By Matthew L. Wald
Published: July 8, 2008
A Michigan company, Energy Conversion Devices, planned to announce Tuesday that it would provide the solar electric system for what it says will be the world's largest rooftop array, on a General Motors assembly plant in Zaragoza, Spain. The project will be 12 megawatts, a huge number in a field where most arrays are measured in kilowatts.
Solar cell arrays on houses are commonly a handful of kilowatts, or thousandths of a megawatt. On big commercial buildings, installations of one or two megawatts have become common. A one-megawatt installation will run about 1,000 window air-conditioners simultaneously, at least as long as the sun is shining.
The Zaragoza project will use solar devices manufactured in rolls, like carpet runners. Installation will be completed this autumn, according to the company, which is based in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Energy Conversion will supply the equipment to Veolia Environment and Clairvoyant Energy, which will lease the rooftop space from GM and own and operate the installation, which will cover 185,000 square meters, or two million square feet.
Spain has become a center for solar installations because it offers generous subsidies - €0.42, or $0.66, per kilowatt hour. That is about five times the average cost of a kilowatt hour to residential customers in the United States. The Spanish government is considering a reduction in the subsidy for installations after September.
Energy Conversion plans to produce about 150 megawatts of cells this year. Last month, the company raised $400 million in new capital and announced plans to raise its annual production to one gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, by 2012. The company did not say what the Spanish installation would cost.
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group based in Washington, the largest installation planned in the United States, announced in June, was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the convention center will have 2.36 megawatts of capacity, about one-fifth the size of the installation to be completed in Zaragoza.
Southern California Edison announced in March that it would install 250 megawatts of rooftop solar arrays, spread over 100 or more roofs.
-->
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Sharp Focuses on Manufacturing (Solar panels)
A $9 Billion Plant In Japan Will Make LCD, Solar Panels
By YUKARI IWATANI KANEJuly 9, 2008;
In an old seaport city near its Osaka headquarters, Sharp Corp. is building a $9 billion factory complex the size of 32 baseball stadiums to make liquid-crystal-display panels and solar panels. The complex, which Sharp broke ground last November, will be the world's largest LCD and next-generation solar panel plant when it is ready sometime in the next fiscal year, ending March 2010. It will house most of its major suppliers on the same premises. Sharp itself will invest about $4.3 billion.
Getty Images
While Apple Inc. is leading a trend in the electronics industry to outsource hardware manufacturing and focus on design and software, Sharp is making a huge bet that keeping manufacturing of LCD and solar panels in-house will give it a big competitive advantage.
The Sakai factory is the culmination of a decision 10 years ago by Katsuhiko Machida, Sharp's chief executive, to narrow the company's focus when it was barely making a profit. Sharp at the time was making cathode-ray tube televisions, but they weren't highly regarded because the company didn't make its own tubes. It was also making big investments in semiconductors, but was a minor player in the competitive industry.
So Mr. Machida, then president, ended production of CRT TVs, cut investments in semiconductors and focused on LCD technology, even though it was still an emerging, money-losing business. Mr. Machida, who saw potential in using LCD panels in televisions, declared that Sharp would replace every traditional television with an LCD TV in 10 years.
In the past decade, Sharp has become one of the world's largest LCD-panel manufacturers, and it nearly doubled its revenue to 3.4 trillion yen ($31.7 billion) and more than tripled its operating profit to 183.7 billion yen. Sharp's solar-panel business, meanwhile, is still small, but it is the world's second-largest manufacturer of the product after Germany's Q-Cells AG.
There are big risks. Prices for LCD panels have been steady so far, but several companies are planning new plants that will significantly increase global supplies, which could lead to price declines. What's more, some rivals like Sony Corp. also are developing next-generation technologies like the organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, which could eventually make LCD technology obsolete.
Still, if Sharp continues to be successful, the focused-manufacturing strategy could be a model for other Japanese electronics makers, which find Apple's outsourcing model a turnoff and are still trying to figure out a way to remain a manufacturer while growing its profit in an industry that is rapidly commoditizing.
In 2001, Mr. Machida created a stir by declaring his intention to build a $1.4 billion LCD panel plant in the town of Kameyama in central Japan, even though the trend at the time was to move factories offshore to places like China, where products could be made more cheaply.
The construction of the Kameyama plant was a turning point for Sharp, because it led to a technological breakthrough that allowed the company to make bigger and better panels before its rivals. For the first time, Sharp's TVs were in strong demand, particularly in Japan, as consumers sought to buy made-in-Kameyama TVs.
The new plant, built near its headquarters, takes that strategy a step further. Designed for both LCDs and solar panels, which share a similar manufacturing process, it will include factories for its major suppliers including Asahi Glass Co. and Corning Inc., which makes the glass for the panels. Even the gas and electric companies will have facilities on the premises.
Sharp plans to continue to make televisions and other electronics goods. But Mr. Machida says he believes LCD and solar panels will be more important to the company's survival and growth because they can differentiate themselves by packing more technology into them.
"There will eventually be no distinction between a parts manufacturer and an electronics maker," says Mr. Machida, adding that LCD panels have the potential to embed so much technology that a television in the future could consist of just a panel and a plastic frame.
When that happens, Mr. Machida figures that the parts makers will profit even if the finished goods become commoditized.
Whether Sharp can survive with the current strategy in the long term is still an open question. But Mr. Machida says he isn't worried because he just needs to recover his investments, something he is confident he can do.
By that time, Sharp hopes that its investments in its solar-panel business will pay off. Solar currently generates just less than 1% of global energy, but that is expected to increase to as much as 37% in 2040, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, which follows the industry. The research firm also estimates that the market could increase to more than $1 trillion in 2040, compared with $20 billion last year.
Sharp believes that even if competition increases, there should be plenty of business to go around. Sharp last month made another huge bet in this area by forming a partnership with an Italian power company to investigate the possibility of building a solar-generated electricity plant.
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com
By YUKARI IWATANI KANEJuly 9, 2008;
In an old seaport city near its Osaka headquarters, Sharp Corp. is building a $9 billion factory complex the size of 32 baseball stadiums to make liquid-crystal-display panels and solar panels. The complex, which Sharp broke ground last November, will be the world's largest LCD and next-generation solar panel plant when it is ready sometime in the next fiscal year, ending March 2010. It will house most of its major suppliers on the same premises. Sharp itself will invest about $4.3 billion.
Getty Images
While Apple Inc. is leading a trend in the electronics industry to outsource hardware manufacturing and focus on design and software, Sharp is making a huge bet that keeping manufacturing of LCD and solar panels in-house will give it a big competitive advantage.
The Sakai factory is the culmination of a decision 10 years ago by Katsuhiko Machida, Sharp's chief executive, to narrow the company's focus when it was barely making a profit. Sharp at the time was making cathode-ray tube televisions, but they weren't highly regarded because the company didn't make its own tubes. It was also making big investments in semiconductors, but was a minor player in the competitive industry.
So Mr. Machida, then president, ended production of CRT TVs, cut investments in semiconductors and focused on LCD technology, even though it was still an emerging, money-losing business. Mr. Machida, who saw potential in using LCD panels in televisions, declared that Sharp would replace every traditional television with an LCD TV in 10 years.
In the past decade, Sharp has become one of the world's largest LCD-panel manufacturers, and it nearly doubled its revenue to 3.4 trillion yen ($31.7 billion) and more than tripled its operating profit to 183.7 billion yen. Sharp's solar-panel business, meanwhile, is still small, but it is the world's second-largest manufacturer of the product after Germany's Q-Cells AG.
There are big risks. Prices for LCD panels have been steady so far, but several companies are planning new plants that will significantly increase global supplies, which could lead to price declines. What's more, some rivals like Sony Corp. also are developing next-generation technologies like the organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, which could eventually make LCD technology obsolete.
Still, if Sharp continues to be successful, the focused-manufacturing strategy could be a model for other Japanese electronics makers, which find Apple's outsourcing model a turnoff and are still trying to figure out a way to remain a manufacturer while growing its profit in an industry that is rapidly commoditizing.
In 2001, Mr. Machida created a stir by declaring his intention to build a $1.4 billion LCD panel plant in the town of Kameyama in central Japan, even though the trend at the time was to move factories offshore to places like China, where products could be made more cheaply.
The construction of the Kameyama plant was a turning point for Sharp, because it led to a technological breakthrough that allowed the company to make bigger and better panels before its rivals. For the first time, Sharp's TVs were in strong demand, particularly in Japan, as consumers sought to buy made-in-Kameyama TVs.
The new plant, built near its headquarters, takes that strategy a step further. Designed for both LCDs and solar panels, which share a similar manufacturing process, it will include factories for its major suppliers including Asahi Glass Co. and Corning Inc., which makes the glass for the panels. Even the gas and electric companies will have facilities on the premises.
Sharp plans to continue to make televisions and other electronics goods. But Mr. Machida says he believes LCD and solar panels will be more important to the company's survival and growth because they can differentiate themselves by packing more technology into them.
"There will eventually be no distinction between a parts manufacturer and an electronics maker," says Mr. Machida, adding that LCD panels have the potential to embed so much technology that a television in the future could consist of just a panel and a plastic frame.
When that happens, Mr. Machida figures that the parts makers will profit even if the finished goods become commoditized.
Whether Sharp can survive with the current strategy in the long term is still an open question. But Mr. Machida says he isn't worried because he just needs to recover his investments, something he is confident he can do.
By that time, Sharp hopes that its investments in its solar-panel business will pay off. Solar currently generates just less than 1% of global energy, but that is expected to increase to as much as 37% in 2040, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, which follows the industry. The research firm also estimates that the market could increase to more than $1 trillion in 2040, compared with $20 billion last year.
Sharp believes that even if competition increases, there should be plenty of business to go around. Sharp last month made another huge bet in this area by forming a partnership with an Italian power company to investigate the possibility of building a solar-generated electricity plant.
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com
Gillespie unveils £250m plans for waste-to-heat 'energy station'
Published Date: 09 July 2008
By PETER RANSCOMBE
BUSINESS REPORTER
PLANS for a futuristic £250 million "energy station" and recycling plant in North Lanarkshire were unveiled yesterday.
Airdrie North, a development subsidiary of the Gillespie Investment Group, said its plans would create 65 jobs at the new station and provide work for about 150 construction staff.The developer said the power plant would burn up to 300,000 tonnes of waste a year, producing enough heat for 30,000 homes, local businesses and public buildings, such as hospitals. Airdrie North said the site would also recycle 50,000 tonnes of rubbish each year.The planning application followed a series of meetings with North Lanarkshire Council, Scottish Natural Heritage, the Scottish Environment Agency and ADS, the government's architectural design service, Airdrie North added.The developer said it had consulted with residents in Greengairs, Plains, Glenmavis, Holehills, Rochsolles and Wattston.Under the plan, the developer would build a new mile-long section of the A73 trunk road.Scott Gillespie, managing director of Airdrie North, said: "Our proposals focus on creating an exemplar centre, which will deliver a substantial amount of energy from waste. "It will also deliver real economic benefit to the area through the creation of jobs in both construction and the ongoing operation."We have looked at the best possible models abroad and are committed to developing a facility for Scotland that will be among the best in the world."He added: "We undertook a wide-ranging consultation process and were pleased that a significant number of local people participated. "One of their main concerns was, quite rightly, the possible environmental impact. "However, the principle of utilising household waste in a sustainable manner, rather than simply sending it to a landfill site, was universally understood. This is especially pertinent in today's economic climate of rising energy bills."This centre could only operate by conforming to the strictest environmental regulations laid down by government at local and national level."Shirley Linton, planning manager at North Lanarkshire Council, said: "That application will now be subject to a public consultation period, after which it will be presented to the planning and transportation committee for discussion and debate. "No decision will be made on this application until that time."Owen Davis, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: "Incinerators like this are really not an appropriate solution to our waste problems and addiction to landfill. "Investment in waste to energy plants such as this risks reducing incentives for waste prevention and recycling, and leads to unnecessary climate changing emissions."
Texas oilman outlines plan for cleaner energy
The Associated Press
Published: July 8, 2008
HOUSTON:
The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens opened an advertising campaign Tuesday in an attempt to bring more focus to solving the energy crisis in the United States.
The former "wildcatter," who now heads the Dallas-based hedge fund BP Capital Management, outlined his concerns and some proposed solutions in New York.
"U.S. dependency on foreign oil has reached an economic crisis point," Pickens said. "Now dependent on foreign nations for 70 percent of its oil, the U.S. is exporting $700 billion annually, more than four times the cost of the Iraq war."
Last year, Pickens announced plans to build the world's largest wind farm in Texas. The cost of the project could grow to $12 billion before its scheduled completion in 2014.
Under Pickens proposal, thousands of wind turbines would be constructed across the nation's wind belt, from Texas to the north, which he said would generate enough power to meet 20 percent of the U.S.'s electricity needs.
Transmission lines would be constructed to connect distant wind farms to cities that need the power.
Natural gas would be used to replace some imported gasoline and diesel.
Pickens now wants to bring energy to the forefront of the presidential election.
"I am calling on the next president and Congress to take immediate action in the first 100 days of the new administration to do whatever is necessary to make this plan a reality," Pickens said. "We are asking the American public to get behind this plan and to help us reduce our dangerous dependency on foreign oil."
Published: July 8, 2008
HOUSTON:
The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens opened an advertising campaign Tuesday in an attempt to bring more focus to solving the energy crisis in the United States.
The former "wildcatter," who now heads the Dallas-based hedge fund BP Capital Management, outlined his concerns and some proposed solutions in New York.
"U.S. dependency on foreign oil has reached an economic crisis point," Pickens said. "Now dependent on foreign nations for 70 percent of its oil, the U.S. is exporting $700 billion annually, more than four times the cost of the Iraq war."
Last year, Pickens announced plans to build the world's largest wind farm in Texas. The cost of the project could grow to $12 billion before its scheduled completion in 2014.
Under Pickens proposal, thousands of wind turbines would be constructed across the nation's wind belt, from Texas to the north, which he said would generate enough power to meet 20 percent of the U.S.'s electricity needs.
Transmission lines would be constructed to connect distant wind farms to cities that need the power.
Natural gas would be used to replace some imported gasoline and diesel.
Pickens now wants to bring energy to the forefront of the presidential election.
"I am calling on the next president and Congress to take immediate action in the first 100 days of the new administration to do whatever is necessary to make this plan a reality," Pickens said. "We are asking the American public to get behind this plan and to help us reduce our dangerous dependency on foreign oil."
Biofuel for thought
Published: July 8 2008 22:30
You can run a G8 conference on caviar, but not use it as biofuel for your car. One outcome of this week’s meeting of world leaders in Japan should be an end to subsidies for biofuels of uncertain environmental merit but definite harm to some of the world’s poorest people. Subsidising the use of crops as fuel is no substitute for putting a price on carbon emissions.
This week, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, called for more focus on growing food rather than biofuels. In Britain, a government agency proposed that the European Union should rein back its biofuel targets. Both are right and deserve a wider audience.
It was originally assumed that biofuels would be distilled from farm waste and residues, and fuel crops would be grown on marginal land. But growing fuel crops on land previously farmed for food and turning US corn into oil have both pushed up the cost of food. The world’s poorest people would always have suffered from increased food prices this year; the development of biofuels has added to their misery.
The process of growing biofuels instead of existing vegetation also means that their carbon abatement benefits are dubious. As well as replacing existing farmland, biofuels have contributed to deforestation in Africa, South America and Asia. Fuel crop production is reducing biodiversity and may even add to net carbon emissions.
Yet there should be no surprise about the problems caused by the biofuel schemes. The increase in biofuel production has been achieved through vast subsidies that make fuel production more attractive than producing food. These subsidies are an attempt to encourage one technology for carbon reduction rather than another. This has never worked before; the world will not reduce carbon emissions with dirigisme.
The only way to fight climate change effectively is to charge emitters of carbon and compensate carbon abaters. There should be no special tariffs and schemes for different technologies, and no polluters should be left out. This will create incentives for the private sector to find efficient solutions.
