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No progress at climate talks in Bonn
photo by Adopt A Negotiator (Flickr Creative Commons)
According to representatives of both poor and rich nations, there has been no progress at the climate talks held in Bonn, Germany this past week.
In fact there has been the opposite: regression and pessimism concerning potential progress. The EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said she believes the negotiations have ‘gone backwards’.
From a BBC News report:
Unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from progress made in Copenhagen, and what was agreed there.
–chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing
Despite frustrating developments at Bonn and the aforementioned ‘negative Nancys’, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, believes progress towards a binding deal has been made.
From an AP report:
The sharp divide between rich and poor nations over how best to fight climate change — a clash that crippled the Copenhagen summit — remains, and bodes ill for any deal at the next climate convention in Cancun, Mexico, which begins in November.
Amid mutual accusations of reneging on promises between rich and poor nations, food crises in Africa, floods in Pakistan and raging fires in Russia, one has to wonder what it might take to achieve a binding climate deal that had real teeth and a modicum of fairness.
In light of the lack of effective carbon cutting measures in the US and China, especially concerning coal, a good deal of pessimism is completely understandable.
For more on the coal dilemma see the below article in the Guardian:
Coal: The cheap, dirty and direct route to irreversible climate change
Additional resources:
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Tags: Bonn, change, climate, copenhagen, Germany, pessimism, progress, talks
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If it works, I wish the best for it, Sokkha! Especially with China opening a coal plant every day or whatever they are doing over there
Graham,
Thank you for your comment in support of carbon capture.
My objective is a sustainable future. We face enormous difficulties in attempting to halt climate change.
The questions to the Australian Coal Association to which I referred were not about building any new, “clean” coal power stations. The issue was far simpler: Did the Coal Association have a plan to clean just ONE existing coal-fired power station?
As renewable energy sources come on stream it will eventually be possible to decommission fossil-fueled power stations. This decommissioning has not yet begun. It will certainly not be completed any time soon.
Only after this distant eventuality will CO2 emissions have been reduced to zero. By then atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will be far greater than they are now. Extreme weather from climate change and ocean acidification will be much worse.
Bill Gates announced in February this year (2010): “Bill Gates’s New Mission: Zero CO2 Emissions” http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/02/bill-gatess-new-mission-zero-co2-emissions/
It is too little, and far too late, to pursue only Zero CO2 emissions. We need to start now on the technology to Lower atmospheric CO2 levels.
Any coal-fired power station that is equipped to capture 90% of the CO2 it produces can be used for this purpose. Look at this example: A 1,000 MW coal-fired power station produces 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per hour. If it can capture 90% of this (900 tonnes of CO2 per hour), then it can begin reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere as soon as 10%-20% of its CO2 output is produced from biomass.
When the last coal-fired power stations are decommissioned we will be able to operate a number of them – equipped to capture CO2 and fueled only by biomass – to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the rate of 900 tonnes per hour each. Solar and wind power generators do not capture CO2.
If we are very lucky and flexible in our approaches to solving this problem, we might achieve a sustainable future.
Thanks for your comment Sokkha.
I agree with your criticism on biofuel for the most part, but truly clean coal – which sounds great – is as of yet unproven on a large scale. The new plants currently being constructed are maybe cleaner from the old ones, but has there been a large coal plant that produces zero CO2 emissions? If so the coal industry in Europe, the US, Australia and China would do well to build them because they would be welcome everywhere.
I sincerely with you well with your work on carbon capture.
What if we could have our cake and eat it too?
i.e. Affordable fossil-fuel energy with zero CO2 emissions.
This would be preferable to what a rush to renewables is already producing:
1. World trade in wood pellets is a fast growing sector in the energy industry.
2. Ethanol and bio-diesel from monoculture (sugar-cane and palm oil plantations) for car fuel is produced on land previously occupied by rain forests in Indonesia and the Amazon.
The renewable energy industry is hastening the conversion of rain forests into wood pellets and the clear-felled land they once occupied is being turned into ethanol-producing sugar cane plantations.
And this is to satisfy demand driven by an ideology that the use of fossil fuels is always “bad”.
Acceptance of this ideology depends on blindly believing that the use of renewable energy is always “good”.
Daniel’s article “Coal: The cheap, dirty and direct route to irreversible climate change” (Guardian, 6 August 2010) offers no answer to developments such as:
“UPDATE 1-US awards $1 bln for clean coal power plant project:
The project could eventually help retrofit 594 coal-fired power plants”. (Reuters, 5 August 2010)
See “Questions to the Australian Coal Association” ( http://tinyurl.com/gerbil-coal ) for an approach based on asking the right questions of fossil-fuel producers –
(Get their act together on cutting CO2 emissions, or lose government funding and go out of business.)