By Kate Sheppard

Alun Hubbard, a researcher at Aberystwyth University’s Center for Glaciology in Wales, recently returned from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Polar scientists last photographed the glacier, located in the northwest corner of the country, in the summer of 2009. They went back this summer to see how much ice it has lost in just the last two years, and the results were dramatic.

“Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the breakup, which rendered me speechless,” Hubbard said in response to the images. Below, you can see the original shots from 2009 beside those taken this summer:

(h/t Wales Online)

By Kate Sheppard

Photo: taberandrewBack in 2008, ExxonMobil pledged to quit funding climate change deniers. But according to new documents released through a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act request, the oil giant was still forking over cash to climate skeptics as recently as last year, to the tune of $76,000 for one scientist skeptical of humankind’s role in global warming. This — and much more — came to light in a new report about the funding [PDF] of Wei Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Soon has been a favorite among climate skeptics for years, since coauthoring a paper back in 2003 that claimed that the 20th century was probably not the warmest, nor was it unique. That paper, published in the journal Climate Research, was widely criticized by climate scientists for its content, not to mention the funding it received from the American Petroleum Institute. An astrophysicist by training, Soon has also claimed that solar variability — i.e., changes in the amount of radiation coming from the sun — are to likely to blame for warming temperatures.

In 2007, Soon coauthored a paper challenging the claim that climate change harms polar bears. The paper drew plenty of criticism, as it was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, The Charles G. Koch Foundation, and ExxonMobil — groups with a clear interest in the debate over whether the bears merited endangered species protections.

Given that Soon had previously disclosed some of his corporate funding, in December 2009, Greenpeace submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information about Soon’s funders and any conflict of interest forms he may have submitted. In response, Smithsonian produced a list of his major bankrollers, which included more than $800,000 from major energy interests. According to the document, Exxon provided $55,000 for a study on Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers accused Greenpeace of “peddling this discredited conspiracy theory” about its support for climate deniers. He maintained that the company stopped funding Soon in 2009. “We made a decision to discontinue funding groups whose positions on climate change weren’t very constructive. It was distracting,” said Jeffers. “The issue of climate change is so important, it shouldn’t be distracted by the type of things Greenpeace does,” Jeffers said.

Even if Greenpeace and Smithsonian are wrong and ExxonMobil has stopped funding his work, Soon still appears to be getting significant backing from other fossil fuel companies, with the coal giant Southern Company providing $120,000 to look at “solar variability and climate change signals from temperature” in 2008 and 2009, and the Koch Foundation providing Soon another $65,000 last year.

“Dr. Soon needs to make clear what exactly these corporations expected from him,” said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace. “There’s been a long-term campaign of climate denial for over 20 years, organized by big coal and big oil. This is evidence that it continues to this day.”

By Kate Sheppard

Looks like the past year hasn’t been so bad after all for BP, which today reported a 16 percent increase in profits over the first quarter of 2010. The company reported $7.2 billion in net earnings — compared to $6.2 billion for the first three months of last year.

The company sold off a bunch of assets in order to pay for the Gulf oil disaster, which is how they managed to keep the profits up. BP also hasn’t been drilling in the deepwater since that whole giant oil catastrophe it unleashed last year. But to still report an increase in income is, well … let’s just say I have a hard time feeling too bad for them because their profits weren’t as high as they could have been.

Never fear though, as the company says it expects to be back out drilling in the Gulf by the second quarter of this year.

By Kate Sheppard

The Gulf oil disaster largely disappeared from the headlines last August, after the well was finally capped and the federal government declared that most of the oil was “gone.”

For Gulf coast residents, though, the nightmare was just beginning. A year later, business hasn’t come back for many in fishing and tourism, and the compensation check from BP still hasn’t arrived. In the areas closest to the shores, people are reporting health problems consistent with exposure to chemicals. Dead turtles, dolphins, and fish are still washing ashore. So are tar balls. So while most of the country has moved on, a number of Gulf coast residents have been in D.C. over the past week to tell decisionmakers one thing: It’s not over.

Mother Jones talked with several Gulf residents who have become advocates for their communities in the wake of the spill.

Kindra Arnesen, 33, of Buras, La.