Piecemeal schemes to encourage biofuels, as with other special incentives to insulate houses or improve energy efficiency, are not the right way to fight climate change. Summiteers in Hokkaido, wrestling with this dilemma over their sushi, must not try to plan production and they must not try to pick technological winners. They must introduce a carbon price and then let the private sector do its business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
You can run a G8 conference on caviar, but not use it as biofuel for your car. One outcome of this week’s meeting of world leaders in Japan should be an end to subsidies for biofuels of uncertain environmental merit but definite harm to some of the world’s poorest people. Subsidising the use of crops as fuel is no substitute for putting a price on carbon emissions.
This week, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, called for more focus on growing food rather than biofuels. In Britain, a government agency proposed that the European Union should rein back its biofuel targets. Both are right and deserve a wider audience.
It was originally assumed that biofuels would be distilled from farm waste and residues, and fuel crops would be grown on marginal land. But growing fuel crops on land previously farmed for food and turning US corn into oil have both pushed up the cost of food. The world’s poorest people would always have suffered from increased food prices this year; the development of biofuels has added to their misery.
The process of growing biofuels instead of existing vegetation also means that their carbon abatement benefits are dubious. As well as replacing existing farmland, biofuels have contributed to deforestation in Africa, South America and Asia. Fuel crop production is reducing biodiversity and may even add to net carbon emissions.
Yet there should be no surprise about the problems caused by the biofuel schemes. The increase in biofuel production has been achieved through vast subsidies that make fuel production more attractive than producing food. These subsidies are an attempt to encourage one technology for carbon reduction rather than another. This has never worked before; the world will not reduce carbon emissions with dirigisme.
The only way to fight climate change effectively is to charge emitters of carbon and compensate carbon abaters. There should be no special tariffs and schemes for different technologies, and no polluters should be left out. This will create incentives for the private sector to find efficient solutions.
Piecemeal schemes to encourage biofuels, as with other special incentives to insulate houses or improve energy efficiency, are not the right way to fight climate change. Summiteers in Hokkaido, wrestling with this dilemma over their sushi, must not try to plan production and they must not try to pick technological winners. They must introduce a carbon price and then let the private sector do its business.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Portugal invests in electric cars
By Peter Wise in Lisbon
Published: July 8 2008 16:28
Portugal will unveil details Wednesday of a partnership with Renault and Nissan to create a national network for zero-emission electric cars produced by the Franco-Japanese alliance.
José Sócrates, Portugal’s socialist prime minister, who has urged the European Union to use more “political muscle” to combat rising fuel prices, said the plan would reduce the country’s high level of dependence on imported oil.
Mr Sócrates, who will be accompanied by Carlos Ghosn, president of Renault and Nissan, will set out plans to create a network of battery recharging and swap stations, tax incentives and a promotional programme to make electric cars a viable and attractive option.
Portugal follows Israel and Denmark in agreeing on similar plans to create a market for electric vehicles. But Renault-Nissan has named Portugal as its first partner in a “direct programme” to encourage the wide-spread commercialisation of zero-emission cars.
The car-making alliance said its electric vehicle would be available in Portugal in 2011. Basílio Horta, head of Portugal’s state investment agency, AICEP, said the car would “revolutionise” the automobile and fuel markets.
It would drive like a petrol-fuelled car and have a range of 200 km , he said.
Private-sector Portuguese companies will also participate in the project. Energias de Portugal, the country’s dominant power utility, is already working with other European groups to gauge the potential impact of electric vehicles on national power grids.
Portugal is also keen to involve its auto components industry in supplying seats, dashboards and other parts for the new electric car, which is expected to be manufactured in France.
The Lisbon government is expected to press the EU to lift restrictions on state aid to industry to allow governments to provide incentives for the manufacture of zero-emission vehicles and related infrastructures.
Mr Sócrates has been urging the EU to take more decisive action to promote alternatives to fossil fuels. “Europeans cannot go on accepting the additional tax on their economies of higher oil prices,” he said in Brussels recently.
“It is time to invest in electric cars by guaranteeing a market and by ensuring that European consumers will be able to buy them at a reasonable price without any negative consequences.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Published: July 8 2008 16:28
Portugal will unveil details Wednesday of a partnership with Renault and Nissan to create a national network for zero-emission electric cars produced by the Franco-Japanese alliance.
José Sócrates, Portugal’s socialist prime minister, who has urged the European Union to use more “political muscle” to combat rising fuel prices, said the plan would reduce the country’s high level of dependence on imported oil.
Mr Sócrates, who will be accompanied by Carlos Ghosn, president of Renault and Nissan, will set out plans to create a network of battery recharging and swap stations, tax incentives and a promotional programme to make electric cars a viable and attractive option.
Portugal follows Israel and Denmark in agreeing on similar plans to create a market for electric vehicles. But Renault-Nissan has named Portugal as its first partner in a “direct programme” to encourage the wide-spread commercialisation of zero-emission cars.
The car-making alliance said its electric vehicle would be available in Portugal in 2011. Basílio Horta, head of Portugal’s state investment agency, AICEP, said the car would “revolutionise” the automobile and fuel markets.
It would drive like a petrol-fuelled car and have a range of 200 km , he said.
Private-sector Portuguese companies will also participate in the project. Energias de Portugal, the country’s dominant power utility, is already working with other European groups to gauge the potential impact of electric vehicles on national power grids.
Portugal is also keen to involve its auto components industry in supplying seats, dashboards and other parts for the new electric car, which is expected to be manufactured in France.
The Lisbon government is expected to press the EU to lift restrictions on state aid to industry to allow governments to provide incentives for the manufacture of zero-emission vehicles and related infrastructures.
Mr Sócrates has been urging the EU to take more decisive action to promote alternatives to fossil fuels. “Europeans cannot go on accepting the additional tax on their economies of higher oil prices,” he said in Brussels recently.
“It is time to invest in electric cars by guaranteeing a market and by ensuring that European consumers will be able to buy them at a reasonable price without any negative consequences.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
D8 summit calls for halt to biofuels
By John Aglionby in Kuala Lumpur
Published: July 8 2008 07:09
The world should halt the development of biofuel crops on arable land and instead boost agricultural production to solve the global food crisis and prevent “disaster”, the Malaysian and Indonesian leaders warned on Tuesday at the opening of a developing countries summit.
Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, said the use of arable land for biofuels “should be stopped because such action will deepen the global food scarcity and further drive up food prices”.
“We must not allow the zeal for energy security to come into direct conflict with the basic need for food production,” he told the Developing Eight summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The D8 comprises Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. All are prominent members of the Organisaton of the Islamic Conference.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president, blamed “some developed countries” for exacerbating the food crisis by allowing biofuel development on arable land.
“The idea is to reduce greenhouse gases and to wean themselves away from dependence on fossil fuels,” he said in his speech. “It is not a good idea: it has only worsened the global food crisis.”
The leaders’ statements join a growing consensus that biofuel production has contributed more to soaring food prices than was thought to be the case until a few months ago.
On Monday Britain hinted it might reassess its biofuel targets after a review by a former Environment Agency chief indicated that while there is probably enough land to meet agricultural needs until 2020, biofuels had contributed to rising food prices. The World Bank has expressed similar sentiments to the British report.
Mr Yudhoyono predicted there would be “no quick fix” to the crisis.
“But we must act on it at once and in concert,” he said. “To delay concerted action on this great challenge of our time is to court disaster.”
The president is now en route to Japan to meet with the G8 leaders on Wednesday. Indonesian officials said he would urge the G8 members to “share the burden” endured by developing countries in the face of soaring oil and food prices.
Both Mr Badawi and Mr Yudhoyono stressed the need to find ways to boost agricultural production. Neither, however, mentioned whether they would halt, let alone reverse, their planned expansions of oil palm plantations.
Indonesia and Malaysia are, respectively, the world’s largest and second largest producers of palm oil, which is becoming increasingly popular as a biofuel.
Much of the development, particularly in Indonesia, has come at the expense of vast swathes of rainforest, which is widely considered to exacerbate climate change.
Mr Badawi also took aim at the oil futures market, suggesting the international community “examine how [it] might be organised to assist in stabilising [oil] prices.”
He said the summit should send a united message on how to confront the oil and food price crises. Analysts believe the D8 will struggle to reach consensus on what to do about high oil prices because it comprises both significant oil producers and consumers.
The summit is also expected to approve a roadmap to strengthen cooperation between D8 members, particularly on intra-member trade. The aim is to boost this from the current figure of $60bn to $517.5bn within a decade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Published: July 8 2008 07:09
The world should halt the development of biofuel crops on arable land and instead boost agricultural production to solve the global food crisis and prevent “disaster”, the Malaysian and Indonesian leaders warned on Tuesday at the opening of a developing countries summit.
Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian prime minister, said the use of arable land for biofuels “should be stopped because such action will deepen the global food scarcity and further drive up food prices”.
“We must not allow the zeal for energy security to come into direct conflict with the basic need for food production,” he told the Developing Eight summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The D8 comprises Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. All are prominent members of the Organisaton of the Islamic Conference.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president, blamed “some developed countries” for exacerbating the food crisis by allowing biofuel development on arable land.
“The idea is to reduce greenhouse gases and to wean themselves away from dependence on fossil fuels,” he said in his speech. “It is not a good idea: it has only worsened the global food crisis.”
The leaders’ statements join a growing consensus that biofuel production has contributed more to soaring food prices than was thought to be the case until a few months ago.
On Monday Britain hinted it might reassess its biofuel targets after a review by a former Environment Agency chief indicated that while there is probably enough land to meet agricultural needs until 2020, biofuels had contributed to rising food prices. The World Bank has expressed similar sentiments to the British report.
Mr Yudhoyono predicted there would be “no quick fix” to the crisis.
“But we must act on it at once and in concert,” he said. “To delay concerted action on this great challenge of our time is to court disaster.”
The president is now en route to Japan to meet with the G8 leaders on Wednesday. Indonesian officials said he would urge the G8 members to “share the burden” endured by developing countries in the face of soaring oil and food prices.
Both Mr Badawi and Mr Yudhoyono stressed the need to find ways to boost agricultural production. Neither, however, mentioned whether they would halt, let alone reverse, their planned expansions of oil palm plantations.
Indonesia and Malaysia are, respectively, the world’s largest and second largest producers of palm oil, which is becoming increasingly popular as a biofuel.
Much of the development, particularly in Indonesia, has come at the expense of vast swathes of rainforest, which is widely considered to exacerbate climate change.
Mr Badawi also took aim at the oil futures market, suggesting the international community “examine how [it] might be organised to assist in stabilising [oil] prices.”
He said the summit should send a united message on how to confront the oil and food price crises. Analysts believe the D8 will struggle to reach consensus on what to do about high oil prices because it comprises both significant oil producers and consumers.
The summit is also expected to approve a roadmap to strengthen cooperation between D8 members, particularly on intra-member trade. The aim is to boost this from the current figure of $60bn to $517.5bn within a decade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Big polluters agree deep emissions cuts needed
Reuters
, Wednesday July 9 2008
* G8 set for climate change showdown
* Poor states unimpressed by G8 plan to curb greenhouse gases
* Two sides may clash over global trade as key talks loom
By Yoko Kubota and Oleg Shchedrov
TOYAKO, Japan, July 9 (Reuters) - Big emerging economies will come under pressure on Wednesday to respond in kind to an initiative by rich countries to work towards a target of at least halving their global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations want the leaders of eight fast-growing countries to adopt a "shared vision" of tackling global warming in U.N. negotiations due to conclude in Copenhagen in December 2009.
"There has been major progress on the climate change agenda beyond what people thought possible a few months ago," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of Tuesday's agreement.
"For the first time the G8 has said we will adopt at least a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 as part of a worldwide agreement that we hope to get in Copenhagen," he said.
The U.N.-led talks aim to create a new framework for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Critics said the agreement was a timid advance on last year's summit commitment in Heiligendamm, Germany, to seriously consider the 2050 goal of halving emissions by mid-century.
"This is a complete failure of responsibility. They haven't moved forward at all. They've ducked the responsibility of adopting clear mid-term targets and even the 2050 target is not a single thing more than what we got in Heiligendamm," said Daniel Mittler, Greenpeace International's political adviser.
Environmental group WWF called the G8's stance "pathetic".
Even one of the G8 signatories sounded a note of caution.
"We are ready to cooperate on this goal on understanding that it is not legally binding," said Alexander Pankin, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official. "It is very difficult to imagine a government subscribing to something which happens 42 years later."
The other G8 members are Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the United States and Britain.
GET ON BOARD
The cool reaction of a group of five developing countries also suggested that hard bargaining was in store.
China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil called on rich nations to slash their carbon emissions by 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and make cuts of 25-40 percent by 2020.
This Group of Five will join the G8 on the last day of its three-day annual summit on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in a so-called Major Economies Meeting that Australia, Indonesia and South Korea will also attend.
The G5's stance is important. The G8 nations emit about 40 percent of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions. But China and India together emit about 25 percent of the total, a proportion that is rising as their coal-fueled economies boom.
Washington in particular has said a global climate deal is impossible unless China and India make sacrifices. But the G5 not only failed to make an offer of its own after a coordinating meeting on Tuesday but said the ball was still in the G8's court.
"It's not we who are not on board. We've got a more ambitious package. Now we need the U.S. to get on board. It's going to be two years of tough negotiations," said a Group of Five diplomat who declined to be identified.
Given the positions that have been staked out, a Japanese official said the meeting was unlikely to get down to specific targets for emission cuts.
"We do not expect our final statement to touch on numerical targets that include the emerging economies," he said.
TRADE AND FOOD PRICES
Climate change will not be the only bone of contention at Wednesday's talks. Emerging nations are suffering more than rich countries from soaring fuel and food prices and bristled at the suggestion that their rising demand is to blame.
"This is not a responsible attitude," Chinese President Hu Jintao said after the G5 met in the northern city of Sapporo.
Developing countries are also likely to come under pressure to help achieve a breakthrough in long-running global trade talks when ministers gather in Geneva on July 21.
"This could be the last chance to seal a deal and we should not miss it," said Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union's executive Commission.
The EU, United States and other rich countries are trying to win further concessions in areas of interest to their exporters of goods such as cars and chemicals, and their service providers.
But emerging countries complain that the rich world is not doing enough to scale back huge farm subsidies or high farm import tariffs that penalise exporters in poor countries.
"Developed countries must dismantle barriers and distortions, especially agriculture subsidies and domestic support that affect the overall efforts of developing countries," the G5 said. (Reporting by Linda Sieg, David Clarke, William Schomberg and Lucy Hornby; Writing by Alan Wheatley; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
, Wednesday July 9 2008
* G8 set for climate change showdown
* Poor states unimpressed by G8 plan to curb greenhouse gases
* Two sides may clash over global trade as key talks loom
By Yoko Kubota and Oleg Shchedrov
TOYAKO, Japan, July 9 (Reuters) - Big emerging economies will come under pressure on Wednesday to respond in kind to an initiative by rich countries to work towards a target of at least halving their global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations want the leaders of eight fast-growing countries to adopt a "shared vision" of tackling global warming in U.N. negotiations due to conclude in Copenhagen in December 2009.
"There has been major progress on the climate change agenda beyond what people thought possible a few months ago," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of Tuesday's agreement.
"For the first time the G8 has said we will adopt at least a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 as part of a worldwide agreement that we hope to get in Copenhagen," he said.
The U.N.-led talks aim to create a new framework for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Critics said the agreement was a timid advance on last year's summit commitment in Heiligendamm, Germany, to seriously consider the 2050 goal of halving emissions by mid-century.
"This is a complete failure of responsibility. They haven't moved forward at all. They've ducked the responsibility of adopting clear mid-term targets and even the 2050 target is not a single thing more than what we got in Heiligendamm," said Daniel Mittler, Greenpeace International's political adviser.
Environmental group WWF called the G8's stance "pathetic".
Even one of the G8 signatories sounded a note of caution.
"We are ready to cooperate on this goal on understanding that it is not legally binding," said Alexander Pankin, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official. "It is very difficult to imagine a government subscribing to something which happens 42 years later."
The other G8 members are Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the United States and Britain.
GET ON BOARD
The cool reaction of a group of five developing countries also suggested that hard bargaining was in store.
China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil called on rich nations to slash their carbon emissions by 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and make cuts of 25-40 percent by 2020.
This Group of Five will join the G8 on the last day of its three-day annual summit on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in a so-called Major Economies Meeting that Australia, Indonesia and South Korea will also attend.
