with 'mega clean energy parks' run on solar thermal, geothermal, marine and wind energy.
5 March Environment Business Australia media release

The path to Copenhagen

China promises to cut carbon intensity

China has pledged that by 2020 it would cut its carbon intensity, the measure of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP, by 40 per cent to 45 per cent compared to 2005 levels. Officials announced Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, would personally take the offer to the summit in Copenhagen.
27 November Independent article
26 November Telegraph article
27 November China Daily article
26 November New York Times article (free registration required)
26 November Guardian article

China's pledge on greenhouse gases means it would shoulder more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide emissions cuts needed to avoid dangerous global warming, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.
27 November AFP article

China's top climate envoy said emissions absorbed by carbon "sinks" will not be covered by the country's carbon intensity target, which will be calculated using energy consumption and "production processes."
27 November Reuters article through Planet Ark

Obama to Copenhagen with US commitment for cuts

United States President Obama will travel to Copenhagen next month to attend the climate change conference, ending weeks of uncertainty over whether he would go and after intense pressure from Europe for his presence. Mr Obama will also take to the summit a US commitment to make substantial cuts in greenhouse gas pollution over the next two decades, removing one of the greatest obstacles to a deal in Copenhagen.
Mr Obama will offer to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020, a 30 per cent reduction by 2025 and a 42 per cent drop by 2030. The White House said the targets represented a “pathway” to Mr Obama’s goal of cutting American emissions 83 per cent by 2050.
25 November Times article
25 November Telegraph article
25 November New York Times article

For all President Obama’s aspirations to global leadership on climate change there remains a gulf between what the world expects and what he can deliver. That gulf has been exposed by starkly contrasting reactions at home and abroad to his pledge to cut US carbon emissions. He has a mountain to climb to sell his new climate change commitments to a sceptical American public.
27 November Times article

Papua New Guinea has criticised the United States's "irresponsible" and "unacceptable" climate change policy at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. PNG PM Michael Somare said, "The targets proposed by the United States of only three per cent below 1990, by 2020 is not only irresponsibly low; it is also quite unacceptable." The "stakes are too high", he said.
29 November The Age article

President Obama will stop off in Copenhagen on December 9 on his way to Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize. He will not, his officials say, be returning to join 65 other heads of state for the crucial last three days of the conference from December 16-18. He is simply heading to Copenhagen for a photo opportunity. He is playing politics with the most important climate change negotiations for more than a decade in order to try to avoid embarrassing headlines.
25 November Times commentary by Environment Editor Ben Webster

US, China and India commit to action

Three of the world's top emitters, China, America and India are now committed to action on emissions at Copenhagen, though they have yet to reveal the actual targets. But it does significantly boost the prospect that world leaders could commit to strong action at the UN summit, despite the rancourous atmosphere among their official negotiating teams at the last set of meetings in Barcelona this month.
24 November Guardian article

Countries must "reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty," United States President Obama said at a press conference he hosted jointly with Indiaqn Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In a joint statement, Singh and Obama spoke of their hopes for a "comprehensive" deal at the December 7-18 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. "It should reflect emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries," they said.
25 November Sydney Morning Herald article

The coming charade

We are about to see an advanced case of ''agreementism'' between world leaders at the Copenhagen climate change meeting. It is a painful and embarrassing disorder with familiar results. Every case begins the same way. Leaders gather in summits. They confer. They reach earnest consensus that they need to solve a common problem. They commission studies and agree to meet again. Next time, they tell reporters, they will make real decisions.
24 November The Age commentary by Peter Hartcher

Encouraging change in political climate

Over the past fortnight, three big countries have made major new pledges to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide from industry, transport and deforestation which is causing climate change, leading to a significant improvement in hopes for the outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit.
23 November Independent article

US considers 'provisional target'

United States of America President Barack Obama is considering setting a provisional target for cutting America's huge greenhouse gas emissions, removing the greatest single obstacle to a landmark global agreement to fight climate change. Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, said the administration recognised that America had to come forward with a target for cutting its emissions. "What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation," Stern said from Copenhagen, where he was meeting Danish officials.
22 November The Observer article

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretasry Yvo de Boer is pressuring the United States of America for “a numerical midterm target (for emissions reduction) and commitment to financial support”. “We now have offers of targets from all industrialised countries except the United States,” Mr. de Boer said.
19 November New York Times article (free registration required)

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretasry Yvo de Boer has urged US President Obama to attend the Copenhagen conference. "Obama's presence would make a huge difference," he said.
19 November ENS article

India promises to be no worse than the west, per capita

While acknowledging that India could be a big polluter considering its large population and growing economy, New Delhi has said it would ensure that its per capita emissions never exceed that of developed countries. “India’s per capita emissions are now around 1.2 tonnes of CO2 equivalent and are expected to be around 2-2 .5 tonnes by 2020 and 3-3 .5 tonnes by 2030. The per capita limit is an onerous binding that India has imposed on itself,” said Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.
19 November Economic Times article

India's environment minister said the country may have to be more flexible over climate change talks after China unveiled its first firm targets to cut carbon emissions.
27 November Reuters article

South Korea announces emissions target

South Korea has announced its first greenhouse gas reduction target, pledging to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by to per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.
16 November AP article

Russia tightens emissions target

Russia President Dmitry Medvedev said his country would try to reduce greenhouse emissions by 25 per cent, not by 15 per cent as was planned before.
18 November Itar-Tass article

Brazil to offfer 'voluntary reductions'

Brazil will take proposals for voluntary reductions of 38-42% by 2020 to the Copenhagen climate change conference next month, country's chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff said.
10 November Guardian article

Canada urged to cut deeply

Canada's parliament has carried a resolution urging Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Tory government to adopt a deep carbon dioxide reduction target at upcoming international climate talks. The motion calling on the ruling Conservatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels was supported by all three of Canada's opposition parties, 137 votes to 124. It has no legal weight.
24 November AFP article

A small spark of new hope

The United States and China, the world's two biggest polluters, said they aimed to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month, potentially breathing new life into the flagging Copenhagen climate negotiations.
17 November Guardian article
17 November Telegraph article
17 November AFP article
18 November AP article

US Senate 'to act next year'

The US Senate will act in early 2010 on legislation to battle climate change, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, ending hopes of a breakthrough by next month's global talks.
17 November AFP article

Quebec sets target

The Canadian province of Quebec said it aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, the same target as that set by the European Union.
24 November Reuters article

Merkel calls on all to fix binding targets

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for all countries to fix binding climate change targets next year at the latest, acknowledging that no such deal is likely at global talks in Copenhagen in December.
19 November AFP article

de Boer vows Copenhagen will succeed

United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer has a message for naysayers about the Copenhagen climate conference next month: It will succeed. Yvo De Boer vowed Copenhagen "will be the turning point" when words turn to action globally to begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and a fuller treaty can be worked out by six months after the meeting.
20 November AP article
20 November AFP article

Plea for leaders to head to Copenhagen

 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appeals to world leaders to come to Copenhagen and hammer out the foundation of what he hopes will eventually be an ambitious climate deal.
17 November Spiegel article

Failure 'will cause further rise in hunger'

The world cannot achieve food security without first tackling global warming, the United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon said, warning that failure at next month's international climate change negotiations would result in a further rise in hunger.
17 November Financial Times article

Russia warns of climate catastrophe

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that climate change posed a "catastrophic" threat, using some of the sharpest comments yet on a subject the Kremlin has often seemed reluctant to confront.
16 November Reuters article

World leaders give up and turn to Plan B

World leaders have agreed to a political compromise deal on climate change aimed at salvaging next month's international UN conference in Copenhagen, which scraps the 200-page draft agreement. The leaders have begun work, instead, on a plan B document of no more than 15 pages that would not be legally binding in which nations would agree to embrace emissions reductions conditional upon other nations adopting and meeting their own targets.
16 November Australian article
16 November Independent article
15 November Times article
16 November ABC AM transcript
15 November Telegraph article
15 November Guardian article
15 November New York Times article

The worst kept secret in the world is finally out – the climate change summit in Copenhagen is going to be little more than a photo opportunity for world leaders.
15 November Telegraph analysis by Environment Correspondent Louise Gray

Any kind of ambition, hopeless or otherwise, has been rare on the ground when it comes to global efforts to curb climate change. Obama has confirmed we can expect more of the same. Despite the rhetoric about Copenhagen being a moment in history, a crucial last chance to deliver, it will likely revert to type – talks about talks.
15 November Guardian analysis by Environment Correspondent David Adam

'Human cost' of delay

The likely delays in sealing a global deal to fight climate change would have a "human cost", and increase the risks of great harm to the planet and the economic costs of dealing with it, the head of the UN environment programme said.
16 November Guardian article

'We cannot afford another Kyoto'

We cannot afford another Kyoto conference where fine words are exchanged but behaviour continues as normal. At Copenhagen it is vital that leaders keep in mind a core set of minimum requirements that, if agreed to, would represent a political breakthrough and step-change in tackling climate change.
14 November Telegraph opinion by Lord Browne of Madingley, former BP Chief Executive, now managing director and managing partner (Europe) of Riverstone Holdings LLC and president of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Can we trust the accounts?

Measurement, reporting and auditing of nations' greenhouse gas emissions is a key focus of marathon UN climate talks. The problem is that it is not yet possible to independently monitor a country's greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels or deforestation. To a large extent, the world community must take nations' reports of their emissions on trust. Rich nations such as Australia and the United States have developed reliable reporting methods on energy use and fossil fuel emissions, said Pep Canadell of the Global Carbon Project. Accuracy for developing countries was often not as good.
10 November Reuters article

US will not bow to UN enforcement power

It has become clear that the Americans will not sign up to certain aspects of the Kyoto Protocol: Namely, the legal requirement for rich nations to sign up to a world target enforced by the UN. They want different countries to propose their own targets that are agreed by the rest of the world but enforced by domestic — not international — law in a system known as “pledge and review”.  From the American perspective, a new treaty must also include legally-binding targets for developing countries. Not necessarily on carbon cuts but “actions” such as introducing a certain amount of renewable energy or phasing out dirty coal.
9 November Telegraph article

Setting aside just enough national self-interest

Even if the imperative is clear and recognised by all, national self-interest guides a different response to it in different nations, and the great trick to pull off in the Danish capital will be for all countries to put aside just enough self-interest to agree.
9 November Independent article

Gorbachev calls for climate wall to be broken 

"The road to the end of the Cold War was certainly not easy, or universally welcomed at the time, but it is for just this reason that its lessons remain relevant. In the 1980s the world was at an historic crossroad. The arms race had created an explosive situation. Nuclear deterrents could have failed at any moment. We were heading for disaster, spending billions on an arms race, rather than investing in creativity and people. Today another planetary threat has emerged. The climate crisis is the new wall that divides us from our future, and today’s leaders are vastly underestimating the urgency, and potentially catastrophic scale, of the emergency."
9 November Times article in which former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev calls for action on climate

No advance in Barcelona

Talks in Barcelona on a new UN climate pact wrapped, leaving a roster of bitterly divisive issues to be hammered out at a showdown in Copenhagen next month. Senior officials meeting over five days made scant headway on the problems dogging a negotiation blueprint for the December 7-18 conference, and activists feared the much-trumpeted outcome would be a fudge. The Barcelona session "was a waste of time. Nothing was achieved whatsoever," Austrian Environment Minister Nikolaus Berlakovich said.
7 November AFP article through Brisbane Times

40 national leaders to attend

Forty heads of state or government have signalled they will attend the world climate talks in Copenhagen next month, UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said.
7 November ABC article

United States President Barack Obama said he would travel to Copenhagen next month if a climate summit is on the verge of a framework deal and his presence there will make a difference in clinching it.
10 November Reuters article

Others wait on a stalled US

With United States legislation on reducing carbon emissions caught up in political wrangling and many other nations waiting to see what the US does before making their own firm commitments, prospects are fading that a legally binding new pact to limit climate change will be signed at Copenhagen in December.
7 November Reuters article

Negotiators work on scaled-back draft

Negotiators and diplomats are working on a scaled-back version of a global climate change treaty that could be agreed by next month's deadline, without firm United States commitments. The idea of forging a political agreement, instead of a legally binding treaty, was becoming a more accepted possibility as negotiators acknowledged some nations, including the United States, would not be ready in time for the December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
6 September AP article

US draws line in sand

In the latest round of UN climate change talks in Barcelona, the United States of America said it was unfair to expect rich countries to cut emissions while developing nations like China and India continue to pollute.
6 November Telegraph article

Big polluters hiring thousands of lobbyists

Big greenhouse polluting companies around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to weaken climate change laws at home and slow progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals. In the US there are more than 2800 climate lobbyists, five for every member of Congress.
6 November Sydney Morning Herald article
More details from the Center for Public Integrity

Agreement 'at least a year away'

A global deal to stop catastrophic climate change won't be agreed for another year, officials have warned, as rich and poor nations wrangle over the sacrifices each will have to make.
5 November Telegraph article
5 November Guardian article

Financial support for developing countries

Commonwealth agrees aid deal

An emergency £13 billion deal to persuade poorer nations to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately was backed by the British Commonwealth after being proposed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to kickstart the Copenhagen climate-change process.
28 November Times article
27 November Guardian article
29 November Sydney Morning Herald article

UN calls for $10 billion a year pledge

United Nations Climate chief Yvo de Boer urges the developed nations to pledge $10 billion a year for three years to help poor nations cope with climate change.
19 November Reuters article