Arnesen and her husband, David, were just putting the finishing touches on the house they rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina when the Deepwater Horizon exploded. The disaster made an accidental activist out of this fisherman’s wife and restaurant owner.

“We’re not used to having to come up here and ask all these agencies in D.C. to do what our tax dollars pay them to do. I own two homes, a restaurant, and four boats. I’ve put that back together in the last five years. I don’t owe no money on anything. We work really, really hard for what we do and what we get, and then it is almost like we’re painted by our own politicians through their actions, or lack thereof, as people that don’t need to exist, like we are expendable.”

To read my interview with Arnesen, click here.

Cherri Foytlin, 38, of Rayne, La.

Foytlin, a reporter, wife of an oilfield worker, and mother of six, walked 1,243 miles from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to demand a better future for Gulf residents.

“I would love for my husband to be making solar panels, but all the solar panels are being made in China. One of the things I’m totally advocating is bringing clean energy jobs here, and then providing subsidies so our oil workers get those jobs first.”

“We are not divided. It’s them that’s dividing us up, and making us feel like we’re against this other group, that the oil workers are against the green movement and the green movement are against the oil workers. They are not — they are against the oil companies. That’s a big difference. The oil companies don’t care about the oil workers.”

To read my interview with Foytlin, click here.

Ryan Lambert, 53, of Buras, La.

Lambert rebuilt his charter boat company, Cajun Fishing Adventures, after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. But a year after the oil disaster began, business still hasn’t come back.

“BP hasn’t made people whole. I’m not saying I’m so much worried about me, because financially, I’m okay. I’m the oldest one in the business, just about. But the youngest guys are starving to death. People are losing their homes, losing their boats and there’s BP advertising that they’re spending millions of dollars. They’re not. They’re not making anyone whole.”

To read my interview with Lambert, click here.

By Kate Sheppard

BP is gunning to get back to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the Department of Interior issued its first deepwater permit since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was for a well that BP owns half of. Earlier this month, company officials also announced that they are seeking an agreement with the U.S. government to resume drilling at their 10 deepwater wells in the Gulf this July, arguing that they will follow tougher safety rules, The New York Times reported earlier this month. This comes even as the government is said to be considering manslaughter charges against the oil giant for the deaths of 11 workers last year.

People are sick. Nearly three-quarters of Gulf Coast residents that the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice group, polled this year reported health concerns that they believe are related to the spill. Of the 954 residents in seven coastal communities, almost half said they had experienced health problems like coughing, skin and eye irritation, or headaches that are consistent with common symptoms of chemical exposure. While the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is conducting health monitoring for spill cleanup workers, residents in the areas closest to the spill are concerned that their own health problems have gone unattended.

Fish and other sea life in the Gulf are still struggling after the disaster. The death toll for dolphins and whales in the Gulf may have been 50 times higher than the number of bodies found, according to a recent paper in Conservation Letters. Earlier this year, a large number of dead dolphin calves were found on the coast, and scientists have linked many of those deaths to the oil disaster. Anglers are also reporting dark lesions, rotting fins, and discoloration in the fish they’re catching in the Gulf, as the St. Petersburg Times reported last week.

While those most affected by the spill are still waiting for payments, some state and local officials have been making bank off the disaster. As the Associated Press reported recently, some local governments have been using the $754 million from BP to buy iPads, SUVs, and laptops. Meanwhile, BP just gave another $30 million to Florida to help entice tourists onto its beaches this summer.

Congress hasn’t changed a single law on oil and gas drilling in the past year. A year later, the liability cap for companies that cause a major spill is still just $75 million, companies with dismal safety records can still obtain new leases, and they can still avoid compensating families when workers die on rigs. In January, the National Oil Spill Commission released 300 pages of findings and recommendations that Congress has largely ignored.

GOP House members want more drilling off all our coasts with less environmental review. The Natural Resources Committee is considering a trio of bills that would open new areas for drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans for drilling, speed up the process of approving permits, and force the Department of Interior to move forward with lease sales in the central Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia without further environmental review. And, for good measure, the legislation would even create economic incentives for oil companies to use seismic technology to survey for oil reserves, letting taxpayers cover half the cost.

