Category: Environment
HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
In December, 50,000 people converged on Copenhagen to attend, protest, lobby, observe or report on the global climate conference. The original purpose of this long-awaited summit was to complete a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. However, instead of a new agreement, the 50,000 attendees, protestors, lobbyists, and observers were left with what Friends of the Earth described as a “sham agreement” that was agreed to by just five countries on the last evening of the two-week-long gathering. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso termed the accord a “commitment to the lowest common denominator.”
The so-called “Copenhagen Accord” is indeed a sham of an agreement because it’s nothing more than a statement issued by the leaders of just five countries after a brief closed-door meeting to which the remaining 188 countries were not invited. Especially infuriating was the complete exclusion of the European Union (the only region of the world to have offered ambitious and firm measures to curb greenhouse gases) and the bulk of the world’s developing countries that stand to lose the most from global warming. So Copenhagen produced an Accord arrived at completely outside the normal participatory United Nations process. Worst of all, the Accord established no goals, targets, strategies or even a process for future negotiations. Amazingly, President Obama—one of the five leaders who put the Accord together in a couple of hours (the leaders of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa were the others)—acted as if he’d engineered a breakthrough.
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HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Both the Bush/Cheney and Obama Adminstrations and the Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress have openly supported the concept of ‘clean coal’—or what is more precisely called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Billions of government dollars have already been allocated to funding test projects that will serve to develop new technologies that (1) remove carbon from the emissions of coal-fired power plants, plants that convert coal to synthetic oil, and other industrial plants that use coal as an energy source; and (2) store the carbon permanently underground.
These technologies will, according to the coal lobby, make our most abundant carbon fuel ‘clean.’ CCS technologies thus simultaneously reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil. The coal lobby then continues to argue that, even though these new technologies are not yet available, spending taxpayer money on test projects and other types of CCS research justifies the construction of more familiar coal-fired power plants instead of more expensive alternative wind, solar or conservation projects because these coal-fired plants can be ‘cleaned up’ in a few years ‘when the technology becomes available.’
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James Hansen
Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Coal & Climate Disaster
Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty… ‘Clean coal’ is an oxymoron. The clean-coal concept, at least so far, has been an illusion, a diversion that the coal industry and its government supporters employ to allow dirty coal uses to continue… Coal use must be prohibited unless and until the emissions can be captured and safely disposed of… For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we cannot allow our government to continue to connive with the coal industry in subterfuges that allow dirty-coal use to continue… If we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period.
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HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
It is looking like we will not get a new international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen Conference this December. After several unproductive preparatory meetings among government officials, the news media now report that Copenhagen is unlikely to result in more than a bland statement saying world leaders will continue working toward a new agreement. This is a sharp decline in expectations from a year ago, when Copenhagen was seen as the venue where a new international accord would be adopted to replace the Kyoto Protocol set to expire in 2012.
After initial optimism about the Obama Administration’s willingness to take a lead in framing a new climate agreement, the U.S. is now being accused of playing a spoiler role. The U.S. has ended negotiations over specific emissions targets by insisting that countries be given the freedom to decide their own measures for reducing greenhouse gases. The Obama Administration has cynically appealed to the principle of “national sovereignty” to redirect global negotiations away from a new set of binding limits on carbon emissions. “I feel like the Americans have lost the plot a little bit,” the European Commission president was dryly quoted as saying in the September 22 Financial Times.
A country’s national sovereignty is, of course, under much greater threat from climate change than it is from a binding international agreement on preventing global warming. But nationalism serves as a convenient emotional ‘hot button’ that special interests can use to derail serious climate legislation. Opponents of carbon taxes and environmental regulations know very well that voluntary efforts designed by individual governments will not stop global warming. Permitting individual nations to set their own standards invariably results in an international ‘race to the bottom,’ in which competing countries consistently ‘water down’ the costly measures that actually promote alternative energy and conservation.
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