The G5's stance is important. The G8 nations emit about 40 percent of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions. But China and India together emit about 25 percent of the total, a proportion that is rising as their coal-fueled economies boom.
Washington in particular has said a global climate deal is impossible unless China and India make sacrifices. But the G5 not only failed to make an offer of its own after a coordinating meeting on Tuesday but said the ball was still in the G8's court.
"It's not we who are not on board. We've got a more ambitious package. Now we need the U.S. to get on board. It's going to be two years of tough negotiations," said a Group of Five diplomat who declined to be identified.
Given the positions that have been staked out, a Japanese official said the meeting was unlikely to get down to specific targets for emission cuts.
"We do not expect our final statement to touch on numerical targets that include the emerging economies," he said.
TRADE AND FOOD PRICES
Climate change will not be the only bone of contention at Wednesday's talks. Emerging nations are suffering more than rich countries from soaring fuel and food prices and bristled at the suggestion that their rising demand is to blame.
"This is not a responsible attitude," Chinese President Hu Jintao said after the G5 met in the northern city of Sapporo.
Developing countries are also likely to come under pressure to help achieve a breakthrough in long-running global trade talks when ministers gather in Geneva on July 21.
"This could be the last chance to seal a deal and we should not miss it," said Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union's executive Commission.
The EU, United States and other rich countries are trying to win further concessions in areas of interest to their exporters of goods such as cars and chemicals, and their service providers.
But emerging countries complain that the rich world is not doing enough to scale back huge farm subsidies or high farm import tariffs that penalise exporters in poor countries.
"Developed countries must dismantle barriers and distortions, especially agriculture subsidies and domestic support that affect the overall efforts of developing countries," the G5 said. (Reporting by Linda Sieg, David Clarke, William Schomberg and Lucy Hornby; Writing by Alan Wheatley; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
A deal on climate change - but then the backlash
US signs up to 50% target but emerging economies demand more
Patrick Wintour and Larry Elliott in Hokkaido
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
A new global deal on climate change heralded by G8 leaders as a significant step forward yesterday ran into trouble within hours as developing nations including China and India rejected it because they believe the commitments are not strong enough.
After years of US intransigence, President George Bush finally signed up to a G8 statement vowing to "consider and adopt" a target of at least a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, an agreement described by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, as "major progress".
But while the five-page communique is the first time Bush has committed his country to a long-term target, the deal agreed at the G8 summit in northern Japan was quickly dismissed by the big five emerging economies, which want the world's biggest polluters to go much further in cutting emissions.
Leaders from Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa will meet with Bush and other G8 leaders at the summit, and will demand more concerted action from the developed world
In a statement last night, the five nations, after meeting at a separate summit in Japan, said: "It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emission reductions."
They want the G8 countries to commit themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. They are also concerned that the deal fails to set milestone interim targets for the coming decades and does not make clear the scale of the cuts to be expected from the developed and developing world.
Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa also urged all developed countries to commit to absolute emission reductions based on a medium-term target of a 25-40% cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
The G8 is making an offer to provide up to $150bn in public and private investment over the next three years to help them grow economically while using green technology. Despite the tough statement from the emerging economies, Gordon Brown said the deal marked "major progress" and British officials claimed the deal opened the way for agreement next year under UN auspices at Copenhagen on a new long term framework on climate change, replacing the flawed agreement struck at Kyoto in 1997.
They pointed out that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was already committed to an 80% cut in US carbon emissions and his Republican rival, John McCain, to a 60% reduction. Both candidates' commitments would be sufficient to meet the US required contribution for a worldwide cut of 50%, seen as the minimum to avert catastrophic climate change.
Green groups slammed the deal, although they privately acknowledged that Bush has shifted his position substantially from a time when he denied the science of climate change.
Friends of the Earth's international climate campaigner, Tom Picken, accused G8 leaders of an "elaborate smokescreen" to try to fool the world that they were showing international leadership on global warming.
"Setting a vague target for 42 years' time is utterly ineffectual in the fact of the global catastrophe we all face. Urgent action is needed to tackle climate change and spiralling energy prices caused by our addiction to increasingly expensive and insecure fossil fuels."
The EU Commission said any mention of midterm goals was an advance from last year when the G8 agreed only to "seriously consider" a goal of halving emissions by mid-century.
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said the G8 deal had positive elements, but warned: "What I find lacking is any kind of language on where industrialised nations, G8 nations, want their emissions to be in 2020 and I think that is critical to making progress in the negotiations."
US sources said that huge challenges remained, including an agreed framework to measure carbon reductions, a mechanism to drive down carbon emissions such as an international carbon trading scheme, the scale of the contributions to be required from differing developing countries, and whether targets could be set on economic sectors instead of countries.
Populous developing countries such as India claim their per capita emissions are tiny in comparison with the US. Methods also have to be found to bring aviation and maritime emissions within the scope of a scheme.
British officials were pleased that there will also be a new push to set international benchmarks on biofuels, a move that could require US corn producers to scale back on production for biofuels.
Oxfam described the deal as tepid and little more than a stalling tactic. They claimed that much of the money from the multilateral banks was simply transferred from aid programmes.
The environmental campaign group WWF said: "The G8 are responsible for 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem."
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South African minister of environmental affairs and tourism, said "As it is expressed in the G8 statement, the long term goal is an empty slogan. To be meaningful and credible, a long term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions."
Patrick Wintour and Larry Elliott in Hokkaido
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
A new global deal on climate change heralded by G8 leaders as a significant step forward yesterday ran into trouble within hours as developing nations including China and India rejected it because they believe the commitments are not strong enough.
After years of US intransigence, President George Bush finally signed up to a G8 statement vowing to "consider and adopt" a target of at least a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, an agreement described by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, as "major progress".
But while the five-page communique is the first time Bush has committed his country to a long-term target, the deal agreed at the G8 summit in northern Japan was quickly dismissed by the big five emerging economies, which want the world's biggest polluters to go much further in cutting emissions.
Leaders from Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa will meet with Bush and other G8 leaders at the summit, and will demand more concerted action from the developed world
In a statement last night, the five nations, after meeting at a separate summit in Japan, said: "It is essential that developed countries take the lead in achieving ambitious and absolute greenhouse gas emission reductions."
They want the G8 countries to commit themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. They are also concerned that the deal fails to set milestone interim targets for the coming decades and does not make clear the scale of the cuts to be expected from the developed and developing world.
Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa also urged all developed countries to commit to absolute emission reductions based on a medium-term target of a 25-40% cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
The G8 is making an offer to provide up to $150bn in public and private investment over the next three years to help them grow economically while using green technology. Despite the tough statement from the emerging economies, Gordon Brown said the deal marked "major progress" and British officials claimed the deal opened the way for agreement next year under UN auspices at Copenhagen on a new long term framework on climate change, replacing the flawed agreement struck at Kyoto in 1997.
They pointed out that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was already committed to an 80% cut in US carbon emissions and his Republican rival, John McCain, to a 60% reduction. Both candidates' commitments would be sufficient to meet the US required contribution for a worldwide cut of 50%, seen as the minimum to avert catastrophic climate change.
Green groups slammed the deal, although they privately acknowledged that Bush has shifted his position substantially from a time when he denied the science of climate change.
Friends of the Earth's international climate campaigner, Tom Picken, accused G8 leaders of an "elaborate smokescreen" to try to fool the world that they were showing international leadership on global warming.
"Setting a vague target for 42 years' time is utterly ineffectual in the fact of the global catastrophe we all face. Urgent action is needed to tackle climate change and spiralling energy prices caused by our addiction to increasingly expensive and insecure fossil fuels."
The EU Commission said any mention of midterm goals was an advance from last year when the G8 agreed only to "seriously consider" a goal of halving emissions by mid-century.
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said the G8 deal had positive elements, but warned: "What I find lacking is any kind of language on where industrialised nations, G8 nations, want their emissions to be in 2020 and I think that is critical to making progress in the negotiations."
US sources said that huge challenges remained, including an agreed framework to measure carbon reductions, a mechanism to drive down carbon emissions such as an international carbon trading scheme, the scale of the contributions to be required from differing developing countries, and whether targets could be set on economic sectors instead of countries.
Populous developing countries such as India claim their per capita emissions are tiny in comparison with the US. Methods also have to be found to bring aviation and maritime emissions within the scope of a scheme.
British officials were pleased that there will also be a new push to set international benchmarks on biofuels, a move that could require US corn producers to scale back on production for biofuels.
Oxfam described the deal as tepid and little more than a stalling tactic. They claimed that much of the money from the multilateral banks was simply transferred from aid programmes.
The environmental campaign group WWF said: "The G8 are responsible for 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem."
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, South African minister of environmental affairs and tourism, said "As it is expressed in the G8 statement, the long term goal is an empty slogan. To be meaningful and credible, a long term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions."
G8: leaders inch forward on climate change with communique wording
The G8 leaders today inched forward on climate change, setting a goal to cut emissions by the middle of the century.
A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world’s leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.
Negotiations to hammer out the wording of the communiqué continued all night but as day dawned the small scale of progress in the final text disappointed environmentalists.
European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.
Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December. “We would be naive to expect an issue as difficult as climate change to achieve a breakthrough in less than a year,” said Koji Tsuruoka, one of the Japanese government’s chief negotiators.
Although no global targets were set for cutting emissions by 2020, each of the G8 countries has promised to work unilaterally to cut its own emissions. “The G8 will implement aggressive midterm total emission reduction targets on a country-by-country basis,” said Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, the chair of this year’s G8.
Each nation will however be free to set its own mid-term emissions target, allowing it to tailor its response to the nature of its economy.
Environmentalists poured scorn on the announcement. "The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," a statement by the environmental group WWF said. “WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."
Friends of the Earth said that it was worried that the G8 had failed to set a baseline year from which the 2050 cuts will be measured. Friends of the Earth says that 1990 should be used, the same year used in the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty, but in comments Mr Fukuda seemed to indicate that the baseline would be taken as this year.
The vexed character of the negotiations was suggested by the tortuous language of the final communiqué. “We seek to share with all parties ... the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in ... negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050,” it read.
This was nonetheless an advance on last year, when the G8 agreed merely to "seriously consider" the goal of halving emissions by 2050.
Without a strong lead from the G8, the onus for finding a global agreement on climate change is likely to fall once more on the stalled talks being led by the United Nations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. Those talks are scheduled to end in December next year.
The G8 leaders today inched forward on climate change, setting a goal to cut emissions by the middle of the century.
A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world’s leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.
Negotiations to hammer out the wording of the communiqué continued all night but as day dawned the small scale of progress in the final text disappointed environmentalists.
European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.
Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December. “We would be naive to expect an issue as difficult as climate change to achieve a breakthrough in less than a year,” said Koji Tsuruoka, one of the Japanese government’s chief negotiators.
Although no global targets were set for cutting emissions by 2020, each of the G8 countries has promised to work unilaterally to cut its own emissions. “The G8 will implement aggressive midterm total emission reduction targets on a country-by-country basis,” said Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, the chair of this year’s G8.
Each nation will however be free to set its own mid-term emissions target, allowing it to tailor its response to the nature of its economy.
Environmentalists poured scorn on the announcement. "The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," a statement by the environmental group WWF said. “WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."
Friends of the Earth said that it was worried that the G8 had failed to set a baseline year from which the 2050 cuts will be measured. Friends of the Earth says that 1990 should be used, the same year used in the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty, but in comments Mr Fukuda seemed to indicate that the baseline would be taken as this year.
The vexed character of the negotiations was suggested by the tortuous language of the final communiqué. “We seek to share with all parties ... the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in ... negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050,” it read.
This was nonetheless an advance on last year, when the G8 agreed merely to "seriously consider" the goal of halving emissions by 2050.
Without a strong lead from the G8, the onus for finding a global agreement on climate change is likely to fall once more on the stalled talks being led by the United Nations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. Those talks are scheduled to end in December next year.
A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world’s leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.
Negotiations to hammer out the wording of the communiqué continued all night but as day dawned the small scale of progress in the final text disappointed environmentalists.
European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.
Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December. “We would be naive to expect an issue as difficult as climate change to achieve a breakthrough in less than a year,” said Koji Tsuruoka, one of the Japanese government’s chief negotiators.
Although no global targets were set for cutting emissions by 2020, each of the G8 countries has promised to work unilaterally to cut its own emissions. “The G8 will implement aggressive midterm total emission reduction targets on a country-by-country basis,” said Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, the chair of this year’s G8.
Each nation will however be free to set its own mid-term emissions target, allowing it to tailor its response to the nature of its economy.
Environmentalists poured scorn on the announcement. "The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," a statement by the environmental group WWF said. “WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."
Friends of the Earth said that it was worried that the G8 had failed to set a baseline year from which the 2050 cuts will be measured. Friends of the Earth says that 1990 should be used, the same year used in the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty, but in comments Mr Fukuda seemed to indicate that the baseline would be taken as this year.
The vexed character of the negotiations was suggested by the tortuous language of the final communiqué. “We seek to share with all parties ... the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in ... negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050,” it read.
This was nonetheless an advance on last year, when the G8 agreed merely to "seriously consider" the goal of halving emissions by 2050.
Without a strong lead from the G8, the onus for finding a global agreement on climate change is likely to fall once more on the stalled talks being led by the United Nations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. Those talks are scheduled to end in December next year.
The G8 leaders today inched forward on climate change, setting a goal to cut emissions by the middle of the century.
A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world’s leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.
Negotiations to hammer out the wording of the communiqué continued all night but as day dawned the small scale of progress in the final text disappointed environmentalists.
European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.
Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December. “We would be naive to expect an issue as difficult as climate change to achieve a breakthrough in less than a year,” said Koji Tsuruoka, one of the Japanese government’s chief negotiators.
Although no global targets were set for cutting emissions by 2020, each of the G8 countries has promised to work unilaterally to cut its own emissions. “The G8 will implement aggressive midterm total emission reduction targets on a country-by-country basis,” said Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, the chair of this year’s G8.
Each nation will however be free to set its own mid-term emissions target, allowing it to tailor its response to the nature of its economy.
Environmentalists poured scorn on the announcement. "The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," a statement by the environmental group WWF said. “WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."
Friends of the Earth said that it was worried that the G8 had failed to set a baseline year from which the 2050 cuts will be measured. Friends of the Earth says that 1990 should be used, the same year used in the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty, but in comments Mr Fukuda seemed to indicate that the baseline would be taken as this year.
The vexed character of the negotiations was suggested by the tortuous language of the final communiqué. “We seek to share with all parties ... the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in ... negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050,” it read.
This was nonetheless an advance on last year, when the G8 agreed merely to "seriously consider" the goal of halving emissions by 2050.
Without a strong lead from the G8, the onus for finding a global agreement on climate change is likely to fall once more on the stalled talks being led by the United Nations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. Those talks are scheduled to end in December next year.
G-8 promises to halve emissions by 2050
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Published: July 8, 2008
RUSUTSU, Japan: Pledging to "move toward a low-carbon society," leaders of the world's richest nations Tuesday endorsed the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, but did not specify whether the starting point would be current levels or 1990 levels, and refused to set a short-term target for reducing the gases that scientists agree are warming the planet.
The declaration by the Group of 8 - the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia - came under intense criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity and said it ignored the urgent need to cut emissions more rapidly.
But European leaders, who have long pressed President George W. Bush to adopt a more aggressive stance on climate change, said they were pleased with the agreement, which is nonbinding. They cast it as an important step toward laying the groundwork for a binding international treaty, to be negotiated in Copenhagen in 2009 under the auspices of the United Nations.
"This is a strong signal to citizens around the world," the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said at a news conference near here. "The science is clear, the economic case for action is stronger than ever. Now we need to go the extra mile to secure an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen."
The climate change document was among a series of communiqués the Group of 8 leaders issued Tuesday, the second day of their three-day gathering on the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. In addition to global warming, they tackled food security, the global economy and aid to Africa at the meeting, which is being held in a mountain-top hotel under the gaze of 21,000 police officers guarding against potential protesters.
On food security, the leaders said they were "deeply concerned that the steep rise in food prices" could push "millions more back into poverty." On the global economy, the leaders insisted they "remain positive," but conceded financial markets face "serious strains."
On aid to Africa, they agreed to monitor their own progress, a victory for Bush, who has complained countries are not living up to a 2005 promise to double development assistance by 2010. But advocates said the Africa communiqué rolled back important past commitments on health and education.