Bangladesh seeks $10 billion

Bangladesh said it would need $10 billion from rich countries in the next four years to offset the effects of climate change - double its original estimate.
17 November AFP article

World faces huge funding shortfall

The world will face a finance shortfall of 32 billion euros ($47.99 billion) in 2020 to combat climate change, analysts at Societe Generale/orbeo said. The private sector will have to be mobilised to finance national measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions to bridge that gap, analysts said in a report.
12 November Reuters article

G20 deadlock

The rich nations went into the G20 meeting expecting the emerging powerhouses such as Brazil, India and China to agree to pay at least something towards these future costs (which include everything from investing in more efficient plants and power stations to creating carbon trading platforms to paying for research to find new green technologies). The emerging nations flatly refused. The days are ticking down to Copenhagen, and it looks increasingly like one of those occasions where politicians will have to use grand gestures and statements to mask the fact that in truth they can’t find any common ground at all.
8 November Telegraph commentary

Realignment of currencies causing havoc

The decision to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a series of interlocking international emissions trading schemes rather than carbon taxes is turning into a disaster because of currency realignments. The collapsing US dollar is playing havoc with ETS projections. Governments that had been hoping to make extra revenue by selling carbon permits will now lose money, which means less cash available for subsidies to the developing countries.
5 November Business Spectator article

Euope's proposed €50bn annually 'not enough'

The giant cash deal to save the planet – proposed by Europe for the forthcoming Copenhagen climate conference – will not be enough, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, said. The public-money fund of up to €50bn annually, which the European Union suggested would be adequate to help developing nations protect themselves from global warming, and cut back on their own carbon emissions, would need to be “scaled up”, Mr Ban said.
3 November Independent article 

Emissions and policy

Aviators call for 'single global framework'

British Airways, Virgin, the airports group BAA, defence firm BAE Systems and manufacturers Airbus UK and Rolls-Royce are all signatories to the Sustainable Aviation Manifesto. It calls for a single global framework for emissions, which it says is needed to stop "differential impact" of nationally-imposed targets that would damage the UK industry.
28 NOvember Telegraph article

China invests in methane capture

China, a massive consumer of fossil fuels and coal in particular, is trying to modernise its mines by containing emissions of methane and turning the gas into a source of much-needed energy.
27 November Telegraph article

Greenhouse gas concentrations rise more rapidly 

Not only is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continuing to increase, but the rate of increase is also rising, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
24 November Telegraph article
23 November World Meteorological Organization media statement
Download the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin

Reverse combustion processes produces fuel from carbon dioxide

United States researchers have demonstrated a technology that uses the sun’s heat to convert carbon dioxide and water into the building blocks of traditional fuels, a reverse combustion process that may emerge as a practical alternative to sequestration of CO2 emissions from power plants. Researchers warn the technology likely will not be ready for market for 15 to 20 years.
24 November Cleantechies article

Forget city density, it is transport policy that matters

We can keep our leafy suburbs and still save the planet. Despite opinions popular among planners, it can be demonstrated that it is transport policies that add to the sustainability of a city, not population density. Cities like the Canadian capital, Ottawa, demonstrate that relatively high denisities have little to do with the use of sustainable transport.
23 November The Age analysis by Paul Mees

Decarbonisation 'the greatest error'

The greatest error in the current conventional wisdom is that, if you accept the (present) majority scientific view that most of the modest global warming in the last quarter of the last century — about half a degree centigrade — was caused by man-made carbon emissions, then you must also accept that we have to decarbonise our economies. For a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, which is uncertain, it is far less than the economic cost (let alone the human cost) of decarbonisation.
23 November The Times opinion by Nigel Lawson, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer

Inaction 'imperils world'

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the UK Department for Environment and Rural Affairs, said a decade of inaction on climate change meant it was now virtually impossible to limit global temperature rise to 2C. He said the delay meant the world would now do well to stabilise warming between 3C and 4C.
22 November Guardian article

Sceptics claim evidence of scientists manipulating data

Climate change sceptics and deniers claim documents now publicly available on the web, alleged emails and documents hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, are evidence of scientists manipulating data to make the case for climate change. The head of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, has confirmed that the institution's database has been hacked but he cannot confirm which of the emails are authentic and which are fakes.
20 November Guardian article
24 November The Australian article
23 November The Age article
23 November Crikey article
21 November Christian Science Monitor article

It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
25 November Guardian opinion by George Monbiot

Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full. In a statement reversing previous policy, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.
28 November Telegraph article

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
29 November Times article

Lord Lawson, the former UK chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into claims that leading climate change scientists manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made global warming.
23 November Telegraph article

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world's wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world's biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, birdwatchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.
In a 25 November National Times article, author and environmental columnist George Monbiot outlines the breadth of the "conspiracy of global warming"

The publication of damning emails about climate change could literally change the world. Gordon Rayner reports. In the US, where the CRU emails have been cited as proof of "the greatest act of scientific fraud in history", there are very real fears that hardline Republicans – together with powerful Right-wing media organisations – will use the scandal to scupper President Obama's proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions. In Australia, the world's worst carbon dioxide polluter per capita, 10 opposition front bench MPs have resigned in protest at a proposed carbon bill, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the emergence of the emails. And here in the UK, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal.
27 November Telegraph commentary by Gordon Rayner

Emissions trend up; sinks trend down

The most comprehensive analysis to date of how economic changes and shifts in the way people have used the land in the past five decades have affected the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere finds that global temperatures are on a path to increase by 6 degrees C by the end of this century. Scientists from the Global Carbon Project said that fossil fuel emissions have risen by 29 per cent in the past decade. The study found that, in the past 50 years, the fraction of carbon dioxide emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability.
18 November Independent article
18 November Guardian article
Nature Geoscience Progress Article abstract
Nature Geoscience Progress Article (suibscription required, or purchase access online)

There now seems to be a growing disconnection between the message that scientists are sending out about climate change and the corresponding reaction of politicians and the public. As the experts issue increasingly dire warnings about what could happen to the world's climate system if we don't do something about carbon dioxide emissions, politicians prevaricate, the public becomes more sceptical and we all continue to burn more fossil fuels.
18 November Independent commentary by Steve Connor

These might sound like small numbers. But their implications could not be bigger – or more dangerous.
We have long known that, unchecked, climate change is likely to result in a serious reduction in global agriculture, chronic drought, rising sea levels and the mass displacement of populations. But the implications of a 6C rise are more disastrous still. They include the acidification of the oceans, the loss of all polar ice and the combustion of the rainforests. It is doubtful that mankind could survive such a catastrophe.
18 November Independent leading article

Free condoms for climate proposed

Braking the rise in Earth's population would be a major help in the fight against global warming, according to a UN report  that draws a link between demographic pressure and climate change.
18 November AFP article
18 November AP article

Dutch plan to charge drivers by the kilometre

Dutch drivers will be first in Europe to start paying according to the kilometres they drive rather than for owning a car, if a legislative proposal submitted to the lower house of the country's parliament goes through. The kilometre charge would replace road tax and purchase tax in 2012. The idea is to cut CO2 emissions while halving traffic jams in what is one of Europe's most congested road networks.
17 November EurActiv brief

Forget emissions, focus on equity and research

Any prospect of meeting the aggregate global emissions target consistent with developing countries not sacrificing their energy needs will require revolutionary improvements in the technology. There is a low-carbon path out of the climate change problem or there is no path at all. The world needs to go on a war footing to bring about such technological change. The major emitters – developed and developing countries – should put public funds into green energy research. And we should decide on a new starting point for negotiations: countries should prioritise eliminating the vast inequities in energy opportunities.
17 November Financial Times opinion by Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian, Center for Global Development

Canada delays again

A Canadian plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions will be delayed yet again because global warming talks set for next month in Copenhagen won't result in a binding legal treaty, Environment Minister Jim Prentice says. Those plans are already slow-moving because they are waiting on legislation that is being written and debated in the US Congress. Canada hopes to harmonise the two countries' policies and create a North American market to cap greenhouse gases and trade emissions credits.
17 November Toronto Star article

It's all a lie - British poll

Less than half the British population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to a poll for The Times.
14 November Times article

EU-15 beat their target

The 15 European Union members which pledged to curb greenhouse gases by an overall eight per cent under the UN's Kyoto Protocol are on track to beat the target, the European Environment Agency said. Under the 1997 Protocol, the EU-15 promised as a whole to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases by eight per cent by a 2008-2012 timeframe compared to 1990 levels. Latest projections indicate that the EU -15 will achieve a 13 per cent reduction from the base year.
12 November AFP article

'Clean and green' New Zealand shameless on emissions

My prize for the most shameless two fingers to the global community goes to New Zealand, a country that sells itself round the world as "clean and green". New Zealand secured a generous Kyoto target, which simply required it not to increase its emissions between 1990 and 2010. But the latest UN statistics show its emissions of greenhouse gases up by 22%, or a whopping 39% if you look at emissions from fuel burning alone.
12 November Guardian article

South Korea reconsiders targets

South Korea, the OECD's fastest-growing carbon polluter, has ditched its weakest voluntary 2020 emissions target and will choose one of two stricter options ahead of a global meeting in Copenhagen. In a statement  the government said it had dropped an option for an 8 per cent increase from 2005 emissions levels by 2020. It would finalise the 2020 target on November 17 at between unchanged from and 4 per cent below 2005 levels.
6 November Reuters article

Germany, Mexico and US win praise

Germany, Mexico and the United States have crafted some of the world's smartest policies for improving energy use, according to a study released on the sidelines of the UN climate talks. The study was commissioned by WWF International and E3G.
6 November Independent article
WWF statement
Briefing note
Scorecard

Financial support for developing countries

Europe fails to agree on funding

European leaders agreed for the first time that the price tag for tackling global warming would amount to €100bn (£89bn) a year by 2020, up to half of which would need to come from taxpayers' money in the developed world. But mired in wrangling over how to split the European share of the bill among 27 countries and how much Europe collectively should spend, they failed to agree on urgent short-term funding for combating climate change in the developing world.
30 October Guardian article
30 October EurActiv brief

Finance is the key - Yvo de Boer

The head of the United Nations climate office said that richer nations must pledge funds to poorer nations to make progress on a new agreement to curb global warming this year.
“Finance is the key to a deal in Copenhagen,” said Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
29 October New York Times article

US airlines do not want to contribute

The Air Transport Association of America (ATA), the industry trade organisation for the leading United States airlines, urged climate negotiators to oppose an exorbitant new
climate change tax to be imposed on the airlines and their passengers. The so-called "International Air Passenger Adaption Levy," would single out aviation to raise $10 billion per year for climate-change projects to be built in developing countries.
30 October Reuters article

Draft agreement provides for adaptation fund

The draft text of the Copenhagen agreement requires developed countries to pay an "adaptation debt" to developing countries. Clause 33 on page 39 says that "by 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least $67 billion] or [in the range of $70 billion to $140 billion per year]." The draft text sets out various alternatives for how it could be paid, including "a [global] levy of 2 per cent on international financial market [monetary] transactions" to developed countries.
28 October Wall Street Journal article

Africa wants finance and technology

Africa requires new, sustained and scaled-up finance, technology and capacity for adaptation and risk management, according to a statement from a technical meeting in Addis Ababa. Delegates said they want sections of the Kyoto Protocol on the developed countries to be amended to include further commitments for a second and subsequent commitment periods, as well as a separate legal instrument to be developed based on the outcome of the negotiations of the Bali Action Plan under the Climate Change Convention.
28 October Pana article
27 October All Africa article

Plan for aid fund falls apart

The United Kingdom proposal that Europe build a $100 billion fund to help developing nations meet the terms of a new climate agreement is falling apart. Poland leads nine eastern countries that say they cannot afford to help other nations when they have so much to do to cut emissions in their own coal-based economies. They want the scheme to be voluntary, at least in its early years. Germany, meanwhile, leads others, including France and Italy, that feel it is wrong to put a price on the plan before Copenhagen.
26 October Times article

Public money 'could stimulate investment'

Public finance could help stimulate private investment in climate change solutions in developing countries, a report commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program showed.
26 October Reuters article

'All we need is political will'

Every day, the critical December summit in Copenhagen grows closer. All agree that climate change is an existential threat to humankind. Yet agreement on what to do still eludes us. . . Yet the elements of a deal are on the table. All we require to put them in place is political will.
25 October New York Times opinion by Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon

Japanese load to Indonesia

Japan offered a $400 million yen-denominated loan to Indonesia, the world's third-largest air polluter, to help tackle global warming, Japanese officials said. The loan was part of the "Hatoyama Initiative" unveiled last month by Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in which Tokyo will provide financial and technical assistance to developing countries to help address the problem of climate change.
25 October Reuters article

India to act 'only with support'

India can lower its emissions only if there is a technology flow and financial support from the developed nations, Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said.
22 October Deccan Herald article
22 October AP article

Fears on aid budgets

Non-government organisations expressed concern that European countries would "cannibalise" aid budgets rather than provide new funding to tackle climate change, after EU ministers failed to agree on the issue.
20 October AFP article

Britain lobbies EU

The European Union should commit €10bn a year in direct funding to help developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change and reduce their emissions, according to Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling.
20 October Guardian article

Bangladesh seeks $5.5 billion

Bangladesh has sought $500 million urgently as financial assistance from the UN and developed countries to recoup the current climate-change related losses, is now  seeking a further $ 5 billion as compensation for next five years.
19 October Financial Express article

'A lot to be discussed' on funding

Australians will help fund developing nations via a mix of public and private "climate finance" for the massive $45 trillion global investment needed to overhaul the world economy to one reliant on low carbon emissions, says Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong following two days of intensive talks with senior Chinese policy-makers in Beijing.  "We understand that financing is part of what will have to be agreed at Copenhagen," Senator Wong said. "We will keep working through the issues with other nations - there is a lot that has to be discussed."
16 October The Australian article

'Rich should meet commitments'

Poor nations are not blocking global climate talks but are simply demanding that rich nations meet existing commitments of financial help, a leading negotiator for the 77 poorest countries said.
15 October Reuters article

US 'should help poor countries'

Experts and aid groups called for the United States to help poor countries deal with the effects of global warming, as Congress considers key climate change legislation.
15 October AFP article

Who will pay?

