GOODBYE KYOTO: CANADA TO JOIN ASIA-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

Prime Minister Stephen Harper used a United Nations conference aimed at saving the Kyoto Protocol as a backdrop yesterday to announce that Canada would join a rival climate change pact. Hours after urging all countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 per cent in any successor to Kyoto, Mr. Harper told reporters Canada would become the seventh member of the Asia-Pacific Partnership, a group nicknamed the anti-Kyoto partnership by some environmentalists. Seeking to portray Canada as a bridge-builder on the climate change file, Mr. Harper said he wants to be involved in the partnership so he can coax its members into joining a new deal under the United Nations when Kyoto expires in 2012.

The Asia-Pacific Partnership, created last year by Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States, has been criticized for lacking the mandatory targets contained in Kyoto. Together, the six countries account for nearly half the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr. Harper has hinted previously that Canada would like to join the partnership. His announcement yesterday that this would happen at a meeting in New Delhi next month followed a speech in which he called for a "flexible, balanced" new UN plan to halve greenhouse-gas emissions from their 2006 levels by 2050. His government's plan calls for Canada to cut emissions by 60 to 70 per cent by 2050.

"It's critical that ... all major emitters have binding targets, and one of the reasons it's important for Canada to participate in the Asia-Pacific Partnership is these are the major emitters on the planet," Mr. Harper told reporters. "Those are the discussions we want to be involved in because these are the people that have to get involved in an effective global protocol, or we won't have such a protocol." Mr. Harper, who has been criticized for focusing on targets that are several decades away, told reporters that medium-term targets are also required.

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BACK TO SQUARE ONE: CARBON TRADING ISN'T WORKING

The battle to beat climate change has come down to one weapon -- the price of carbon. And analysts say it is not working. Much lip service has been paid to cutting climate warming carbon emissions through measures such as improved energy efficiency, technological innovation, reduced demand, higher standards and carbon output restrictions. But in most cases the vital incentive is supposed to be provided by achieving a high price for carbon, from which all else would follow. Neither has happened and time is running out.

"The policy instrument of choice pretty well everywhere is a price for carbon, and it is not going to work," said Tom Burke of environment lobby group E3G. "To stop climate change moving from a bad problem getting worse to a worse problem becoming catastrophic, you have to make the global energy system carbon neutral by 2050 -- and that will not happen just using carbon pricing." Burke said what was urgently needed were strict technical standards and investment incentives to achieve the transition. "You have got to drive the carbon out of the energy system and then keep it out forever," he said. "In the first part of that you are making serious step changes. They are not going to be accomplished by marginal changes in price."

The European Union's carbon emissions trading scheme got off to a shaky start due to over-allocation of permits, but has now established a price of about 20 euros a tonne of carbon dioxide. There is also the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol on cutting global carbon emissions, under which developing nations effectively get paid for emissions foregone.

VERY POOR WEAPON

Together, these two have generated a global carbon trade worth billions of dollars and handed vast profits to some key players, but had little measurable effect on carbon emissions. "Governments are relying way too much on the price of carbon to deliver everything," said Jim Watson of Sussex University's Energy Group. "It is a prerequisite but not a panacea. It has to go hand in hand with regulations and technological developments, and they are sadly lacking," he said. "If you rely too much on the carbon price you give people the option of buying their way out of it. It is a very poor weapon in what is supposed to be a war to save humanity. "The oil price shocks of the 1970s didn't wean us off oil, so why should we believe that a high carbon price will wean us off carbon," he added.

The United States appears finally to have bought into the climate change argument having spent years rejecting the idea of man-made global warming, and is hosting a meeting of major emitting nations later this week. The United Nations is also holding a climate summit on Monday, ahead of a crucial meeting in December on the Indonesian island of Bali of UN environment ministers that is supposed to kick start talks on a new global climate treaty. But there is no consensus on what needs to be done or how to achieve it. While some countries want targets and timetables for emissions cuts, to others like the United States the idea is abhorrent.

"The price of carbon has had virtually no effect on the market so far and virtually no effect on climate change," said Oxford University economics professor Dieter Helm. "People like me who think the price of carbon is important don't think it is the only thing that matters. There must be more focus on energy efficiency, more research and development and more renewable energy. "The truth is that Europe has performed less well on carbon dioxide since the late 1990s than the United States -- and Europe is inside Kyoto and has an emissions trading scheme," he said.