“Fail safe” technology isn’t fail safe. The blowout preventer (BOP), the device that was supposed to stop a catastrophic spill after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, failed due to a faulty design and a bent piece of pipe, according to a report released in March. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement contracted the Norwegian firm Det Norske Veritas to conduct a forensic examination of the BOP. The blind shear rams, which were supposed cut through and close off the well, failed because a pipe had buckled, the 551-page report concluded – a problem that casts doubt on all the other BOPs in use today.

The country’s offshore regulator has a new name, but it’s still got plenty of problems. The much-maligned Minerals Management Service got a branding overhaul and is now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE). And while it’s made a number of changes in the past year, there are still plenty of concerns about whether the agency is up to the task. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and BOEMRE head Michael Bromwich acknowledge that it will take years of reforms to ensure that drilling is safe for workers and the environment.

Fewer than half of people who have filed claims from the spill have been paid. The Gulf Coast Claims Facility, under the direction of administrator Kenneth Feinberg, has approved approximately 300,000 claims out of the 857,000 it has received from individuals and businesses, totaling $3.8 billion. The claims facility cited the “unprecedented magnitude of the task” in its announcement marking the year since the spill. A number of residents have grown frustrated with the process and say they would rather sue than wait on the claims facility.

BP still doesn’t want you to see its tar balls. That’s right — even a year later, BP is still blocking reporters from the beaches.

By Kate Sheppard

What did we learn?The National Oil Spill Commission on Tuesday released a voluminous report on the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its implications for the future of offshore drilling in the United States. The report, a doorstop of more than 300 pages, contains a long list of advice for the oil industry and federal regulators about how to avert a future catastrophe. But many of the commission’s recommendations require action from Congress — and given the current political climate, those changes might be hard to make for at least the next two years.

“The industry fought measures in Congress and previous administrations to tighten safety standards and prevent regulations,” said Richard Charter, senior policy adviser for the marine program at Defenders of Wildlife. “If industry continues its past practice of foot-dragging and a recalcitrant attitude about actually implementing safer drilling practices, then what we will be left with is a big pile of paper and no action.”

The commission released an advance copy of one chapter of the report last week that outlined the risks that rig operator BP, owner Transocean, and cement-provider Halliburton took that likely caused or contributed to the explosion. In the rest of the report, while allocating the blame for the Deepwater spill largely to the three companies involved, the commission made it clear that it believes systemic failures across the industry underlie the tragedy. The authors note that Transocean and Halliburton are two of the largest offshore drilling contractors, working with a number of other major industry players beyond BP.

“The Deepwater Horizon disaster did not have to happen,” said commission cochair and former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) on Tuesday. “It was both preventable and foreseeable … That it did happen is the result of a shared failure that was years in the making.”

The commission laid out a number of changes that Congress would need to make to prevent a repeat disaster: raising the cap on liability (which ensures that companies that spill only have to cover up to $75 million in damages in the event of a disaster), extending the window of time granted to regulators to evaluate permit applications for new drilling from 30 to 60 days, and creating a new office in the Department of Interior charged specifically with overseeing safety in offshore drilling. The commission also recommended better compensation for regulators (an incentive to keep them working in government rather than industry) and a dramatic increase in funding for the Department of Interior agency that oversees drilling.

The commission did not offer a new figure for the liability cap, which was set under the Oil Pollution Act in 1990 and has not been increased since then. There were several proposals before Congress last year following the spill, including one that would eliminate the cap entirely and force companies to be on the hook for all the costs incurred in a spill, though the change, along with a larger spill-response bill passed by the House, was never approved in the Senate.

With Republicans now in control of the House, few expect that any package of spill response measures will be considered this year — let alone one as aggressive as the measures the lower chamber approved last year. Nevertheless, Graham was optimistic about the likelihood of proposals actually going somewhere in a Republican-controlled House. “I believe that this issue and the searing impact that the Deepwater Horizon has had on the conscience of America is such that it will override an ideological preference for less government, less government intrusion,” he said.

His cochair (and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George H.W. Bush), William Reilly, also said he thought Congress would heed the advice. “It’s very hard to predict Congress,” he said, “but in the conversations I’ve had, we have had a respectful hearing.” The cochairs will appear before several House and Senate committees later this month to discuss the proposals. “We’re going to make a lot of noise,” Reilly said.

