China, U.S. Square Off on Climate Proposals

By JEFFREY BALL and SHAI OSTER
The world's top two greenhouse-gas-producing countries for the first time offered specific targets for controlling their emissions, but their broad promises ahead of a United Nations climate summit merely set the terms for a high-stakes struggle over money and future economic growth.
China kicked off the latest round of global climate poker Thursday when it announced the country would aim to cut its "carbon intensity" -- or the amount of greenhouse gas it emits per unit of gross domestic product -- by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2020. The plan is fundamentally different from those offered by the U.S. and the European Union in that it doesn't pledge to reduce emissions, but rather to slow the rate at which emissions grow.
The move came a day after President Barack Obama announced he would travel to the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to deliver a pledge that the U.S. will cut greenhouse-gas emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.
Left unanswered were a host of questions, most notably how both nations will achieve their cuts at a time when industries across the world are reeling from the recession and in no mood to sacrifice further economic growth in the name of the environment.
The proposals by the U.S. and China -- which together account for 40% of the world's total emissions -- don't address one of the most contentious issues in the climate-change debate: Which countries and industries in the West will pay, and how much they'll pay, to help finance a clean-energy revolution in the developing world, home to many of their toughest competitors.
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China and other developing countries say they want the U.S. and other industrialized nations to pay 1% of their yearly gross domestic products to help the developing world finance emissions reductions.
China notes that the U.S. and Europe developed in an era without constraints on greenhouse-gas emissions, which are produced when fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are burned. Per capita incomes in China are less than a tenth of those in the U.S., despite the dramatic surge in wealth in the country's coastal cities.
If the rest of the world wants China to shift its economy toward a cleaner path, China says, the rest of the world is going to have to help China pay for that transformation. India and other developing countries make a similar argument.
U.S. officials have said they expect to offer some financial assistance to developing countries, but have not specified how much. U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern has said the request for 1% of GDP, which would translate to more than $140 billion for the U.S. alone, is "untethered from reality."
Many U.S. lawmakers and leaders of major U.S. industries are concerned that if the U.S. agrees to hard caps on emissions, and China agrees to become more energy efficient without a cap on growth, U.S. industries will be saddled with higher costs and become less competitive.

The National Association of Manufacturers said Thursday in a statement that it wants additional details on the Obama administration's pledge: "As we evaluate this proposal, we will do so with an eye toward its impact on American jobs, our economic recovery and long-term growth."
Beneath the green rhetoric, the actual promises from the U.S. and China don't appear to go far beyond near-term environmental improvements that the two economies already are on track to achieve, several analysts said. The recession has crimped industrial activity, and both countries have been improving their energy efficiency, because that cuts energy costs.
Enthusiasm for tough climate action has also waned in the U.S. as the economy has soured. The U.S. House passed a climate bill with limits similar to those Mr. Obama will propose in Copenhagen. But the Senate has put off action until spring.
The White House said Thursday that it welcomes "China's intention to cut the growth of their emissions," adding that the "international community will be closely analyzing this proposal."
Neither the Chinese nor the U.S. proposals may satisfy the EU, which has been well ahead of the U.S. in pledging cuts. The bloc's 27 nations have agreed to lower greenhouse-gas emissions 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020, or the equivalent of a 14% cut from 2005 levels. They have also agreed to a larger reduction, equivalent to a 24% cut from 2005 levels by 2020, if other nations outside the bloc make substantial cuts.
Some European leaders suggested that both the U.S. and Chinese pledges were insufficient. Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's climate and energy minister, said leaders "must analyze more carefully" how significant China's pledge is. As for the U.S., said Ms. Hedegaard, the bulk of the promised cleanup appears likely to come many years out.
Both the general idea of capping U.S. emissions and the details of how that cap might be structured remain hugely contentious in the U.S., pitting different regions of the country, and different industries, against each other.
The White House said its target reductions are conditional on Congressional approval. But that wasn't enough for some lawmakers. Sen. James Webb (D., Va.) sent a letter Wednesday to the White House expressing "concern" that U.S. officials "may be intending to commit" the U.S. to an emissions cap at the Copenhagen conference before Congress agrees to anything. Sen. Webb is one of several Democrats from states with significant coal-mining or heavy-industry interests who have expressed opposition to the climate proposals backed by Democrats from coastal states.
Xie Zhenhua, China's top climate envoy, said his country now expects "real action" by the West before the Copenhagen conference on funding and technical support to slow the growth in Chinese emissions. So far, he said, such support hasn't materialized.
China said the West also has failed to live up to its own emission-cutting promises so far. Europe imposed rules capping emissions from much of its industry in 2005, but to date its reductions haven't matched its promises, Chinese officials said.
Emissions through 2008 of the EU nations are down more than 10% since 1990, more than halfway to the target of a 20% cut by 2020.
The pledges by the U.S. and China followed a development in recent days that many analysts said could erode public support for expensive policies to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Hacked emails from an influential U.K. climate-science lab suggest that researchers there tried to squelch scientific challenges to what has become scientific consensus: that human beings are largely responsible for climate change.
The emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. They suggest that many scientists around the world were concerned about the policy implications of a recent decline in average global temperatures. Although global temperatures remain among the hottest on record, they have declined since 2005, according to various measurements.
Opponents of significant curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions have pointed to the disclosed emails as reason to pause before implementing any broad policies.
—Charles Forelle, Stephen Power and Evan Perez contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com and Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com