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BRITISH GOVERNMENT: BINDING TARGETS FOR USA, FREE RIDE FOR CHINA

Britain pointedly called on the United States yesterday to join other rich nations making binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as dozens of world leaders held a summit on the danger of catastrophic climate change. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, told the meeting at United Nations headquarters that "the greatest challenge we have ever faced as human beings" required action from every developed nation. "That means all of us, including the largest economy in the world, the United States, taking on binding reduction targets," he said. "It is inconceivable that dangerous climate change can be avoided without this happening."

Mr Benn's decision to single out the US during a visit to New York will be regarded in Washington as particularly provocative. President Bush skipped most of the UN meeting yesterday and was planning to attend only a working dinner last night. He has called his own two-day meeting of 15 major economies in Washington later in the week. Although he has abandoned his previous scepticism about man-made climate change and promises to negotiate a "long-term global goal" for cutting emissions, Mr Bush still envisages countries entering framework agreements voluntarily.

"It's our philosophy that each nation has the sovereign capacity to decide for itself what its own portfolio of policies should be," said James Connaughton, the President's chief environmental adviser. The White House remains hostile to international measures such as a cap-and-trade system on emissions, which might increase electricity bills for ordinary Americans, with Mr Connaughton questioning whether a "woman on fixed income in Ohio should pay for carbon dioxide reductions in the oil sector".

European diplomatic sources are complaining privately that Mr Bush's agenda is too limited and threatens to undermine their attempt for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified by the US. Some say that they are already looking "beyond Bush" towards the 2008 presidential elections. Elizabeth Bast, spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth, said: "The US must join the rest of the world in tackling climate change within the United Nations framework, instead of promoting purely voluntary measures that will not achieve necessary emissions reductions."

The UN has tried to smooth over the potential conflict with Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, accepting an invitation to attend the Washington meeting. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, represented the Bush Administration in the main session of the UN summit. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Governor, upstaged her with his own appearance. "It is time we came together in a new international agreement that can be embraced by rich and poor nations alike," he said. "California is moving the United States beyond debate and doubt to action."

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, claimed there was now "universal recognition" that the UN provided the right forum for negotiating global action. "The message is simple: we know enough to act; if we do not act now, the impact of climate change will be devastating."

Mr Benn said that a scheduled UN conference on climate change in Bali in December should start negotiations leading to an agreement by the end of 2009 on greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. "The ultimate objective of the UN convention on climate change requires at least a halving of global emissions by the middle of this century," he said. At a breakfast appearance before the summit, the Environment Secretary said that he welcomed the "evolving" thinking on global warming by the United States. But he stopped short of calling for binding emissions targets for China's growing economy. "China in the end will have to decide what they are going to contribute," he said.

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Like it or not, coal is vital to Asia's growth

Those calling on China and India to `kick the coal habit', and opt for less sooty forms of energy, overlook the vast benefits of coal-use for those nations

In Sydney all last week, economic leaders and ministers from 21 nations held the annual meeting of Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC). Rich members of the organisation (Canada, the US, Japan, Australia) rubbed shoulders with poorer ones (China, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Mexico and Peru). Among the issues on the table? Climate change.

Fair enough. What is not so fair, however, is for Western commentators to use the APEC summit to hector China, South East Asia, Korea and also India, a non-member of APEC, about what economists call `choice of technique' in energy supply. These nations, Western environmentalist opinion now insists, should eschew the use of coal and instead embrace cleaner forms of energy.

Welcome to the haughty presumptions and condescending commands of Green Imperialism. The East, we are told, should not follow Cardiff, King Coal and the dirty Victorian way. It should not develop by following the path of soot along which, in decades gone by, we in the West so foolishly mired ourselves. Rather, the East should face up to its twenty-first century planetary responsibilities, and accept that its current enthusiasm for coal (but also its enthusiasm for cleaner nuclear energy) is dangerously misplaced.

Paul Brannen, head of campaigns at Christian Aid, expressed the new dogma in a letter to the UK Guardian: `Carbon has fuelled the rich world's wealth and development. But the devastating impact of climate change means that poor countries cannot now develop in the same way.' (1) Coal, it is felt, is `not an option' for the developing world. Yet in fact, coal will be an important source of energy for the whole world for many decades to come.