But the early signs from the new Congress aren’t too promising. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), the new chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, has outlined plans to increase domestic drilling. His statement in response to the commission report, while acknowledging that some of the proposals “deserve real consideration,” struck a similar chord against any measures that could rein in drillers. “Congress needs to ensure that offshore energy production meets the highest safety standards, but as gasoline prices continue to rise we cannot allow ourselves to become increasingly dependent on hostile foreign nations for our energy needs,” he said.

The industry certainly provided no cheering section for the report. The American Petroleum Institute (API), which last week laid out its 2011 mission to make it easier for oil companies to drill in the U.S., released a statement Tuesday claiming that the industry has already undertaken “numerous steps to further improve safety.” The oil industry’s largest trade group argues that more regulations aren’t necessary: “API is deeply concerned that the commission’s report casts doubt on an entire industry based on its study of a single incident.” American Solutions for Winning the Future, Newt Gingrich’s pro-drilling 527 committee, dismissed the report as “anti-energy blather.”

The defensive stance from oil interests, says oil industry veteran Bob Cavnar, can be blamed at least in part on the fact that the commission itself lacked anyone from the industry; instead it is made up largely of academics and environmentalists. “The major changes to offshore drilling require congressional action,” said Cavnar, whose book Disaster on the Horizon assessed the causes of the blowout on the rig. “With a Republican Congress, the chances of those changes being made are zero unless the industry pushes it, and because the industry rejects the report, that’s not going to happen.”

While many in the environmental community welcomed the commission’s advice, they noted that even those proposals are still not enough to bring the risks of an accident down to zero. Many groups still want see offshore drilling stopped altogether.

“I think the recommendations are pretty tepid given the severity of the crisis,” said Jackie Savitz, director of pollution campaigns at the advocacy group Oceana. But, she admitted, “Even the small things they’re suggesting, I think it’s going to be hard to convince Congress to make those changes.”

By Kate Sheppard

In the wake of the tragic shootings in Tucson on Saturday, there has been a lot of talk about the influence of heated — and at times, violent — political rhetoric, which has seemingly escalated in recent years. Sarah Palin has gotten plenty of attention for her midterms target map (replete with bulls-eyes) of congressional districts, including Arizona’s Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D), who was critically injured in the shooting. But it’s worth noting some of the other examples of extreme rhetoric — notably Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) calling on constituents to get “armed and dangerous” over the climate bill.

Here’s Bachmann in a 2009 radio interview, talking about the cap-and-trade bill that was under debate in the House at that time:

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.

Now, it’s important to note that the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, certainly appears to be suffering from mental illness and that his political ideology, if he even has one, is not really clear at this point. (See Mother Jones‘ exclusive interview with one of his close friends for more.) He — or any other twisted individual — could have well committed a heinous act like this without elected officials fanning the flames. But it’s also certainly true that statements like Bachmann’s haven’t really helped create a positive discourse in this country on key policy issues — in this case, climate change.

It’s not just Republicans though (though I would certainly note that we’ve seen much more of this from the right in recent years). Remember West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s campaign ad that featured him gunning down — literally — the cap-and-trade bill? Ken Ward has a thoughtful post on the need to back off the violent rhetoric on coal issues in particular, highlighting the Manchin ad.

Given that it’s well known that there are paranoid, dangerous, and fragile individuals among us, the insinuation that violence against the government is a meritorious pursuit is irresponsible. There are serious debates to be had about policy, but those don’t involve guns.

By Kate Sheppard

It’s not perfect, and it’s not binding, but international climate negotiators have struck a deal.

The final hours in Cancun were a world of difference from the closing night of the Copenhagen climate talks. Last year’s summit closed with drama, confusion, and plenty of unhappy delegations, but the Mexico conference came to an end with multiple standing ovations for the host country and widespread concurrence among countries to approve the text of an agreement.