As world leaders struggle to hash out a new global climate deal by December, they face a hurdle perhaps more formidable than getting big polluters like the United States and China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: how to pay for the new accord. The price tag for a new climate agreement will be a staggering $100 billion a year by 2020, many economists estimate; some put the cost at closer to $1 trillion. That money is needed to help fast-developing countries like India and Brazil convert to costly but cleaner technologies as they industrialise, as well as to assist the poorest countries in coping with the consequences of climate change, like droughts and rising seas.
14 October New York Times article (free registration required)

The path to Copenhagen

 

Consensus grows - expect a Claytons agreement at Copenhagen

With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it now appears that there is little chance that international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December will produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming. The United States and many other major pollutant-emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced. There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who leads the United Nations climate secretariat and oversees the negotiations, said.
20 October New York Times commentary

"A fully fledged new international treaty under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change? I don't think that is going to happen," Yvo de Boer, head of the UNFCC, said in an interview.
21 October Spiegel article

United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December are unlikely to agree a legally binding treaty and even backers of a robust pact are reluctantly starting to look to new deadlines in 2010.
27 October Reuters analysis

Recently United Nations officials and diplomats have said privately that it is unlikely a legally binding deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be clinched at the Copenhagen summit. They have suggested that the most that could be expected was a non-binding political declaration.
26 October Reuters article

The Copenhagen climate negotiations are likely to end with a "political framework", while leaving detailed emission reduction targets open for further discussion, according to a report released yesterday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
23 October China Daily article

Hope is vanishing that a historic deal to address climate change can be concluded in Copenhagen, and Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice says the best chance is for a political agreement that would pave the way for a treaty to be signed later.
24 October Globe and Mail article

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen warned that the current pace of climate negotiations was too slow for an international agreement to be reached at a UN climate summit in December.
24 October AFP article

Religious leaders call for action

Leaders from across the United Kingdom's religious communities have said there is a "moral imperative" to tackle global warming. Leaders from the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha'i, Jain and Zoroastrian faiths called on G20 nations to cut greenhouse gases. They said climate change posed a "very real threat to the world's poor".
30 October BBC article

US 'confident'

The United States administration is confident it will help forge progress at climate-treaty talks this year in Copenhagen, said Carol Browner, a White House adviser on energy and the environment.
28 October Bloomberg article

Major push by US

United States President Barack Obama's Senate allies have launched a major push behind sweeping legislation to battle climate change, with time running short before a high-stakes global summit in December. "Today, we begin the formal legislative process to lead the world in rolling back the urgent threat of climate change," said Democratic Senator John Kerry, the lead author of a Senate bill to create a "cap-and-trade" regime.
27 October AFP article

'We've not given up' - US, Britain

The United States and Britain insisted they had not given up on securing a deal to tackle climate change at a crunch summit in December after a meeting of major polluting countries in London.
19 October AFP article

China 'will not shrug off responsibilities'

China supports the development of a low-carbon economy, and will not shrug off its due responsibilities in countering global climate change, an environment expert with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.
23 October China Daily article

Obama should do more - IPCC

United States President Barack Obama should do much more to ensure Congress passes a greenhouse emissions bill, giving global climate talks a major boost, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said, adding that legislation clarifying US emissions targets would make all the difference to a climate conference in Copenhagen in December.
22 October Reuters article

Americans just don't believe

Only 57 per cent of Americans believe there is solid scientific evidence that the Earth's atmosphere is warming, said the poll of 1,500 people by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press. That is a fall of 20 per centage points, down 77 per cent in 2007. The number of people who believe that human activity is causing global warming also fell to just 36 per cent.
22 Octrober Guardian article

EU wants to include aviation and shipping

The aviation and shipping sectors would be included in global carbon-cutting measures for the first time under a European Union proposal to be tabled at December's Copenhagen climate conference.
22 October Financial Times article

India, China sign pact

India and China have signed an initial pact on climate change in the run-up to the global talks in Copenhagen. Under the five-year pact, the two countries have agreed to set up a working group on climate change that would exchange views on issues concerning international negotiations on climate change. They agreed to work together on slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, but resist making those limits binding and subject to international monitoring.
21 October Wall Street Journal article
21 October AP article

'Fewer than 50 days to save the planet'

"There are now fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years and more," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a meeting of the Major Econhomies Forum. "So, as we convene here, we carry great responsibilities, and the world is watching. If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late."
20 October Independent article

Eight rule out binding limits

Eight South Asian countries have agreed they can't be part of any climate change deal that sets legally binding limits on their emissions, an Indian official said.
20 October AP article through Toronto Star

Indian Minister flirts with being part of the solution

It seems as if India, along with Indonesia, Brazil, and China, is floating new proposals about how much it may be ready to do on climate change – in the hope, presumably, of getting some kind of commitment in return from the US and other industrialised countries to help adoption of new green technology they will need in the future.
19 October Guardian commentary

Disapproval by Congress and threat of resignation by a key negotiator forced environment minister Jairam Ramesh to take a U-turn on his earlier statement that India might accept internationally binding emissions targets.
21 October Economic Times article

Meeting builds hope of bridging the gap

A two-day meeting of officials from countries responsible for the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions ended Monday in London with hints that rich and developing nations might be able to bridge at least some of their differences on issues hobbling agreement on a new climate treaty.
19 October New York Times article

Brazil urges common target for Amazon nations

Brazil wants to forge a common position among all Amazon basin countries for a global climate summit later this year, the country's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said.
19 October Reuters article

US President must intervene'

United States of America President Obama must intervene personally to rescue a proposed global deal on climate change that is hanging in the balance, the British Energy and Climate Change Secretary said.
16 October Times article

Canada mindful of its reputation

Canada aims to re-establish itself as an environmental defender at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen by calling on all major emitters to cut carbon emissions, but distrust lingers as its own emissions soar.
16 October AFP article

A balmy Copenhagen December could focus minds

If Copenhagen basks in sunshine for the two weeks of the crucial December climate conference there it will tell us nothing about climate change but could prove decisive by focusing minds on the problem.
15 October Times commentary by Ben Webster

Europe undecided on deforestation

European countries are still undecided on how to handle the thorny issue of deforestation under a new international climate change agreement, with national interests coming into play.
15 October EurActiv brief

US looks to bilateral deals with China, India

The United States of America is hoping to win new commitments to fight global warming from China and India in back-to-back summits next month, including the first Indian emissions trading scheme. The US hopes the new commitments will breathe life into the moribund negotiations to seal a global treaty on climate change in Copenhagen in December, by setting out what action each country will take. But man previously believed, according to a studyy observers say such bilateral deals also risk seriously weakening any Copenhagen agreement by allowing the idea of a global limit on greenhouse gas emissions to be abandoned.
14 October Guardian article

Emissions

Methane even worse than thought

Methane has 33 times the climate change impact of carbon dioxide if the effects of interaction with other airborne pollutants is taken into account, rather than the 25 times currently used in carbon accounting under the Kyoto Protocol, according to a study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
30 October Telegraph article
Abstract from Science
Article from Science (subscription required, or purchase access online)

Europe 'could halve emissions in 20 years'

By replacing all energy equipment at the end of its life with low-carbon technologies, the European Union could halve its greenhouse gas emissions within two decades, according to a report by climate consultancy firm Ecofys.
29 October Reuters article

Give up meat for the planet - or not

Lord Stern, whose 2006 report set out the consequences and costs of various levels of global warming, has now called for humans to stop eating meat. People have been told they must eat locally-sourced food, abandon their cars for public transport, and drastically cut their air travel, among many other 'essential' changes. Giving up meat is only another step on the 'live more simply' road. f we give up animal husbandry and eat the vegetarian diet Lord Stern advocates, it would be one devoid of milk, cheese and butter, and the world would have to get along without leather for its shoes or jackets, or wool for its clothes. This is not going to happen, any more than the other 'essential' changes.
Lord Stern's view in 27 October Telegraph article
The opposing view in 27 October Telegraph article

Brazil considers deeper cuts

Brazil's Environment Minister Carlos Minc said that the government is studying deeper emissions cuts than previously announced and that it favors a U.N.-backed forest preservation scheme.
27 October Reuters article

US political battle intensifies

Barack Obama's efforts to forge a new American consensus around the need for action on climate change has run into a brick wall of Republican opposition, with senators threatening a boycott of a proposed law to cut carbon emissions.
25 October Guardian article

Developed nations' emissions rise

Carbon emissions by the 40 industrialised nations increased one percent in 2007, the UNFCCC reported. Emissions in 2007 were about four per cent below 1990 levels, but over the period 2000-2007, they rose three per cent.
21 October AFP article
21 October Bloomberg article
21 October AP article

Europe to cut aviation, shipping emissions

European environment ministers agreed on a proposal on Wednesday to curb global emissions from planes and ships by 10 per cent and 20 per cent over the next decade.
21 October Reuters article

US Chamber steps up its opposition

Losing key members and facing political headwinds, the United States Chamber of Commerce spent a record $34.7 million in the third quarter lobbying against the Obama administration's proposals to overhaul energy policy, financial regulation and health care.
21 October AP article

Carbon accouting flaw exposed

An international team of scientists including Daniel Kammen, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of energy and resources and of public policy, have reported a critical but fixable error in the accounting methodology used for the Kyoto Protocal of typical cap-and-trade systems, under which emissions from biofuels are assumed to be cancelled by growth of the fuels, even if the biofuel is gathered by wide-spread land clearing. Studies suggest that persisting with this accounting method as emissions limits are tightened could result in loss of most of the world's forests.
23 October Science Daily article
22 October New York Times article

Finland plans 80% cut

Finland aims to cut greenhouse gases by 80 per cent or more from 1990 levels by 2050, the Government said in a report outlining its long-term climate and energy policy.
15 October Reuters article

Environment watchdog joins 10:10

Britain's Environment Agency has joined more than 34,000 individuals who have signed up to reduce their carbon footprint by 10 per cent in 2010, along with 1,225 businesses, 591 organisations, and 348 schools.
15 October Guardian article

Britain 'must cut more deeply'

Britain must cut greenhouse gas emissions six times faster than at present and consider more aggressive intervention in energy markets if it is to meet its low carbon targets, the government's chief climate change adviser said.
13 October Reuters article

Financial support for developing countries

$550 billion a year needed - World Bank

Rich countries will have to spend about $550 billion a year by 2030 to help developing countries tackle climate change, the World Bank has estimated in World Development Report 2010: Development and climate change.
16 September The Age article
16 September Sydney Morning Herald article
World Bank media statement
Link to download World Development Report 2010: Development and climate change, in sections

The World Banks' recognition of the need to tackle climate change does not stop it spending billions of dollars subsidising new coal-fired power stations in developing countries.
16 September Times article

G20 agrees money is need, not who will pay it

"Climate financing is going to be absolutely key if we're going to have a deal in Copenhagen," says Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and author who heads the climate advocacy group. But G20 leaders put no specific numbers on the table, just a vague statement of intention that did little to clarify murky global climate negotiations: "Public and private financial resources to support mitigation and adaptation in developing countries need to be scaled up urgently and substantially," the statement said.
26 September Time article
26 September Bloomberg article

'4.5 million children could die'

At least 4.5 million children could die if wealthy nations fail to provide more funds to help impoverished countries combat global warming, development charity Oxfam has warned.
16 September AFP article through News

Europe promises climate aid

In an effort to push global climate change talks forward, the European Union this week offered to $15 billion to aid developing countries cutting emissions, and got a mixed response. However, development and environmental campaigners blasted the offer as insufficient because it assumes that poorer nations will bear most of the costs of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
11 September Christian Science Monitor article
11 September Associated Press article

Europe seeks to dampen expectations

The European Union’s commissioner for the environment sought to tamp down expectations that wealthy nations would immediately hand over vast sums of money demanded by developing countries to manage global warming.
10 September New York Times article

Europe pressures G20 to give climate aid

European leaders at the G20 put pressure on the United States and other rich nations to provide at least five billion euros of "fast-start" money next year to help poor nations tackle climate change.
18 September AFP article through Manilla Bulletin Publishing Corporation

Support 'must not come from existing aid budget'

Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan supports funding to help poor countries meet the dire consequences of climate change. It must not come out of the existing aid budget. If a government was to say ''we are going to take this money that was to go to that sanitation project, or to immunise children, and spend it building levies to stop inundation, or on replanting rainforests to lock in carbon'', what is the future for the kids who now won't be immunised, or be able to drink clean water?
22 September The Age opinion by Paul Ronalds