In 2005, there were just over 700 billion tonnes of reserves of hard coal and lignite in the Earth. North America had about 200 billion, Russia and its environs 150 billon, India and China 75 billon each, and South Africa 40 billion. The contribution of coal to power generation in different countries reflects its disposition: in 2003, it accounted for half the power generated in the US, two-thirds of that in India, 79 per cent of China's power, and 93 per cent of South Africa's (2). Altogether, coal is far from being a legacy of the nineteenth century. Though it was vital to the industrialisation of Britain then, it remains a sine qua non for three of the key economies of the twenty-first century - America, India and China.

The installed base of coal-fired power plants cannot be wished away as an outdated relic. Without coal, there would be no future for energy and indeed civilisation in large parts of the world. Moreover, though mining coal remains dangerous - especially in China - coal is cheap compared with other sources of fuel.

Cheapness is important to developing nations: they are as yet in little position to substitute other, more expensive energy sources for coal. Even China, with all the US Treasury bonds it owns, cannot afford to invest, either at home or abroad, in alternative fuels on the scale that would allow it to leave coal behind. What's more, coal is a key national resource for China and India. It is vital to something that environmentalists usually talk up: energy security.

Environmentalist thinkers and activists always feared international dependence in energy - particularly dependence on oil in the Middle East. From the green point of view, energy should always be local. However, the local nature of coal for countries like India and China is not seen as a benefit. Yet when accused of double standards, environmentalists point to the heavy carbon emissions that use of coal leads to. Those emissions are an incontestable fact. But what certainly can be contested is greens' dismissal of a technology that could make a difference to the way we use coal: carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is an approach which attempts to mitigate global warming by capturing the CO2 that is emitted from power plants and subsequently storing it instead of allowing it to be released into the atmosphere.

For all their mantra-like invocations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greens rarely mention the fact that even the IPCC favours CCS: it names CCS as one of its `key technologies' for mitigating CO2 emissions (3). It's true that CCS is in its infancy, and it's also true that so far, capitalism is, as usual, not rushing to make the investments that will be required to test and then apply an innovation like CCS. But solar and wind power are also in need of major research and technological advance if ever they are to be a useful and efficient part of the world's energy portfolio: scientists in Japan and China, which are particularly expert in photovoltaic panels, will agree that really competitive devices are 20 or 30 years away. So why, if greens believe the price and viability of renewable energy will come right in time, do so many of them hold a means of dealing with emissions, such as CCS, to be a non-starter?

The answer is that, behind their hostility to coal and CCS, is something much bigger than the important issues of carbon emissions and the need to make the right, dispassionate choice of technique in energy supply. Environmentalists are selective in their optimism because they want to repudiate the twentieth century, not just the coal that, in large part, made that century happen. A little like Lady Macbeth, they guiltily want the dark spots of Western affluence removed. They have premonitions of doom, and are disillusioned with economic growth at home. As a result, they stigmatise burgeoning development in Asia, and especially the coal that fuels it, as a catastrophe.

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GM: where the science doesn't count

Today's climate change activists pose as `defenders of science'. Yet not so long ago, they irrationally rejected the scientific truth about GM crops

Hold the front page: `There is no change in the government's policy towards GM crops', says Hilary Benn of Britain's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Benn's statement was a reaction to yesterday's scaremongering frontpage story in the UK Guardian. The Guardian headline said `The return of GM', and the report claimed that `ministers back moves to grow crops in UK'

It is hard to remember now, but in 2000 environmental campaigners were protesting all over the country, organising meetings and debates and breaking into premises, all to draw the public's attention to the dangers represented by. genetically modified organisms - crops, mainly. Lord Melchett, himself a former Labour cabinet minister turned Greenpeace activist, tore up GM crops. (My grandfather slaved away for his father at Imperial Chemicals Industries, dying young, as many did, because of the way the chemical fumes tended to accelerate your heart rate, leading to the `Tuesday death'. GM crops would help alleviate the need to use these kinds of chemicals.)

The GM debate was remarkable. In quite a short time, environmental campaigners brought to the surface intense public anxieties about the industrialisation of the food chain. Just before the debate about the introduction of GM foods, there had been another public health scare when one government scientist, Dr Robert Lacey, warned that by 1997 one third of Britain could be infected with the debilitating brain illness Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD), from eating beef contaminated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)-inducing prions. As it turned out, you were about as likely to die of CJD as you were to be struck by lightning, and there is still no proven link with it and BSE - but public distrust of authority was at an all-time high.

