[Shannimal]

"Emissions from industrialized countries plateaued in 2006 after six years of growth, the United Nations said Monday. But the countries have not yet reported emissions from the past two years, and the new report did not include large emerging economies like those of India and China.

The United Nations report was released two weeks before the world’s environmental ministers are to meet in Poland to discuss ways to curb greenhouse gases and against the backdrop of the global financial crisis.

In presenting the latest findings, United Nations officials said they were concerned that the economic downturn would add a new layer of uncertainty to the coming talks, because many of the programs under development to curb the emissions that cause global warming require credit and financing.

While they expressed some optimism about the new data, which went through 2006, the last year available, they said the slight decline — one-tenth of 1 percent from 2005 to 2006 — was too small to indicate a significant downward trend.

Over all, among the 40 industrialized countries that reported to the United Nations, emissions had increased by 2.5 percent from 2000 to 2006, leading the climate panel to denounce what it called “continued growth.”

“This is a critical moment for ministers and politicians,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, at a news conference in Bonn, Germany. He called the coming climate negotiations “the most complicated process the world has ever seen.”

Mr. de Boer said he found some cause for hope in the figures issued Monday. “What I saw was a slowing of the increase in emission from industrialized countries,” he said.

But his statistician, Sergey Kononov, pointed out that the percentage decline had been so small that it could have been caused by either improved policies or simply the relatively warm 2005-2006 winter.

Just one year ago, the United Nations climate agency convened the world’s environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, where the group committed itself to hammering out a climate pact by 2009. Rich nations pledged to design a system to help the poor in coping with global warming.

The current agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012 and does not cover the United States, which never ratified it, or developing nations like China.

But the world has changed since Bali. The United States, a reluctant participant in the United Nations meeting last year, now has a president-elect, Barack Obama, who has pledged to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration.

Perhaps more important, fallout from a global economic crisis has turned the economics of climate change upside down.

On one hand, oil is now cheaper than in the recent past, making it tempting for struggling economies to fall back on this relatively dirty fossil fuel, rather than plowing ahead with efforts to develop less polluting alternatives, like wind and solar power.

On the other hand, stagnant economies mean less industrial production, which historically leads to a drop in emissions.

“It is clear that the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn will have implications for climate negotiations,” Mr. de Boer said. But he added that “it will take time to see how.”

In any case, Mr. de Boer said that the hoped the world would meet its climate goals by “relying on policy actions and not an economic turndown,” adding, “I hope never to be in the situation where we say we made our Kyoto target, but everyone is starving.”

Indeed, he and others have expressed hope that some nations will renew their economies by investing in green jobs and green growth, a proposal put forth by Mr. Obama during the campaign and endorsed by nongovernmental organizations like the Clinton Foundation.

United Nations officials said Monday that Mr. Obama would not attend the meeting, but expressed hope that the United States delegation would work closely with the next administration, which takes office in January."


Unlike the Bush administration, Mr. Obama supports a cap-and-trade system, similar to the one that operates in the European Union. Companies and industries are assigned emissions limits and must buy “carbon permits” to exceed those limits. Such permits can come from investing in emissions-reducing projects such as planting trees or cleaning up a dirty coal mine in Asia, in theory “offsetting” environment damage done at home.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist who directs Columbia University's Earth Institute, said the global financial crisis could well lead to a slowdown of emissions growth, though it was unlikely to reverse it.

But he said it also provided an opportunity to restructure polluting industries, such as America’s automakers, which could be pressed to make high-mileage, low-emissions vehicles.

With the new administration poised to take power in the United States, “I think everyone’s waiting for a discussion between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters and the two countries that haven't been at the table,” Mr. Sachs said.


NYT

[millenia]

yes it is truth is the same thing:-). Sorry i read the new in the 30stm news. Here my comments on the new york times report:

The new york times new is quite right in the way that said that the procedures of UNFCCC has a lot of lacks. What is truly sad is that for example in my country probably we could get doing almost everything that we can do for the climate change and we probably receive 200 million in compensation. But one single inundation (that exactly happen the last year) due by Climate Change cost us 1000 million dollars.

The cost of CER (Certificate Emission Reduction) actually i think is in 12 euros/tonCO2. when some years ago was in 30 euros/ton CO2. On december 2007 fall to 1.3 euros/ton CO2. These changes in prices has a lot of relationship, with the fact that many countries and companies did not take seriously the program and buy CERs without to download their emissions as well. In the last meeting of Copenhagen it was serious accusations against NGOs and other big institutions that let this happen. Countries like USA created a parallel market one part serious (Chicago) but others that look more like a fake. In the last EB 44 many request of China projects was made because they are contaminating much more quickly than they are doing something about the environment.

And today in the first day of the 14 meeting in Polony the calling to a real compliment and compromise with the Kyoto Protocol was made. Because the last climate data are really bad. Our future is going to the bathroom literally.

For investigation the last year US. gave a donation to the municipality of Cuenca (my country) 20.000 us dollars when the analysis investment was at least 100.000 without the costs to allocate the project, and for receive this, the project had to be sell in a real down low price (3-4 euros/ton-CO2).

And if you read a contract for emission reduction from a bank, then do not have anything to do about environment, is only debt and interest rate.

Then sometimes it looks like a cruel joke from the Joker.

Our efforts or at least my effort is to reduce as much greenhouses as we can. At the end the core of the UNFCCC and the IPCC is made for people that do not think in money but in common welfare. And my hope is that more people will be involved for the right reasons and not for the changes in CERs price.

Mile