Tag Archives : climate deal

’No one said Copenhagen was going to be easy. After all, at its heart, the climate summit is about persuading nearly 200 nations to use drastically less of the fossil fuels that power the global economy.’ The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States gave hope that a legally binding climate agreement in Copenhagen would be produced. [...]

A lot of skepticism has grown regarding the success of the just opened United Nations Climate Change Conference (December 7-18, 2009), more commonly called Copenhagen Climate Conference. Skeptics believe that climate agreements will not be reached during the summit. On the other hand, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), [...]

Realists claim that the Copenhagen Climate Conference or the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference 2009 will fail in its intended agenda, and that no climate deals will be forged between December 7 and 18 of 2009. Months before the climate summit, it had already been clear that climate negotiations will hit a standoff. ‘The rest of the world has been [...]

Right before the Copenhagen Climate Conference, ‘a group of scientists issued an update on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their conclusions? Ice at both poles is melting faster than predicted, the claims of recent global cooling are wrong, and world leaders must act fast if steep temperature rises are to be avoided.’ The [...]

Beijing’s declaration that the country aims ‘to reduce its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020’ does not mean that ‘China’s overall emissions will drop, it just means that CO2 emissions per unit of GDP will decline. Because China’s economy is growing at such a torrid pace, overall emissions will keep ticking upward—it’s [...]

China, the world’s largest CO2 emitter, has pledged to increase its efforts to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will also attend the Copenhagen Climate Summit, officially known as COP15 UN Climate Change Conference 2009, ‘to show the country’s commitment to the global effort to reduce greenhouse emissions.’ [...]

The road to Copenhagen has become torturous. The ghosts of things past such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol whose provisions the Copenhagen Climate Conference hopes to rectify and revise continue to haunt the imperative climate negotiations and the ultimate climate deal. Kyoto’s promise of 5% emissions cuts (by 2012, from 1990 levels) is now impossible. [...]

The Kyoto Protocol is an obvious failure in its mandate to enjoin countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, and quite ironically, ‘global carbon-dioxide emissions have grown by 25% since the protocol was adopted in 1997.’ There are glaring reasons why the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol did not succeed. This treaty left out of [...]

Major negotiating camps in the upcoming climate deal are lapsing into ‘a new and dangerous form of trade and technology protectionism’ in the name of climate change. The unfortunate turn of events is ‘poisoning North-South relations in the two negotiating arenas on climate change and on trade.’ It seems that developed countries, especially [...]