Self-Interest: Inconvenient Truth of Climate Change!

Det är enkelt att lova Guld och Gröna Skogar NÄR NÅGON ANNAN FÅR BETALA. Och att göra ”stolta” deklarationer på toppmöten. Nu har det  ekonomiska realiteterna gjort sig påminda och Merkel slåss nu för den tunga tyska industrins fortlevnad.

”Mrs Merkel was completely different from last year when she chaired the summit,” said a participant and senior European government figure. ”This time she was the chancellor of German industry.”

Nu gäller inte längre vad man officiellt kom överens om för bara ett halvår sedan. Nu är det undantag för den egna industrin som gäller och inget annat. För det är GIGANTISKA SUMMOR som kommer att förslösas på dessa nonsensåtgärder (Se bl.a. mina inlägg: De ekonomiska realiteterna av Global Warming Hysterin, Realpolitik i klimat dimmorna, Blame the greens when the lights go off!,  Snabb helomvändning i Australien!)

Man blir så tröööttt på detta hyckleri. Och det här är ju inget nytt. Det här händer varenda gång som det har varit toppmöten och stolta deklarationer har antagits under stort jubel och fanfarer.

Och massmedia spelar med i denna fars genom att blåsa upp förväntningarna inför toppmötena, skildra dramatiken under förhandlingsspelet (Se mitt inlägg:  Miljökonferensen på Balis verkliga inre liv) och till slut ”triumfiatoriskt” tillkännage efter mycket rävspel och hårda förhandlingar, det FANTASTISKA RESULTATET!

När ALLA VET att detta bara är ett spel för gallerierna och att det är hårda nationella och ekonomiska intressen som styr. Och ingenting annat!

Man undrar bara när svenska politiker skall ta av sig nattmössan och sluta prata om att Sverige skall vara ”ett föregångsland” och ”att vi skall ligga i täten” när det gäller åtgärder mot Global Warming (dvs. minska CO2).

Naturligtvis ivrigt påhejade av de andra EU medlemmarna EFTERSOM EU:S KLIMATMÅL (dvs. sänkningen av CO2) gäller för EU SOM HELHET och INTE enskilda länder.

Vilket innebär att om någon vill ”gå före” och ”ta täten” så slipper resten av EU:s medlemsländer billigare undan. Så naturligtvis så stödjer de helhjärtat dessa svenska åtaganden för det blir ju inte de som får betala det höga priset. Det får nämligen det svenska folket göra! Tack för det!

Här kommer tre intressant artiklar som från olika vinklar belyser de realpolitiska dimensionerna av Global Warming Hysterin. Och de har inte mycket med den förskönade bild som uppmålas i massmedia och av politiker.

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om <a href=”http://bloggar.se/om/milj%F6” rel=”tag”>miljö</a>

Yeatmans artikel finns här:

http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/opinion/commentary.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2007-10-28-0098.html

Self-Interest: Inconvenient Truth of Climate Change

Sunday, Oct 28, 2007 – 12:05 AM 

By WILLIAM YEATMAN

TIMES-DISPATCH GUEST COLUMNIST

GLOBAL WARMING

WASHINGTON Al Gore has called on humans to address climate change ”as a species.” Inconveniently for Gore, however, Homo sapiens are parsed into nation-states that have always pursued their own, sub-species interests. As there is no evidence the threat of a changing climate is making nations less selfish, expectations of a global response to global warming are unrealistic.

Consider India, the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The Indian government could invest in clean energy, and thereby reduce its carbon footprint to the benefit of all humans.

Instead, it is building the world’s longest fence, along its border with Bangladesh, in part to keep out refugees when rising sea levels start swallowing the Bengali coastline. As the world heats up, India is looking out for itself, neighbors and climate be damned.

Then there’s Russia, which emits the third most heat-trapping greenhouse gases of any nation on the planet. Scientists say that country stands to benefit considerably from a warmer climate. A temperate Siberia has the potential to become the world’s breadbasket, and the melting of Arctic ice would make accessible to Russia huge deposits of oil and gas thought by geologists to be up to 25 percent of known reserves. Climate change might even grant Russia the warm-water port it has sought since czarist times.

