![On the back of a Dragonfly [B&W]](http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6194/6128449851_14ec409b56_s.jpg "On the back of a Dragonfly [B&W]")
US Climate Envoy Todd Stern's meter reading was firmly on "determined optimism" today.
In his first public comments since December's climate treaty conference, Stern said that the Copenhagen accord, the political agreement that came out of the two-week meeting in December, included several important breakthroughs:
- It is the first time large body has endorsed a "2 degree objective" for the climate treaty -- that is, not letting the mean global temperature rise more than 2 degrees Centigrade by 2100.
- A "breach in the firewall" between the developed and the major developing economies, in that China, India, South Africa, and Brazil have agreed to list the specific actions they are going to take to reduce their emissions.
- Important steps toward greater transparency and international monitoring by these nations on their domestic actions and their impacts. Stern called this "crucial," because to build trust among the parties to the treaty, they need to have a "good clear picture" of what's going on in major developing economies, which will be the locus of the major emissions growth in the 21st century.
- Landmark agreements on financing climate adapation and mitigation in developing nations, including fast start financing that is intended to approach $30 billion a year by 2012, and $100 billion a year by 2020; "bilateral, multilateral, public and private money," Stern noted. US participation in the funds will only happen if its demands for transparency and reporting are met.
Relating his version of how the talks went down in their final make-or-break hours, Stern described some fissures in the stances of the developing nations, which have been treated as a unified bloc under the Kyoto accord.
The especially vulnerable nations, such as Ethopia, the Bahamas and the Maldives, were much more intent upon reaching an agreement than the major developing economies, he said, particularly after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen on Thursday. She "shifted the prevailing atmosphere" of the talks, said Stern, with her announcement that the US would participate in the $100 billion climate finance fund -- if a new climate agreement included strong transparency and reporting requirements.
According to Stern, the process that ensued over the next 36 hours was extraordinary from a diplomacy perspective, as negotiators were sidelined, and the heads of state haggled face to face with only short breaks. (President Obama joined Secretary Clinton at the talks early on December 18.)
The occasion for Stern's comments was a gathering of institutional investors (heads of large pension funds and other giant pools of organizational money) at the United Nations to discuss the risks climate change poses to utilities, energy companies, heavy industry, and other traditional investments.
The flip side of that is the lucrative potential of investments in clean energy, green job creation, energy efficiency, and carbon mitigation. With their collective control over around $13 trillion dollars -- and legal obligations to minimize exposure to risk -- these fund managers have a great deal of influence over how fast and far a clean-energy economy can be established. (As a group, these investors today called on the "U.S. Congress and other global decision-makers 'to take rapid action' on carbon emission limits, energy efficiency, renewable energy, financing mechanisms and other policies that will accelerate clean energy investment and job creation.")
As for next steps, the first major deadline is almost here: under the Copenhagen accord, the United States, South Africa, India, China, and Brazil need to submit their targets for cutting carbon emsissions by January 31.
Stern noted that while the climate conference plenary did not formally adopt the accord (due to the objections of five nations out of roughly 170), any of them can join in by notifying the UN group that manages the current international climate agreement.
And there are mandates in the Copenhagen accord lacking a "clear path" to realization, Stern said, that need to be achieved in the coming year. These include establishing the new global climate finance fund, as well as a "mechanism" for sharing new technologies; creating more detailed guidelines on transparency in both targets and reporting on their progress; and figuring out how forest conservation and preservation will play into the accord.
Getting these things underway will help create momentum for achieving a replacement to the Kyoto protocol in 2010, said Stern. "We have an accord that is lumbering down the runway," he said. "We need to get enough speed so that it can take off."
Image: President Barack Obama briefs European leaders, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Union Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, and Danish Prime Minister Lars L. Rasmussen, following a multilateral meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Dec. 18, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Stewart Brand reports,
"We are as gods and have to get good at it."
I hope Stewart will forgive me saying that he has elucidated at least one of the problems humanity faces now. It appears the formidable global challenges that loom before the human community in our time are likely the result of distinctly human activities borne of extreme foolishness, pathological arrogance, unbridled greed and malignant narcissism. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity (likely signifying nothing).
The first fifty years of my life were lived as if in a dream world in which humans believe and act like gods, a profane world devised by the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness a single generation would elect sponsors of powerful, greed-mongering economic powerbrokers who would formulate policies and implement business plans that irreversibly degrade Earth's environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere. My failures include not realizing that my selfish generation were hyperconsuming and excessively hoarding resources, ravaging the Earth, and effectively behaving in a way that could soon lead to the destruction of our planetary home as a fit place for habitation by the children. Even though it is discomforting and difficult to responsibly perform our duties to science and humanity, at least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate circumstances and in the process educate one another as best we can. Like you, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable 'trajectory' of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form that has been organized by and for the benefit of the Masters of the Universe. Much more problematic, however, is the ruinous determination of many too many experts who have colluded with the Masters of the Universe to obstruct open discussion of the best available scientific evidence of "what could somehow be real". If what could be real about the human condition and the Earth we inhabit is not confronted with intellectual honesty and moral courage, how is it possible for the family of humanity to adapt to the practical requirements of "reality" in reasonable, sensible, sustainable and timely ways?
An ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of experts choosing to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute rather than skillfully examining and objectively reporting on extant science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our evidently finite and noticeably frangible planetary home. This refusal to respond ably by acknowledging evidence and accepting responsibility for the human-driven global challenges that have emerged robustly and converged rapidly just now could be one of the greatest mistakes in human history. After all, what mistake in history could be greater than the ones made in our time by those self-indulgent Masters of the Universe and their many minions who are knowingly leading humanity down a primorse path, perhaps to precipitate the inadvertent demise of life as we know it and to put at risk a good enough future for the children?
We have entered not only a new year but a new decade as well. Hopefully the deafening silence, disinformation, dishonesty, denial and ideological idiocy that marked the last decade have ended.