The path to Copenhagen

I'm optimistic, but there are major obstacles - Nicholas Stern

China, India and Japan, along with the private sector, all made positive and significant contributions at the climate-change summit in New York. The developed countries must now demonstrate that they have the political will to reach a strong agreement in Copenhagen. While the commitments by the largest emitters already on the table for 2020 offer significant cuts relative to today's emissions, they collectively fall 4 or 5 gigatonnes short of what is necessary if we are to be on a realistic trajectory to reach the 2030 and 2050 targets.
23 September Guardian article by Nicholas Stern

The deadlock consists of an approach by rich countries which collectively involves inadequate emissions reductions and unwillingness to make financial commitments without being able to approve the plans for developing countries to move to low-carbon growth. And on the part of developing countries, an unwillingness to make commitments on reductions without a clear indication of financial support from the rich countries, together with an unwillingness to have their own plans for low-carbon development determined by, or subject to the approval of, the rich countries. The developing countries also find the level of commitment by rich countries to domestic reductions in the next two decades both too small and unconvincing.
22 September Telegraph article by Nicholas Stern

World's glaciers melting faster than we are acting - Ban Ki-moon

With just 75 days to go before the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) convenes in Copenhagen, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has warned that we’re now in the “last-chance saloon” – and time is running out. “The climate negotiations are proceeding at glacial speed. The world’s glaciers are now melting faster than human progress to protect them – and us,” he said, adding that failure to conclude a deal “would be morally inexcusable, economically short-sighted and politically unwise”.
24 September Irish Times article

Rich countries promise too little

Total greenhouse gas emission reductions currently proposed by industrialised countries fall short of the pathway to reaching a 2 degree target as referred to by the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol negotiating group, while the cost of meeting these pledges is much lower than anticipated, according to a study by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which found that by 2020, total greenhouse gas emissions of industrialised (Annex I) countries would decline by between only 5 per cent and 17per cent, relative to 1990, depending on the conditions associated with the pledges.
20 September media statement
Download the full report

Europe-US split threatens treaty

Europe has clashed with the United States over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.The Guardian understands that key differences have emerged between the US and Europe over the structure of a new worldwide treaty on global warming. Sources on the European side say the US approach could undermine the new treaty and weaken the world's ability to cut carbon emissions.
15 September Guardian article

Under the increasingly frustrated gaze of Europe and others, the United States of America continues to hasten slowly, with the Senate in no hurry to finalise climate legislation this year.
20 September New York Times article

United States of America participation in a Copenhagen agreement is critical, but the UN hasn't engaged Washington meaningfully on the issue in the dozen years since Kyoto was negotiated. Instead, the UN has embraced green groups, inviting nearly 1,000 NGOs into the Copenhagen process. Green groups bring their ethos that America, its allies and corporations form an axis of evil. They insist climate decisions must follow what scientists recommend, with no room for debate or compromise.
21 September Guardian commentary

In the hands of the US Senate

It is important that targets for cutting emissions be realistic, says United States Energy Secretary Steven Chu. An ambitious goal might not get through the US Senate, he said. The United States, the world's second biggest carbon emitter, has proposed cutting its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 - a reduction of 14 percent from 2007 levels.
15 September Reuters article

Just 2500 areas of disagreement

“If we continue at this rate we are not going to make it,” concluded a grim-faced Yvo de Boer at the end of the latest session of international climate talks in Bonn. When the weary participants in the latest session went home, they left behind 2,500 areas of disagreement— enclosed in square brackets—in the 200 pages of the negotiating text.
10 September Grist article

"With the Copenhagen conference looming, there is no common scenario that can serve as a basis for negotiations," the Energy and Environment Institute at the International Organisation of La Francophonie said.
27 September AFP article

'Enormous problems'

"Enormous problems" remain to agree a global climate deal in Copenhagen in December, China's senior diplomat to the United Nations said.
11 September Reuters article

US abandons hope of final agreement at Copenhagen

Top United States of America energy and climate leaders have began to openly plan for international global warming talks to trickle into 2010.
17 September New York Times article

Climate change activists reacted sharply yesterday to indications from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that cap-and-trade legislation may have to wait until 2010, warning that the delay could derail international negotiations in Copenhagen.
16 September New York Times article

Developed v developing world - deep divisions

The official Chinese position is snappily summarised as "shared burden, differentiated responsibilities", which roughly translates as: We're all in the same boat but it's your fault that it's taking on water, so you'd better do most of the baling.
16 September Guardian article

The Obama administration’s senior negotiator on global warming warned that developed and developing nations remained deeply divided in talks on reducing greenhouse gases and that time was running out before United Nations treaty negotiations in December.
10 September New York Times article

India wrong-footed the United States and other rich nations by agreeing for the first time to set numerical targets for curbing its greenhouse gas emissions. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Environment Minister, said that legislation was being drafted in Delhi to limit India’s carbon footprint consistent with India's long-standing commitment to keep per capita emissions below those of developed nations.
18 September Times article

With less than three months left for the Copenhagen conference, it appears particularly urgent for all countries to reach a consensus and then carry out effective cooperation in dealing with climate change. Developed countries should do more than developing ones. Having completed their modernisation and urbanisation process, developed nations can more easily use advanced technological means to achieve a gradual decline of their per capita carbon dioxide emissions after these emissions have reached high levels. For developing nations, which are still in the process of industrialisation and modernisation, per capita emissions are expected to keep rising in the foreseeable future.
21 September China Daily opinion by Zhao Xingshu

Australia mooted a compromise plan that would take some heat off emerging economies such as China. Britain’s Gordon Brown warned that talks currently faced an impasse. And reports said Japan too would unveil its own initiative.
21 September Christian Science Monitor article

'The best time for optimism for a decade'

Cynicism in politics is contagious and has haunted climate politics since the United States repudiated the Kyoto climate treaty in 2001. But optimism can be contagious, too, and this looks like the best time for optimism for at least a decade. The statement by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, that China will curb the growth in its emissions could be the first sign that the tectonic plates of the post-Kyoto political world are shifting.
27 September Sunday Times commentary

It is China that has managed to seize the moral high ground — fairly or not. President Hu Jintao told the UN that by 2020 China would increase the share of renewable and nuclear power in its energy supply to 15 per cent, plant 40 million hectares of forest, increase investment in a greener economy and reduce its carbon intensity — the amount of economic value it gets per unit of power — by a "notable margin."
24 September Time article

What did China really promise?

All Mr Hu actually said was that China would now “endeavour” to curb its carbon emissions by a “notable” margin. But how does one measure “endeavour” or “notable”? As someone with close links to the Chinese administration told me when pressed: “What was said was actually pretty meaningless.”
25 September Times commentary

Obama disappoints

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has praised new offers from China and Japan on cutting greenhouse gas emissions before the Copenhagen climate change conference, but he has given limited approval to the offering by US President Barack Obama.
After speeches to a UN summit by world leaders from the smallest and most threatened nations, including "the canary of climate change", the Maldives, to the biggest and largest emitters of greenhouse gases, there was general disappointment with the contribution of Mr Obama.
24 September Australian article

'The world's fate hangs on Copenhagen'

The world's fate hangs on Copenhagen. From today, all of us, developing countries too, must join in a new, open dialogue. To succeed, we need to avoid traditional finger-pointing and act collectively. Every country faces its own compelling constraints: whether it is the United States, where the debate about climate change has been held back, or India, which has 400 million people living on less than $1 a day.
Ed Milliband, Britain's Climate Change Secretary, writes a 21 September Guardian article pleading for a new approach

All there 'to pursue their national interest'

South Africa will not sign any deal that would compromise the country's economic development chances at the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, the environment minister said. "All negotiators are there to pursue national interests ... and South Africa is no different in this regard."
15 September AFP article

Divisions within Europe

Europe, which hopes to be a model for the world at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, is squabbling internally over who cuts what and who pays for it.
27 September AFP article
24 September Reuters article

Need to provide for 'climate migrants'

Participants at December’s climate change talks in Copenhagen must consider measures to provide social, cultural and economic support for “climate migrants” who have to flee their homes and sometimes their entire countries because of global warming, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister told the General Assembly.
26 September UN News Centre article

US threatens trade tariffs

Todd Stern, the United States' climate change envoy, has warned countries such as China and India that they run greater risk of protectionist measures in the US Congress if they do not co-operate on international steps to hold down carbon emissions.
16 September Financial Times article

US delays weigh on others

The fate of United States legislation capping carbon emissions weighed heavily on delegates at UN climate talks starting on 28 September in Bangkok, with the Americans saying delays in passing the bill could deter commitments from other nations.
28 September Associated Press article

'A ray of hope'

Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is a ray of hope in the air, hope that a significant global climate deal may yet be struck at December’s talks in Copenhagen. It could herald the start of a successful agreement, or it could dissolve just as rapidly into despair.
16 September Grist article

Rich must commit to cut more

Rich countries must commit to deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions if they want China and India to sign onto an accord to curb global warming, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told the World Economic Forum.
12 September Associated Press article

Brazil's Environment Minister Carlos Minc said United States targets for greenhouse gas emissions are unacceptably weak.
10 September Reuters article
9 September Guardian article

Poor reject emission limits

Developing nations' urgent need for more energy has become a central issue as developed countries push for a global reduction in carbon emissions ahead of a climate change conference scheduled for December in Copenhagen. Many African, Latin American and Asian countries want to avoid legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, saying their emissions are well below those of the developed world and that such limits would hinder their efforts to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
8 September Washington Post article

Agreement on aviation emissions needed

The world must reach an agreement to cap aviation emissions at climate talks in Copenhagen in December if countries are to meet targets to combat global warming, Britain's chief climate adviser said.
8 September Reuters article

Copenhagen 'risks failure'

Two British Cabinet ministers said that attempts to broker a new global pact on climate change by the end of the year are at risk of failing.
8 September Associated Press article

UK Prime Minister commits to Copenhagen

The United Kingdom claims that its Prime Minister is the first world leader to commit to taking part in the Copenhagen talks. "And if it is necessary to clinch the deal, I will personally go to Copenhagen to achieve it," Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in a newspaper article.
21 September Telegraph article

Major polluters talk

Representatives of the world's 17 biggest carbon polluters kicked off a week of high-stakes talks on climate change with a discussion at the US State Department. The main aim of the week of meetings is to bridge differences ahead of the UN December 7-18 climate change conference in Copenhagen, where a pact for curbing global warming beyond 2012 is to be crafted.
17 September AFP article

Australia, New Zealand 'blocked Small Island States communique'

Australia and New Zealand blocked a draft communique from a meeting of the Small Island States which called for emissions cuts of 85 per cent by 2050 and 45 per cent by 2020, insisting instead of a press release endorsing lower emissions targets, according to sources among the Small Island States.
21 September Crikey article

Emissions

World investing in coal power, but not research

The world is now collectively planning to build so many coal-fired power stations over the next 25 years that their lifetime carbon emissions will equal the total of all the human coal-burning activities since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Yet the energy industry is spending alarmingly little on research and development that might clean up its emissions.
22 September Sydney Morning Herald opinion by Marian Wilkinson

China cuts energy per unit of GDP

China said it expects to cut energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by five per cent this year but meeting a pledge to cut consumption by 20 per cent by 2010 would be difficult.
27 September AFP article

Australia biggest per capita energy emitter

Australia has the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions from energy use, according to a British analysis. The CO2 Energy Emissions Index, released by risk assessment company Maplecroft, found Australia's overwhelmingly coal-based electricity supply meant the average person emitted 20.58 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, overtaking the United States - responsible for 19.78 tonnes per head - as the worst per capita emitter.
11 September The Age article

'Contraception crucial'

Contraception advice is crucial to poor countries' battle with climate change, and policy makers are failing their people if they continue to shy away from the issue, according to Leo Bryant, a lead researcher on a World Health Organisation study on population growth and climate change.
18 September Reuters article

Emissions down

Recession has set the stage for the sharpest fall in world greenhouse gas emissions in 40 years. The International Energy Agency said global emissions of carbon dioxide would fall by about 2.6 percent this year amid a tumble in industrial activity.
21 September Reuters article

European Union greenhouse gas emissions declined for the fourth year running in 2008, driven by falling industrial production in the wake of the economic recession, provisional EU data showed.
1 September EurActiv brief

Greenhouse gas emissions in Northern Ireland are reported to have fallen by 13 per cent since 1990.
24 September Press Association article

Cutting emissions 'highest priority'

Cutting carbon emissions and restoring the natural world must be given the ''highest priority'' by the next government, the UK's leading environment groups urged as they unveiled a manifesto for the coming election. The green groups want the UK to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020, higher than the 34% the government has signed up to, and ban coal-fired power plants and an end to airport expansion.
18 September Telegraph article

10:10 campaign gathers momentum

The mobile phone giant O2, Manchester city council and In the Loop actor Peter Capaldi have become the latest big names to sign up to the 10:10 climate change campaign.
27 September Guardian article

The Royal Mail in the United Kingdom has become the latest major business to sign up to 10:10, the national climate change campaign to reduce carbon emissions in the UK by 10 per cent in 2010. With 176,000 employees, it is the largest organisation to commit to 10:10 so far.
10 September Guardian article