It was after 3:00 a.m. when the parties adopted the agreement — or two agreements, really: one that delays a decision on the future of the Kyoto Protocol and another laying out in more detail a new deal on climate that includes major emitters like the U.S. and China. Of the 194 countries represented in Cancun, 193 backed the text — which, while it falls short on many fronts, represented “a new era in international cooperation on climate change,” said Patricia Espinosa, the minister of foreign affairs for Mexico and president of the summit. Much of what is included in the 32-page agreement [PDF] for a new climate deal is based on the spare Copenhagen Accord, formalizing it within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The greatest success may have been that the Mexican organizers, particularly Espinosa, were able to restore faith in the process. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh praised Espinosa as a “goddess” for her bringing together the parties around an agreement. “You have not only crafted a balanced agreement but most importantly you have restored the confidence of the international community in multilateralism and the multilateral process at a time when the confidence had hit a historic low,” he said. “I believe we have launched a process where the trust deficit has been considerably bridged.”

Broadly, the agreement accomplishes most of what observers hoped it would heading in two weeks ago: It records the commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions that developed and developing countries made in Copenhagen, establishes a framework for transparency, sets up a global climate fund with the goal of providing $100 billion in financing to developing countries by 2020, and establishes an initiative aimed at curbing deforestation.

Observers and many parties acknowledged that the progress was modest, and that the emission pledges are not legally binding and fall short of the stated goal of limiting global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). And there are still outstanding questions about the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, which binds most industrialized nations to emissions targets, and which is set to expire in 2012.

Not everyone is entirely happy with the final text. Bolivia objected to the adoption of the agreements, saying it did not require enough of wealthy nations. Ambassador Pablo Solon said his country “is not prepared to sign a document which means an increase of the average temperature which will put more human lives in a situation close to death.” But Espinosa moved to adopt the agreement anyway, calling it “one party trying to impose a right of veto upon the will of the conference.” Solon objected to the move to override dissent, a departure from the usual practice to accept agreements only with complete consensus. “Today it is Bolivia, tomorrow it could be any other country,” said Solon.

Most delegations, however, were eager to walk away with something they could declare a win — including the U.S. and China, a signal that the language in the text bridged differences between the two countries about emissions targets and how they would be tracked by other countries.

“What we have now is text that, while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward,” said U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern. Xie Zhenhua, Stern’s Chinese counterpart, gave similarly positive remarks.

I caught E.U. commissioner for climate action Connie Hedegaard, who led last year’s talks, leaving the plenary early Saturday morning and asked about the difference between this year and last. “The major difference is that people this year realized if we didn’t get a result here the process risked dying,” said Hedegaard. “Basically it was the political will that changed.”

Environmental groups praised the progress, even while noting the agreement’s flaws. Friends of the Earth called it a “wholly inadequate response” while noting “progress in some areas.” The World Wildlife Fund noted “measurable progress” but added that a “lot more work and some big political challenges remain.”

Among the 193 countries that approved the agreement, there was acknowledgment of the significant challenges that remain, but also a more clear desire to compromise. “This deal is not ideal, but it is a deal that works, and that works for us,” said Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates.

Mohamed Aslam, environment minister for the Maldives, said, “I speak from a country whose survival is dependent on any deal we get here. Nobody can doubt what sort of interest I have when I speak about the outcome of this conference. It is a negotiation. Therefore we don’t get everything we want. There are compromises.”

The debate over the future of the Kyoto Protocol — which legally binds industrialized countries to reduce emissions — is the major lingering question. The United States, of course, famously failed to sign on to Kyoto. Japan and Russia have balked at a second commitment period for the 13-year-old protocol, while developing countries have said that allowing the agreement to expire is a deal-breaker for their ongoing participation in broader climate negotiations. “The biggest hole in the Cancun agreement is its failure to permanently resolve the Kyoto conflict. To be fair, that would have been an impossible task this year,” said Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But Kyoto will come back as a front-burner issue next year in Durban, and it will be impossible to avoid it again.”

It’s not clear, said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute in Boston, whether the one-year delay on a decision will serve as “a lifeline or a noose” for Kyoto.

U.S. envoy Stern skirted the question of whether the new agreement is heading toward a legally binding form anytime soon. “The day will come when there is a legal agreement, but we’re not going to hang everything up on that,” Stern told reporters.

“We should not see this Cancun conference as an end. We should see it rather as a beginning,” said Mexico’s Espinosa. “The text we have before us really seems to be the best we could achieve at this point in a long process.”

