Category: Previous Issues Articles

You may have heard that things have gone a little awry in the climate downunder.

Not only has Sydney just had the worst bushfires ever in October (mid-spring!), this year saw national temperature records broken month after month after month. After the hottest day ever across Australia in January, the Bureau of Metereology had to include a new colour for much hotter levels of hot.

And perhaps this is no surprise — now the heat seems to have gone into the heads of the politicians.

Despite the fact that the majority of Australians want action on climate change (as made clear by extensive exit polling at the recent election), the new government sacked the independent Climate Change Authority (which provided independent scientific advice on climate policy), and is in the process of repealing Australia’s carbon price and limit on pollution as well as its legislated commitment to 80% reductions by 2050.

Say again? With more than 40 countries, states and provinces around the globe implementing a carbon price, the new government is falling backwards, scrapping Australia’s pricing scheme and moving to an inefficient government funded scheme that – wait for this! — pays polluters to pollute.

But unfortunately, there’s even more.
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ECO’s ears are hurting from the deafening noise developed countries are making around private finance as being the key to scaling up climate action and meeting the $100 billion target.

Maybe we are just finding it hard to see, on the evidence provided, that developed countries are really trying hard at all to mobilize enough public finance to address developing country needs for mitigation and adaptation. It’s hard not to conclude that maybe they’re just trying to get away with as little public finance as possible. But so far, the sad reality that since the end of Fast Start Finance, developing countries have been given no clarity on the future scale of public finance they can work with.

Worst of all, most developed countries’ climate financing levels have either plateaued or decreased. And it also turns out most public finance reported to be available in actuality is recycled ODA or loans to be repaid. Do developed countries really expect the private sector to fill the climate finance gap as it continues and even increases investment in the multi-billions in fossil fuels each year? ECO’s sense of humour does not stretch that far.

Meanwhile, ECO has been doing some homework too. Here’s the maths for those private finance-loving Parties.
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Has the Polish Government been taken over by the Yes Men? (That would be the somewhat erratic outfit with a penchant for highlighting the superficial and often self-serving follies of leading institutions and firms). ECO asks this only rhetorically, of course — at times the back and forth made our eyes cross. But let us explain.

There was that somewhat mad posting a few weeks ago on the official COP19 website about the economic opportunities that the Arctic ice melt would bring while chasing pirates, ecologists and terrorists off the seas.

The Yes Men stepped up to claim credit, sort of. The whole thing left everyone quite perplexes, including the Polish government.
But then the story got better (or really, worse). Check out the official COP iPhone application. It actually greets you with this opening message: ‘Climate changes are natural phenomena, which occurred already many times on earth’. So why worry, huh?! ECO has been wondering whether an accompanying ringtone is coming, maybe “Que sera, sera”…

Inviting 12 fossil industry firms to sponsor the COP, including only the anti-climate lobby Business Europe in the pre-COP and – to top the madness, actually organizing a global coal summit in Warsaw alongside the COP, complete with a “Warsaw Communiqué ”?

All this would push the envelope even for the Yes Men.

“Mommy, before you go to work, tell me again the story about how ships and airplanes saved the world…”

“Sure, dear. Back at the beginning of the century, believe it or not, most people weren’t very sure that we could avoid a climate catastrophe and still give the world’s growing population a long, prosperous and happy life.
“Government diplomats met over and over again at big international meetings and mainly told each other why their countries were already doing more than they needed to and why other countries should do more. Just like mommy and daddy arguing over who should wash the dishes after dinner.

“But their most clever and silly arguments were about ships and airplanes. They even argued about where they should argue about this. They would argue in one meeting that voting was against everything they stood for, and in the next that voting was healthy and indispensible. ”

“But why would they do something silly like that, mommy?”

“These diplomats weren’t quite sure how to blame each other for pollution from ships and airplanes, because it happened in between countries. And if they couldn’t blame each other, they had to come up with new arguments. The people who owned their own ships and airplanes came up with clever arguments for not doing anything, which many diplomats repeated enthusiastically.
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Several organizations, including ActionAid, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Oxfam and WWF, sent a letter to UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres asking her not to participate in the forthcoming ‘Coal and Climate’ summit. Due to the provocative and problematic nature and timing of this event, ECO presents an excerpt below.
Your Excellency,
The undersigned organizations write to raise very serious concerns regarding the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Warsaw, Poland.
It is abundantly clear that to prevent the breaching of critical climate tipping points and potential catastrophic climate change, we must stop the extraction and use of all new fossil fuels sources, particularly coal, the most abundant and dirtiest fossil fuel in use today. Therefore it is outrageous that the World Coal Summit on invitation of the deputy Prime Minister of Poland will take place at the beginning of the second week of the climate negotiations.

In light of the above, we were very troubled to learn that you as the ‘voice’ of the climate change convention (UNFCCC) have agreed to address this Coal Summit. By doing so we believe you would give it much more public attention and add your own (considerable) credibility to an event that should not be legitimized.
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Will the Adaptation Fund (AF) come to a standstill next year?

