Word: summits
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...factor above all others: U.S. President George W. Bush. As the world's top carbon emitter and the only major developed country to refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, America is seen as hastening global warming while foiling attempts to slow it down. At December's U.N. climate-change summit in Bali, the frustration toward American intransigence on global warming was palpable. When U.S. negotiators stood in the way of agreement during the summit's final day, the anger boiled over, with delegates, observers from environmental groups and even members of the international press booing the American team...
...international condemnation. The Bush Administration has stymied action on global warming at home and abroad, questioning and occasionally suppressing compelling scientific evidence that the earth is heating up and man-made pollution is a major reason why. In a damning speech delivered near the end of the Bali summit, former U.S. Vice President and climate-change prophet Al Gore told the rest of the world to carry on the fight against global warming without the U.S. "Save a large blank space in your documents," he said. "Move ahead anyway, on the hope that blank will be filled...
That will take money, but thanks to record oil prices, money is one thing Abu Dhabi does not lack. At the summit's opening conference, Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahaya announced that the government would channel an additional $15 billion to the Masdar Initiative. Although the money comes with no time frame, and officials wouldn't say exactly where the funding will go, Masdar also announced that it would join Rio Tinto and British Petroleum to build the world's first hydrogen power plant, a 500-megawatt operation that would cost at least...
Still, standing by Sameer's solar panels, Masdar City remains an imaginary place. For all the ambitious announcements and bold pledges made at the Future Energy Summit, too much is yet to come, while the climate crisis bears down on us with greater urgency every day. Walking through the summit's exhibition hall, where companies from Spain to the U.S. to Japan hawk wind turbines and eco-cars and thin-film solar, a technologically-driven optimism battles with a fear that all humankind's best ideas, on display here, aren't moving fast enough to save...
...summit's hosts were only too eager to emphasize, when they weren't announcing a new hydrogen plant, almost every projection of energy use over the next several decades says that fossil fuels aren't going anywhere. Abu Dhabi will develop hundreds of megawatts of clean solar power, but it will export far more polluting power in oil - because the world will need it and there is nothing else feasible to replace it. "The World Future Energy Summit is nothing less than the future of the world itself," said Jonathan Porritt, founder of the UK sustainability organization Forum...