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Deadlock at APEC Summit Over Climate Change    [

    Kings of the Coal Habit
    By Jeremy Leggett
    The Guardian UK

    Wednesday 05 September 2007

The fate of our warming planet hinges on six nations, and five of them meet in Sydney this week.

    Through his long years of greenhouse denial, George Bush must have been particularly grateful to John Howard. The Australian prime minister was quick to join Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and has batted for his country's coal interests as trenchantly as Bush has batted for US coal and oil interests.

    Now Bush has had to deal with the impact on American public opinion of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's movie, and can no longer afford to ignore climate change. Howard, contending with a killer drought, is similarly finding that greenhouse denial is out of bounds. The flow of Australian rivers has fallen by a staggering 70% in recent decades. All Australia's major cities are in drought. The "big dry" in the Murray-Darling basin threatens 40% of food production. Global warming has become an issue in the January elections.

    Howard hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Sydney this week. Bush will be one of the leaders attending. Everyone who cares about the greenhouse threat should train a microscope on their actions. The fate of human civilisation will probably hinge on the fossil-fuel decisions of just six nations, and five of them are members of Apec.

    If we are to avoid tipping the planet over a widely accepted danger threshold of 450 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide, we can only afford to burn fossil fuels in a quantity measured in low hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon. Industry estimates suggest that remaining oil deposits alone exceed this figure, if we include unconventional sources such as Canada's tar sands.

    As for coal, the energy industry suggests several thousand billion tonnes remain to be burned. Even if we believe fossil-fuel proponents tend to exaggerate estimates of the size of deposits, it is clear that most of the remaining coal has to stay in the ground if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Three-quarters of coal reserves are in five nations: the US, Russia, China, India and Australia.

    Add Canada, because of the scale of the oil deposits in the Athabasca tar sands, and there you have it: the fate of human civilisation will probably hinge on the resource decisions of just six nations. Those who place their hopes in bolt-on adjustments to the fossil-fuel status quo, notably carbon capture and storage technology, face the problem that mass production of the necessary technology is more than a decade off.

    What can we expect of Howard, Bush and their fellow coal leaders this week? Howard has said he will instigate a carbon-trading scheme if re-elected, but will not be drawn on the all-important issue of caps. Bush opposes an energy bill passed recently in the House of Representatives that would place an obligation on electric utilities to use more renewables and less coal. He is endeavouring to run his own international negotiations in competition with the UN's long-running Kyoto process. On this kind of running, it would be surprising if the Apec summit offered any hope of the world kicking the coal habit.

    Would different leaders in the Big Six make any difference? In Australia, Labor is ahead in the polls, but strong on defence of coal interests. In America, the Democratic challenger Barack Obama, from the coal state of Ohio, has co-sponsored a bill to boost technology that makes gasoline from coal via a process that would be ruinous for the climate.

    Meanwhile, those not in the coal big league and best placed to lead the way to a different energy future are not doing so. In the UK, coal use is rising, renewables investment is derisory, and even investment in carbon capture and storage would pave but a short stretch of motorway.

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    Jeremy Leggett is author of "Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis."

 

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    Deadlock at APEC Summit Over Climate Change
    Agence France-Presse

    Thursday 06 September 2007

    Sydney - Asia Pacific ministers are deadlocked over a common statement on climate change to be issued by their leaders at the end of a weekend summit, a Japanese official said.

    "The gap among the members is still wide," the foreign ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

    Foreign ministers of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which groups 21 Pacific rim economies, met over breakfast hosted by Australian counterpart Alexander Downer.

    "The foreign ministers stuck to their own principles on details of a climate change statement," the Japanese official said.

    "One group in particular remained opposed to introducing a numerical target in the leaders' statement, although Foreign Minister Downer stressed that the target is not binding."

    Australia has put climate change high on the summit's agenda, proposing a new approach that would veer away from the Kyoto Protocol, the main international treaty on climate change.

    Backed by the United States, it argues that Kyoto was flawed as it did not commit developing nations - such as China and India - to the same targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions as industrialized nations.

    Instead it wants a new framework calling on developing nations to do more.

    The Kyoto accord expires in 2012 and the APEC summit is one of a series of meetings at which plans for a post-Kyoto agreement on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions behind global warming are being discussed.

    However, developing nations here are blocking US and Australian pressure to agree a statement that would include targets for cuts in emissions.

    They say work on climate change should be led by the United Nations, which is hosting a key summit in Bali in December.