Obama’s big climate journey: he has a mountain to climb and a gulf to bridge

Giles Whittell in Washington

President Obama has no official engagements for the Thanksgiving weekend but that does not mean that his Blackberry will be switched off. Behind the scenes he has a mountain to climb to sell his new climate change commitments to a sceptical American public.
For all the President’s aspirations to global leadership on climate change there remains a gulf between what the world expects and what he can deliver. That gulf has been exposed by starkly contrasting reactions at home and abroad to his pledge to cut US carbon emissions by 17 per cent relative to their 2005 levels in the next 11 years.
Mr Obama’s target is the first by a US administration in more than a decade, and the most realistic in the history of American involvement in UN-sponsored climate change talks. Yet it was “lower than we would like” and would prove “disappointing to some”, an EU spokesman said. On the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, said that it was likely to prove unacceptable to Congress because “it will harm our economy and have virtually no effect on climate change”.
Between such views the White House finds itself in uncharted territory, balancing the risk of being seen to undermine the Copenhagen conference with that of losing congressional support for Mr Obama’s entire domestic agenda.

His announcement that he will travel to Copenhagen with a concrete carbon reduction proposal has already yielded an historic dividend: yesterday’s response from Beijing — an undertaking to cut Chinese carbon emissions per unit of GDP by at least 40 per cent by 2020 — marks the first time the world’s two biggest polluters have committed themselves to measurable carbon targets as part of UN climate change negotiations. It will also allow Mr Obama to argue that the US is not committing itself to a costly process that demands no sacrifices from developing economies.
China’s exemption, along with India and Brazil, from core requirements of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol led the US Senate to reject it by 95-0.
In Denmark on December 9 Mr Obama will hail an almost complete reversal of US policy on climate change since then. He will point to new US car mileage standards and the passage of a climate change Bill through the House of Representatives as evidence that his Administration has done more to curb greenhouse gas emissions in ten months than its predecessor did in eight years. He will also say that the target of a 17 per cent cut by 2020 should become legally binding in a Bill he hopes to sign next year.
That may be enough to mollify those heading for Copenhagen who have accused him this week of snubbing the conference by appearing at its start — when he happens to be in the neighbourhood collecting the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo — rather than at the leaders’ forum near the end of the conference. Whether Mr Obama can indeed turn his 17 per cent pledge into law is another matter.
Senator John Kerry, Mr Obama’s closest congressional ally on climate change and the author of a stalled Senate climate change Bill, has called the pledge “one hell of a game changer”. Crucially, the US coal and coal-fired power industries have also broadly endorsed the principle of carbon cap-and-trade, by which major polluters receive an allocation of permits to pollute that is lowered year-on-year to meet carbon targets but which rewards firms that move fastest to cleaner technologies by allowing them to sell surplus permits.
“A well-designed cap will provide a smooth transition to clean energy,” James Rogers of Duke Power, one of America’s largest coal-fired power producers, said when lending his support to the Waxman-Markey climate change Bill passed by the House of Representatives this summer.
American Electric Power, Duke’s biggest rival, also endorsed the Waxman-Markey Bill. The company has since started pumping liquefied carbon dioxide thousands of feet beneath its largest plant in West Virginia in a project that it hopes will prove the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS), attracting sufficient federal subsidies to remove carbon from the smokestacks of the plants that still provide 40 per cent of America’s electricity.
The Waxman-Markey Bill set out roughly the same targets adopted by Mr Obama this week. His problem is that it cannot become law until it is merged with a comparable Senate Bill, and the 60 votes needed to pass one are still little more than a White House dream.
Senator John McCain, in the past a staunch campaigner for climate change legislation, is now withholding his support for a new Bill being drafted by Senators Kerry and Lindsey Graham, demanding sweeping guarantees for a new generation of US nuclear power plants before joining them.
Experts believe that Mr McCain will be won over eventually but senators from the major oil-producing states will have to swap sides as well to give a Senate Bill a hope of passing. Robert Dillon, spokesman for the powerful Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, has welcomed Mr Obama’s decision to travel to Copenhagen but he warned on Wednesday that whatever the Administration says there “the real negotiations on reductions happen here in Congress. We pass the laws.”
Environmentalists worry that the White House will concede almost anything to win the votes of the senators whom it regards as proxies for Big Oil because the US legislative timetable is already being squeezed by next year’s mid-term elections. “There is a desperation for getting something done before June next year because of the mid-terms,” a Greenpeace spokesman said.
Meanwhile, America’s climate change sceptics have seized on the hacked British academics’ e-mails that appear to point to the suppression of data that may undermine parts of the UN consensus of climate change science. Carole Browner, Mr Obama’s chief adviser on the subject, has made light of what conservatives are calling “Climategate”, saying: “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists” who continue to support the view that climate change is real and that humans are largely to blame.