Japan sets target of 25 per cent cut by 2020

Japan's incoming prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has promised a 25 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emission from 1990 levels by 2020 for the world's number two economy, a far more ambitious target than the 8 perent reduction set by his predecessor Taro Aso's conservative government.
7 September RTT News article
7 September BBC article
11 September Radio Australia article

EU looks to 'radical decarbonisation'

The European Union will embark on a radical decarbonisation of its transport and electricity sectors to retain leadership on climate change in the run-up to 2020, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said as he outlined the EU executive's priorities for the next five years. But environmentalists remain sceptical.
7 September EurActiv brief

India 'ready to set non-binding target'

India said it was ready to set itself non-binding targets for cutting carbon emissions in a bid to shed its image as an intransigent polluter ahead of UN climate change talks in December.
17 September AFP article

Policy

Plea for widespread contraception

Unchecked population growth is speeding climate change, damaging life-nurturing ecosystems and dooming many countries to poverty, experts concluded in a conference report published by the Royal Society. Unless birth rates are lowered sharply through voluntary family-planning programs and easy access to contraceptives, the tally of humans on Earth could swell to an unsustainable 11 billion by 2050, researchers warned.
21 September AFP article

Lawmakers look to coal in home states

Despite the lower emissions of natural gas compared to coal energy, influential lawmakers from coal-producing states in the United States, from both parties, say that new technologies under development to capture and bury emissions of coal are a better bet than gas for long-term solutions to climate change.
6 September New York Times article

Bipartisan group urges action

In the United States of America a bipartisan group of 32 former secretaries of State, national security advisers, senators, military leaders and senior foreign policy officials are urging Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing the country's dependence on petroleum, curbing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change.
8 September Government Executive article

European policy 'distoring and expensive'

The European Union's climate legislation risks turning into a "grossly distorting and expensive policy" unless it is seriously revamped, a leading British academic has warned.
7 September EurActiv brief

Business leaders criticise uncertainty

Uncertainty over Australian and New Zealand plans to cut carbon emissions is hurting businesses in both countries, undermining stock market valuations and raising financing risks, according to industry leaders from power generation to farming.
26 August Reuters article through Planet Ark

Swiss set 2020 target

The Swiss government committed to cut its carbon emissions by at least 20 per cent from its 1990 levels by 2020, but green groups said the target was too modest.
26 August AFP article

Copenhagen agreement 'vital'

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said a deal on climate change at the Copenhagen summit in December would be vital and urged the creation of a single global body that would be the "cornerstone" of monitoring efforts to ensure that summit commitments were met.
26 August Reuters article through New York Times

Creation is under threat - Pope

"Creation is under threat'" warned Pope Benedict XVI as he singled out the importance of climate change negotiations, encouraging "all the participants in the United Nations summit to enter into their discussions constructively and with generous courage," adding it was incredibly important that "the international community and individual governments send the right signals to their citizens and succeed in countering harmful ways of treating the environment!"
26 August Mongabay article

IPCC chair urges target of 350 ppm

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Pachauri has spoken in support of a target of holding atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million. "What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target," he said. In its 2007 report the IPCC said that a maximum of 450 parts per million was needed to avert dangerous warming. In recent times many have argued that this target seems out of reach.
25 August AFP article
26 August Guardian article

Business challenges EPA on climate endangerment

The United States Chamber of Commerce has filed a 21-page petition with US Environmental Protection Agency, asking the agency to approve an on-the-record proceeding with an independent trier of fact who would allow EPA and environmental and business groups to engage in a "credible weighing" of the scientific evidence that global warming endangers human health.
25 August New York Times article
25 August Grist article

'Seductive promise' of endless growth

"The seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilised folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom.  But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few."
Grist essay by Adam D Sacks

Lessons from the Montreal Protcol

"The Montreal (Protocol) model has much it can offer the fight against climate change. Governments are increasingly waking up to the urgency of the threat of global warming. And there is already an arsenal of alternative-energy technologies, ranging from wind turbines to energy-conserving building design, that could be delivered quite quickly around the world — if there was a political will to make it happen."
12 August Nature editorial opinion

Phasing out hydroflourocarbons under the Montreal Protocol would do far more for climate protection than the Kyoto Protocol has accomplished in its entire history or than Copenhagen could achieve in the next decade, according to Samuel LaBudde, senior Unite States climate campaigner for the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency. "And it will do so at a fraction of the cost of securing reductions in other sectors and much faster as well," LaBudde said.
25 August IPS article

China and US toward agreement

China and the United StatesS, the biggest sources of the greenhouse gas emissions, have stood in the way of an international climate treaty for almost as long as there have been efforts to craft one.Now, the two countries may be moving toward agreement.
24 August Sydney Morning Herald article

'Multinational wrestlng match'

China's top environment negotiator said that the current global fight over climate change is in nature a multinational wrestling match on winning or maintaining each country's economic competitive edge or room for development.
24 August People's Daily article

US, China 'determine fate of world'

"What the U.S. and China do over the next decade," declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who is leading President Obama's push for a clean-energy economy, "will determine the fate of the world."
23 August Time article

Obama trapped by old Washington habits

"Eight months into Obama's presidency, foreign observers might be forgiven for asking why haven't all those winged words lifted US climate policy from its rut? The man who admonished Americans: 'We can't fall into the old Washington habit of throwing money at the problem' has run into old Washington habits."
23 August The Observer commentary

Can the military fix climate change?

A new debate is unfolding over whether linking climate change too closely with security planning will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, running the risk that the United States will rely too heavily on its armed forces to deal with global problems.
22 August Boston Globe article

Australia pushes for new approach

Australia's chief climate change negotiator says a dramatic shift from the design of the Kyoto Protocol could be the best way to reach an international climate change agreement. Australia is pushing a ''schedules approach'' in which countries nominate their emissions targets and reduction policies such as emissions trading. Countries would then be expected to report on their progress towards those targets.
21 August Sydney Morning Herald article

Warning that new approach needed

Reversing global warming will cost up to $185 billion (euro130 billion) a year before 2020 and require more action by world governments than currently pledged, according to international environmental analysis group ClimateWorks Foundation, which added that UN climate change talks would fail to reach a meaningful agreement with the proposals made so far, and that a new approach was needed.
20 August AP article

Don't bog down in percentages - Blair

World leaders must not get bogged down in 'precise percentages' when they negotiate a successor the Kyoto climate change treaty in Copenhagen, Tony Blair has said. Mr Blair said leaders should trust in new technologies to put the world on a path to a greener future.
20 August Telegraph article

China looking to act

China appears committed to stronger steps to contain swelling greenhouse gas emissions, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said after meetings in Beijing.
20 August Reuters article

India and US 'can work together'

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has exuded confidence that despite differences over way to tackle climate change, India and the United States can devise a successful plan on the issue. “I am very confident — and even more so after this trip — that the United States and India can devise a plan that will dramatically change the way we produce, consume, and conserve energy. And, in the process, start an explosion of new investments and millions of jobs,” Clinton said.
20 August Press Trust of India article through Business Standard

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rubbished criticism from developed nations that India was not doing enough to combat global warming, saying it fully recognised the importance of the issue.
18 August Press Trust of India article

Clean-technology focus trumps emissions targets

Focusing on the deployment of clean technology could be a more realistic approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions than setting emissions targets for China and other developing countries, researchers at the Center for Clean Air Policy say in a new report.
17 August New York Times article
Center for Clean Air Policy statement

What if it is too late?

What if it is too late? What if everything the United States, or Europe, does in the way of clean energy and cutting earth-heating gasses is not enough to halt the onrushing warming to the world, with all its attending consequences? What if the centuries-long build–up of gasses and nature itself have conspired to make this trend irreversible?
16 August New York Times opinion

China, India chastise the developed world

China accused rich nations at United Nations climate talks of increasing pressure on the poor to do more to combat global warming while shirking their own responsibility to lead. India also said the rich were expecting too much of the poor while failing to lead in setting deeper 2020 cuts for emissions of greenhouse gases.
13 August Reuters article 

Little progress in climate talks

The August round of climate talks in Bonn made little progress on the critical issues of financing and intermediate targets, but a deal on a new climate agreement by the year's end is still on the cards, according to Sweden's climate negotiator, Anders Turesson.
19 August EurActiv brief 

The latest round of international climate talks in Bonn ended with disappointing results, raising concerns that a lack of progress is now effectively making a comprehensive climate deal in Copenhagen in December unrealistic.
18 August EurActiv brief
14 August New York Times article

The US and other rich nations have refused to discuss any changes in the intellectual property regime that would help poor nations access clean technologies currently in private hands. The industrialised nations took the position in the resumed UN negotiations at Bonn, Germany, while opposing demands to the contrary from the developing and poor countries, including India. On the issue of finance too, the industrialised countries have balked at the idea of providing funds to the poor nations to undertake greenhouse gas mitigation.
13 August Times of India article

Conoco plays both sides of the climate street

ConocoPhillips is actively campaigning against the United States of America House climate and energy bill—even though it is a member of the US Climate Action Partnership, an influential enviro-business coalition that played a key role in shaping the legislation. Conoco Phillips is also a member of the American Petroleum Institute,
17 August Grist article
26 August San Francisco Chronicle article

China urged to set timeframe, and does

China should set firm targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions so they peak around 2030, a new study by some of the nation's top climate change policy advisers has proposed ahead of key talks on a new global warming pact.
17 August Reuters article

China's carbon emissions will start falling by 2050, its top climate change policymaker said, the first time the world's largest emitter has given such a time-frame.
15 August Financial Times article

US bill 'would cut GDP'

The bill intended to combat global warming that passed the United States House of Representatives in June would decrease the Gross Domestic Product of the US by $2 trillion to $3 trillion between 2012 and 2030, according to a study commissioned by the American Council for Capital Formation, a non-profit that examines tax and environmental policy, and the National Association of Manufacturers, the nation’s largest manufacturing trade organisation.
14 August CNS News article

A climate control bill that Democratic leaders hope to move through the US Senate will seek to give companies a substantial number of pollution permits, potentially worth billions of dollars, rather than sell them, an aide to a key Democratic senator said.
16 August Reuters article through Planet Ark 

The United States needs to have a climate change law in place before international talks on a climate pact begin in December, two top Obama administration officials said.
26 August Reuters article through Planet Ark

Australian defeat 'bad news for Copenhagen'

The failure to pass new climate change legislation in Australia does not bode well for a global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol at the end of the year in Copenhagen. If Australia cannot agree, how will more than 90 countries with opposing views possibly thrash out an agreement to tackle climate change?
13 August Telegraph commentary

US emissions down

Annual United States emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil burning fuels should fall 5 percent in 2009 as the recession crimps demand and there is some transfer from coal to natural gas, the government's top energy forecaster said.
12 August Reuters article through Planet Ark 

India's emissions 'a quarter of China's'

India contributes around five per cent to global carbon dioxide emissions, a new government report showed, still only about a quarter of the emissions of China and the United States.
12 August Reuters article through Planet Ark

Global carbon dioxide emissions still rising

Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2008 rose 1.94 per cent year-on-year to 31.5 billion tonnes, German renewable energy industry institute IWR said, based on official information and its own research.
11 August Reuters article through Planet Ark
10 August IWR media statement (Google translation to English)

Copenhagen 'a flop' unless developed world does more

A United Nations climate deal due in December will be a flop unless industrialised nations sharply increase promised cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for 2020, according to John Ashe, who led work at August 10-14 UN climate talks looking at planned cuts by rich nations. He said existing pledges were far short of the range of 25-40 perc ent below 1990 levels outlined by the IPCC as required to avoid the worst of climate change.
12 August Reuters article

Ireland fails the Kyoto test

The Kyoto Protocol allowed Ireland’s target for greenhouse gas emissions to be 13 per cent higher than its 1990 level, yet by 2006 emissions were 24.5 per cent higher than in 1990.
12 August Irish Examiner article

Industrialised nations plan cuts of 15 to 21 per cent

Industrialised nations excluding the United States are planning cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of between 15 and 21 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 under a new UN climate pact, official data shows.
11 August Reuters article 

NZ defends emissions target

The New Zealand government denied it had failed to accept its country's share of the burden for tackling climate change after announcing greenhouse gas emission targets, reductions from 1990 levels of between 10 and 20 per cent by 2020.
11 August AFP article

Act now or face violence - UN

Failure to act quickly on climate change could eventually lead to violence and mass unrest as global weather patterns drastically change, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters," Ban said. "Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest - even violence - could follow." 
12 August Reuters article through Planet Ark
 
British universities reduce carbon by degrees

An ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK by 34% within 11 years, is setting the nation on track for an 80% cut by 2050. The university sector in England has been devising carbon reduction targets of its own. Last year the London School of Economics saved 21 tonnes of waste and the equivalent of 163 tonnes of carbon emissions
21 July Guardian article

Herculean effort needed for low carbon future

Responding to the launch of the UK government's Low Carbon Transition Plan, the Carbon Trust forecast a seven-fold increase in renewable energy power generation over the next 11 years. They said a transformation in "political, economic and industrial thinking" would be required, as well as new technology.
21 July LowCarbonEconomy.com article

UN shipping body agrees to cut CO₂
  
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the United Nations shipping agency, have agreed to voluntarily cut carbon emissions but not to fund adaptation in poor nations. Shipping accounts for nearly 3% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and pressure has grown for cuts ahead of a crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.
17 July BBC article
20 July EurActiv article

Unconditional EU climate committment

The newly-elected chair of the European Parliament's environment committee says European engagement for climate protection is not conditional on success in global climate negotiations. "It was a self-evident challenge to meet and would not stop climate protection even if Copenhagen does not bring results," he added.
20 July EurActiv article

Accepting the goal but not the deadline

While leaders of over one dozen developed nations attending the Major Economies Forum (MEF) recognized that the global average temperature should not increase by more than 2 degrees centigrade they have disregarded the IPCC’s findings that emissions will have to reach their pinnacle in 2015 and rapidly decline thereafter.
20 July UN News article

US talks climate in India

Tackling global warming is one of the central issues on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to New Delhi. She says Washington does not wish to do anything that would reduce India's growth and India's minister of state for environment seeking to blunt criticism his government might concede too much .
19 July Reuters article

World powers accept warming limit

Developed and developing nations have agreed that global temperatures should not rise more than 2C above 1900 levels. A G8 summit declaration says "We recognise the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees Celsius."
9 July BBC article
9 July ABC article

Spotlight on reducing forest emissions

Forests are propelled into the spotlight for their ability to store carbon and mitigate climate change. Developing countries will be paid for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in a scheme to be finalised at this year's climate negotiations in Copenhagen.
8 July SciDevNet article
7 July Ecosystem Marketplace article

Climate protectionist?