It was climate change that drew the most attention. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan, the host of the meeting, made addressing global warming a high priority for the talks, just as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany did last year, when she was the host to the G-8 gathering at Heiligendamm.
In a brief appearance with Bush before the agreement was announced, Merkel said she was "very satisfied" with the leaders' progress.
But there was confusion over whether the cuts would be from current levels or the 1990 levels discussed at Heiligendamm. Fukuda, in a question-and-answer session with reporters, seemed to indicate it would be current levels.
That prompted harsh criticism. Phil Clapp, an expert in climate change at the Pew Environment Group who is here monitoring the talks, said, "The science shows that we have to reduce 80 to 90 percent from current levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."
Another American climate change expert who is here in Japan for the meeting, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the communiqué "a missed opportunity," adding, "What was needed was a clear signal that the world's major industrialized countries would provide real leadership in cutting their own emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2020."
The feelings of advocates were perhaps best summed up in a full-page advertisement in The Financial Times on Tuesday placed by Avaaz.org, an international online advocacy group. The ad showed the faces of Fukuda, Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada pasted onto the cutesy Japanese character branded Hello Kitty.
"Hello Kiddies," the headline read. "Be a Grown-Up. Set 2020 climate targets now."
Cutting emissions in half is just the first step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere once released.
As long as more is emitted than oceans or plants can absorb, its concentration will rise. Such natural sinks only soak up about half of the current annual output of about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. And fuel emissions are projected to rise relentlessly, driven by fast-expanding economies in Asia. On Wednesday, the Group of 8 will take up the climate control issue again, this time with the "Outreach 5" leaders of developing nations, including China and India.
Bush has insisted that no climate change agreement is workable without the participation of the so-called major economies - others call them "major emitters" - particularly China and India.
In a victory for Bush, the declaration issued Tuesday adopted that line of thinking, as well as the White House contention that fighting global warming will require advances in clean technology as well as conservation.
The White House was pleased. "These are significant advances over the collective thinking," said Dan Price, Bush's deputy national security adviser and the lead American negotiator here.
"It has always been the case that a long-term goal is one that must be shared," said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "So what the G-8 has offered today is a G-8 view of what that goal could be and should be, but that can only occur with the agreement of all the other parties."
Some advocacy groups called it a wasted opportunity and inadequate to meet the challenge of global warming, reflecting their argument that deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions should be enforced more rapidly.
Kumi Naidoo, a leader of an alliance called the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, said in a telephone interview from Japan that the G-8 action was "significantly too slow for us," calling the negotiations "a battle of words which underscores a lack of political will." He took particular issue with the White House, saying Bush had "really held back the negotiation, passing the buck to China and India and not accepting that climate change is a catastrophe that the industrialized countries have caused."
Another environmental group, WWF, said in a statement: "The G-8 are responsible for 62 percent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem."
But the major emitters that are not part of the G-8 - China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil - sounded skeptical. Their leaders were meeting in Sapporo, about two hours from here, on Tuesday, to prepare for the session Wednesday. They have been pressing for the industrialized nations to commit to a short-term goal, and issued their own communiqué, saying it was "essential that developed countries take the lead."
The South African minister of environmental affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, issued a blistering statement criticizing the G-8 climate change declaration, calling it a concession to "the lowest common denominator" and "regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris and Andrew Revkin from New York.
Published: July 8, 2008
RUSUTSU, Japan: Pledging to "move toward a low-carbon society," leaders of the world's richest nations Tuesday endorsed the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, but did not specify whether the starting point would be current levels or 1990 levels, and refused to set a short-term target for reducing the gases that scientists agree are warming the planet.
The declaration by the Group of 8 - the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia - came under intense criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity and said it ignored the urgent need to cut emissions more rapidly.
But European leaders, who have long pressed President George W. Bush to adopt a more aggressive stance on climate change, said they were pleased with the agreement, which is nonbinding. They cast it as an important step toward laying the groundwork for a binding international treaty, to be negotiated in Copenhagen in 2009 under the auspices of the United Nations.
"This is a strong signal to citizens around the world," the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said at a news conference near here. "The science is clear, the economic case for action is stronger than ever. Now we need to go the extra mile to secure an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen."
The climate change document was among a series of communiqués the Group of 8 leaders issued Tuesday, the second day of their three-day gathering on the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. In addition to global warming, they tackled food security, the global economy and aid to Africa at the meeting, which is being held in a mountain-top hotel under the gaze of 21,000 police officers guarding against potential protesters.
On food security, the leaders said they were "deeply concerned that the steep rise in food prices" could push "millions more back into poverty." On the global economy, the leaders insisted they "remain positive," but conceded financial markets face "serious strains."
On aid to Africa, they agreed to monitor their own progress, a victory for Bush, who has complained countries are not living up to a 2005 promise to double development assistance by 2010. But advocates said the Africa communiqué rolled back important past commitments on health and education.
It was climate change that drew the most attention. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan, the host of the meeting, made addressing global warming a high priority for the talks, just as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany did last year, when she was the host to the G-8 gathering at Heiligendamm.
In a brief appearance with Bush before the agreement was announced, Merkel said she was "very satisfied" with the leaders' progress.
But there was confusion over whether the cuts would be from current levels or the 1990 levels discussed at Heiligendamm. Fukuda, in a question-and-answer session with reporters, seemed to indicate it would be current levels.
That prompted harsh criticism. Phil Clapp, an expert in climate change at the Pew Environment Group who is here monitoring the talks, said, "The science shows that we have to reduce 80 to 90 percent from current levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."
Another American climate change expert who is here in Japan for the meeting, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the communiqué "a missed opportunity," adding, "What was needed was a clear signal that the world's major industrialized countries would provide real leadership in cutting their own emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2020."
The feelings of advocates were perhaps best summed up in a full-page advertisement in The Financial Times on Tuesday placed by Avaaz.org, an international online advocacy group. The ad showed the faces of Fukuda, Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada pasted onto the cutesy Japanese character branded Hello Kitty.
"Hello Kiddies," the headline read. "Be a Grown-Up. Set 2020 climate targets now."
Cutting emissions in half is just the first step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere once released.
As long as more is emitted than oceans or plants can absorb, its concentration will rise. Such natural sinks only soak up about half of the current annual output of about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. And fuel emissions are projected to rise relentlessly, driven by fast-expanding economies in Asia. On Wednesday, the Group of 8 will take up the climate control issue again, this time with the "Outreach 5" leaders of developing nations, including China and India.
Bush has insisted that no climate change agreement is workable without the participation of the so-called major economies - others call them "major emitters" - particularly China and India.
In a victory for Bush, the declaration issued Tuesday adopted that line of thinking, as well as the White House contention that fighting global warming will require advances in clean technology as well as conservation.
The White House was pleased. "These are significant advances over the collective thinking," said Dan Price, Bush's deputy national security adviser and the lead American negotiator here.
"It has always been the case that a long-term goal is one that must be shared," said Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "So what the G-8 has offered today is a G-8 view of what that goal could be and should be, but that can only occur with the agreement of all the other parties."
Some advocacy groups called it a wasted opportunity and inadequate to meet the challenge of global warming, reflecting their argument that deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions should be enforced more rapidly.
Kumi Naidoo, a leader of an alliance called the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, said in a telephone interview from Japan that the G-8 action was "significantly too slow for us," calling the negotiations "a battle of words which underscores a lack of political will." He took particular issue with the White House, saying Bush had "really held back the negotiation, passing the buck to China and India and not accepting that climate change is a catastrophe that the industrialized countries have caused."
Another environmental group, WWF, said in a statement: "The G-8 are responsible for 62 percent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem."
But the major emitters that are not part of the G-8 - China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil - sounded skeptical. Their leaders were meeting in Sapporo, about two hours from here, on Tuesday, to prepare for the session Wednesday. They have been pressing for the industrialized nations to commit to a short-term goal, and issued their own communiqué, saying it was "essential that developed countries take the lead."
The South African minister of environmental affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, issued a blistering statement criticizing the G-8 climate change declaration, calling it a concession to "the lowest common denominator" and "regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris and Andrew Revkin from New York.
Analysis: G8 sidestep the issue on climate change
Philippe Naughton, and Richard Lloyd Parry, Lake Toya, Japan
That the G8's newly stated "goal" of a 50-per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 is deliberately vague in its wording almost goes without saying. No-one really expected the leaders of the world's major economies to be taking the lead on climate change, especially with George W Bush still in the White House.
Politically, however, today's G8 statement on climate change is a carefully worded text that gives each G8 delegation something to go home with even it fails to give any satisfaction to environmental campaigners.
Last time around, in Heiligendamm, Germany, the G8 nations skated fairly quickly over the issue of climate change, but agreed, in the chairman's final statement, to "consider seriously the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050".
This time, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, they issued a lengthy statement on what the world needs to do to combat the threat of global warming, including the development of clean technologies and new market mechanisms.
But they moved only fractionally closer to a binding target on reducing carbon emissions, instead putting the onus on the negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol which is due to be wrapped up at a UN summit in Copenhagen next year.
Today's communique stated: "We seek to share with all Parties to the UNFCCC the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in the UNFCCC negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."
By putting the onus onto the UN, the communique allows Western European nations to take the lead ahead of the Copenhagen summit in the push for stronger emissions targets. The phrase "at least" allows them to argue that a 50-per cent reduction by 2050 should be seen as just a starting point.
But even that reduction is just a "goal", not a binding target - which would not have been accepted by either the United States or Canada, both of which are major energy producers and consumers.
Environmental campaigners said that the communique glaringly misses out any mention of two key aspects to a deal: an interim target, for 2020 or 2030 for example, and a clear statement of the base year from which the reductions will be counted.
The Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, used the base year of 1990, which at the time was seen as advantageous for the Europeans and difficult for the Japanese, who had already made energy efficiency gains in the 1990s. Japan argued at this year's G8 for a new base year of 2006, which would make it easier to meet any future targets.
Green groups and aid agencies reacted with disappointment to the latest G8 text, including its use of committed aid funding to help developing countries tacked climate change.
“The G8’s endorsement of a tepid ’50 by 50’ climate goal leaves us with a 50/50 chance of a climate meltdown," said Antonio Hill, a spokesman for Oxfam.
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, added: “The G8 leaders have failed the world again. We needed tough targets for the richest countries to slash emissions in the next 100 months, but instead we got ambiguous long-term targets for the world in general.
“The G8 could and should have ruled out the scores of new coal-fired power stations set to be built across the industrialised world, threatening any hope we have of beating climate change. Instead we got a festival of vacuous back-slapping that bore no relation to the scientific reality we face as inhabitants of a warming world. Thank God this was Bush’s last G8.”
That the G8's newly stated "goal" of a 50-per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 is deliberately vague in its wording almost goes without saying. No-one really expected the leaders of the world's major economies to be taking the lead on climate change, especially with George W Bush still in the White House.
Politically, however, today's G8 statement on climate change is a carefully worded text that gives each G8 delegation something to go home with even it fails to give any satisfaction to environmental campaigners.
Last time around, in Heiligendamm, Germany, the G8 nations skated fairly quickly over the issue of climate change, but agreed, in the chairman's final statement, to "consider seriously the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050".
This time, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, they issued a lengthy statement on what the world needs to do to combat the threat of global warming, including the development of clean technologies and new market mechanisms.
But they moved only fractionally closer to a binding target on reducing carbon emissions, instead putting the onus on the negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol which is due to be wrapped up at a UN summit in Copenhagen next year.
Today's communique stated: "We seek to share with all Parties to the UNFCCC the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in the UNFCCC negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."
By putting the onus onto the UN, the communique allows Western European nations to take the lead ahead of the Copenhagen summit in the push for stronger emissions targets. The phrase "at least" allows them to argue that a 50-per cent reduction by 2050 should be seen as just a starting point.
But even that reduction is just a "goal", not a binding target - which would not have been accepted by either the United States or Canada, both of which are major energy producers and consumers.
Environmental campaigners said that the communique glaringly misses out any mention of two key aspects to a deal: an interim target, for 2020 or 2030 for example, and a clear statement of the base year from which the reductions will be counted.
The Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, used the base year of 1990, which at the time was seen as advantageous for the Europeans and difficult for the Japanese, who had already made energy efficiency gains in the 1990s. Japan argued at this year's G8 for a new base year of 2006, which would make it easier to meet any future targets.
Green groups and aid agencies reacted with disappointment to the latest G8 text, including its use of committed aid funding to help developing countries tacked climate change.
“The G8’s endorsement of a tepid ’50 by 50’ climate goal leaves us with a 50/50 chance of a climate meltdown," said Antonio Hill, a spokesman for Oxfam.
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, added: “The G8 leaders have failed the world again. We needed tough targets for the richest countries to slash emissions in the next 100 months, but instead we got ambiguous long-term targets for the world in general.
“The G8 could and should have ruled out the scores of new coal-fired power stations set to be built across the industrialised world, threatening any hope we have of beating climate change. Instead we got a festival of vacuous back-slapping that bore no relation to the scientific reality we face as inhabitants of a warming world. Thank God this was Bush’s last G8.”
G8: Electric cars on agenda after carbon 'victory'
Leaders hail breakthrough after persuading US to agree for the first time to adopt target for reducing carbon emissions
Philip Webster and Richard Lloyd Parry
European leaders claimed a climate change breakthrough yesterday after persuading the United States and other sceptics to agree for the first time to adopt a target for reducing carbon emissions.
Gordon Brown hailed “major progress” and said that leaders had signed up to a series of practical measures to reduce dependence on fuel. He predicted that in Britain electric cars could become the norm one day.
Despite disappointment among environmental groups and some nations that the summit had not gone farther, Mr Brown said that counties that had once rejected international targets had now accepted them. The G8, which said only last year that it would seriously consider a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050, agreed yesterday that it would aim for at least 50 per cent and that it would consider and adopt the target.
Critics swiftly pointed out that the summit had failed to agree on a target for cuts by 2020 with neither President Bush nor Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, willing to be bound by a medium-term agreement.
The target agreement comes before a UN summit next year in Copenhagen to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The summit persuaded the World Bank to redirect funds so that $150 billion (£75 billion) was spent in developing countries in the next three years to help them to change to cleaner technologies.
Mr Brown said that Britain's target to reduce new car emissions would inevitably lead to the day of the hybrid, electric and battery-powered car. The electric car could become the family car, and even electric sports cars were in development.
He told reporters that clean cars would be exempt from car tax - and suggested that high oil prices could prove “to the benefit of car drivers” by pushing forward alternatives. “These hybrid cars, as we are finding with discussions in America and Japan, are cars within the range for families - not just for a few but cars that the ordinary family would think of buying.”
The G8 also agreed a list of 25 areas where more prosperous countries could help by cutting energy use - including abandoning traditional light bulbs and cutting power used by appliances on standby.
The energy efficiency standards will be drawn up by an energy conference in Japan in the coming months and then fed into a meeting of oil producers and consumers being hosted by Mr Brown in London, which he said would take place in December, before being put in the hands of a permanent international body.
Yesterday's statement addressed total world emissions rather than just those produced by wealthy countries, and critics attacked it for failing to go much beyond the G8 statement last year. The communiqué also did not set a base year from which emissions would be cut.
“So little progress after a whole year of minister meetings and negotiations is not only a wasted opportunity, it falls dangerously short of what is needed to protect people and nature from climate change,” said Kim Carstensen, the director of WWF Global Climate Initiative.
Philip Webster and Richard Lloyd Parry
European leaders claimed a climate change breakthrough yesterday after persuading the United States and other sceptics to agree for the first time to adopt a target for reducing carbon emissions.
Gordon Brown hailed “major progress” and said that leaders had signed up to a series of practical measures to reduce dependence on fuel. He predicted that in Britain electric cars could become the norm one day.
Despite disappointment among environmental groups and some nations that the summit had not gone farther, Mr Brown said that counties that had once rejected international targets had now accepted them. The G8, which said only last year that it would seriously consider a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050, agreed yesterday that it would aim for at least 50 per cent and that it would consider and adopt the target.
Critics swiftly pointed out that the summit had failed to agree on a target for cuts by 2020 with neither President Bush nor Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, willing to be bound by a medium-term agreement.