Behind the scenes at the biggest deal on Earth

For all the corridor plotting and text chopping the best hope is a fudge. After Copenhagen we’ll turn to wackier solutions
Tony Brenton

Sometime towards the end of the Copenhagen climate conference, Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat and conference chairman, will gather 20 or so people into a back room of the Bella Conference Centre for an all-night session (or two) to do the deal. All the noise and the posturing, the 20,000 delegates, the lobbyists, the dramatic green demonstrators, the 180-page legal negotiating text, will be shut outside.
Those 20 people — representatives of the world’s key climate-change governments — will have in front of them perhaps a ten-page text. They will agree, or not, on greenhouse gas emissions limits for developed countries, financial assistance for developing countries and emissions constraints that developing countries are willing to take on in exchange for that assistance. If they find agreement they will sell it to the wider conference and then to the wider world. It will set our course for at least the decade to come.
What are the chances of success? Of all the negotiations I have been involved with, those on climate have been the hardest to call. This is the biggest piece of international business that mankind has ever done. Huge interests are involved (we are talking about fundamental reform of the world’s trillion-dollar energy sector). Lobbyists, from Exxon to Greenpeace, are stridently present. The range of national interests — from Saudi Arabia’s dependence on hydrocarbons to Vanuatu’s potential submersion — is bewilderingly wide. And because it is so important, the maelstrom of corridor plotting, text chopping, endless reaffirmation of entrenched negotiating positions and rhetoric make it very hard to identify where the centre of gravity might lie.
In the case of Copenhagen the shelving of efforts to finalise a legally binding text demonstrates how complex and fractious things have become. That the negotiation coincides with a world recession limits what rich countries can offer. And the poor world remains obdurate that it will do nothing the rich world won’t pay for. On the other hand, no one wants to take responsibility for failure. The US has come up with its first real offer on emission cuts since its abandonment, a decade ago, of the Kyoto Protocol. Even in India (a benchmark developing country) there is some debate about more flexibility.
So outright failure is unlikely. But it is equally unlikely that Copenhagen will get us right around the climate corner. The probability has to be, at best, an interim deal with lots of work still to do. This is a pity because, behind the fog of negotiation, the political landscape is more positive than it has ever been.
Two key things have changed. First, US public and scientific opinion is much more convinced of the reality of climate change, and the need to deal with it, than was the case at Kyoto. And the US now has an administration ready to take the lead. This doesn’t mean it will be easy to reduce US energy profligacy, but at least the will is now there.
Second, the hitherto refusal of the developing world to contribute to emissions reductions is beginning to fragment. Key players, led by China and Brazil, recognising the potential costs of climate change for themselves as well as the benefits of taking the lead in energy-saving technology, are now looking for ways to constrain their emissions growth. This is a huge step in negotiations that have been dominated by a sterile confrontation between developed and developing blocs. In a world where the annual increase in China’s emissions alone outweighs all of the savings achieved by the Kyoto Protocol, it is a crucial step.
But, while the politics may be moving from red to green, the science tells us that the timing problem is acute. The positive trend is undermined by evangelism winning over objectivity in the scientific debate. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change read more like exercises in advocacy than sober scientific analysis. This has undermined the credibility of their projections and contributed to the growth of “climate agnosticism”, led here by Nigel Lawson.
Even taking into account the huge uncertainties, the picture painted by the IPCC and others is both persuasive and stark. We have perhaps a couple of decades to reduce global emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic climatic effects.
It is hard to see the negotiating process moving fast enough to turn this round. Its first product, the 1991 Rio Convention, was broken-backed at birth. Its second product, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, was abandoned by the US and, to the extent it did succeed, only did so because of the Soviet industrial collapse. The process has been bedevilled by green posturing, overoptimistic target setting, US solipsism and Third World militancy. The “Copenhagen Protocol”, if we get there, will reincorporate the US and begin to place downward pressure on the fastest-growing emissions; those from developing countries. But while those emissions may grow more slowly, they will continue to grow. The governments of the poor are not going to let concern about the climate condemn their people to remain poor.
So radical new approaches are going to be needed. Expect, after Copenhagen, much more talk of carbon taxes and tariffs. Expect, too, sharply increased interest in the various “geoengineering” options recently aired by the Royal Society: global afforestation, deliberate plankton growth, “space mirrors”, artificial volcanoes. Wacky (and hideously difficult to agree) as some of these may seem, they may soon be our only way out.
Tony Brenton was a British diplomat from 1975 to 2009, most recently serving as Ambassador to Moscow