Only three years after the first call for proposals, the AF has approved 29 concrete adaptation projects and allocated US $200 million. It has entered new ground with its direct access modality.

Just a week ago, the Board of the AF approved a comprehensive environmental and social policy, including capacity building support for developing country institutions to meet the substantive requirements.

Delegates should really have a look at the annual report of the Adaptation Fund Board. The AF has made remarkable strides in very tough circumstances, and yet things are actually getting worse.

The main funding source of the AF, the “share of proceeds” of CERs from the Clean Development Mechanism, has now almost totally dried up. Early in 2012 the AFB estimated it would have another $200 million from that source during the year. Instead, CER prices collapsed and only $17 million was delivered.

The AFB also set a fundraising goal of an additional $100 million by the end of 2013, to be met mostly from direct contributions by Parties. But only 4 pledges were made since then (brave Sweden weighed in twice), amounting to only roughly $40 million.
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“If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?” Those words of Philippine lead negotiator Naderev Saño touched the hearts of all COP18 attendees in a powerful speech just one year ago, just after Typhoon Bopha (Pablo) struck the southeastern Philippines and killed more than 1000 people.

Who could imagine that just one year later this country would face the most powerful and strongest storm ever to touch land – Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), with a death toll that might surpass 10,000, and millions more affected? These real losses of lives and physical damages occurred despite strenuous efforts to avoid such a disaster. It points to a new world where there is no more normal.

ECO would like to express its solidarity with the Filipino people, and grief for those who are suffering and those who died from this storm. Haiyan appeared so magnificent in the photos from the space shuttle, and yet so utterly devastating to millions on the ground, and especially to girls and boys who lost their fathers and mothers, and to the parents who lost their children.

This monstrous storm scored an unthinkable 8.1 on the 8.0 Dvorak scale (causing consternation from meteorologists worldwide).
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And so here we are once again — with a hop (Doha), skip (Bonn) and a jump (Bonn the sequel) we’ve landed back in Poland for another COP.
Indeed, it’s been a busy few months with the IPCC AR5 report from Working Group I out (and shutting down the deniers), both China and the US taking explicit action to curb coal, and some movement from the Montreal Protocol negotiations and even the ICAO. We are excited to see whether this momentum plays out in Warsaw, but you can tell we’re also a bit worried.
ECO welcomes our readers to Poland! [despite the inappropriate scheduling of coal conferences] So what’s in store over the next two weeks?
In the coming days, we can see some wild cards on the table. How will the Russian et al. objections be reconciled? How many lawyers will the US bring out of the woodwork to ensure no mention of ‘compensation’ crops up?
But there are also some positives. With the completion of the Kyoto Protocol and Bali negotiating tracks, negotiators will feel less of a burden from those complicated flow charts that tried to keep up with seven negotiating tracks at once.
And the simplified schedule should also concentrate minds on the key issues that urgently need to be addressed.
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Delegates: whilst you sat around the Maritim fountain enjoying the balmy weather, Germany suffered historic flooding. It’s a pity the flooding was the physical variety, and not a flood of ambition washing over these negotiations.

The SBI drowning in Russian bile was the disappointing low point of the last fortnight. Really? In two weeks you can’t agree on an agenda?! And you wonder why the public thinks you might be wasting their precious tax dollars. Perhaps Russia might like to pick up the bill for these last weeks, not to mention the bill for the extra climate impacts caused by this stalling.

While we’re on the subject of bills, let’s reflect on how much lower the climate damage bill will be if you raise your ambition (you might recall this is the objective of Workstream 2 – where we’ve yet to see an over abundance of concrete outcomes). The science is clear: the less you mitigate, the more you will pay to adapt – and to deal with ever more frequent climate related disasters.

But, happily, Warsaw offers you the opportunity to address this dearth of ambition, thus plugging a hole in the leaky climate boat.

ECO recommends two Ministerials at Warsaw.
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A milestone was passed today, when perhaps for the first time ever, an intervention by Saudi Arabia got an enthusiastic round of applause. Speaking on behalf of the Arab Group, Saudi Arabia delivered an intervention devoid of the finger-pointing that an ADP co-chair lamented about past sessions. The applause came when the Saudi speaker delivering the intervention stumbled over an unpronounceable English word, then recovered with grace, humour and dignity.

She went on to commit the Arab group to assume its fair share of efforts to combat global climate change, to move past finger-pointing, to implement new and renewable energy strategies, to delink growth from emissions, and then called for a principled approach based on equity and science. A breath of fresh air, and quite different from a Saudi intervention earlier this session that emphasised uncertainties in the climate science.

PS: After the advice offered from one of the co-chairs, no non-native English speaker should ever feel compelled to utter this 8-syllable word again. But even if it becomes treated as a 4-letter word, we still want it to happen!