While the American President praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as an “extraordinary first step,” he opposed a provision that would impose trade penalties on countries that do not accept limits on global warming pollution. He wants to modernize the American economy by shifting to cleaner and more efficient forms of energy.
29 June NY Times article
30 June ABC article

Climate refugees a policy issue

The debate on providing protection to possibly several million "climate refugees" displaced by the vagaries of nature is heating up. A new initiative, the Climate Refugee Policy Forum, will act as a web-based clearinghouse on climate refugees and climate-related migration, aiming to support science and inform policy.
25 June Reuters article
Forum

American cap-and-trade legislation advances

President Obama has intensified his lobbying effort ahead of an expected vote Friday on an energy proposal designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply by 2050. The climate change bill would establish a complex cap-and-trade system and aims to spark an American clean energy transformation.
24 June Washington Post article
25 June LA Times article
25 June NY Times article

Scotland the brave

The Scottish parliament voted to cut the nation's CO₂ emissions by 42% by 2020. All political parties agreed to fix the target as part of a bill which also requires the Scottish government to set legally binding annual cuts in emissions from 2012. Scotland has committed to an 80% reduction on 1990 levels by 2050.
24 June The Guardian article

Pushing the limit

The United States has been resisting European calls for industrialised nations to target an upper limit for global warming of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). The limit is widely seen as the threshold beyond which climate change will reach danger levels, with rising seas and more heatwaves, floods and droughts.
23 June The Guardian article
23 June Reuters article

UNprecedented UN climate change summit

UN Secretary-General invites heads of State and government to attend an “unprecedented” global summit. The high-level meeting will be held at UN Headquarters on 22 September, just over two months before the start of the pivotal world climate change conference in Copenhagen.
23 June UN News article

Major polluters meet in Mexico

Environment ministers from the world's largest polluters, including the United States and China, met for two days in Mexico. The so-called Major Economies Forum (MEF) aims to help form a new agreement to curb greenhouse gases to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
22 June AFP article
22 June COP15 article

Greenhouse count up

A 21 meter sign near Penn Station in New York is now showing the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere as it happens. Launched by the Deutsche Bank, the Carbon Counter displays the running total amount of long-lived greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, measured in metric tons. At current rates, the counter's figures are expected to rise by 2 billion tonnes a month.
18 June The Guardian article
19 June SolveClimate article
Carbon count update

Risk getting lost in politics

Even as Congress belatedly tackles legislation that would cut U.S. carbon emissions and international negotiators bickered over a global climate deal in Bonn, Germany, a new report by several federal agencies underscores the truths that too often risk getting lost in politics.
17 June Time article
4 June Time article
Report

Baby steps in a marathon

The EU and the US took a backseat at the negotiating table during June's global climate talks in Bonn, and Japan shocked developing countries by announcing a "shameful" emissions reduction target. While the negotiating text had swelled to hundreds of pages, there was no movement towards agreement on financing for climate mitigation and adaptation.
15 June EurActive article

Commitments don't add up

An analysis of wealthy nations' carbon reduction goals do not add up to enough to avoid dangerous climate impacts according to a number of sources including scientists from the Potsdam Institute and UN officials. Tough negotiations are expected to continue between the largest emitters, the U. S. and China.
13 June The Age article
12 June Times Online article
12 June UPI article

Smoother driving reduces emissions

Road transport emissions can be reduced by developing a smoother driving style with less acceleration and breaking according to a Monash University study of cement trucks. Other benefits are less wear and tear on the vehicles without increasing transit time.
9 June Science Alert article

China and US seek greenhouse truce

A climate truce between the United States and China, by far the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, is the only chance for forging a meaningful international treaty in Copenhagen later this year to restrict emissions. The current standoff has gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions replacing megatons of nuclear might as a looming risk for people across the globe.
8 June NY Times article

Urgency in Bonn for climate treaty

Poor nations suffering from drought, floods and erratic cyclones brought on by rising temperatures appealed to 174 countries on Monday to move faster on an agreement to fight global warming. The latest round of United Nations climate change talks assembled 4,000 participants to discuss negotiating texts to form the basis of the new global climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
2 June Business Mirror article
3 June Xinhuanet article
8 June Grist article
6 June Ottawa Citizen article

Japanese business supports aggressive emission cuts

A Japanese business lobby says Japan would be able to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. The Prime Minister is set to finalise a target for midterm emissions cuts in the world's fifth-biggest emitter, from six target options proposed for Japan.
3 June Reuters article

U.S.-China collaboration essential

The U.S. climate envoy said America must meet China halfway and develop a “genuine, collaborative partnership” on climate change and clean energy to help move forward international negotiations to stem global warming.
3 June Bloomberg article
3 June AP article

New world climate summit called

The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, will call the world's heads of government to New York in September to "galvanise political will" about what he describes as "the defining issue of our time". And there are plans for another G20 summit to discuss the issue in the autumn.
31 May The Independant article

African climate accord

The Nairobi Declaration was adopted at the Special Session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) where over 30 African ministers agreed to mainstream climate change adaptation measures into national and regional development plans, policies and strategies to ensure adequate adaptation to climate change
29 May UN News article

Transport emissions European goal

Europe's next big move to confront climate change should be to tackle rapidly growing emissions from transport, with more road tolls and greener cars, trains and trucks. A top EU environment official said."We've been very successful in reducing the emissions of the power sector and manufacturing by around 15 to 20 percent since 1990, but we've been neutralizing that with an increase in emissions from transport,"
28 May Reuters article

Cities want more representation in climate solutions

Leaders of the world's biggest cities at a summit looking at how to actually reduce CO₂ emissions called for a bigger say in upcoming UN climate change talks. Half the world's population lives in cities which represent 80 percent of emissions.
20 May CNN article
21 May AFP article
21 May Toronto Star article

US climate bill passes first hurdle

A committee in the American House of Representatives passed a climate bill, the first step toward having a law that controls greenhouse gases. Based on a cap-and-trade mix of government mandate and free-market economy the bill still needs to pass both the full House and then the Senate to become law.
22 May NPR article
22 May GreenTech article
22 May The Guardian article

China presses for stronger cuts

A statement by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which oversees China's climate policy, says rich nations should give between 0.5% and 1% of their annual economic worth to aid climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries and should cut emissions 40% below their 1990 levels by 2020.
22 May EurActive article

Writing the plan for Copenhagen

For the first time real negotiating texts are on the table as a basis to start drafting a Copenhagen agreement. Three negotiating texts for a post-2012 climate change treaty have been published offering a new level of detail on mechanisms to meet emission targets.
20 May CarbonFinance article

Options on the table for new climate deal

The United Nations took a step toward a new climate treaty by publishing the first draft negotiating texts to help bridge a "great gulf" between options for rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. They laid out choices on controversial issues such as nuclear power, emissions trading, forests, shipping and aviation.
15 May Reuters article

Megatrucks may cause significant damage

Proponents of freight megatrucks say they would pull emissions down by reducing traffic on the roads. But research commissioned by railway industry association CER shows longer and heavier trucks would replace up to 30% of container transport on rail, increasing emissions by two million tonnes of CO₂ per year.
14 May EurActive article

New climate deal lacking ambition

Most nations have submitted less-than-ambitious proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions Taking account of the new Australian offer, plans outlined by developed nations add up to average cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of between 9 and 16 percent below 1990 levels by 2020,
11 May Reuters article
11 May ClimateArk article

Polar bear habitat not protected

Declining to extend environmental protection to polar bear habitat, the US government said that while habitat melting and an iconic species threatened is a tragedy of the modern age, "the endangered species act is not the best mechanism for cutting down on climate change."
8 May Guardian article
9 May San Francisco Chronicle article

Cool compromise

The Australian government improved their political position on climate mitigation by giving business a delay in starting emissions trading to help get through the recession, and more compensation for affected industries while pleasing the Southern Cross Climate Coalition by promising increased targets to 25 per cent by 2020.
9 May The Age article
8 May ABC article

Waiting for America

According to India's special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, because there is still too much of a 'wait and see' attitude towards the US, diplomats involved in climate negotiations are not making enough progress, despite the need to come up with a global deal by the end of the year in Copenhagen.
6 May EurActiv article
21 April WorldWatch article

2-degree-C climate balloon

As climate negotiations look for consensus on a target , 2 new studies show that if CO₂ emissions are halved by 2050 compared to 1990, global warming might be stabilised below two degrees Celsius. One hundred countries have adopted this “2°C target”.
4 May Science Daily article
4 May IPS article
30 April Times article

Wanted - A Truly Clean Development Mechanism

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change will only have a real befit to the atmosphere when their projects are "additional". A German expert says to be of any use, the net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has to be greater than cuts that would occur anyway without the initiative.
4 May IPS article

US massage of hope to G8+ negotiations

Momentum is building in global climate negotiations while distrust between north and south nations continues and the lack of commonly agreed goals hamper a clear path forward. Talks in Italy moved the agenda forward but produced no clear and measurable commitment.
24 April AFP article
25 April Tehran Times article

Emissions still climbing despite recession

Despite the global economic downturn researchers measured an additional 16.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning and 12.2 million tons of methane in the atmosphere at the end of December 2008. They point out that our emission increases still exceed the small decreases caused by the recession.
24 April Science Daily article

Tribal climate conference

Indigenous peoples from 80 countries met at a summit in Alaska to forge a common position on climate change, seeking an official voice alongside national governments in upcoming negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol. They fear being trampled by rich countries trying to cut greenhouse emissions by managing indigenous lands.
21 April New Scientist article

U.S. to regulate greenhouse emissions
Formal findings by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases "endanger" public health and welfare are a landmark step toward slowing global warming potential by regulating American emissions and influencing international policy.
17 April IPS News article
17 April The Independent article
17 April US EPA article

Bonn talks made slow progress on climate

At the Bonn climate negotiations developing countries like Mexico, Argentina and South Africa shouldered more responsibilities in global climate negotiations. Special sessions suggested that financing through carbon markets would be needed to compensate developing countries for protecting forests.
8 April NY Times article
9 April EurActiv article

US urged to meet EU standards

Chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged the United States to agree to at least the same level of emission caps as the European Union did this year. He said that US leadership in combating rising greenhouse gas emissions will depend on making a significant contribution to reductions.
1 April EurActiv article

Major negotiations for new UN climate change pact kick off in Germany

The first round of United Nations-backed negotiations designed to culminate in an ambitious new international climate change treaty in Copenhagen in December are taking place in Bonn, Germany.
29 March UN News Centre article

New approach for US in global climate change talks

At its first negotiations on climate change, the Obama administration is trying to convince other countries that the US does care about global warming and wants to shape an international accord.
28 March AP through Yahoo News article
28 March AFP article
27 March The Wall Street Journal article

The Obama administration enters the complex world of global climate talks in Bonn amid a furious domestic debate about whether the US should be placing limits on the pollutants that cause global warming.
28 March Deutsche Welle article

White House announces international meetings to address energy and climate issues

The Obama administration has announced that it has organized a series of meetings among representatives of 16 countries and the European Union to discuss energy and climate issues. The meetings, to be held in Washington in April and in La Maddalena, Italy, in July, will seek to resolve longstanding issues that have blocked the development of an international climate treaty.
28 March The New York Times article
28 March Reuters through Yahoo News article
28 March AFP through Yahoo News article

US President Barack Obama plans to take a leadership role at the crucial UN climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year by calling meetings of major polluting nations, including Australia, for April and July. The President's involvement raises hopes a deal may be brokered despite the ravages of the global economic crisis.
30 March The Australian article

Sweden committed to climate change reforms

Cliamte change “will be an absolute focus” of Sweden’s presidency of the European Union from July 1st when it takes over from the crisis-stricken Czech Republic, according to Swedish environment minister Andreas Carlgren.
27 March The Irish Times article

Kyoto goal a breeze as 2008 British emissions fall

Britain's greenhouse gas emissions fell two percent in 2008, firmly putting the country on course to meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol, the government's environment agency said. Provisional statistics published by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) showed total greenhouse gas emissions dropped to 623.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, down from 636.6 million tonnes in 2007.
26 March Reuters article

US Congress told 'climate change is not real'