Al Gore and Lord Monckton go head-to-head over climate in spoof video rap battle

Leo Hickman: Brilliantly rapped spoof news report for YouTube channel TheJuiceMedia pits Al Gore against Lord Monckton in a war of words over climate change

It's what the world has been waiting for. We've had the Rumble in the Jungle. And the Thriller in Manilla. But now – following years of trying to get it on– we're proud to bring you news of The Storming of the Warming.
Finally, Al Gore and Lord Monckton have come together to "rap battle" over climate change. Well, sort of.
Hugo Farrant, "an MC/spoken word performer from the UK now based in Melbourne", has put together a brilliantly rapped "news report" for TheJuiceMedia, a YouTube channel which describes itself as "an independent media source for events taking place in Australia relating to indigenous people, history, law and the environment". Farrant, who has clearly done his homework, plays the role of anchorman Robert Foster, as well as the parts of well-known climate combatants Al Gore and Lord Monckton. Neither Gore nor Monckton come out of it too well. Here's a snippet of their rap battle …
Monckton: The IPCC are Marxist trapeze artists, bleeding the free market. We're the target! They'll keep us herded in corners: one currency, one government, a new world order.
Gore: Better than the coroner, Let this fact just sink in: World. Unite, or face the sixth mass extinction, a feedback cycle, the death of the Gulf Stream. We need 'clean coal' or it's the end of the Holocene.
Monckton: That's just postulated, we've got to collate it. Secretly these people want the earth depopulated, a communist dictatorship, a way station, good Christians killed by UN troops and Aids patients.
Gore: You strain my patience, you scaremonger.
Monckton: It's freedom they're plundering, and you're the scaremonger king!
Gore: I got my Nobel prize, I was nearly the president.
Monckton: I share that prize for revealing this evidence.
Gore: You got a pin melted down from a physics experiment.
Monckton: You're a pin melted down from a physics experiment.
Foster: Lord Monckton! Let me hear from you. Have any of your articles been peer-reviewed?
Monckton: Well, no, but the SPPI has published a few.
Foster: The Science and Public Policy Institute. Their chief policy adviser happens to be who?
Monckton: Well, me.
Foster: You? So you publish you. I think we've heard enough from you. People, please, research the truth. Nowadays it isn't tough to do. Mr Gore.
Gore: Robert, we need global governance: A new world order to replace local governments.
Foster: And I suppose who better to comprise it than the very same people who altered the climate.
Gore: Sure, who else?
Hugo Farrant is a name to watch, it seems. Last year, he helped to put together another spoof rap that went viral called Branksome, which was about life on the mean streets of Branksome, a middle-class suburb of Poole in Dorset. It went as far as catching the attention of the Daily Telegraph and the Sun.