For Russia, global warming is an opportunity, not a threat. Commentators speculate that is why the Kremlin dragged its feet on the Kyoto Protocol, a multilateral emissions reductions treaty, even though the protocol calls for significant wealth transfers to Russia.

More recently, at this fall’s United Nations conference on climate change, a Russian envoy conspicuously disparaged the Kyoto Protocol, stating that its continuation would be ”ineffective.” Given that a warmer world is good for Russia, these remarks are unsurprising.

In China, the world’s No. 2 emitter of greenhouse gases, fighting climate change takes a back seat to lifting hundreds of millions of peasants out of abject poverty. Because emissions controls impede economic growth, Chinese officials steadfastly refuse to submit to them.

China‘s priorities are shared throughout the developing world. Even though developing countries produce about half the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year, significant emitters such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia have made it clear that participation in any scheme to fix the climate would violate their ”right to develop.”

The developing world’s inaction forces the hand of the United States, the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases. America is the world’s most powerful country; China is second in the pecking order. Naturally, the United States wants to remain on top. So it has no desire to give the Chinese economy a comparative advantage by unilaterally adopting drastic emissions reductions. Even in green, post-modern Europe, nations are loath to cooperate to cure the climate. Although European countries are legally bound by the Kyoto Protocol — which requires emissions cuts of 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 — the rate at which the continent belches out greenhouse gases has increased each year.

In light of this failure, the European Union recently gave itself until 2020 to reach its Kyoto goals. There is, however, a catch: The extended emissions reduction target applies not to individual nations, but to the aggregate EU. That means the 27 member states will have to agree how to distribute their responsibilities to the climate among themselves, which is a sure-fire recipe for conflict.

The burden-sharing negotiations will begin in December. ”It will be a battle,” Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen predicted, ”For all member states, this is a question of basic interests.” Exactly.

To avert the worst of a warming climate, scientists tell us that we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent by 2050. To reach this goal, many influential statesmen such as Al Gore are calling upon the nations of the world to cooperate in a selfless manner. Since their inception, however, nations have always competed in the spirit of self-help, and there is no indication that the threat of climate catastrophe is changing this dynamic.

In this world, such as it is, there is little hope that nations will work together to stop global warming.

William Yeatman, a Richmond-area native, is an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Guardians artikeln finns här:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/15/germany.climatechange

Concessions to Merkel threaten climate change plan·

 Germany’s heavy industry may get special treatment

 New wording threatens 2020 emissions target

Ian Traynor in Brussels

The Guardian, Saturday March 15 2008

Europe’s chances of spearheading a global post-Kyoto climate change accord were jeopardised yesterday when Germany secured pledges that several of its heavy industries could be protected from international competition and exempted from the EU’s plan to combat global warming.

The concessions, agreed at a summit of European leaders in Brussels, will also complicate the chances of Europe delivering on its commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by 2020.

Under intense pressure from German industrial lobbies the chancellor, Angela Merkel, won changes to the wording of the summit statement ordering the European commission to spell out how ”energy-intensive industries” could be granted special treatment in the climate change package.

Britain and the commission had opposed German demands but, according to senior EU sources, Gordon Brown and the head of the commission, José Manuel Barroso, brokered the deal with Merkel.

In return, Brown won support for his push to use VAT rates to encourage green consumption by, for example, cutting VAT on low-energy lightbulbs, washing machines or fridges.

The commission was instructed to ”examine areas where economic instruments, including VAT rates, can have a role to play to increase the use of energy-efficient goods and energy-saving materials”, the summit statement said. VAT rates across Europe are set in Brussels.

A year ago Merkel was praised for steering European governments towards agreement on the world’s most ambitious climate change blueprint – to cut emissions by 20% by 2020, ensure that 20% of Europe’s energy mix is provided by renewables by the same deadline and that 10% of road fuel is from biofuels.

Yesterday’s summit was about how to deliver on those targets and how to convert the aims into binding national and European law by next year.

”Mrs Merkel was completely different from last year when she chaired the summit,” said a participant and senior European government figure. ”This time she was the chancellor of German industry.”

The core of the European plan, expected to supply the bulk of the cuts, is a carbon-trading scheme in which auctions are held for permits to pollute after 2013, driving up the cost of carbon and forcing companies to curb their discharges.