By Kate Sheppard

There are quite a few numbers tossed around at climate negotiations. Should world leaders agree to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) in the next decade, or 1.5 (2.7 F)? How many gigatons of carbon can the world cut in 10 years? Should they shoot for reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, or can the world deal with 450 parts per million? The numbers can be daunting, and discussions of them can get, well, heated. But they often avoid the reality that we’re already on the path to dangerous warming, and the actions countries have put forward so far aren’t nearly strong enough to avert dangerous warming.

A set of papers from the United Kingdom’s Royal Society takes a look at the implications of the current path in a new set of reports. If action isn’t taken, they conclude, the world is likely to warm 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees F) in the next 50 years. Despite the political goal of 2 degrees drafted in Copenhagen last year, the continued rise in emissions and the delay of a legally binding deal, the researchers conclude, means the world is going to exceed that goal.

The reports offer a stark contrast to the political negotiations here in Cancun. “[T]here is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2 C,” writes Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and Alice Bows of the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester in one of the key papers. And new findings about the impacts of a 2-degree rise indicated that the goal “now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.”

Another paper, from scientists at the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Center and the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter predicts that the world is likely to reach a 4 degree temperature (7 degrees F) rise in the 2070s. But if the climatic reactions are stronger than scientists currently expect, the world could hit that mark in the 2060s, they conclude.

The Copenhagen Accord pledged to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius.” But not only are the pledges to cut emissions that countries have offered so far not legally binding, they also fall far short of meeting that goal. Even if countries followed through on their pledges, they’d only be 60 percent of the way toward meeting that goal.

Thus, scientists need to look more closely at how the climate system will react to that level of increase, and the implications it will have around the world, the Royal Society package recommends. Leaders will also need to start preparing for and reacting to warming that exceeds their stated goal.

“Everyone is realizing that the Copenhagen pledge is not enough,” said Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. But here in Cancun, leaders are still focused on hashing out how to meet last year’s goals — or if they will ever formalize even those weak commitments in a new, legally binding treaty.

“There is no sense of that urgency here in this conference, or not anywhere near enough,” said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, a group formed to spur world leaders to keep greenhouse gas concentrations under that parts-per-million mark. “It appears too difficult for our leaders and negotiators to understand the science.”

“Political reality is important, it’s not to be underestimated,” he continued. “But it’s nowhere near as difficult to deal with as the reality of chemistry and physics.”

By Kate Sheppard

Photo: Pietro IzzoThe hope — and hype — surrounding the climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December was hard to miss. Even though the possibility of securing a new global climate pact was scaled back significantly in the weeks ahead of the summit, the level of engagement was unprecedented. President Obama and more than 60 other heads of state from around the world flew in for the brutal final days of the summit, and in the closing hours a deal of sorts was finally hashed out.

But a year later, there’s almost no build-up to the sixteenth Conference of the Parties, the annual climate negotiation hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The two-week negotiating session starts today, Nov. 29, in Cancun, Mexico. And while it’s happening much more quietly this year, the 2010 meeting could make or break the future of global negotiations. There could be an opportunity south of the border to reinforce commitments and establish new frameworks for cooperation — but if there’s no real agreement on what comes next, the summit could leave the path forward somewhat treacherous.

“I think they’ve set the expectations at a place where they might actually be able to meet them, which I think is good news,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. That said, he continued, “If they don’t get something out of this meeting after the failure at Copenhagen, then it raises questions about the whole U.N. negotiating process.”

“There is a risk if you don’t make significant progress in Cancun that countries and others are going to start spending their energy in other forums,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute. Some countries have suggested that venues like the G20 might make it easier to hash out disagreements. But those, Morgan points out, don’t generally include the least-developed nations and those most vulnerable to climate change.

Whether the U.N. process can produce a global agreement is still in question. After two weeks of deliberations that at times grew rancorous last year, Obama and leaders from Brazil, India, South Africa, and China hammered out an eleventh-hour deal that came to be known as the Copenhagen Accord. It was more a statement of intent than an actual plan, and it left quite a few countries unsatisfied — particularly those who weren’t in the room that final night.