Australia's Copenhagen climate strategy is smoke and mirrors

Australian PM Kevin Rudd talks a good climate game, offering 25% emissions cuts. But do the numbers add up?

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 07.00 GMT
This may seem churlish in the week when the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is doing a deal with the opposition to get climate change legislation through the Senate. After all, that puts him one step ahead of Barack Obama.
But it has to be said: Australia has had a ridiculously easy ride on climate change so far. And, whatever Rudd's domestic green credentials, he seems intent on continuing as before. For when Rudd shows up in Copenhagen in a couple of weeks, he will bring a negotiating position almost certain to ensure that, while others make cuts, Australia's emissions remain above 1990 levels until at least 2020.
Australia got lucky in Kyoto back in 1997. I wrote afterwards in New Scientist magazine:
"Australia, which threatened not to accept any limit on its emissions, was made an offer too good to refuse. First came a licence to increase its emissions by 8%. Then, in the final hours, it won an amendment that allows it to benefit massively from past deforestation… Up to 30% of its CO2 emissions in 1990, the baseline date for the targets, were from deforestation. But far from being penalised for this, Australia won the right to count any improvement from this position as a carbon credit. It just has to make sure it doesn't cut down quite as many."
And that is what has happened. Aussies offset rising emissions from cars and power stations by reducing their deforestation, in Queensland and New South Wales in particular. In fact, even before signing in Kyoto, Australia had cut back deforestation emissions from 131m tonnes in 1990 to 75m tonnes. It was, according to an analysis carried out by the Sustainability Council of New Zealand, "the equivalent of Australia starting with an 11% discount on its Kyoto target."
But the story of Australia's emissions without forests – what carbon counters term its "gross emissions" – has been very different. UN statistics today show that gross emissions rose by 30% between 1990 and 2007. Among developed countries, that figure is exceeded only by Spain, Portugal and Iceland.
Some other countries besides Australia had a head's start in meeting Kyoto targets. In Britain, for instance, Margaret Thatcher spent the 1990s shutting down the coal industry for reasons that had little to do with climate change. But many of those countries accepted tougher emissions targets in recognition of that head start. Under a deal with the rest of the European Union, Britain agreed to national cuts of 12.5%.
But Australia has simply milked its good luck, carrying on largely as if Kyoto never happened. As a result, today it has the highest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases of any major developed nation.
In response, a spokesperson for the Australian government said: "Australia does not accept that our base year emissions [1990] are 'inflated'… Deforestation emissions from the Australian continent are a significant part of the national emissions profile. The large reduction in [Australian] deforestation emissions that resulted [from the Kyoto protocol] provides a lesson on the value of international agreement on deforestation emissions."
But since Australia is the world's hottest and driest continent, it is potentially more vulnerable to climate change than any other. That suggests another path would be prudent. And, to be fair, Rudd is aware of that. But he has a tough task persuading his industrialists and hugely powerful coal industry (Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal.)
So what is Australia bringing to Copenhagen? Rudd will be there in person. His headline grabber is the offer of a 25% cut in emissions. Except that the "conditions" he sets the rest of the world for this are so stringent that he is unlikely to have to deliver.
For instance, as the government spokesperson said, it would only be "fair" for Australia to make cuts that deep if other "advanced" countries made cuts "in the middle of the range identified by the IPCC" – that is, between 25-40%.
That's an odd definition of fairness. It is based, according to the spokesperson, on the fact that "Australia faces higher economic costs to achieve equivalent emissions reductions… than most other advanced countries." Funny, but I don't remember Australia offering bigger cuts in Kyoto because it was cheap and easy to end deforestation. Quite the contrary.
Otherwise, Rudd offers a range of reductions from 5-15%. That doesn't sound too bad until you remember the deforestation discount that Australia won in Kyoto. Along with other land-use changes since then, even a 15% "cut" would still allow Australians to emit more from burning coal in power stations, running cars and industry than they did in 1990. About 1% more, according to the analysis by the Sustainability Council of New Zealand.
A new beginning in Copenhagen? Rudd's Copenhagen plan looks like a greenwashed version of the old Kyoto plan.

