Word: copenhagen
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...tall order, to say the least - after eight years of the Bush Administration largely stifling global negotiations on climate change, the world has barely 10 months, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, to prepare for Copenhagen. "There are a lot of challenges now," says Hedegaard, speaking to TIME recently at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. "This is a special challenge, but also a special opportunity." (Listen to Hedegaard talk about the run-up to Copenhagen on this week's Greencast...
...question is: Can the U.S. act in time for Copenhagen? The answer is hardly certain. The first attempt at a national cap-and-trade bill, last year's Warner-Lieberman Act, didn't make it out of the full Senate. The U.S. has a new, greener President, but the sheer number of legislative priorities sitting on his desk could make cap and trade impossible to achieve this year. That doesn't mean Copenhagen will come and go without a deal, but, under the pressure to get something on paper, it's possible the summit will produce a watered down agreement...
...that it called on developed countries to make mandatory CO2 emissions cuts, while letting developing countries - including massive emitters like China - essentially off the hook, an inequality that has to be resolved if the world is to craft a new treaty at the U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen in December. (See the top 10 green ideas...
...Whether Copenhagen succeeds, however, isn't up to onlookers like Gore. That job falls to diplomats like Todd Stern, the new U.S. envoy on climate change; international bureaucrats like Yvo de Boer, the crisp Dutch executive-secretary of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change; and politicians like Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, who will preside over the summit's proceedings...
...Copenhagen will shape the environmental future of the world, but in many ways, it will determine its economic future as well. The key, Hedegaard insists, will be the world's two biggest carbon emitters, the U.S. and China, each of which essentially sidestepped Kyoto. (Though China ratified the Kyoto Protocol, it wasn't required to do anything.) Hedegaard sees hope for firm carbon targets. In the U.S., Obama has talked green early in his term, added incentives for energy efficiency and renewables to his stimulus plan and supports a domestic carbon cap-and-trade program that experts believe needs...