The target agreement comes before a UN summit next year in Copenhagen to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The summit persuaded the World Bank to redirect funds so that $150 billion (£75 billion) was spent in developing countries in the next three years to help them to change to cleaner technologies.
Mr Brown said that Britain's target to reduce new car emissions would inevitably lead to the day of the hybrid, electric and battery-powered car. The electric car could become the family car, and even electric sports cars were in development.
He told reporters that clean cars would be exempt from car tax - and suggested that high oil prices could prove “to the benefit of car drivers” by pushing forward alternatives. “These hybrid cars, as we are finding with discussions in America and Japan, are cars within the range for families - not just for a few but cars that the ordinary family would think of buying.”
The G8 also agreed a list of 25 areas where more prosperous countries could help by cutting energy use - including abandoning traditional light bulbs and cutting power used by appliances on standby.
The energy efficiency standards will be drawn up by an energy conference in Japan in the coming months and then fed into a meeting of oil producers and consumers being hosted by Mr Brown in London, which he said would take place in December, before being put in the hands of a permanent international body.
Yesterday's statement addressed total world emissions rather than just those produced by wealthy countries, and critics attacked it for failing to go much beyond the G8 statement last year. The communiqué also did not set a base year from which emissions would be cut.
“So little progress after a whole year of minister meetings and negotiations is not only a wasted opportunity, it falls dangerously short of what is needed to protect people and nature from climate change,” said Kim Carstensen, the director of WWF Global Climate Initiative.
Bush agrees to target on greenhouse gases
By David Pilling in Toyako and Fiona Harvey in London
Published: July 8 2008 04:23
George W. Bush bowed to pressure from other world leaders on climate change on Tuesday, agreeing for the first time to a long-term target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The decision to set a goal of halving emissions by 2050, in line with scientific advice, at the Group of Eight meeting of industrialised nations in Japan, marked what is likely to be the US president’s final contribution to the climate change debate.
The G8 leaders agreed to “consider and adopt . . . the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response”.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the agreement was “very positive in that it talks about an ambitious economy-wide goal”.
However, he warned that a long-term goal was insufficient without shorter term commitments too: “What I completely miss in this is any reference to what the G8 countries want their emissions to be in 2020.”
Yasuo Fukuda, prime minister of Japan, said leaders had been “able to overcome [their] differences to come to this agreement”.
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who was at the talks, said he was “very happy” with the deal, and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, hailed it as “major progress”.
Mr Bush’s agreement, after more than a year of promising to commit to a long-term goal without proposing what that goal should be, moves the climate change debate forward significantly. If developing nations agree to the proposed halving of global emissions by mid-century – which is likely – then one of the most important components of an international accord to replace the Kyoto protocol will be close to settlement.
The UN is locked in negotiations, begun last December and scheduled to finish in late 2009, over the shape of an international agreement on climate change to succeed the Kyoto protocol when its main provisions expire in 2012.
Green campaigners poured scorn on the deal. Tom Sharman of ActionAid said: “They are passing the buck to China and India.”
Additional reporting by Krishna Guha and George Parker
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Published: July 8 2008 04:23
George W. Bush bowed to pressure from other world leaders on climate change on Tuesday, agreeing for the first time to a long-term target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The decision to set a goal of halving emissions by 2050, in line with scientific advice, at the Group of Eight meeting of industrialised nations in Japan, marked what is likely to be the US president’s final contribution to the climate change debate.
The G8 leaders agreed to “consider and adopt . . . the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response”.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the agreement was “very positive in that it talks about an ambitious economy-wide goal”.
However, he warned that a long-term goal was insufficient without shorter term commitments too: “What I completely miss in this is any reference to what the G8 countries want their emissions to be in 2020.”
Yasuo Fukuda, prime minister of Japan, said leaders had been “able to overcome [their] differences to come to this agreement”.
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who was at the talks, said he was “very happy” with the deal, and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, hailed it as “major progress”.
Mr Bush’s agreement, after more than a year of promising to commit to a long-term goal without proposing what that goal should be, moves the climate change debate forward significantly. If developing nations agree to the proposed halving of global emissions by mid-century – which is likely – then one of the most important components of an international accord to replace the Kyoto protocol will be close to settlement.
The UN is locked in negotiations, begun last December and scheduled to finish in late 2009, over the shape of an international agreement on climate change to succeed the Kyoto protocol when its main provisions expire in 2012.
Green campaigners poured scorn on the deal. Tom Sharman of ActionAid said: “They are passing the buck to China and India.”
Additional reporting by Krishna Guha and George Parker
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
The U.S. Keeps Its Global Commitments
July 8, 2008;
If you've ever been through a G-8 Summit, right about now you're probably feeling like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." That's the one where he plays a man forced to live the same day over and over.
In much the same way, G-8 meetings follow a familiar script year after year. They begin with leaders issuing lofty statements on a checklist of "global challenges." They continue with TV footage of riot police struggling with the global protester brigade. And they finish with news stories quoting unnamed diplomats sighing that American obstinacy has just lost the world its last chance for some great advance on some issue vital for humanity.
The good news is that this week's summit in Japan may be the one in which we finally awake from the G-8 version of "Groundhog Day." And when we do, we will find that the president has now succeeded in baking into the G-8 process a time-honored Texas principle. It's called "put up or shut up."
That's not how it will read in the official G-8 communiqués, of course. Instead, these statements will speak diplomatically of "accountability." And this time, they will give us something we have never seen before: country-by-country breakdowns of how well nations are living up to their G-8 commitments.
What a revolutionary concept: Judging a nation's commitment to problem-solving by whether its money matches its mouth. The first reports come out today, and will track how well G-8 members live up to promises to tackle health scourges such as polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria. These reports should have a salutary effect on the public debate.
For while the rhetoric about Uncle Sam's global leadership tends to the harsh and negative, the record tells a different story. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. has taken the lead on issues from combating malaria to breaking down trade barriers that keep the crops of poor African farmers out of First World markets. No one else is even close.
Take HIV/AIDS. Before the president launched his Emergency Program for Aids Relief in 2003, only 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa afflicted with the disease were receiving treatment. Since then, the U.S. has helped deliver lifesaving treatment to nearly 1.5 million Africans – many of them women and children. To put this in perspective, the president's AIDS initiative is the largest commitment ever by any nation for an international health initiative dedicated to a single disease.
At last year's summit in Germany, the president called on members to stem the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. They responded by committing to spend billions of dollars on care for tens of millions, and treatment for five million. When the accountability reports are released, we'll know who is doing their part – and who is falling short.
The aim is to ensure that old promises are kept before new ones are made. Under the old dynamic, summits were characterized by haggling over this or that sentence in a document that few ever read and even fewer had any intention of living up to. The new way should help shift the emphasis away from pie-in-the-sky promises (which are easy to make) to on-the-ground delivery of real results (which takes hard work and follow-through).
The president has taken much the same approach on climate. For many years, the preferred M.O. – as illustrated by Kyoto – was long-term and theoretical. Rich countries agreed to mandatory reductions in their greenhouse emissions that if fully implemented would cost their economies untold billions of dollars. Meanwhile, countries like China and India – developing nations that are also major emitters – were let off the hook.
The president argued that there could be no real progress unless all major emitters were part of the deal. He also suggested that instead of trying to regulate ourselves into carbon Nirvana – which would succeed only in wrecking our economy – we would be far better off investing in cleaner and more efficient technologies. So guess what happened? Tomorrow the G-8 members will sit down with leaders of the developing world's major economies to look for a better way forward. And don't be surprised if by the end of this summit we have G-8 backing for another Bush initiative: a Clean Technology Fund to help developing countries move from older, dirtier and cheaper technologies to cleaner and more advanced versions that they otherwise could not afford.
On issue after issue, the president has pushed for global policies and reforms that are opening up new opportunities, bringing relief to the suffering, and introducing a measure of sanity to the debate on climate. Maybe one day we will all wake up to a world willing to give him some credit for it.
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com
If you've ever been through a G-8 Summit, right about now you're probably feeling like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." That's the one where he plays a man forced to live the same day over and over.
In much the same way, G-8 meetings follow a familiar script year after year. They begin with leaders issuing lofty statements on a checklist of "global challenges." They continue with TV footage of riot police struggling with the global protester brigade. And they finish with news stories quoting unnamed diplomats sighing that American obstinacy has just lost the world its last chance for some great advance on some issue vital for humanity.
The good news is that this week's summit in Japan may be the one in which we finally awake from the G-8 version of "Groundhog Day." And when we do, we will find that the president has now succeeded in baking into the G-8 process a time-honored Texas principle. It's called "put up or shut up."
That's not how it will read in the official G-8 communiqués, of course. Instead, these statements will speak diplomatically of "accountability." And this time, they will give us something we have never seen before: country-by-country breakdowns of how well nations are living up to their G-8 commitments.
What a revolutionary concept: Judging a nation's commitment to problem-solving by whether its money matches its mouth. The first reports come out today, and will track how well G-8 members live up to promises to tackle health scourges such as polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria. These reports should have a salutary effect on the public debate.
For while the rhetoric about Uncle Sam's global leadership tends to the harsh and negative, the record tells a different story. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. has taken the lead on issues from combating malaria to breaking down trade barriers that keep the crops of poor African farmers out of First World markets. No one else is even close.
Take HIV/AIDS. Before the president launched his Emergency Program for Aids Relief in 2003, only 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa afflicted with the disease were receiving treatment. Since then, the U.S. has helped deliver lifesaving treatment to nearly 1.5 million Africans – many of them women and children. To put this in perspective, the president's AIDS initiative is the largest commitment ever by any nation for an international health initiative dedicated to a single disease.
At last year's summit in Germany, the president called on members to stem the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. They responded by committing to spend billions of dollars on care for tens of millions, and treatment for five million. When the accountability reports are released, we'll know who is doing their part – and who is falling short.
The aim is to ensure that old promises are kept before new ones are made. Under the old dynamic, summits were characterized by haggling over this or that sentence in a document that few ever read and even fewer had any intention of living up to. The new way should help shift the emphasis away from pie-in-the-sky promises (which are easy to make) to on-the-ground delivery of real results (which takes hard work and follow-through).
The president has taken much the same approach on climate. For many years, the preferred M.O. – as illustrated by Kyoto – was long-term and theoretical. Rich countries agreed to mandatory reductions in their greenhouse emissions that if fully implemented would cost their economies untold billions of dollars. Meanwhile, countries like China and India – developing nations that are also major emitters – were let off the hook.
The president argued that there could be no real progress unless all major emitters were part of the deal. He also suggested that instead of trying to regulate ourselves into carbon Nirvana – which would succeed only in wrecking our economy – we would be far better off investing in cleaner and more efficient technologies. So guess what happened? Tomorrow the G-8 members will sit down with leaders of the developing world's major economies to look for a better way forward. And don't be surprised if by the end of this summit we have G-8 backing for another Bush initiative: a Clean Technology Fund to help developing countries move from older, dirtier and cheaper technologies to cleaner and more advanced versions that they otherwise could not afford.
On issue after issue, the president has pushed for global policies and reforms that are opening up new opportunities, bringing relief to the suffering, and introducing a measure of sanity to the debate on climate. Maybe one day we will all wake up to a world willing to give him some credit for it.
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com
Queen and Charles join race to build government-sponsored ecotowns
· 5,000-home project from MoD and royal estate · Prince's foundation to advise on local input
James Meikle
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
The Queen and the Prince of Wales have joined the race to be part of the government's controversial ecotown scheme, with the crown estate acting as partner in a consortium that hopes to built a town of 5,000 houses near Nottingham.
Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment has been asked to advise on the scheme's design and to try to ensure community involvement from the outset for the project.
The prince has been personally involved in the development of "more sustainable" communities. He set up the Poundbury development on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorset a decade ago and is now helping develop a town with homes for 12,000 people at Sherford, near Plymouth, and a 4,000-home ecovillage near Neath, Wales. His foundation has also advised government bodies developing "urban extensions" to existing towns.
The crown estate, which manages a £7bn portfolio of the Queen's property and gives its revenue to the Treasury, has joined up with the MoD and the company Newton Nottingham LLP to develop property owned by the three around the former RAF base at Newton, near Bingham in Nottinghamshire.
The site replaces another previously selected, at nearby Kingston on Soar, the suitability of which was questioned by civil servants. The Guardian understands the government's housing department approached the landowners to see if they would put together an outline proposal.
Details remain sketchy at this stage because the partners in the scheme claim they want to involve the local community from the start. But the proposals include discounted public transport passes for residents, car-free areas and restricted parking zones, food and biomass fuel production, home-based offices, and business units for local graduates. Two or three primary schools are planned as well as "significant levels" of low-cost and social housing for rent.
Nick Harper, head of asset management and development for the crown, speaking for all the landowners, said: "We are keen to engage with residents and politicians to hear more about their ideas and aspirations and hope that our initial assessment will provide a sound platform on which an informed debate can be taken forward."
Hank Dittmar, chief executive of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, said stand-alone towns had to meet several principles for true sustainability. "We would be looking for a genuine mix of types of homes, jobs and amenities, such that everyday needs could be met within a five-minute walk ... we're interested in evolving vernacular building traditions - by which we mean building methods and materials that are synonymous with a particular area - to meet 21st century challenges of post peak oil, climate change and population growth."
In the past fortnight three developers have dropped out of building ecotowns. Gallagher Estates, which is behind one of two overlapping bids to create an ecotown south of Bedford, became the latest developer to withdraw.
The Guardian revealed yesterday that a consortium behind an ecotown at Curborough, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, had quit, while East Lindsey district council, in Lincolnshire, last month pulled out from a list of 17 shortlisted bids for 15 sites. Now there are only 13 sites left from which the government intends to select five to 10 ecotown projects.
Tories, whose pledge is to scrap any ecotown plans not enjoying local support, claim the wheels are coming off the government's scheme as many of the bids have fallen short on green credentials.
James Meikle
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
The Queen and the Prince of Wales have joined the race to be part of the government's controversial ecotown scheme, with the crown estate acting as partner in a consortium that hopes to built a town of 5,000 houses near Nottingham.
Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment has been asked to advise on the scheme's design and to try to ensure community involvement from the outset for the project.
The prince has been personally involved in the development of "more sustainable" communities. He set up the Poundbury development on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorset a decade ago and is now helping develop a town with homes for 12,000 people at Sherford, near Plymouth, and a 4,000-home ecovillage near Neath, Wales. His foundation has also advised government bodies developing "urban extensions" to existing towns.
The crown estate, which manages a £7bn portfolio of the Queen's property and gives its revenue to the Treasury, has joined up with the MoD and the company Newton Nottingham LLP to develop property owned by the three around the former RAF base at Newton, near Bingham in Nottinghamshire.
The site replaces another previously selected, at nearby Kingston on Soar, the suitability of which was questioned by civil servants. The Guardian understands the government's housing department approached the landowners to see if they would put together an outline proposal.
Details remain sketchy at this stage because the partners in the scheme claim they want to involve the local community from the start. But the proposals include discounted public transport passes for residents, car-free areas and restricted parking zones, food and biomass fuel production, home-based offices, and business units for local graduates. Two or three primary schools are planned as well as "significant levels" of low-cost and social housing for rent.
Nick Harper, head of asset management and development for the crown, speaking for all the landowners, said: "We are keen to engage with residents and politicians to hear more about their ideas and aspirations and hope that our initial assessment will provide a sound platform on which an informed debate can be taken forward."
Hank Dittmar, chief executive of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, said stand-alone towns had to meet several principles for true sustainability. "We would be looking for a genuine mix of types of homes, jobs and amenities, such that everyday needs could be met within a five-minute walk ... we're interested in evolving vernacular building traditions - by which we mean building methods and materials that are synonymous with a particular area - to meet 21st century challenges of post peak oil, climate change and population growth."
In the past fortnight three developers have dropped out of building ecotowns. Gallagher Estates, which is behind one of two overlapping bids to create an ecotown south of Bedford, became the latest developer to withdraw.
The Guardian revealed yesterday that a consortium behind an ecotown at Curborough, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, had quit, while East Lindsey district council, in Lincolnshire, last month pulled out from a list of 17 shortlisted bids for 15 sites. Now there are only 13 sites left from which the government intends to select five to 10 ecotown projects.
Tories, whose pledge is to scrap any ecotown plans not enjoying local support, claim the wheels are coming off the government's scheme as many of the bids have fallen short on green credentials.