The United States Congress has been told to ignore President Barack Obama's plan to place limits on carbon emissions because climate change does not exist. "The right response to the non-problem of global warming is to have the courage to do nothing," said British aristocrat Lord Christopher Walter Monckton, a leading proponent of the 'climate change is myth' movement.
26 March ABC News online article
26 March France 24 article

Economic crisis has limited impact on climate change talks

The current global economic crisis will only have a limited impact on global efforts to clinch a climate deal in Copenhagen, said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC).
25 March China View article

Obama cools on climate change

Bowing to stiff opposition on Capitol Hill, President Obama has backed away from his call to deal with climate change as part of the budget, saying he never expected to get everything he asked by demanding that Congress use its major spending blueprint to act on health care, education, alternative energy and deficit reduction.
25 March The Washington Times article
25 March The Guardian article

Climate lobbyists look beyond cap and trade

Climate lobbyists are flooding Capitol Hill, and they're not showing up in all the likely places. As uncertainty hovers over passage of an economywide cap on greenhouse gases, advocates are pushing for climate provisions in less obvious spots, like legislation funding the Federal Aviation Administration.
24 March The New York Times article

Japan election may bring tougher climate policies

Japan will adopt greener climate policies if the opposition, ahead in voter polls, wins an election this year and sticks to promises for greater use of renewable energy and bold cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
24 March Reuters article

Greenpeace: China should attend UN climate talks

Greenpeace China is calling on Chinese President Hu Jintao to attend December's climate change conference in Copenhagen. As the world's most populous developing nation and, by some estimates, its biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, China is obliged to take a major role in the talks, said climate change specialist Li Yan of Greenpeace's Chinese branch.
24 March AP article

EPA presses Obama to regulate warming under clean air act

The Environmental Protection Agency's new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act.
24 March The Washington Post article
23 March AP through Yahoo News article
24 March Reuters through Planet Ark article
23 March The New York Times analysis
25 March The Australian article

Climate pact needs flexible deadline - Agency Chief

The deadline for a new global accord on climate change should be extended if Washington is not ready to make commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by December, the head of a major environmental funding agency said. Monique Barbut, chief executive officer of the Global Environment Facility, told Reuters the administration of US President Barack Obama wanted to tackle global warming but might not have time to pass legislation on carbon trading in time to sign an international pact by December.
24 March Reuters through Planet Ark article

World wants tough 2050 climate cuts, split on path

Governments broadly support tough 2050 goals for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions but are split on how to share out the reductions, according to a new guide to negotiators of a new UN climate pact. A document to be presented to UN climate talks in Bonn from March 29-April 8 narrows down a list of ideas for fighting global warming in a new treaty due to be agreed in December to about 30 pages from 120 in a text late last year.
23 March Reuters article

Unions press G20 to take new tack

Union leaders from the UK and overseas have put forward a global five-point plan they want G20 leaders to adopt as a way of tackling the economic crisis. The plan includes job creation, some bank nationalisation, tackling wage deflation, and climate change action.
23 March BBC News online article

Obama's climate challenge: Winning the carbon game

When it comes to perhaps the largest and most complex policy challenge facing the Obama administration—finally slowing the pace of global warming before dangerous changes become unstoppable—the new president stares down a Dickensian paradox.
March Scientific American opinion

Brazil wants developing country climate targets

Work on a new UN deal on global warming is threatened by a "climate apartheid" between rich and poor countries, and emerging economies must do their part by setting emissions targets, Brazil's environment minister said. Carlos Minc told Reuters developing countries such as Brazil, India and China should adopt targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions but that rich countries need to honor their pledges on existing climate targets and the transfer of technology and finance to poor countries.
19 March Reuters through Forex Pros article

China says US could hold up climate deal

China has pressed for the US Congress to pass legislation to fight global warming, warning that inaction could hold up a new treaty slated for Copenhagen in December.
19 March AFP article

Americans support action on global warming despite economic crisis

Even in the midst of a growing economic crisis last fall, over 90 percent of Americans said that the United States should act to reduce global warming, according to a national survey released by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities. The results included 34 percent who said the United States should make a large-scale effort, even if it has large economic costs.
18 March ScienceDaily article

Leading climate scientist: 'democratic process isn't working'

Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said. James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.
18 March The Guardian article

Carbon emissions from new coal-fired power stations could contribute to mass extinctions, a leading climate scientist has warned.
19 March BBC News online article

Is Obama's environmental agenda losing out?

Ask an Administration official what to expect legislatively this year and the answer will probably fall along these lines: reregulation of the financial markets, followed by the budget, health care and then green jobs. It is a massive agenda for President Barack Obama's first year in office, and already some in the environmental community are worried that their agenda will be sacrificed.
18 March Time article

Did climate conference just confuse the politicians?

Have scientists muddied the waters over what needs to be done to stave off dangerous climate change? Have they caused confusion instead of telling politicians how to save the world? That's what many are asking in the wake of a major meeting intended to inform politicians before vitally important negotiations later this year.
18 March New Scientist article

Science and politics make uncomfortable bedfellows. Rarely is this more true than in the case of climate change, where it is now time for emergency counselling. One point repeatedly made the climate change congress in Copenhagen was that formulating an action plan to curb climate change is not the job of scientists.
18 March New Scientist editorial opinion

Complex path for climate bills in Congress

US Congress is expected to tackle climate change this year with bills aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging cleaner alternative energy and more efficient delivery of electricity. Climate change legislation is complicated and so is the path it could take in the Democratic-controlled Congress. Here is a rundown of key committees that would have a say in shaping the bills.
18 March Reuters article

In search of the climate's tipping point

When asked to quantify the impact of climate change, scientists come up with a lot of interesting answers, no two of them quite the same. For the lay person, then, perhaps the simplest way to understand it is to imagine a distant asteroid, somewhere out in space, on a collision course with Earth. It's not clear when or where the asteroid will hit, or exactly how severe the consequences will be. But it is clear that when it happens, the consequences will be far worse — and last far longer — than any natural disaster humanity has ever known.
17 March Time article

Author: Eat green, cut global warming

Most people assume that getting rid of a gas-guzzling car is the best way to help the environment. But Kate Geagan, a Park City dietitian and author of the new book Go Green, Get Lean, believes people can make a bigger impact on global warming simply by changing what they eat for dinner. In the book, Geagan explains how America's food choices are a major player in the global-warming crisis.
17 March The Salt Lake Tribune article

UK climate change targets 'not tough enough'

Tough UK targets to cut greenhouse gases are too weak to help prevent the temperature rises which could lead to dangerous climate change, scientists have warned.
17 March The Telegraph article

The UK is going ahead with a plan to make energy-intensive businesses, including banks, hotels and schools, cut their energy use and carbon emissions.
13 March EurActiv article

India hits out at developed nations on climate change issue

India strongly hit out at developed nations for putting “conditions” and “adding dimensions” such as carbon tariff and trade competitiveness for action on climate change. “Action on climate change cannot be based on conditions. Once we start going in that direction, it means we start going for protectionism under green label and it is harmful to India’s interest-seeking sustainable development,” Shyam Saran, India’s special envoy on climate change said.
17 March Business Standard article

Singapore firm aims to make vessel emissions ship-shape

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, the shipping industry is neither lean nor green. Ships carry about 90 percent of global trade, and until recently, such has been the demand for coal, cars and electronics, that there has been little concerted effort to rein in the growth of polluting emissions from ships.
17 March Reuters article

Copenhagen aims to be first carbon neutral capital

The capital of Denmark has set itself the ambitious target of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral capital by 2025 by bringing its net carbon dioxide emissions down to zero.
17 March New Kerala article

Ireland's carbon emissions reduced as result of downturn

Ireland is being encouraged to take advantage of the economic downturn and press ahead with efforts to cut carbon emissions in order to meet the criteria set out in the Kyoto Treaty for 2012. The country looks set to avoid having to fork out for the 3.6m tonnes of carbon credits per year it was initially thought to need.
16 March edie article

Eight US Democrats oppose quick debate on global warming bill

Eight Senate Democrats are opposing speedy action on President Barack Obama's bill to combat global warming, complicating prospects for the legislation and creating problems for their party's leaders. The eight Democrats disapprove of using the annual budget debate to pass Obama's "cap and trade" bill to fight greenhouse gas emissions, a measure that divides lawmakers, environmentalists and businesses.
16 March Associated Press through Yahoo News article

UN climate chief hustles on global warming deal

Big gaps remain in a new UN deal on global warming meant to be agreed in December and time is running worryingly short with just 265 days left, the UN climate chief said. Yvo de Boer criticised a recent meeting of European Union finance ministers, which he said put conditions on financial help for climate action in developing countries, contrary to promises at the launch of the two-year climate talks in Bali in 2007.
17 March Reuters article
17 March Bloomberg article
18 March BBC News online article

Industries in developing countries must do more to curb their greenhouse gases before earning the right to sell carbon offsets under a new climate treaty from 2013, the European Commission said.
17 March Reuters article

US, China worlds apart on climate change curbs

China's top climate negotiator's visit to Washington sent a fresh signal that the two countries, which account for about half the world's greenhouse gas emissions, have a long way to go to reach a common agreement on how to cut emissions to prevent serious climate change. China wants to become a "low-carbon society," but can't say when that will be achieved. And it doesn't want to be held accountable for emissions it produces to make goods for export, said Li Gao, the director of China's climate change office.
16 March The Miami Herald article
17 March The Washington Times article
16 March Reuters article
17 March The Guardian article

Gore says global climate deal will be reached

Former US vice-president Al Gore was quoted as saying he believed a global climate deal would be agreed in Copenhagen later this year because a "political tipping point" had been reached. Gore, who won an Oscar for his 2006 climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", said he believed the support of world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, and many business leaders, had given political momentum to the issue.
16 March Reuters through Planet Ark article

Children come with a high carbon cost

What is your carbon legacy - not the emissions you are personally liable for, but those of your descendants? Ask Paul Murtaugh, a statistician at Oregon State University in Corvallis. If you have a child, he says, you and you partner are each responsible for half its emissions.
15 March New Scientist article

Let's see climate change as an opportunity

If we continue to pollute the planet at our current rate, terrible consequences will follow. The evidence is there. But our leaders cannot find the will to do anything about it. No wonder the scientists are frustrated. At a meeting in Copenhagen, leading researchers called explicitly for more government action, breaking the taboo that has traditionally held scientific inquiry above the political fray.
15 March The Guardian editorial opinion

Global warming or global cooling?

US carbon dioxide emissions have been essentially flat since 2000, while global emissions are rapidly increasing, according to new figures released by the Global Carbon Project. Global carbon dioxide emissions are outpacing even the worst-case projections of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the Global Carbon Project.
13 March Daily Press article

UK to go ahead with domestic emissions scheme

The UK is going ahead with a plan to make energy-intensive businesses, including banks, hotels and schools, cut their energy use and carbon emissions, the country's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said. The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which includes all central government departments and local authorities, is a mandatory scheme that will help Britain cut greenhouse gas emissions by four million tonnes by 2020, the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road.
13 March EurActiv article

Stern attacks politicians over climate 'devastation'

Politicians have failed to take on board the severe consequences of failing to cut world carbon emissions, according to Nicholas Stern, the economist commissioned by Gordon Brown to analyse the impact of climate change. His stark warning about the potentially "devastating" consequences of global warming came as scientists issued a desperate plea for world leaders to curb greenhouse gas emissions or face an ecological and social disaster.
13 March Guardian article

Time to change 'climate change'

What's clear from Copenhagen is that policymakers have fallen behind the scientists: global warming is already catastrophic. Presentations by climate scientists at a conference in Copenhagen show that we might have underplayed the impacts of global warming in three important respects.
12 March Guardian article

Buoyed by US, UN chief sees climate deal this year

The UN chief has predicted that a new global climate deal — with US backing — will be reached this year. "With US leadership, in partnership with the United Nations, we can and will reach a climate change deal that all nations can embrace," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters.
12 March msnbc.com article
13 March Reuters through Planet Ark article

Termite-killer is powerful greenhouse gas: study

A compound used to kill termites and other pests has turned out to be a potent greenhouse gas that stays in the atmosphere much longer than previously thought, an international team of scientists has found. Sulfuryl fluoride (SO2F2) is nearly 5,000 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal volume of carbon dioxide, scientists say.
12 March Reuters article
16 March New Scientist article

Polar bear states obliged to take action on climate change at historic meeting

An agreement signed in 1973 obliges the five Arctic states with polar bear populations to take action on climate change at a meeting next week, WWF said. For the first time in more than 25 years, the Contracting Parties to the 1973 international Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears and Their Habitats - Canada, Russia, US, Greenland/Denmark, and Norway - will come together for a formal meeting under the agreement.
12 March msnbc.com article
18 March AFP article
16 March Reuters article

EPA plans US registry of greenhouse gas emissions

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to establish a nationwide system for reporting greenhouse gas emissions, a program that could serve as the basis for a federal cap on the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming.
11 March The Washington Post article
11 March Reuters through Planet Ark article
11 March Carbon Finance article

London summit to include climate talks - diplomats

A summit meeting on the financial crisis in London in April will tackle the issue of climate change, which the UN chief had planned to make the focus of a separate gathering in New York, diplomats said.
11 March Reuters article

UN climate chief: US carbon cuts could spark 'revolution'