But heavy industrial sectors, particularly in Germany and in the car, steel, cement, and glass industries, have warned of ”carbon leakage”, saying they will relocate outside Europe because they will be unable to compete with rivals in the US and Far East not subject to the same constraints. That could lead to large-scale job losses.

Berlin, backed by France, the Czech Republic and Austria, wants such sectors to be excluded from the carbon permit auctions unless the rest of the world signs up to similar penalties for polluters. In new wording agreed at the end of the summit yesterday, the commission was ordered to spell out in a legally binding form a special regime for the industries affected ”if international negotiations fail”.

”The risk of carbon leakage is a concern in certain sectors, such as energy intensive industries particularly exposed to international competition,” the statement said.

The commission is to table a draft law by the end of the year. Barroso and Brown, while sympathetic to heavy industries, wanted to delay specifying the exemptions for a few years until it became clear whether the US, China, and India would sign up to similar measures.

They believe detailing the exceptions for European car makers or steel manufacturers will discourage rival industries elsewhere from joining the battle against climate change.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

AFP Artikeln finns här:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hmpNZyQuwQlqi2NscJE4uOVpP7Yw

Rich, poor nations clash at climate talks

MAKUHARI, Japan (AFP) – Disagreements between rich and developing countries came into the open Sunday as the world’s top 20 greenhouse gas emitters worked to lay the groundwork for a new deal on climate change.

The developed and developing countries, whose greenhouse gas emissions account for about 80 percent of the global total, were wrapping up two days of talks hoped to jumpstart negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

But developing countries voiced scepticism about the meeting, saying they should not be considered in the same league as major industrialised countries when deciding on future cuts to gas emissions blamed for global warming.

”India, for example, has an emission of one tonne per capita. The US is 20 tonnes per capita. So I have no idea why India should be a major emitter,” Indian climate official Ajay Mathur said late Saturday.

The South African team was also highly critical of saying the meeting involved ”20 major emitters” due to the gap with wealthy countries, Japanese trade minister Akira Amari said.

”I told them it’s important that all countries participate in measures to tackle climate change to avoid global warming,” Amari told reporters.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair opened the conference on Saturday with an impassioned call for developing nations to join the rich world in steep binding cuts in emissions for the sake of the planet.

”I was very worried about the atmosphere of the discussion,” said Yuri Onodera, an environmental activist at Friends of the Earth Japan.

”Developing countries say that developed countries should keep to their promises first before talking about involving developing countries into a new deal on climate change,” he said before the start of Sunday’s closed-door session.

The United States is the only major industrial country to shun the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that it is unfair by making no demands of fast-growing emitters such as China and India.

But virtually all countries agreed in talks in December in Bali to be part of the negotiations to draft a successor to the Kyoto treaty, whose obligations run out at the end of 2012.

The next round of negotiations starts at the end of the month in Bangkok. Blair has been tasked with trying to bridge the gaps to help meet a UN-backed deadline of sealing Kyoto’s successor treaty by the end of 2009.

”The talks here are very useful, because this is the first opportunity after the Bali meeting,” said Halldor Thorgeirsson, director of the Bali Road Map efforts at the UN climate body.

The weekend talks are not aimed at coming up with a deal but will draft a chairman’s summary to be presented to July’s summit of the Group of Eight rich nations in northern Japan.

”Many countries are looking to Japan for leadership as it will host the G8 summit,” Thorgeirsson told AFP.

UN climate experts have recommended steep cuts in emissions to at least slow down global warming, which is feared to spell devastating consequences for the ecosystem.

Japan, which lags behind in meeting its own Kyoto targets, has proposed setting energy efficiency standards for each industry — a so-called bottom-up approach — and sharing eco-friendly technology with developing countries.

But developing countries were sceptical about Japan’s position, which was backed by the United States.

Onodera agreed on the importance of energy efficiency, but warned: ”I’m worried that if Japan pushes the idea too strongly, it could provoke developing countries and may have negative effects on the two years of talks ahead.”

Copyright © 2008 AFP. All rights reserved

Etiketter: Al Gore, Carbon Trading, CO2, Kyoto