Fertile ground for exploitation
Adding iron to the seabed to generate the growth of microscopic plants is the latest solution to dealing with CO2. But is it safe?
Chris Baker
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age." The late American oceanographer John Martin's inflammatory comment - alluding to geological records that suggest there were high levels of iron in the ocean during the glaciations - was never likely to win prizes for making friends and influencing people.
Martin's "iron hypotheses", put forward in early 1990s, suggested seeding plankton-low areas of ocean in order to hotwire the so-called biological pump - a naturally occurring phenomenon that sequesters CO2 on the seabed.
His ocean fertilisation theory has never had an easy ride. Some researchers argue that it is an inefficient way of capturing and storing CO2; others say the technology could have disastrous consequences, such as damaging ecosystems, inadvertently releasing more potent greenhouse gasses such as methane, or stimulating the growth of toxic algae.
Scientists around the world began to test the idea, adding nutrients, usually iron, to the sea and watching what happened next. But it was not until fairly recently, when commercial companies began taking an interest in exploiting Martin's idea in order to make money from the carbon market, that the antennae of scientists and environment groups really began to twitch.
Carbon credits
Jim Thomas, researcher and writer at the Ottawa-based technology watchdog ETC Group, says: "It is the cheapest way of making carbon credits. Whether you mess up the oceans in the process does not matter to them as long as they can make money out of it."
The concerns recently prompted the UN's convention on biological diversity (CBD) to agree a moratorium on commercial ocean fertilisation, and on all but small-scale, scientifically controlled tests in coastal waters, at least until the technology is properly understood - already dubbed the first global attempt to police geo-engineering.
"Basically, it means nations around the world have agreed they are not going to permit large-scale ocean fertilisation to go ahead," Thomas says. "The work-round is to do small-scale, strictly scientific - not commercial - tests that are not for using or generating carbon credits."
The biological pump itself is quite elegant. Phytoplankton (microscopic marine plants) at or near the ocean's surface convert CO2 into organic matter and oxygen, and when they die carry small amounts carbon to the seabed, where it is stored in sediments for millions of years.
There is a physical pump too, where CO2 dissolves in the ocean at high latitudes, is carried to depth by sinking currents, and stays there for hundreds of years before returning to the surface. Exploiting the latter by piping liquid CO2 direct to the deep ocean has also been proposed, a different technology to ocean fertilisation but which has provoked many similar concerns.
Victor Smetacek, professor of biological oceanography at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, was chief scientist on the European iron fertilisation experiment - the most recent and most thorough of about a dozen major ocean fertilisation tests. Three tonnes of iron sulphate - made from powder you can buy at garden centres to treat lawns - was poured from the research vessel Polarstern into a 150 sq km eddy in the southern ocean.
A bloom of phytoplankton occurred almost immediately, as expected. What surprised the scientists was the discovery four weeks later of a vast amount of dead and dying matter from their manmade bloom, sinking extraordinarily quickly. It was something nobody had properly witnessed before, and, as Smetacek says, "one of nature's mechanisms to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere, and ultimately global climate". The results are so far unpublished but, according to Smetacek, a "significant amount" of carbon sank with the dying bloom.
He says: "There is no question our bloom behaved the way blooms are supposed to behave, they build up and then they sink. We found it sinking down the water column, and all the previous experiments did not find that. I am of the opinion that you cannot afford not to do it, iron fertilisation. On the other hand, the outstanding question is who is going to do it? Is somebody going to make a profit out of it? I think this is too important to be left to the mercy of the profit-makers."
In about a third of the oceans - the so-called paradoxical zones - the growth of phytoplankton is limited by lack of iron, a nutrient essential for life. Adding iron to a quarter of the world's seas, in areas where amounts of the mineral are low, would, according to ocean fertilisation's proponents, remove about 1bn tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere - roughly 15% of what accumulates annually because of human activity.
"If you get it wrong on that scale, things could be a bit serious," says Chris Vivian, chair of the Scientific Group of the London Convention, which regulates dumping waste at sea and has issued its own "statement of concern" about ocean fertilisation. "If we wanted to have an impact, we would probably have to do something on that scale. And if it worked, we would have to do this continuously, year after year after year. It is a continuous activity, which is another concern."
Gung-ho fertilisation
The moratorium is not a legal instrument and cannot be enforced, although countries usually respect CBD decisions. Southern countries, whose seas have been the target for commercial trials, were the most vocal in favour of a moratorium, supported by European nations. Worryingly for some, the US, home to the most gung-ho commercial ocean fertilisation companies, is not a signatory to the convention.
According to Dr Margaret Leinen, the chief science of Climos - whose aim is to use sea power to fight climate change - the CBD requested that governments exercise the precautionary principle and ensure further tests are adequately controlled, rather than specify an outright suspension. "They did not impose a moratorium, they identified conditions that they thought should be met," she says. "We have no disagreements with this call for scientific justification, an analysis of risk, and regulatory control."
Small-scale is expected to be defined at about the size of those experiments already carried out: 100-200 sq km. San Francisco-based Climos, the leading commercial ocean fertilisation company, has proposed testing an area of 40,000 sq km. Already, some scientific organisations have criticised the prohibition of large-scale trials, arguing it puts too strict a restriction on research.
David Santillo, senior scientist at Greenpeace International's research laboratory in Exeter, says: "It would be like doing an experiment in a laboratory with no ceiling, no walls and no floor. If something goes wrong, there is very little they could do, even if they could discover something had gone wrong in the first place.
"What they have come up with in terms of the moratorium is quite reasonable.What they have said is that there should be no pursuit of this, except small-scale experiments . . . which stops some of the more aggressive commercial exploitation of this and lets some experiments proceed.
If Martin were still alive, he would probably retract his incendiary comment about an ice age. Many would not. For the latter, the moratorium on ocean fertilisation is an important first step towards trying to control geo-engineered, sometimes science fiction-like, attempts to solve the climate crisis.
Chris Baker
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age." The late American oceanographer John Martin's inflammatory comment - alluding to geological records that suggest there were high levels of iron in the ocean during the glaciations - was never likely to win prizes for making friends and influencing people.
Martin's "iron hypotheses", put forward in early 1990s, suggested seeding plankton-low areas of ocean in order to hotwire the so-called biological pump - a naturally occurring phenomenon that sequesters CO2 on the seabed.
His ocean fertilisation theory has never had an easy ride. Some researchers argue that it is an inefficient way of capturing and storing CO2; others say the technology could have disastrous consequences, such as damaging ecosystems, inadvertently releasing more potent greenhouse gasses such as methane, or stimulating the growth of toxic algae.
Scientists around the world began to test the idea, adding nutrients, usually iron, to the sea and watching what happened next. But it was not until fairly recently, when commercial companies began taking an interest in exploiting Martin's idea in order to make money from the carbon market, that the antennae of scientists and environment groups really began to twitch.
Carbon credits
Jim Thomas, researcher and writer at the Ottawa-based technology watchdog ETC Group, says: "It is the cheapest way of making carbon credits. Whether you mess up the oceans in the process does not matter to them as long as they can make money out of it."
The concerns recently prompted the UN's convention on biological diversity (CBD) to agree a moratorium on commercial ocean fertilisation, and on all but small-scale, scientifically controlled tests in coastal waters, at least until the technology is properly understood - already dubbed the first global attempt to police geo-engineering.
"Basically, it means nations around the world have agreed they are not going to permit large-scale ocean fertilisation to go ahead," Thomas says. "The work-round is to do small-scale, strictly scientific - not commercial - tests that are not for using or generating carbon credits."
The biological pump itself is quite elegant. Phytoplankton (microscopic marine plants) at or near the ocean's surface convert CO2 into organic matter and oxygen, and when they die carry small amounts carbon to the seabed, where it is stored in sediments for millions of years.
There is a physical pump too, where CO2 dissolves in the ocean at high latitudes, is carried to depth by sinking currents, and stays there for hundreds of years before returning to the surface. Exploiting the latter by piping liquid CO2 direct to the deep ocean has also been proposed, a different technology to ocean fertilisation but which has provoked many similar concerns.
Victor Smetacek, professor of biological oceanography at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, was chief scientist on the European iron fertilisation experiment - the most recent and most thorough of about a dozen major ocean fertilisation tests. Three tonnes of iron sulphate - made from powder you can buy at garden centres to treat lawns - was poured from the research vessel Polarstern into a 150 sq km eddy in the southern ocean.
A bloom of phytoplankton occurred almost immediately, as expected. What surprised the scientists was the discovery four weeks later of a vast amount of dead and dying matter from their manmade bloom, sinking extraordinarily quickly. It was something nobody had properly witnessed before, and, as Smetacek says, "one of nature's mechanisms to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere, and ultimately global climate". The results are so far unpublished but, according to Smetacek, a "significant amount" of carbon sank with the dying bloom.
He says: "There is no question our bloom behaved the way blooms are supposed to behave, they build up and then they sink. We found it sinking down the water column, and all the previous experiments did not find that. I am of the opinion that you cannot afford not to do it, iron fertilisation. On the other hand, the outstanding question is who is going to do it? Is somebody going to make a profit out of it? I think this is too important to be left to the mercy of the profit-makers."
In about a third of the oceans - the so-called paradoxical zones - the growth of phytoplankton is limited by lack of iron, a nutrient essential for life. Adding iron to a quarter of the world's seas, in areas where amounts of the mineral are low, would, according to ocean fertilisation's proponents, remove about 1bn tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere - roughly 15% of what accumulates annually because of human activity.
"If you get it wrong on that scale, things could be a bit serious," says Chris Vivian, chair of the Scientific Group of the London Convention, which regulates dumping waste at sea and has issued its own "statement of concern" about ocean fertilisation. "If we wanted to have an impact, we would probably have to do something on that scale. And if it worked, we would have to do this continuously, year after year after year. It is a continuous activity, which is another concern."
Gung-ho fertilisation
The moratorium is not a legal instrument and cannot be enforced, although countries usually respect CBD decisions. Southern countries, whose seas have been the target for commercial trials, were the most vocal in favour of a moratorium, supported by European nations. Worryingly for some, the US, home to the most gung-ho commercial ocean fertilisation companies, is not a signatory to the convention.
According to Dr Margaret Leinen, the chief science of Climos - whose aim is to use sea power to fight climate change - the CBD requested that governments exercise the precautionary principle and ensure further tests are adequately controlled, rather than specify an outright suspension. "They did not impose a moratorium, they identified conditions that they thought should be met," she says. "We have no disagreements with this call for scientific justification, an analysis of risk, and regulatory control."
Small-scale is expected to be defined at about the size of those experiments already carried out: 100-200 sq km. San Francisco-based Climos, the leading commercial ocean fertilisation company, has proposed testing an area of 40,000 sq km. Already, some scientific organisations have criticised the prohibition of large-scale trials, arguing it puts too strict a restriction on research.
David Santillo, senior scientist at Greenpeace International's research laboratory in Exeter, says: "It would be like doing an experiment in a laboratory with no ceiling, no walls and no floor. If something goes wrong, there is very little they could do, even if they could discover something had gone wrong in the first place.
"What they have come up with in terms of the moratorium is quite reasonable.What they have said is that there should be no pursuit of this, except small-scale experiments . . . which stops some of the more aggressive commercial exploitation of this and lets some experiments proceed.
If Martin were still alive, he would probably retract his incendiary comment about an ice age. Many would not. For the latter, the moratorium on ocean fertilisation is an important first step towards trying to control geo-engineered, sometimes science fiction-like, attempts to solve the climate crisis.
Pollution: Value of global carbon trading is already nearly double last year's figure at £30bn
Mark Milner, industrial editor
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
The value of carbon traded on the world's markets reached €38bn (£30bn) in the first half of this year, almost double the total for the whole of 2007, according to the market analysis and consulting group, Point Carbon.
The world's trade in CO2 was dominated by the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS), which has accounted for 70% of all trades so far this year and which will grow further after the inclusion of aviation emissions from 2012, according to the report.
The ETS, which covers a series of industrial sectors, sets limits on the amount of CO2 that companies covered by the scheme can emit. Any permits they do not use can be sold, while companies which overrun their allotment have to buy permits to cover the excess. In the first half of the year trades within the ETS hit €30bn, up 161% on the first six months of 2007, according to Point Carbon.
Initially the ETS came in for heavy criticism because allocations were perceived to be too high, allowing companies to meet their targets too easily. The European commission has since tightened the rules, with further changes in the pipeline.
Point Carbon said that although the ETS increased its share of the global market in carbon trades, other markets in the US, Canada and Australia were developing.
Endre Tvinnereim, a senior Point Carbon analyst, said despite its short comings, the Kyoto Protocol was driving the development of the global market.
"The market is no longer immature and precocious, but rather advancing, geographically and in terms of financial sophistication. Unlike other sectors hit by a global downturn this year, the carbon market is in rude health,"
Point Carbon said the increase in the value of carbon changing hands through the market was the result of a series of factors, including an increase in price from €13.36 a tonne in the first half of 2007, to €20.61 in the first six months of this year.
Overall 1.8bn tonnes were traded in the six months to the end of June and the total for the full year is forecast to reach 4.2bn tonnes. Last year traded carbon contracts amounted to 2.7bn tonnes, while in 2003 it was 28m tonnes.
Point Carbon argued that the American presidential election would usher in a new era of American engagement in international climate negotiations, with both presidential candidates supporting a national cap and trade system for CO2 emissions.
The Guardian,
Wednesday July 9, 2008
The value of carbon traded on the world's markets reached €38bn (£30bn) in the first half of this year, almost double the total for the whole of 2007, according to the market analysis and consulting group, Point Carbon.
The world's trade in CO2 was dominated by the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS), which has accounted for 70% of all trades so far this year and which will grow further after the inclusion of aviation emissions from 2012, according to the report.
The ETS, which covers a series of industrial sectors, sets limits on the amount of CO2 that companies covered by the scheme can emit. Any permits they do not use can be sold, while companies which overrun their allotment have to buy permits to cover the excess. In the first half of the year trades within the ETS hit €30bn, up 161% on the first six months of 2007, according to Point Carbon.
Initially the ETS came in for heavy criticism because allocations were perceived to be too high, allowing companies to meet their targets too easily. The European commission has since tightened the rules, with further changes in the pipeline.
Point Carbon said that although the ETS increased its share of the global market in carbon trades, other markets in the US, Canada and Australia were developing.
Endre Tvinnereim, a senior Point Carbon analyst, said despite its short comings, the Kyoto Protocol was driving the development of the global market.
"The market is no longer immature and precocious, but rather advancing, geographically and in terms of financial sophistication. Unlike other sectors hit by a global downturn this year, the carbon market is in rude health,"
Point Carbon said the increase in the value of carbon changing hands through the market was the result of a series of factors, including an increase in price from €13.36 a tonne in the first half of 2007, to €20.61 in the first six months of this year.
Overall 1.8bn tonnes were traded in the six months to the end of June and the total for the full year is forecast to reach 4.2bn tonnes. Last year traded carbon contracts amounted to 2.7bn tonnes, while in 2003 it was 28m tonnes.
Point Carbon argued that the American presidential election would usher in a new era of American engagement in international climate negotiations, with both presidential candidates supporting a national cap and trade system for CO2 emissions.
Alberta to capture CO2 with oil sands revenue
By Bernard Simon in Toronto
Published: July 9 2008 01:16
Alberta is to set aside C$4bn ($3.9bn, €2.5bn, £2bn) of its burgeoning oil and gas revenues for projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The initiative, announced on Tuesday by Ed Stelmach, the Canadian province’s Conservative premier, is a response to increasingly vocal criticism of environmental damage caused by huge projects to exploit the bitumen-like oil sands deposits in north-eastern Alberta.
The C$4bn will be allocated to two funds. One will finance large projects to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from oil sands recovery sites, the plants that upgrade the bitumen into crude oil, and from coal-fired power stations.
The gas would be pumped deep into the earth where it can be trapped for millions of years.
The other fund will finance improved public transport in the province. The extra funds are likely to revive interest in a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton, the province’s two main cities.
The government estimates that the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions brought about by these initiatives would be the equivalent of taking 1m motor vehicles off the road. Mr Stelmach’s plan is also designed to deflect a recent movement in Canada towards carbon taxes.
