Word: poznan
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Environment ministers will arrive in Poznan on Dec. 11 - when the real work will take place. Here are the critical questions that need to be answered during the last two days of the meeting...
...home - a necessity, if the U.S. is ever going to lead globally on climate change. But while the thought of President Obama has environmentalists feeling warm around the world, the cold logic of the Inaugural schedule means that President George W. Bush's negotiators are still in charge at Poznan. While his team no longer has the power to bring talks to a standstill, as it has in past years (other countries are now treating the Bush team like an annoying houseguest that has overstayed his welcome), Obama can't be anything but vague for now. Although he sent observers...
European nations like France, which is currently the head of the E.U., favor the measure, but newer, poorer countries like Poland - and big industrial powers like Germany - are doubtful. If the E.U. can't present a unified front at Brussels, it won't be able to do so in Poznan. "You can see the U.S. and China moving [on climate change]," said Nicholas Stern, a leading British climate economist, at Poznan. "We will destroy or undermine that movement if we go flaky in Europe...
...real accomplishments of last year's U.N. summit in Bali was an agreement to move forward on avoided deforestation, a system that would pay rain-forest nations to protect their trees in exchange for carbon credits. (Deforestation is responsible for at least 20% of global carbon emissions.) But at Poznan, negotiations have gotten muddy. Thus far, no one can agree on what the rights of indigenous people who actually live among the trees should be in a forestry carbon market, while Brazil - home to 40% of the world's remaining rain forests - seems against the entire idea of avoided deforestation...
...climate-change negotiations can be a depressing experience - maximum rhetoric expended on minimum accomplishment. In Poznan the atmosphere seems even bleaker. For one thing, economic catastrophe has made it harder for leaders to justify cutting carbon. A recent study by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), the independent investigative arm of Congress, sharply criticized the Clean Development Mechanism, the U.N. body that oversees the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-trading practices. The GAO found that carbon offsets - whereby a company in a rich nation pays for a carbon-reducing project elsewhere in lieu of cutting emissions itself - were at best a "temporary...