UN Shifting Climate Focus -- Expansion of Green Fuels now Key

Ken Silverstein

The climate inside of the United Nations is changing. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will emphasize the employment of more sustainable fuels without trying to extract firm commitments on carbon reductions.
 
The UN’s leader remains steadfast in his belief that man-made carbon emissions are causing global warming that has the potential to create devastation. But he now realizes that the most practical way to encourage a cleaner environment is to try and facilitate the wider use of green technologies.
 
That’s because the world’s two biggest carbon emitters are the United States and China and neither one has formally mandated carbon cuts. The United States has been leaning that way under President Obama but his efforts to enact legislation have fallen short -- something that will continue now that he has lost his majority in the U.S. House.
 
China, by comparison, has said that it would agree to reducing its carbon intensity levels and would do so by setting firm green energy targets. But the nation has said repeatedly that it, too, wants to develop and therefore it would not agree to binding reductions in its carbon levels. At the same time, it has said that deep cuts would require major investments in new technologies. That necessitates subsidies from the richer countries.

The UK's Guardian, which first broke the news, reports that UN Secretary Ban will shift the focus to greater implementation of green energy. By taking smaller steps, it would move the global community forward and position it to adopt a cohesive climate strategy at a later time. By extension, there will be no follow on to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012 either before or during the next set of global climate talks in December 2011.
 
The objective at the 2009 summit in Copenhagen had been to limit the rise in global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius or less by 2050. That would require about an 80 percent cut in carbon emissions from where they now stand. The UN has said greenhouses gases must be curbed by about 3 percent annually if that it is to be achieved.

“I have always believed that change does not come from the top-down,” the secretary general has said. “It comes from the bottom-up. It does not begin in world capitals. It comes from people and communities. Climate change, simply, (is) the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family.” He said at the recent World Economic Forum that the United States and Europe must lead and he said publicly that the buzz words going forward would be "sustainable development."
Data compiled by the UN shows that global carbon emissions have increased by 25 percent since 2000. China has doubled its releases in the last decade while India's has risen by 50 percent. And while most of the developed world saw decreases in such emissions in the last year because of the recession, China's releases increased by 9 percent.

The UN is trying to see the glass as half-full, emphasizing that the rapidly developing countries of Brazil, China, Indonesia and South Africa have concrete plans to reduce their emissions. They will also allow their progress to be monitored and verified. China, for example, has set upon a course to increase its green and nuclear energy as a way to cut into its coal-fired power base.

While the December 2010 meeting in Cancun fell short of what Ban had hoped, the diplomat was able to advance the cause. One of the sticking points in past sessions had been the means by which which richer countries would fund poorer countries in their quest to go green: $100 billion a year for a decade, which will now come mostly from the private firms that either make the technologies or that will do businesses in those places.
Meanwhile, the UN has secured an agreement by which the developed world will compensate the undeveloped countries if they do not destroy their rain forests. Those havens are effective in the battle to combat climate change and spoiling them puts whole civilizations at risk.

"The things that are moving faster are the investments in renewable energy, the kind of actual investments and changes on the ground that will make a difference," says Tariq Banuri, director of the division of sustainable development at the UN's department of economic and social affairs in the story that appeared in the UK's Guardian.

Whether those matters move quick enough is another question. With global energy consumption expected to tick up at 1.6 percent a year for the next two decades, those needs will have to be met somehow. Offsetting fossil fuels will require a firm commitment to green technologies, if not binding cuts in greenhouse gases.

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