The neighbouring province of British Columbia this month imposed a carbon tax and the Liberal party, the federal opposition, has made a carbon tax a central part of its policy platform with its proposed levy offset by personal and corporate income tax cuts.
Carbon capture and storage projects are under way in the UK, Norway, Denmark and Australia. In north America, a group of oil and gas producers has piped more than 7m tonnes of CO2 from North Dakota into a depleted oilfield near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
The Alberta government on Tuesday said that porous sedimentary rock formations in the province beneath non-porous geology were well suited to secure, long-term storage of vast quantities of CO2.
The funds will come from this year’s budget surplus which, the province said, would be “significantly larger than predicted” owing to the surge in oil and natural gas royalties. The surplus was estimated at C$1.6bn in April’s budget.
The province has already repaid all its debt. It has the lowest corporate tax rate among Canada’s 10 provinces and is the only one without a retail sales tax.
Critics have accused the long-ruling Conservative government of overspending, thereby fuelling labour and raw material shortages as well as inflation. They have urged the government to save a higher proportion of its oil and gas revenues for the day when oil and gas prices drop.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Published: July 9 2008 01:16
Alberta is to set aside C$4bn ($3.9bn, €2.5bn, £2bn) of its burgeoning oil and gas revenues for projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The initiative, announced on Tuesday by Ed Stelmach, the Canadian province’s Conservative premier, is a response to increasingly vocal criticism of environmental damage caused by huge projects to exploit the bitumen-like oil sands deposits in north-eastern Alberta.
The C$4bn will be allocated to two funds. One will finance large projects to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from oil sands recovery sites, the plants that upgrade the bitumen into crude oil, and from coal-fired power stations.
The gas would be pumped deep into the earth where it can be trapped for millions of years.
The other fund will finance improved public transport in the province. The extra funds are likely to revive interest in a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton, the province’s two main cities.
The government estimates that the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions brought about by these initiatives would be the equivalent of taking 1m motor vehicles off the road. Mr Stelmach’s plan is also designed to deflect a recent movement in Canada towards carbon taxes.
The neighbouring province of British Columbia this month imposed a carbon tax and the Liberal party, the federal opposition, has made a carbon tax a central part of its policy platform with its proposed levy offset by personal and corporate income tax cuts.
Carbon capture and storage projects are under way in the UK, Norway, Denmark and Australia. In north America, a group of oil and gas producers has piped more than 7m tonnes of CO2 from North Dakota into a depleted oilfield near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
The Alberta government on Tuesday said that porous sedimentary rock formations in the province beneath non-porous geology were well suited to secure, long-term storage of vast quantities of CO2.
The funds will come from this year’s budget surplus which, the province said, would be “significantly larger than predicted” owing to the surge in oil and natural gas royalties. The surplus was estimated at C$1.6bn in April’s budget.
The province has already repaid all its debt. It has the lowest corporate tax rate among Canada’s 10 provinces and is the only one without a retail sales tax.
Critics have accused the long-ruling Conservative government of overspending, thereby fuelling labour and raw material shortages as well as inflation. They have urged the government to save a higher proportion of its oil and gas revenues for the day when oil and gas prices drop.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Airlines flying in and out of Europe must cut CO2 emissions from 2012
David Gow in Brussels
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 8, 2008
All airlines flying to and from the EU will be forced to cut their carbon dioxide emissions from 2012 under a compromise deal approved by MEPs today.
But the initial cut will be only 3% of average 2004-06 emission levels, rising to 5% in 2013, and airlines will be handed out 85% of their pollution permits for free. MEPs also dropped earlier plans for intra-EU flights to be affected from 2011.
Even so, angry airlines struggling with higher fuel prices warned that their inclusion within the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS), its flagship mechanism for fighting climate change, would bring extra costs, higher fares and no environmental benefit.
MEPs voted 640 to 30, with 30 abstentions, to endorse a heavily watered down version of proposals first launched by the European commission and due to be rubber-stamped by ministers within the next few weeks.
Their vote could trigger an escalation of a dispute with the US which could seek legal action over the inclusion of non-European airlines within the ETS. MEPs hope a new president in the White House will be more amenable to a global deal on the issue.
Hailing the vote, Stavros Dimas, EU environment commissioner, said greenhouse gas emissions from international air transport were increasing faster than from any other sector in the EU.
They account for only 3% of overall emissions but have grown by 87% since 1990 and could more than double on current trends by 2020. Dimas said someone flying from London to New York and back generates as much CO2 as the average EU citizen does by heating their home for a year.
He held out the threat to deepen the planned emission cuts for aviation and reduce the number of free permits from as early as 2013 under an ETS review he is now undertaking. But smaller airlines will be exempt and fast-growing start-ups will be given free permits.
Friends of the Earth Europe aviation campaigner Richard Dyer said the deal was "so weak it will have little impact on the rocketing growth in CO2 pollution from flying" and the EU should press for international aviation and shipping to be included in the next (post-2012) phase of the UN climate change treaty. He said airlines should bid for all their pollution permits.
Peter Liese, a German Christian Democrat MEP who helped broker the final compromise, said revenues generated from auctioned allowances should not disappear into the general state budget but be earmarked for funding green public transport through lower taxes and research into clean aircraft.
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 8, 2008
All airlines flying to and from the EU will be forced to cut their carbon dioxide emissions from 2012 under a compromise deal approved by MEPs today.
But the initial cut will be only 3% of average 2004-06 emission levels, rising to 5% in 2013, and airlines will be handed out 85% of their pollution permits for free. MEPs also dropped earlier plans for intra-EU flights to be affected from 2011.
Even so, angry airlines struggling with higher fuel prices warned that their inclusion within the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS), its flagship mechanism for fighting climate change, would bring extra costs, higher fares and no environmental benefit.
MEPs voted 640 to 30, with 30 abstentions, to endorse a heavily watered down version of proposals first launched by the European commission and due to be rubber-stamped by ministers within the next few weeks.
Their vote could trigger an escalation of a dispute with the US which could seek legal action over the inclusion of non-European airlines within the ETS. MEPs hope a new president in the White House will be more amenable to a global deal on the issue.
Hailing the vote, Stavros Dimas, EU environment commissioner, said greenhouse gas emissions from international air transport were increasing faster than from any other sector in the EU.
They account for only 3% of overall emissions but have grown by 87% since 1990 and could more than double on current trends by 2020. Dimas said someone flying from London to New York and back generates as much CO2 as the average EU citizen does by heating their home for a year.
He held out the threat to deepen the planned emission cuts for aviation and reduce the number of free permits from as early as 2013 under an ETS review he is now undertaking. But smaller airlines will be exempt and fast-growing start-ups will be given free permits.
Friends of the Earth Europe aviation campaigner Richard Dyer said the deal was "so weak it will have little impact on the rocketing growth in CO2 pollution from flying" and the EU should press for international aviation and shipping to be included in the next (post-2012) phase of the UN climate change treaty. He said airlines should bid for all their pollution permits.
Peter Liese, a German Christian Democrat MEP who helped broker the final compromise, said revenues generated from auctioned allowances should not disappear into the general state budget but be earmarked for funding green public transport through lower taxes and research into clean aircraft.
Fuel prices force airlines into action
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Published: July 8, 2008
ROME: The airline industry is traditionally seen as a bad actor in the global emissions debate. Air travel is by far the fastest-growing source of global greenhouse gas emissions, still rising by about 5 percent a year.
Want to reduce your personal carbon footprint? A round-trip flight for a family of four from London to Los Angeles generates more carbon emissions than commuting by car for a year. It is, indeed, a worrisome and hard-to-resolve trajectory.
But it's summertime, people are flying, so here's a bit of light at the end of this tunnel: A recent report by the international economic research group Innovest describes how the airline industry is now "leading efforts to develop sustainable biofuels," and it points to some level of success.
"The prospects for this type of fuel are very long term, but in the midterm (next generation of airliners) biofuel and regular or synthetic fuel blends are likely, with potential for a dramatic reduction in emissions," the report said.
Given the price of oil, the industry's interest in finding alternatives to fossil fuels, of course, makes sense - the goal not being just greener aircraft but also the industry's survival. With oil prices doubling in the past year, fuel now accounts for 30 percent to 50 percent of airlines' costs.
If governments insist that airline ticket prices reflect the "cost" of airplane emissions into the atmosphere - as the EU plans - fares could skyrocket to a point where they were unaffordable. If the full costs of carbon emissions are factored into the equation, the price of a three-hour flight could rise by $756, the Innovest report said. With that, few airlines would manage to stay in business.
Necessity, then, is the mother of invention.
"If there ever was an incentive to create alternative fuels, $140-a-barrel oil is it," said Paul Charles, communications director of Virgin Atlantic, though he added that the "environmental issue is still the primary incentive."
Charles predicted that given the fast pace of current research, "it is likely that within five years you'll have commercial jets flying on algae - it will be as quick and dramatic as the shift to digital TV."
A number of airlines and aircraft makers are furiously exploring alternative fuels. Virgin led the pack, flying a jumbo jet from London to Amsterdam this year with one of its four tanks using biofuel, in this case made of a blend of coconut oil and nuts. Other airlines have followed.
This month, Rob Fyfe, the chief executive of Air New Zealand, committed to running its fleet on 10 percent biofuels by 2013. He further vowed to use only biofuels made from nonfood plants, focusing on importing fuel from jatropha plantations in Africa and India. Jatropha is a plant that grows in semiarid regions, and its oil can be converted into jet fuel.
Biofuels "present particularly exciting opportunities when placed against a backdrop of jet fuel prices that have recently been as high as $174 a barrel," Fyfe said.
Japan Airlines says it will run a flight partly on biofuel by next spring.
Sébastien Remy, who is in charge of Airbus's alternative fuel program, predicts that 25 percent of jet fuel will be derived from nonpetroleum sources by 2025. In the past few years, research has shown that jet engines today can run on properly refined biofuels, so no mechanical modifications are essential.
Industry experts are pinning their hope on oil from algae, because it is cheap and easily convertible into a fuel that can be used in a plane. Companies like Boeing and Chevron, as well as the U.S. military, are working on the technology.
A couple of years ago most airlines were combating climate change with public relations. And public relations is certainly still a problem. This past week, the British Advertising Standards Agency criticized EasyJet for claiming that its flights generated 22 percent less emissions than traditional airlines.
But sky-high fuel prices are moving polluters to genuine action. Fuel prices are the best friend the environment has these days. Are the airlines' efforts science fiction?
Electric cars and planes powered by algae fuel are technically possible if the research, money and will are there. So now with oil prices high and carbon taxes on the horizon, the industry should be able to find alternatives that will insure its survival, and spare the environment as well.
Published: July 8, 2008
ROME: The airline industry is traditionally seen as a bad actor in the global emissions debate. Air travel is by far the fastest-growing source of global greenhouse gas emissions, still rising by about 5 percent a year.
Want to reduce your personal carbon footprint? A round-trip flight for a family of four from London to Los Angeles generates more carbon emissions than commuting by car for a year. It is, indeed, a worrisome and hard-to-resolve trajectory.
But it's summertime, people are flying, so here's a bit of light at the end of this tunnel: A recent report by the international economic research group Innovest describes how the airline industry is now "leading efforts to develop sustainable biofuels," and it points to some level of success.
"The prospects for this type of fuel are very long term, but in the midterm (next generation of airliners) biofuel and regular or synthetic fuel blends are likely, with potential for a dramatic reduction in emissions," the report said.
Given the price of oil, the industry's interest in finding alternatives to fossil fuels, of course, makes sense - the goal not being just greener aircraft but also the industry's survival. With oil prices doubling in the past year, fuel now accounts for 30 percent to 50 percent of airlines' costs.
If governments insist that airline ticket prices reflect the "cost" of airplane emissions into the atmosphere - as the EU plans - fares could skyrocket to a point where they were unaffordable. If the full costs of carbon emissions are factored into the equation, the price of a three-hour flight could rise by $756, the Innovest report said. With that, few airlines would manage to stay in business.
Necessity, then, is the mother of invention.
"If there ever was an incentive to create alternative fuels, $140-a-barrel oil is it," said Paul Charles, communications director of Virgin Atlantic, though he added that the "environmental issue is still the primary incentive."
Charles predicted that given the fast pace of current research, "it is likely that within five years you'll have commercial jets flying on algae - it will be as quick and dramatic as the shift to digital TV."
A number of airlines and aircraft makers are furiously exploring alternative fuels. Virgin led the pack, flying a jumbo jet from London to Amsterdam this year with one of its four tanks using biofuel, in this case made of a blend of coconut oil and nuts. Other airlines have followed.
This month, Rob Fyfe, the chief executive of Air New Zealand, committed to running its fleet on 10 percent biofuels by 2013. He further vowed to use only biofuels made from nonfood plants, focusing on importing fuel from jatropha plantations in Africa and India. Jatropha is a plant that grows in semiarid regions, and its oil can be converted into jet fuel.
Biofuels "present particularly exciting opportunities when placed against a backdrop of jet fuel prices that have recently been as high as $174 a barrel," Fyfe said.
Japan Airlines says it will run a flight partly on biofuel by next spring.
Sébastien Remy, who is in charge of Airbus's alternative fuel program, predicts that 25 percent of jet fuel will be derived from nonpetroleum sources by 2025. In the past few years, research has shown that jet engines today can run on properly refined biofuels, so no mechanical modifications are essential.
Industry experts are pinning their hope on oil from algae, because it is cheap and easily convertible into a fuel that can be used in a plane. Companies like Boeing and Chevron, as well as the U.S. military, are working on the technology.
A couple of years ago most airlines were combating climate change with public relations. And public relations is certainly still a problem. This past week, the British Advertising Standards Agency criticized EasyJet for claiming that its flights generated 22 percent less emissions than traditional airlines.
But sky-high fuel prices are moving polluters to genuine action. Fuel prices are the best friend the environment has these days. Are the airlines' efforts science fiction?
Electric cars and planes powered by algae fuel are technically possible if the research, money and will are there. So now with oil prices high and carbon taxes on the horizon, the industry should be able to find alternatives that will insure its survival, and spare the environment as well.
MEPs vote to increase cost of European flights
By Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 9:02PM BST 08/07/2008
A family of four could face paying almost £160 more for holiday flights after the European Parliament voted to impose pollution limits on the airline industry, it is claimed.
The European Commission said the decision was a big step in helping meet the EU's legal obligation under the Kyoto Climate Agreement to cut its CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012.
But it acknowledged this would mean a rise in fares.
"Fully passing on costs to customers would mean that by 2020 airline tickets for an average return journey could increase by 4.60 euros (£3.65) to 39.6 euros (£31.4) depending on the journey length," said the Commission's impact assessment report on the plan.
But Michael O'Leary boss of Europe's biggest budget airline Ryanair said it would add up to £39 to the cost of an airline ticket without providing any environmental benefits.
This would be equivalent to an extra £156 for return flights for a couple with two children.
The move, which for the first time will bring airlines within Europe's CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), also infuriated US officials and US-based airlines who said the EU had no right to force airlines using its airspace to abide by the ETS rules.
From January 1 2012 all airlines flying in and out of European Union countries or flying within the EU, will be subject to CO2 limits.
The biggest industrial polluters, mainly the big power companies, are already part of the ETS under which they are allocated emissions limits set for their sector. If they exceed their CO2 limit they have to buy extra permits to compensate for the pollution they cause. If they keep below their limit they are allowed to sell on their unused allowance.
But until now aviation has been kept out of the scheme. The industry accounts for only an estimated three per cent of total emissions they have grown by almost 90 per cent since 1990 and environmental groups have been pressing for them to be included.
Aircraft emissions will be capped at 97% of their average 2004-2006 level, decreasing to 95% from 2013, subject to review.
Airlines will receive 85% of their emission allowances for free in 2012, but the percentage could be reduced from 2013, again, subject to review closer to the time. The remaining 15% of allowances will be auctioned.
Some flights will be exempt from pollution limits - light aircraft (take-off weight under 5.7 tonnes), emergency services, Customs and military flights, UN-mandated humanitarian flights, research flights and all flights run by small airline companies producing "low" emissions (less than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year).
But official royal and Government flights will be part of the scheme: the agreement makes clear that pollution limits will apply equally to air travel "performed exclusively for the transport, on official mission, of a reigning monarch and immediate family, heads of state, heads of government and government ministers, of an EU member state." Small jets favoured by businessmen and rocks stars are also included.