Scientists target Canada over climate change

Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 22.54 GMT

Prominent campaigners, politicians and scientists have called for Canada to be suspended from the Commonwealth over its climate change policies.
The coalition's demand came before this weekend's Commonwealth heads of government summit in Trinidad and Tobago, at which global warming will top the agenda, and next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite criticism of Canada's environmental policies, the prime minister, Stephen Harper, is to attend the Copenhagen summit. His spokesman said today: "We will be attending the Copenhagen meeting … a critical mass of world leaders will be attending."
Canada's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are among the world's highest and it will not meet the cut required under the Kyoto protocol: by 2007 its emissions were 34% above its reduction target. It is exploiting its vast tar sands reserves to produce oil, a process said to cause at least three times the emissions of conventional oil extraction.
The coalition claims Canada is contributing to droughts, floods and sea level rises in Commonwealth countries such as Bangladesh, the Maldives and Mozambique. Clare Short, the former international development secretary, said: "Countries that fail to help [tackle global warming] should be suspended from membership, as are those that breach human rights."
The World Development Movement, the Polaris Institute in Canada and Greenpeace are among the organisations supporting the plan. Saleemul Huq, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: "If the Commonwealth is serious about holding its members to account, then threatening the lives of millions of people in developing countries should lead to the suspension of Canada's membership immediately."
Canada's environment department refused to comment on the call for it to be suspended.
The Commonwealth comprises 53 states representing 2 billion people. In the past it has suspended Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa for electoral or human rights reasons. Speaking earlier this week, its secretary general, Kamalesh Sharma, said: "I would like to think that our definition of serious violations could embrace much more than it does now."

Battle against climate change begins at home

The Conservatives' Green Deal would help to greatly reduce the 27% of UK carbon emissions that comes from households, writes shadow housing minister, Grant Schapps

Grant Shapps
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 11.49 GMT

Next month world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to thrash out a deal to tackle climate change. Reaching agreement at this UN summit will be the key to addressing one of the defining challenges of our century. But the hard work isn't just setting those targets, it's reaching them. Each country will have to set their own priorities to reduce emissions and here in the UK, we'll need to look close to home.
Twenty-seven per cent of all the carbon emissions in this country actually come from the homes we all live in. So it's clear that improving the carbon footprint of our housing stock is crucial if we are to meet our legally binding carbon reduction targets.
Part of the solution lies in making the new homes we build as energy efficient as possible and I enthusiastically endorse the concept of building all new homes at zero carbon. However, the fact remains that 85% of the housing stock that we'll be living in by 2050 already exists.
So, there is a simple and, once again, inconvenient truth – greening-up the 25m existing homes is essential. The efficiency of these properties has been largely ignored thus far.
Under a Conservative government however we will introduce the Green Deal. Every household in this country will be entitled to an allowance of up to £6,500 for energy improvements. Utilities companies, charities, social landlords will improve homes with no cost to the homeowner.
Healthy competition in retro-fits will create 70,000 new jobs and a £2.5bn marketplace, while consumers save money and most importantly 9.4m tonnes of carbon emissions are avoided. It's a great scheme, but that doesn't necessarily lead to great take-up. The key is to create a trigger for people to easily and quickly sign up for retro-fitting.
Imagine if you could walk into your favourite store, buy some clothes or do your weekly shop and then at the checkout, as you hand over your clubcard, the cashier offers you the prospect of permanently lower utility bills. There's nothing to pay, now or later. Your home will be retro-fitted and all you'll notice is that it costs less to heat and power it. Unless you enjoy burning money, you're going to love the Green Deal. Behind the scenes this retailer is working with the banking sector to fund the £6,500 spent on retro-fitting your home, resulting in home improvements like energy-efficient lighting, modern boilers, cavity and loft insulation.
Under a Conservative government you won't have to imagine this scheme, because the likes of Marks & Spencer and Tesco are already interested and more providers of all types will want to get in on the act. In future you'll be able to pick-up your groceries and green-up your home at the same time.
But living a greener life isn't just about the physical changes you can make to your home; it's about how you live in it too.
Even without retro-fitting our properties, there are plenty of things we can do to influence our energy consumption behaviour. Last year I installed a small device which sits on the window sill in our kitchen and constantly reports how much electricity we're using as a household.
This particular energy monitor is called a Wattson and it expresses itself £s sterling. Worryingly it let us know when we switched everything off, we were still spending about £700 per annum on powering our home.
That's the fridge, the freezer and those TVs and chargers which all prefer to go on standby, rather than off.
With the kettle and toaster on for a cuppa and sandwich the clever little monitor told us that our electricity bill could hit £7,000 per annum.
Now rather than filling the kettle to the top, we put just enough water in for cups we're making. Meanwhile, the kids spend their time hunting round the house searching out left on lights and Nintendo DSs which are charged but still plugged into the mains. Devices like this can really alter habits.
For the first time we also became aware that a TV or computer monitor left on standby costs around 15p per day.
With two, three or maybe four screens in the house that's a couple of hundred pounds per year.
Slashing the 27% of carbon currently emitted from our homes is a big ask. The Green Deal enables a combination of the physical and the behavioural changes needed to make a big difference straight away. It removes barriers currently preventing a domestic green revolution. It gives us a significantly better chance of meeting our Kyoto obligations.
As we head towards the Copenhagen summit the Conservative party understands that the solution to the global challenge of climate change truly begins at home.
• Grant Shapps is the Conservative shadow housing minister

