Bali 07

US and EU demand import-tariff reductions on stuff that they export

Wow, the latest out of Bali is really, um, something to behold: The US and the European Union found a rare common cause when they combined to ask developing nations to cut or remove tariffs on imports of environmental goods and services. Golly, why would developing nations not go for that? Other developing countries were […]

US reps to present unfinished energy bill to UNFCCC

When a few members of U.S. Congress come to Bali next week to meet with delegations from all round the world, they'll have something in hand: a first step in the direction of climate change legislation from the U.S.

35mpg fuel economy standards and 15% renewable energy requirements from utilities may not seem like all that much, but for the rest of the world's leaders, who have been holding their collective breath, it's a twitch of life from a government long considered dead on the issue of global warming. The halls of the Bali Convention Center are abuzz with talk of a number of bills going through the U.S. Congress -- delegates and NGO folk alike know the importance of including the United States in the post-Kyoto process.

Confronting the belligerent U.S. delegation at the 2007 climate talks

A friend of mine is in Bali with the youth activist group SustainUS, and sent this video update:

(Thanks, Lauren.)

Check out the body language on the guy who I presume is the U.S. delegate to the talks, as the SustainUS group asks him to take a leading role in the talks to ensure a better future for the planet. Unfortunately, he pretty well embodies the word "obstructionist."

Simple answers

Noel Sheppard: Capitalist democracies around the world should be very concerned about the level of socialism being discussed at the United Nations’ climate change meeting in Bali. Not only are international hands being extended to collect funds from countries like the United States in order to help poorer nations deal with a problem that might […]

The real story at Bali

In 2005, at the U.N.'s Montreal Climate Negotiations, a ragtag but sizable delegation showed up at the conference, desperate to make sure that the world heard their call for climate action. The event proved to be a formative time for people involved in the youth climate movement, and many date its launch to that time. In a conference notable for acronyms and obscure policy jargon, the youth activism was like a breath of fresh air.

While delegates bemoaned the lack of action in the United States, there was an outpouring of activism and creative organizing -- like the launch of It's Getting Hot in Here -- that made many of them think if the young people care so much in the U.S., maybe there is still hope to get them engaged.

Well, the youth are back and badder than ever.

Fossil Awards shame obstructionist delegates at Bali talks

You may have heard about the Fossil Awards given at the United Nations Bali climate negotiations. A collaboration between a number of youth delegations and Avaaz.org, the awards are given to nations whose delegates have obstructed progress during the course of the talks. Here's a first-hand account of the first daily Fossil Awards ceremony, when Canada won the infamous prize. Yesterday, Japan managed to win first, second, and third place for threatening to pull out of the Kyoto protocol. Check out this video of the ceremony:

Winning the battle in Bali, and then winning the war

Since COP13 / MOP3 -- hereafter "Bali" -- has begun, I thought I'd send a brief note on expectations and strategy. Brief because there's too much to say, so I shouldn't try. Besides, I'll try to post again in a few days.

Here's the thing: Bali is freighted with terrific expectations, which are entirely appropriate given the state of the science. We now "know," insofar as we can know these things, that we've got to do everything to hold total temperature increase from global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and that to have a good chance of doing so global emissions are going to peak by 2015.

In other words, we now know this is an emergency situation. So why would we demand anything except emergency action? No reason at all. Which is why EcoEquity signed the "Call for Climate Talks to Accelerate Global Economic and Energy Transitions: What Bali Must Achieve" (PDF), now being circulated by the Institute for Policy Studies and the International Forum on Globalization.

The Call urges negotiators to pursue three paths:

As climate conference kicks off, defenses are up

When I visited Bali 20 years ago, the beaches teemed with people offering any manner of products and services, and the most abundant seemed to be blowguns. Lying in the sand with your eyes closed, you could just hear, above the rhythmic lapping of the waves, the repeated murmur of “Blowgun? Blowgun? Blowgun?” What the […]

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight

This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction.

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Bali, Indonesia, is the perfect backdrop for this week's climate summit. No country better embodies the immense peril of inaction -- and the immense opportunity this meeting has to make massive and immediate progress in stemming the climate crisis.

Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases -- providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people -- who need them to survive.

The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

Polluters would jump at this opportunity. Protecting forests from destruction can cost as little as 75 cents per ton of carbon dioxide - even at higher costs, it's a fraction of the price (PDF) of cleaning up most industrial pollution. In the past, some environmentalists criticized carbon ranching for this very reason: they were concerned that if polluters focused their greenhouse gas reduction efforts on forest conservation, that would divert money from necessary clean-ups in industrial pollution. That's the wrong way to look at it. Because locking up carbon dioxide by protecting forests is so cheap, it means that the world can achieve bigger reductions in global warming pollution faster and for less money. Carbon ranching should be an argument for bigger immediate pollution reductions, from both forests and industry, not a way for polluters to get around their responsibility to clean up their own pollution.