UN data point to lower emissions

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Published: November 17, 2008

The United Nations released its latest global emissions figures on Monday, providing cause for hope and concern just two weeks before the world's environment ministers meet in Poznan, Poland, to discuss the creation of a new global agreement to curb climate changing greenhouse gas emissions.
The release of the new data comes against the backdrop of a global recession, and UN officials acknowledged that they were uncertain how economic hardship would affect countries' nascent commitment or ability to reduce emissions, which is sometimes costly.
"This is a critical moment for ministers and politicians," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, at a press conference in Bonn. He called the coming climate negotiations "the most complicated process the world has ever seen."
The newly released figures show that among a group of 41 industrialized countries that report emissions annually to the Unfccc, emissions decreased very slightly - one-tenth of 1 percent - in 2006 compared with 2005. But overall emissions had increased by 2.5 percent from 2000 to 2006, leading the agency to decry what it called "continued growth."
De Boer expressed some optimism about this year's figures.

"What I saw was a slowing of the increase in emission from industrialized countries," he said. But his statistician, Sergey Kononov, pointed out that the number was too small to indicate a significant downward trend, noting that it could have been caused by either improved policies or simply a warmer than normal winter.
Perhaps the biggest asterisk that must be attached to the new figures is that they tally only emissions from industrialized countries and do not include the so-called large emerging economies, like China and India, two of the world's largest emitters.
Just one year ago, the Unfccc convened the world's environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, where the group pledged to hammer out a climate pact by 2009. Rich nations pledged to design a system that would help the poor cope with global warming. The current agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012 and does not cover developing nations like China or the United States, which never ratified it.
But the world has changed since Bali.
The United States, a reluctant participant in the UN meeting last year, now has a president-elect who has pledged to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration. Perhaps more important, fallout from a global economic crisis has turned the economics of climate change upside down.
On the one hand, oil is now cheaper than at any time in the recent past, which makes it tempting for struggling economies to fall back on this relatively dirty fossil fuel, rather than plowing ahead with efforts to develop less-polluting alternatives, like wind and solar power. On the other, stagnant economies mean less industrial production, which historically leads to a drop in emissions. Indeed, the dramatic downturn in industry in the former East Bloc countries in the 1990s after independence, led to a marked decrease in pollution there.
"It is clear that the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn will have implications for climate negotiations," de Boer said Monday. But he added that "it will take time to see how."
Indeed, he and others have expressed hope that some nations will renew their economies by investing in green jobs and green growth, a proposal put forth by President-elect Barack Obama during the campaign and endorse by nongovernmental organizations like the Clinton Foundation.
De Boer said he hoped that the world would meet its climate goals by "relying on policy actions and not an economic turndown," adding: "I hope never to be in the situation where we say we made our Kyoto target, but everyone is starving."
UN officials said Monday that Obama would not attend the meeting but expressed hope that the U.S. delegation would be "liasing closely" with the incoming administration, which takes office in January.
In 2007, Bush administration officials nearly jettisoned a global agreement, signing on at the 11th hour after a delegate from Papua New Guinea famously told them to "please get out of the way."
Unlike the Bush administration, Obama supports a cap-and-trade system, similar to the one that currently operates in the European Union. Companies and industries are assigned emissions limits and must buy "carbon permits" to exceed them. Such permits can come from investing in emissions-reducing projects like planting trees or cleaning up a dirty coal mine in Asia, in theory "offsetting" environment damage done at home.
Despite the dismal economic situation, the coming climate talks could build on progress over the past year in carbon-trading systems, like the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, which are now fully operational.
"These are no longer just numbers on paper," de Boer said. "They are used in transactions, and the number of trades is going up."