Obama's Copenhagen stopover

The US president's cameo appearance at Copenhagen's climate summit might make more of an impact than his critics realise

Kate Sheppard
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 14.00 GMT
The White House has announced that Barack Obama will travel to Copenhagen for the beginning of the UN summit on climate change next month. Obama will make an appearance at the negotiations on 9 December, a pit stop en route to pick up his Nobel prize in Oslo the following day. There, he plans to tell delegates that the US will commit to cutting emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020.
The move that comes after months of lobbying on the part of citizens concerned that global warming has not gotten due attention. And while many are cheering his decision to attend the summit, the development should be put in its appropriate context. Obama is not planning to return for the end of the summit, which runs until 18 December. That's when approximately 65 other heads of state and government are expected to attend. He's coming early, a visit that will be more geared at setting the tone of the summit rather than sealing a deal at its conclusion – an important distinction.
This shouldn't be seen as a problem; it was already clear that there's not going to be a final treaty in Copenhagen, so the presence of heads of state is not quite as important as once hoped. The real work is still to be done by negotiators, who spend those two weeks in December hashing out the litany of specifics that must still be hashed. If Obama were to show up at the end it would merely be symbolic anyway.
Though it would be nice to see him there alongside other world leaders, his presence would not change the outcome. So while groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the most aggressive of the United States environmental organisations, are basically calling Obama out for treating the summit like a photo-op, that would probably be more true if he showed up at the end to shake hands and pose with other leaders, declaring victory over a non-binding political agreement.
Appearing later – when it wouldn't influence the conversation one way or another – might only lead to a repeat of October's Olympics debacle, wherein Obama showed up in the very same city to much fanfare. His presence didn't change the outcome, and only created bad press. Remember the conservative glee at that failure?
Instead, he is showing up early to set the tone and, for the first time, putting a solid target on the table for emissions cuts. Obama will promise that the US will commit to cutting emissions "in the range of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020," according to a White House official. His presence demonstrates high-level engagement on the issue in the US (even if he should be doing more), and perhaps even shows a desire to go on and earn that Nobel he'll receive the following day.
Let us not underestimate the influence of a real commitment on near-term emissions cuts – a commitment for 2020 that, for the first time, involves actual numbers. That alone is expected to help move the climate talks along. Of course, the 17% figure is not nearly as high as the reductions called for by the European Union, Japan, developing nations, and basically everyone else in the world. It's far from the 25%-40% below 1990 levels that many science and other world leaders acknowledge is necessary. But the hope is that if the US puts out real figures, other key players like China and India will also start talking in real numbers.
And it looks like it might have already prompted that. Today, the Chinese government made an announcement about its ambitious climate policy and action plan (China plans to slow emissions growth by up to 45%). Of course, it was a big deal back in September that China was even willing to talk about specific climate goals. Their announcement will likely be another major development for both the country and international negotiations – and the announcement helps that along.