MEPs voted 640 to 30 for the scheme, which also includes none-EU airlines but it will have to be ratified by the 27 EU member states.
The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) said the cost of emissions trading for European airlines would be £5.6B in the first two years of the scheme and £72B over the 10 years to 2022.
"This legislation will impose massive additional costs on a transport industry that already has to bear unprecedented fuel costs." said ERA director general Mike Ambrose.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary, a bitter critic of environmental policies affecting the airline industry, said:
"It is extraordinary that a bunch of MEPs who swan around between Strasbourg and Brussels, enjoy huge expenses and flight benefits, would vote to increase taxation on Europe's consumers in a measure which won't have any effect at all on the environment, but will further damage European airlines at a time when oil is already 140 dollars a barrel.
"These clowns in the European Parliament seem determined to destroy the European airline industry with these discriminatory taxation penalties. When aviation accounts for less than 2% of Europe's Co2 emissions, and when airlines like Ryanair have invested heavily in new aircraft to reduce our emissions per passenger by 50%, there is no justification for this tax theft by the European Union."
The move was welcomed by the environment lobby but Friends of the Earth said emissions at 97% of 2004-2006 levels in 2012 would still leave CO2 output from aircraft 90% higher than 1990 levels while EU climate change commitments required an actual cut of 8% on 1990 levels.
And giving away 85% of the emissions trading "permits" for free would mean unjustified windfall profits for the airlines.
Liberal Democrat MEP and environment spokesman Chris Davies said MEPs had responded to the "spectacular" pace of air traffic growth, adding: "Air travel across Europe has never been so cheap as it is now, but the real price will be paid by future generations if we don't apply pressure to curb the rise in carbon emissions."
Last Updated: 9:02PM BST 08/07/2008
A family of four could face paying almost £160 more for holiday flights after the European Parliament voted to impose pollution limits on the airline industry, it is claimed.
The European Commission said the decision was a big step in helping meet the EU's legal obligation under the Kyoto Climate Agreement to cut its CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012.
But it acknowledged this would mean a rise in fares.
"Fully passing on costs to customers would mean that by 2020 airline tickets for an average return journey could increase by 4.60 euros (£3.65) to 39.6 euros (£31.4) depending on the journey length," said the Commission's impact assessment report on the plan.
But Michael O'Leary boss of Europe's biggest budget airline Ryanair said it would add up to £39 to the cost of an airline ticket without providing any environmental benefits.
This would be equivalent to an extra £156 for return flights for a couple with two children.
The move, which for the first time will bring airlines within Europe's CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), also infuriated US officials and US-based airlines who said the EU had no right to force airlines using its airspace to abide by the ETS rules.
From January 1 2012 all airlines flying in and out of European Union countries or flying within the EU, will be subject to CO2 limits.
The biggest industrial polluters, mainly the big power companies, are already part of the ETS under which they are allocated emissions limits set for their sector. If they exceed their CO2 limit they have to buy extra permits to compensate for the pollution they cause. If they keep below their limit they are allowed to sell on their unused allowance.
But until now aviation has been kept out of the scheme. The industry accounts for only an estimated three per cent of total emissions they have grown by almost 90 per cent since 1990 and environmental groups have been pressing for them to be included.
Aircraft emissions will be capped at 97% of their average 2004-2006 level, decreasing to 95% from 2013, subject to review.
Airlines will receive 85% of their emission allowances for free in 2012, but the percentage could be reduced from 2013, again, subject to review closer to the time. The remaining 15% of allowances will be auctioned.
Some flights will be exempt from pollution limits - light aircraft (take-off weight under 5.7 tonnes), emergency services, Customs and military flights, UN-mandated humanitarian flights, research flights and all flights run by small airline companies producing "low" emissions (less than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year).
But official royal and Government flights will be part of the scheme: the agreement makes clear that pollution limits will apply equally to air travel "performed exclusively for the transport, on official mission, of a reigning monarch and immediate family, heads of state, heads of government and government ministers, of an EU member state." Small jets favoured by businessmen and rocks stars are also included.
MEPs voted 640 to 30 for the scheme, which also includes none-EU airlines but it will have to be ratified by the 27 EU member states.
The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) said the cost of emissions trading for European airlines would be £5.6B in the first two years of the scheme and £72B over the 10 years to 2022.
"This legislation will impose massive additional costs on a transport industry that already has to bear unprecedented fuel costs." said ERA director general Mike Ambrose.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary, a bitter critic of environmental policies affecting the airline industry, said:
"It is extraordinary that a bunch of MEPs who swan around between Strasbourg and Brussels, enjoy huge expenses and flight benefits, would vote to increase taxation on Europe's consumers in a measure which won't have any effect at all on the environment, but will further damage European airlines at a time when oil is already 140 dollars a barrel.
"These clowns in the European Parliament seem determined to destroy the European airline industry with these discriminatory taxation penalties. When aviation accounts for less than 2% of Europe's Co2 emissions, and when airlines like Ryanair have invested heavily in new aircraft to reduce our emissions per passenger by 50%, there is no justification for this tax theft by the European Union."
The move was welcomed by the environment lobby but Friends of the Earth said emissions at 97% of 2004-2006 levels in 2012 would still leave CO2 output from aircraft 90% higher than 1990 levels while EU climate change commitments required an actual cut of 8% on 1990 levels.
And giving away 85% of the emissions trading "permits" for free would mean unjustified windfall profits for the airlines.
Liberal Democrat MEP and environment spokesman Chris Davies said MEPs had responded to the "spectacular" pace of air traffic growth, adding: "Air travel across Europe has never been so cheap as it is now, but the real price will be paid by future generations if we don't apply pressure to curb the rise in carbon emissions."
Gordon Brown fears backbench revolt over climate change bill
By Urmee Khan and James Kirkup
Last Updated: 9:42PM BST 08/07/2008
Gordon Brown is facing another significant backbench revolt over his climate change policy, it has emerged.
More than 80 MPs are said to be backing an amendment to the Government's Climate Change Bill to make cuts to greenhouse gases far more drastic.
The Bill currently calls for a legally enforceable 60 per cent cut in UK carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
However, the rebel MPs say it should be raised to 80 per cent as the 60 per cent goal will not do enough to control global warming.
The Prime Minister has handed the issue to an independent Climate Change Committee, headed by former CBI chief Lord Adair Turner, who is not expected to report until December.
By then the Climate Change Bill is likely to have passed into law.
The rebels want the Government to either pre-empt Lord Turner's committee and put the 80 per cent goal in the bill now or persuade the peer to report earlier.
The Climate Change Bill completes its detailed committee stage on Tuesday.
The rebel amendment, backed by 85 Labour MPs, was debated a fortnight ago and defeated by the government-dominated committee.
However rebels say their amendment is a marker and are threatening to force a vote on the floor of the Commons at report stage in October or November, if the government does not act.
The amendment Bill is not likely to be debated until after the summer recess, and the Tories may abstain, sparing Mr Brown a defeat.
However there are fears within the government that the Tories could harden up their position and back the rebels target making a government defeat more likely.
Last Updated: 9:42PM BST 08/07/2008
Gordon Brown is facing another significant backbench revolt over his climate change policy, it has emerged.
More than 80 MPs are said to be backing an amendment to the Government's Climate Change Bill to make cuts to greenhouse gases far more drastic.
The Bill currently calls for a legally enforceable 60 per cent cut in UK carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
However, the rebel MPs say it should be raised to 80 per cent as the 60 per cent goal will not do enough to control global warming.
The Prime Minister has handed the issue to an independent Climate Change Committee, headed by former CBI chief Lord Adair Turner, who is not expected to report until December.
By then the Climate Change Bill is likely to have passed into law.
The rebels want the Government to either pre-empt Lord Turner's committee and put the 80 per cent goal in the bill now or persuade the peer to report earlier.
The Climate Change Bill completes its detailed committee stage on Tuesday.
The rebel amendment, backed by 85 Labour MPs, was debated a fortnight ago and defeated by the government-dominated committee.
However rebels say their amendment is a marker and are threatening to force a vote on the floor of the Commons at report stage in October or November, if the government does not act.
The amendment Bill is not likely to be debated until after the summer recess, and the Tories may abstain, sparing Mr Brown a defeat.
However there are fears within the government that the Tories could harden up their position and back the rebels target making a government defeat more likely.
Pollution limits imposed on airlines by MEPs
By Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 6:01pm BST 08/07/2008
The cost of flights throughout Europe are to rise after MEPS voted to impose pollution limits on the airline industry.
For the first time it will bring airlines within Europe’s CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) aimed at cutting greenhouse gases.
Carbon trading could add to the cost of holiday flights
The European Commission said the decision was a big step in helping meet the EU’s legal obligation under the Kyoto Climate Agreement to cut its CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012. But it acknowledged this would mean a rise in fares.
"Fully passing on costs to customers would mean that by 2020 airline tickets for an average return journey could increase by 4.60 euros (£3.65) to 39.6 euros (£31.4) depending on the journey length," said the Commission’s impact assessment report on the plan.
But Michael O’Leary boss of Europe’s biggest budget airline Ryanair said it would add up to £39 to the cost of an airline ticket without providing any environmental benefits.
The move also infuriated US officials and US-based airlines who said the EU had no right to force airlines using its airspace to abide by the ETS rules. From January 1 2012 all airlines flying in and out of European Union countries or flying within the EU, will be subject to CO2 limits.
advertisement
The biggest industrial polluters, mainly the big power companies, are already part of the ETS under which they are allocated emissions limits set for their sector. If they exceed their CO2 limit they have to buy extra permits to compensate for the pollution they cause. If they keep below their limit they are allowed to sell on their unused allowance. But until now aviation has been kept out of the scheme.
The industry accounts for only an estimated three per cent of total emissions they have grown by almost 90 per cent since 1990 and environmental groups have been pressing for them to be included. Aircraft emissions will be capped at 97% of their average 2004-2006 level, decreasing to 95% from 2013, subject to review.
Airlines will receive 85% of their emission allowances for free in 2012, but the percentage could be reduced from 2013, again, subject to review closer to the time.
The remaining 15% of allowances will be auctioned. Some flights will be exempt from pollution limits - light aircraft (take-off weight under 5.7 tonnes); emergency service, Customs and military flights; UN-mandated humanitarian flights; research flights; and all flights run by small airline companies producing "low" emissions (less than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year).
But official royal and Government flights will be part of the scheme: the agreement makes clear that pollution limits will apply equally to air travel "performed exclusively for the transport, on official mission, of a reigning monarch and immediate family, heads of state, heads of government and government ministers, of an EU member state." Small jets favoured by businessmen and rocks stars are alos included.
MEPs voted 640 to 30 for the scheme, which also includes none-EU airlines but it will have to be ratified by the 27 EU member states.
The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) said the cost of emissions trading for European airlines would be £5.6B in the first two years of the scheme and £72B over the 10 years to 2022.
"This legislation will impose massive additional costs on a transport industry that already has to bear unprecedented fuel costs." said ERA director general Mike Ambrose.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, a bitter critic of environmental policies affecting the airline industry, said: "It is extraordinary that a bunch of MEPs who swan around between Strasbourg and Brussels, enjoy huge expenses and flight benefits, would vote to increase taxation on Europe’s consumers in a measure which won’t have any effect at all on the environment, but will further damage European airlines at a time when oil is already 140 dollars a barrel.
"These clowns in the European Parliament seem determined to destroy the European airline industry with these discriminatory taxation penalties. When aviation accounts for less than 2% of Europe’s Co2 emissions, and when airlines like Ryanair have invested heavily in new aircraft to reduce our emissions per passenger by 50%, there is no justification for this tax theft by the European Union."
The move was welcomed by the environment lobby but Friends of the Earth said emissions at 97% of 2004-2006 levels in 2012 would still leave CO2 output from aircraft 90% higher than 1990 levels while EU climate change commitments required an actual cut of 8% on 1990 levels. And giving away 85% of the emissions trading “permits” for free would mean unjustified windfall profits for the airlines.
Liberal Democrat MEP and environment spokesman Chris Davies said MEPs had responded to the "spectacular" pace of air traffic growth, adding: "Air travel across Europe has never been so cheap as it is now, but the real price will be paid by future generations if we don’t apply pressure to curb the rise in carbon emissions."
Last Updated: 6:01pm BST 08/07/2008
The cost of flights throughout Europe are to rise after MEPS voted to impose pollution limits on the airline industry.
For the first time it will bring airlines within Europe’s CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) aimed at cutting greenhouse gases.
Carbon trading could add to the cost of holiday flights
The European Commission said the decision was a big step in helping meet the EU’s legal obligation under the Kyoto Climate Agreement to cut its CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012. But it acknowledged this would mean a rise in fares.
"Fully passing on costs to customers would mean that by 2020 airline tickets for an average return journey could increase by 4.60 euros (£3.65) to 39.6 euros (£31.4) depending on the journey length," said the Commission’s impact assessment report on the plan.
But Michael O’Leary boss of Europe’s biggest budget airline Ryanair said it would add up to £39 to the cost of an airline ticket without providing any environmental benefits.
The move also infuriated US officials and US-based airlines who said the EU had no right to force airlines using its airspace to abide by the ETS rules. From January 1 2012 all airlines flying in and out of European Union countries or flying within the EU, will be subject to CO2 limits.
advertisement
The biggest industrial polluters, mainly the big power companies, are already part of the ETS under which they are allocated emissions limits set for their sector. If they exceed their CO2 limit they have to buy extra permits to compensate for the pollution they cause. If they keep below their limit they are allowed to sell on their unused allowance. But until now aviation has been kept out of the scheme.
The industry accounts for only an estimated three per cent of total emissions they have grown by almost 90 per cent since 1990 and environmental groups have been pressing for them to be included. Aircraft emissions will be capped at 97% of their average 2004-2006 level, decreasing to 95% from 2013, subject to review.
Airlines will receive 85% of their emission allowances for free in 2012, but the percentage could be reduced from 2013, again, subject to review closer to the time.
The remaining 15% of allowances will be auctioned. Some flights will be exempt from pollution limits - light aircraft (take-off weight under 5.7 tonnes); emergency service, Customs and military flights; UN-mandated humanitarian flights; research flights; and all flights run by small airline companies producing "low" emissions (less than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year).
But official royal and Government flights will be part of the scheme: the agreement makes clear that pollution limits will apply equally to air travel "performed exclusively for the transport, on official mission, of a reigning monarch and immediate family, heads of state, heads of government and government ministers, of an EU member state." Small jets favoured by businessmen and rocks stars are alos included.
MEPs voted 640 to 30 for the scheme, which also includes none-EU airlines but it will have to be ratified by the 27 EU member states.
The European Regions Airline Association (ERA) said the cost of emissions trading for European airlines would be £5.6B in the first two years of the scheme and £72B over the 10 years to 2022.
"This legislation will impose massive additional costs on a transport industry that already has to bear unprecedented fuel costs." said ERA director general Mike Ambrose.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, a bitter critic of environmental policies affecting the airline industry, said: "It is extraordinary that a bunch of MEPs who swan around between Strasbourg and Brussels, enjoy huge expenses and flight benefits, would vote to increase taxation on Europe’s consumers in a measure which won’t have any effect at all on the environment, but will further damage European airlines at a time when oil is already 140 dollars a barrel.
"These clowns in the European Parliament seem determined to destroy the European airline industry with these discriminatory taxation penalties. When aviation accounts for less than 2% of Europe’s Co2 emissions, and when airlines like Ryanair have invested heavily in new aircraft to reduce our emissions per passenger by 50%, there is no justification for this tax theft by the European Union."
The move was welcomed by the environment lobby but Friends of the Earth said emissions at 97% of 2004-2006 levels in 2012 would still leave CO2 output from aircraft 90% higher than 1990 levels while EU climate change commitments required an actual cut of 8% on 1990 levels. And giving away 85% of the emissions trading “permits” for free would mean unjustified windfall profits for the airlines.
Liberal Democrat MEP and environment spokesman Chris Davies said MEPs had responded to the "spectacular" pace of air traffic growth, adding: "Air travel across Europe has never been so cheap as it is now, but the real price will be paid by future generations if we don’t apply pressure to curb the rise in carbon emissions."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