The head of the UN body charged with leading the fight against climate change has conceded that Barack Obama will face a "revolution" if he commits the US to the deep carbon cuts that scientists and campaigners say are needed.
11 March Guardian article

Kerry: Climate change delay is 'suicide pact'

A leading US senator warned that deferring potentially costly actions to combat climate change because of the global economic slump amounted to "a mutual suicide pact." "Climate change is not governed by a recession, it's governed by scientific facts about what's happening to Earth. And you either accept the realities of the science or you don't," said Democratic Senator John Kerry.
11 March AFP article

Greece, China resist shipping emission cuts: govt

Greece and China's merchant navies joined forces to resist compulsory greenhouse gas reductions targets for the lucrative sector, the Greek shipping ministry said. The two sides agreed that proposals by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) "must first be applied on a voluntary basis and must only become binding in the long term," the ministry said in a statement.
10 March AFP article

Poland demands international rules on climate burden sharing

Poland is pushing EU economic and finance ministers to agree on how the industrialised world should divide the burden of financial assistance to developing countries to fight climate change. The ministers, meeting in the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (Ecofin), will adopt conclusions on international financing for climate change, but are not expected to put any figures on the table. Poland, however, is demanding the inclusion of a clause on the "clarification of burden sharing".
10 March EurActiv article

Canned diet coke offers smaller carbon footprint

Producing and disposing of a can of Coca-Cola in the U.K. generates about 170 grams of greenhouse gas emissions. Swap that aluminum can for a glass bottle, however, and the carbon footprint doubles. Feel guilty? A can of diet Coke or Coke Zero each have a slimmer 150g carbon footprint. Toss the empty can in the recycling bin and the footprint shrinks to 85g.
10 March ClimateBiz article

Carbon cuts 'only give 50/50 chance of saving planet'

The world's best efforts at combating climate change are likely to offer no more than a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the threshold of disaster, according to research from the UK Met Office.
9 March The Independent article

Mapping the contours of climate change

With formal negotiations on the new international climate change treaty due to open, Independent readers are starting to work with the Debategraph community to develop a comprehensive map of the issues around climate change that are confronting the negotiators. The map is part of a wider online collective intelligence project, ESSENCE 2009 – being run in conjunction with the Open University and MIT and supported by the World Federation of UN Associations – that is building towards the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.
9 March The Independent article

Nigeria: potential gas hotspot, on frontline for climate change

Nigeria, tipped to be the world's next natural gas powerhouse, is on the frontline for climate change as it is ranked Africa's largest producer of greenhouse gases. Experts meeting in the country said the west African powerhouse, which has the seventh largest proven natural gas reserves in the world at 187 trillion cubic feet, could become a key player in the international gas market.
7 March AFP article

Europe advises US officials on climate

A clutch of leading international climate officials and negotiators who descended on Washington to press the United States for action on global warming say they got a clear message from the Obama administration and key lawmakers: The question now is not whether the nation will act, but how.
6 March The Washington Post article

Chinese FM calls for cooperation to address climate change

Developed and developing countries should join hands to address the global climate change, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said. "Developed and developing countries should make their own efforts while addressing climate change issues, and cooperate with each other which is key to the success of the climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen this year," Yang said at a press conference on the sidelines of the annual session of China's parliament.
7 March The Hindu article

China's greenhouse gas emissions threaten to double

Can a climate catastrophe still be averted? Scientists voice pessimism in a new study, which concludes that no matter what the Western industrialized nations do, China's greenhouse emissions will be hard to stop.
6 March Spiegel Online International article

Bay Area's 'big three' mayors sign climate change pact

In a move signaling local cooperation in the fight against climate change, the mayors of the Bay Area's three largest cities have signed onto a regional agreement that outlines a series of goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
6 March Mercury News article

South Africa: Climate change white paper to be drafted by 2010

The National Climate Change Conference has laid the foundations for a Policy White Paper on climate change to be drafted by 2010 as part of government's response to the global phenomenon.
6 March allAfrica.com article

In his address to the National Climate Change Response Policy Development Summit in South Africa, Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), expressed concern with the slow international response to mitigate climate change.
6 March Climate-L.org article

Climate deal a business boost

Four hundred global business leaders at a United Nations-backed gathering stressed the importance of reaching an ambitious climate change deal later this year. They called for increased transparency and a new risk paradigm including extra-financial issues in the realms of environment and governance.
23 April UN News Centre article
23 April iisd article

American Congress pressed on climate

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has asked Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate change legislation to reduce U.S. oil imports and fight global warming, while discussing draft climate legislation to lower carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050.
22 April The Guardian article

Brits get rebates for electric cars

The British government is planning to stump up 5,000 pounds (USD$7,460) to help residents buy an electric car or plug-in hybrid vehicle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. BMW is working with the UK government on building an infrastructure for electric cars.
17 April Forbes article

Small efforts, small results

In an optimistic book that details recent initiatives in increased sustainable practices in Colorado USA, Auden Schendler points out that with the scope and rate of climate impacts we have to do a lot more, and faster, to make any real changes in likely outcomes for the future.
10 April ClimateBiz article
11 April Seattle PI article

Forest Carbon meeting in Panama

Participants Committee of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) met in Panama to plan strategies to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in order to slow global warming. They have been criticised for lack of both indigenous input and effective funding.
6 April Bank Information Centre article
22 April CNN article

Mapping the future

Google maps are increasingly being used to plot climate, energy and biodiversity distribution shifts by governments and non-profit organisations as well as industry. Recent entries range from plots of prime areas for renewable energy projects to seeing how climate change will impact various regions.
3 April ClimateBiz article

Contract and converge

G20 summit members are urged to achieve sustainable and equitable growth by simultaneously reducing global demand for carbon-intensive technologies while giving the developing world the right to benefit from economic growth.
2 April SciDev.net article

From Risk to Opportunity: Insurer Responses to Climate Change

A new report says the 640-plus climate-related insurance initiatives worldwide taking climate change into account when developing or adding to insurance offerings is not increasing fast enough and fails to match the scale and urgency of climate change impacts.
2 April ClimateBiz article
3 April NY Times article
report (pdf 2.7Mb)

Banks have vague climate plans

A BankTrack report says the way banks choose to invest will make a huge difference to the climate. It criticises banking industry agreements to address climate issues citing both the US based Carbon Principles and Climate Principles as vague when substantive, outcome-oriented standards are required.
2 April Environmental Finance article
report

Energy efficiency for job creation in the United Kingdom

While new funding for greening the economy amounts to just 0.6% of the UK's total stimulus package, an annual £5 billion investment in domestic energy efficiency would create around 55,000 jobs directly and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created indirectly and reduce about 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
1 April edie article

Emission reductions through better aviation navigation

International aviation trade groups called for the widespread adoption of Performance-based Navigation (PBN) to trim trip length, fuel and greenhouse gas emissions by shifting from conventional ground-based navigation procedures and tools to satellite-based versions to make take-offs and landings more efficient and routes more direct.
1 April ClimateBiz article

UK Government launches new green charity task force

The government has launched a new joint task force with not-for-profit organisations, designed to increase the involvement of the third sector in the UK's climate change strategy. The group will be jointly chaired by Defra, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and ministers from the Cabinet Office and will aim to identify specific initiatives where the government and the third sector can work together to help communities, businesses and individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
25 March Business Green article

Action on climate to harm gulf economies: Saudi official

Strict measures across the world to act against climate change could seriously affect the economies of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, a Saudi official said. "Countries talking about reducing dependence on oil could impact our economy," Mohammad al-Sabban of the Saudi ministry of petroleum told an OPEC energy conference.
20 March Reuters through Planet Ark article

As planet warms, poor nations face economic chill

A rising tide is said to lift all boats. Rising global temperatures, however, may lead to increased disparities between rich and poor countries, according to a recent MIT economic analysis of the impact of climate change on growth.
20 March ScienceDaily article
17 March WBUR article

Link water, energy and climate in global talks, business urges

Business leaders from some of the world's biggest companies have called for water, energy and climate change to be linked in global negotiations, such as the international climate talks due to culminate in Copenhagen in December. The business leaders were speaking at the launch of a report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development at the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul. The forum is expected to produce a ministerial statement calling for proactive policies on water issues.
19 March World Business Council for Sustainable Development article and report (pdf)

What new climate change policies will mean for your business

As global leaders prepare to negotiate an updated version of the Kyoto Treaty at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, the big question is whether China and the United States will join the 183 countries that have already signed on. If that happens, we’ll be on our way to a serious global effort to stabilize the climate. What would this mean for your company?
19 March ClimateBiz article

$750 billion "green" investment could revive economy: UN

Investments of $750 billion could create a "Green New Deal" to revive the world economy and protect the environment, perhaps aided by a tax on oil, the head of the UN environment agency said. Achim Steiner said spending should focus on five environmental sectors including improved energy efficiency for buildings and solar or wind power to create jobs, curb poverty and fight climate change.
19 March Reuters article

EU power firms to go carbon neutral by 2050

European electricity companies have pledged to go "carbon neutral" and drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Eurelectric, a group of power companies from the EU's 27 countries, said members such as E.On AG, Electricite de France SA, RWE AG and Enel would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and offset what they can't avoid.
18 March AP through MSNBC article

Insurers must reveal climate change risks

Insurance companies must start disclosing how climate change is likely to affect their businesses, state insurance regulators decided. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners voted to require insurers to submit annual "climate-risk" reports, an unusually aggressive stance on the environmental issue from industry regulators.
18 March The Wall Street Journal article
19 March ClimateBiz article

Insurance companies are set to raise their estimates for future premiums because of the effects of climate change. Firms that operate in areas where floods and storms cause a growing amount of damage are likely to see the cost of cover rise by as much as 100% in the next 10 years.
22 March The Times article

Governor unveils green jobs program for youths

In his latest effort to combat global warming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to enlist the state's hard-luck youth. The governor has announced the new California Green Corps, a statewide effort to train young adults between 16 and 24 years old to work in the state's fledgling green-tech industry.
17 March The San Francisco Chronicle article

Microsoft plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent

Microsoft set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions at least 30 percent per unit of revenue by 2012. The company announced to its employees that it will use its 2007 levels as a baseline for the goal, which it intends to meet by making its buildings and operations more energy efficient, using more green power and cutting air travel.
16 March ClimateBiz article

Crisis a chance to tackle climate change, create green jobs

Measures to help ease climate change should be integrated into massive stimulus packages aimed at fighting the global economic crisis, environmental groups and government officials said. There are fears some countries may backslide on commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as they focus on reviving their recession-hit economies, but the two objectives can go hand-in-hand, they said.
16 March AFP through Yahoo News article

EU wants ICT industry to cut emissions by 20 per cent

The European Commission wants the ICT sector to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 per cent before 2015 in exchange for the benefits the industry is expected to reap from EU legislation on smart technologies to tackle climate change.
13 March EurActiv article

Global warming to carry big costs for California

From agricultural losses to devastation wrought by wildfires, California's economy is expected to see significant costs resulting from global warming in the decades ahead, according to a new report. Global warming could translate into annual costs and revenue losses throughout the economy of between $2.5 billion and $15 billion by 2050, according to a summary of cost analyses presented to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's climate advisers.
13 March Associated Press article
11 March The Christian Science Monitor article

Fighting global warming offers growth and development opportunities, leading economist proposes

Combating climate change may not be a question of who will carry the burden but could instead be a rush for the benefits, according to new economic modeling presented at "Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions" hosted by the University of Copenhagen on March 12.
12 March ScienceDaily article

Finnish firm plans CDM partnerships

Finland-based Neste Oil Corp is currently in talks with several Malaysian plantation companies to jointly undertake Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects under the Kyoto Protocol. Renewable fuels vice-president (business operation) Risto Karppinen told StarBiz that the company was keen to jointly invest in CDM projects such as the capturing of methane gas from palm oil mill effluent ponds that were abundant in Malaysia.
12 March Malaysian Star article

Is economic recession slowing down actions against climate change?

Global efforts to combat climate change have not been played down by the current economic slump, although relevant non-governmental organisations have started to feel the pressure, experts say.
11 March China View article

Climate change means bigger medical, council and property bills

Climate change concerns like melting icecaps, increased desertification, loss of coral reefs and the extinction of species like polar bears can seem a distant concern in our everyday lives. Little attention, however, has been paid to the likelihood of increased bills, through tax and insurance charges, that will be incurred as the UK climate changes.
11 March ScienceDaily article
11 March Sky News article

Interview - Global crunch no excuse to ignore climate change

Concerns over the global economy should not derail governments from solving a longer-term crisis in the form of climate change and the disasters it brings with it, says the United Nations' first "champion" for disaster risk reduction in the Asia Pacific. Climate change has already wreaked havoc in the Asia Pacific, and without urgent attention could worsen the plight of many people in the region, Loren Legarda, an environmentalist and regional advocate for the United Nation's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) told AlertNet.
10 March Thomson Reuters Foundation article

A third of global suppliers unaware of climate change risks: CDP

One in three global suppliers believes climate change poses no risk to their operations despite the increasing amount of attention being paid to supply chain greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly three dozen companies -- including heavy hitters such as Johnson and Johnson, P&G, Johnson Controls, Boeing, Dell and PepsiCo -- called on thousands of their major suppliers to disclose emissions and reduction strategies through the Carbon Disclosure Project.
6 March ClimateBiz article
6 March Pensions & Investments article