But the Copenhagen Accord at least solidified some basic commitments. Countries agreed that they would aim to keep planetary warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F), and would each put forward domestic plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the months since then, 138 countries have either formally signed on to the accord or signaled that they would — and combined they are responsible for more than 86 percent of global emissions. Industrialized nations also committed to raising $10 billion each year for the next three years for so-called “fast-start” funding to help developing nations cut emissions and adapt to the changes already taking place. There was an additional agreement to establish a long-term fund of $100 billion per year by 2020 to meet those goals.

But what that accord really meant was somewhat ambiguous. It was not formally adopted by the participants, since several countries — including Venezuela, Bolivia, Tuvalu, Cuba, Sudan, and Nicaragua — objected. It did not even offer a timeframe for reaching a legally binding deal — which, heading into Copenhagen, had been the goal. This year, countries will consider how to formalize those commitments and build upon the specific elements. “You’re likely to get an agreement in Cancun that captures the spirit of a lot of the Copenhagen Accord, with a lot more detail on some of the key pieces,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

World leaders will also need to figure out where talks are heading. “Ideally for the planet there would be a date by which we would have a new, legally binding agreement — that would be the best case scenario for an accountable system to collaborate globally on climate change,” said Angela Anderson, program director for the U.S. Climate Action Network. But she — and most in the environmental community watching Cancun — isn’t expecting that to happen this year. U.S. climate envoy also downplayed the prospects of laying out a concrete time frame for a new deal. “I think it should get done when it’s ripe,” he told reporters last week, adding that he “would rather have the concrete stuff done” before pursuing a legally binding treaty.

Even if leaders don’t set a new due date for a deal or even attempt to assess whether a treaty is possible, they will need to have serious conversations about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which is currently the only legally binding deal on global emissions reductions and is set to expire at the end of 2012. The least-developed countries want a second commitment period for Kyoto pledges in order to keep something legally binding in place, which ensures both that some of the world’s biggest emitters are formally committed to reductions and that there is aid available for transition. But the United States notably never signed that treaty, and major emerging powers like China and India are also not included in the agreement. A new deal would ideally include all those nations agreeing to their own proposed reductions (which would be based on what they are able to commit to) in a formalized agreement.

Zimbabwe’s Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, chair of the UNFCCC working group focused on the new climate deal, said that COP 16 will “need to address big questions, otherwise nothing will move forward.”  For Cancun to deliver progress, she said, leaders need to address “the apparent deadlock” over goals for cutting carbon as well as the details of the financial commitments made to developing countries.

Specifically, there will need to be progress on how countries will formalize the commitments they made last year, and how to keep track of what each country is actually doing when it comes to cutting emissions — a major point of contention between the United States and China last year. The U.S. has already accused China of not following through on the agreement, in which the country pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas intensity 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020.

And as for the U.S.? Well, as anyone following the issue knows, the prospects for action on climate change have only gotten more muddled in the year since Copenhagen. The Senate failed to pass a bill dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, and the prospects of enacting a law over the next two years with a Republican-led House dominated by people who don’t think the planet is even warming is certainly slim. The
Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with its regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, which U.S. negotiators have said they believe will put us on the path to the emissions cut of 17 percent below 2005 levels that the U.S. committed to in Copenhagen last year.

But the chances of the U.S. signing a treaty — which requires 67 votes in the Senate — are pretty much nonexistent. There are also significant questions about whether the U.S. will be able to follow through on providing its share of the promised money to the global fund outlined last year since much the next Congress will likely focus on cutting spending.

“Countries are realizing they might have to go forward without the U.S. again,” said UCS’s Meyer. He pointed back to Kyoto, where the U.S. negotiators signed a deal but it was never ratified in the Senate. “A lot of countries are thinking they’ve seen this movie before.”

Despite the very low expectations for a major agreement, there are major areas where the observers expect to see progress this year: the establishment of new programs to help countries adopt more climate friendly technologies, movement on the details of the global climate fund, and the creation of programs to prevent deforestation (known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD). Progress in those areas would go a long way toward building trust and partnership between nations, observers say.

“We’re not going to see a breakthrough on a new treaty, but we will see significant progress on creating things and launching things that can make a difference on the ground,” said Morgan.