There was no real argument against GM food. But people felt very disconnected from the authorities, having little faith in the public pronouncements that there was no risk. That alone was enough to make most people alarmed. Opportunistically, environmental campaigners realised that they could gain influence by stoking public fears. Activists like journalist Andy Rowell, language-school head Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Interest Network, the Open University academic Mae-Wan Ho, and the Guardian's George Monbiot stirred up a fantastic picture of rogue genes causing all kinds of extraordinary mutations as they passed through the food chain, or as they were carried on the wind from test-beds into `healthy' British meadows.

Of course, there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. The absence of even one example of a negative health impact from the introduction of GM crops in the US put some pressure on the greens. They latched on to examples that really did not demonstrate any danger. Some oil was contaminated, leading to deaths - but it turned out it was nothing to do with GM. And then the Rowett Research Institute's Dr Arpad Pusztai did some experiments on GM lectins in potatoes that seemed to show negative consequences in rats. The press and the environmentalists latched on to the case - except that it only showed that the introduction of poisonous lectins into potatoes was bad for rats. When Pusztai was sacked for overstating the implications of his tests, GM campaigners adopted his case as a cause c,lSbre, only slowly coming to the conclusion that they had indeed overstated the dangers highlighted in Dr Pusztai's tests.

Meanwhile, another hero of the anti-GM lobby, Mae-Wan Ho, who had been involved in biotechnology in the Seventies, was largely preoccupied with the philosophical meaning of genetics rather than hands-on bio-science, and was interested in resurrecting the ideas of the disgraced Soviet biologist Lysenko, and also Bergson's vitalist cult.

GM activists came under pressure from scientists. In a public debate between George Monbiot and biologist Steve Jones, Jones denounced Monbiot as a charlatan (they have since made up). Andy Rowell attacked the scientists for being the mouthpieces of big business. The peer review of Arpad Pusztai's work was denounced as a cover for a hidden agenda to force GM food on an unsuspecting public. Scientific verification was not to be trusted, said the activists, who invoked a higher bar, the `precautionary principle', which puts the onus of proof on those introducing technology that it could do no harm in the future.

Provoking the public's deepest uncertainties about the food chain proved a great success. Supermarkets withdrew GM food from their shelves and made it effectively unmarketable. In 2004, the New Labour government conceded that even the scientific experiments - the rapeseed fields that Melchett had torn down - should be stopped.

The activists, though, were not entirely happy that they had painted themselves into a corner of outright hostility to scientific method. They knew that if their irrational rejection of science and the modern world was made too explicit, people would find it difficult to go along with. On the other hand, the scientists were pretty bruised, too. They were desperate to win back some of the authority they had lost by being portrayed as tools of big business and proto-Frankensteins out to poison the public. Their subsequent pursuit of `public understanding' turned out to mean lots of committees, often full of green activists, seeking to influence the scientists' agenda.

On the issue of climate change, scientists and environmentalists found more to agree on. As the international diplomatic manoeuvres engendered a new science of climate change, there was more influence for those scientists who lent their research to heavy-duty warnings of global catastrophe. The environmentalists were thrilled to find that the one community that had been most resistant to their ideas were now providing the ammunition.

Once environmentalists had routinely attacked science, drawing on the caricatures of the scientific method found in the Frankfurt school of sociology. Now they were defenders of science against the supposedly `irrational' climate change deniers. The radical academic Bruno Latour, who had made a career arguing that science was nothing more than an ideological construct that reflected the interests of the powers-that-be, suddenly changed his mind over the issue of climate change. Protesters against the new runway at Heathrow summed up the activists' changed attitude to science. They marched with a banner that read: `We are armed only with peer-reviewed science.'

The new, more positive attitude to science on the part of the environmentalists, though, is the reason why the previous issue of GM is still unresolved. The pressure for a return to GM testing in Britain comes from the National Farmers Union, which is lobbying to be allowed to introduce the latest biotechnology. Whether a minister did or did not talk to the Guardian over the weekend about reintroducing GM, the government's explicit position is that there will be no return to GM testing.

Still the activists are alarmed. They have an intuitive understanding that they got away with a lot when they committed the UK to outright opposition to GM testing. The decision was an outrage against scientific experimentation. The activists' arguments back then were a lot more hostile to science than they are today. The Guardian suggests that the pro-GM lobbyists, too, think that the debate has moved on, and that GM crops can be defended on grounds that they might be a solution to the problems raised by global warming. But whatever the reason, Britain should be engaged in GM testing - not because it can help with the problems of global warming, but because it is the right thing to do.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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