The cost of adapting to climate change

Farmers in developing countries are already feeling the effects of climate change. What is needed to help them cope is an almost unprecedented shift of resources from north to south, says Anne Perkins
The gap between rhetoric and reality, the developed and developing worlds, is cruelly illustrated by the huge promises and meagre results of successive global gatherings on providing funds to help less developed countries adapt to the changing climate.
On Tuesday, Farm-Africa, one of the Guardian's partners in the Katine project, helped launch Climate Frontline, a collection of African voices reflecting on how their climate has already changed, and how they are adapting to it. It is full of practical ideas – new ways of making liquid compost from animal droppings, or growing maize in pits where moisture is better retained, to name just two.
But unless Copenhagen sets in train a colossal effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, many African communities are going to have to do much more than get smart about soil improvement. Reforestation and irrigation, improved seeds, technology and education are all part of the answer to saving the continent's agricultural potential.
At the Climate Frontline launch at Westminster, Farm-Africa's chief executive, Christie Peacock, warned that despite the experience of generations of farmers in adapting to harsh conditions, "the pace of change is stepping up", while the reaction of the major polluters remained "depressingly poor".
Another speaker, Saleemul Huq, of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), warned that the loss of viable agricultural land could lead to mounting insecurity and the massive relocation of whole peoples, possibly across borders.
The failure of the rainy season is already bringing instability back to some parts of the Teso region of north-east Uganda, in which Katine is found. East of Katine, the Karamojong – whose region is even worse affected – have returned to cattle rustling to replace stock they have lost to drought.
Sub-Saharan Africa is only one of four global regions that will feel the impact of climate change most severely. Island states, coastal areas and the great Asian river deltas are all likely to experience devastating loss of land.
That is why, as long ago as 2001, the protocol agreed at Kyoto included a plan for an adaptation fund. The best feature about it was that it was to be funded by a levy on "clean development mechanism project activities" - that is, it was to depend on funding on the rate at which developed countries reduce their emissions. It was to have an independent source of income rather than relying on vulnerable national pledges of donations.
Sadly, it has taken until now to agree the governance and rules under which it would operate. And although they are hailed as a triumph for a new way of doing business, with developing countries having a majority on the board and the final say on the disbursement of funds, it is still waiting for a steady revenue stream.
Meanwhile other funds have proliferated. The Overseas Development Institute sponsors a site that lists dozens of them from the UN, the World Bank, the EU and some individual countries. As the Guardian reported last month, there is one common feature of the multilateral funds, like the UN's special climate change fund and its less developed countries' fund, and others like the World Bank's loan-based strategic climate fund: the money pledged by individual countries has not been delivered.
Yet the predicted cost of adaptation and mitigation is rising steeply. As the IIED reported in August, it is now estimated at something approaching $150bn a year.
In the likely absence of any deal on targets for emissions reductions at Copenhagen next month, all attention is going to focus on finding a way of guaranteeing that there are reliable, predictable, additional and equitable funds available to the countries that pollute the least and will suffer the effects of global warming the most.
What is needed is an almost unprecedented shift of resources from north to south. It is going to take something like a revolution to get it.

Kiwi Carbon Cramdown

There is no 'good' way to do emissions controls.
New Zealand's government is crowing about the amended cap-and-trade bill passed Wednesday as a "balanced" and "responsible" solution to fight global warming. That is, if pork barreling and ramming a bill through parliament without any serious economic study of its impact is what's considered "responsible."
Prime Minister John Key's National Party-led government ran on a campaign promise to amend the previous government's onerous cap-and-trade law, which was rushed through before the last election. Mr. Key promised to water down the scheme to protect the economy from severe harm, while fulfilling New Zealand's Kyoto Protocol commitments.
The Key government soon found that its coalition partners, the ACT Party and the Maori Party, had serious reservations about passing what turned out to be the world's most comprehensive cap-and-trade bill. No wonder they were alarmed: National's bill covered all greenhouse gases and would affect most of the economy, including the country's key export industries of agriculture and forestry.
Critics also questioned the usefulness and timing of the bill, pointing out that New Zealand only contributes 0.2% of total global emissions, and a Copenhagen deal next month looks unlikely. Add in the climate-gate scandal bubbling in Britain, where evidence surfaced that climatologists tried to suppress skeptical global-warming studies, and there's even more reason to delay.

Yet the nominally conservative Key government plowed ahead by buying off the Maori Party earlier this week. In return for votes, the Maoris will get "energy efficiency assistance" for 8,000 low-income homes, the right to plant trees on government land to offset emissions elsewhere, and other goodies. The Nationals then rushed the bill through parliament under the "urgency" tool, used to extend sitting hours for priority business. The bill still only passed by a hair, 63-58.
Pork barreling to get a bill passed is nothing new in politics. But in this case it is only part of a bad picture: The government still has not released its own comprehensive study of the new law's potential economic impact. Kiwis may soon demand one as their energy prices rise and foreign investment goes elsewhere—all in the name of being "responsible."