Europe must adopt a 30% emissions reduction target

With any luck we are about to see a shift in action on curbing carbon emissions.

It's not just that the annual United Nations climate change talks, COP-18, begin at the end of this month at Doha in Qatar. Nor is it that with the re-election of Barack Obama there will be a renewed impetus in the American Senate to get a climate change bill passed.

Over on the other side of the world, Australia's Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has said his country will sign up to a second round of the Kyoto Protocol, joining the European Union and just a handful of other major greenhouse gas emitters in recommitting to the world's only climate treaty.

The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, required wealthy nations to limit their emission of greenhouse gases by 5.2% on average for the period 2008-2012 from 1990 levels. It is due to expire at the end of this year.

Through the UN climate change negotiations, countries are attempting to thrash out a replacement treaty. If successful, it would be agreed by 2015 and take effect in 2020, and it would include emissions targets for developing nations such as China and India as well as developed countries.

To date, only the European Union and a handful of other small developed nations have signed up to Kyoto 2, which is intended to start in 2013 and continue until such time as when a new agreement comes into effect.

Japan, Russia, Canada and, currently, the US are among the countries refusing to sign up to Kyoto 2. They want a non-binding agreement.

New Zealand has already said it will not follow Australia.

But Kyoto 1 and 2 has been widely criticised. The main candidates for alternative action are a carbon tax activated at national levels, and a network of regional emission trading schemes.

Already, a carbon tax is back on the agenda in the US and the UK.

Republicans are not expected to be enthusiastic; they dislike taxes. The main American proponent of a carbon tax is prominent NASA climate scientist James Hansen. His proposal is to tax carbon at source, whether oil, gas or coal, with a 100% dividend returned to citizens in equal shares, under the principle of the “commons", that every citizen has an equal right to a portion of the sky.

It is estimated that citizens would each get $3,000 to spend as compensation for the tax.

A similar tax has been in place in Canada's British Columbia for four years and is currently under review. The income from the tax is spent on public works.

But how high would a carbon tax need to be to make a significant difference in the consumption of fossil fuels? Consider the amount of tax (60%) already on a litre of petrol. Does it deter us from driving?

Would it make a difference if the price of a barrel of oil was doubled with a $100 tax? That would put up the cost of a litre of petrol to almost £2.

You can imagine the public reaction, even with a cash dividend. The thing is, it’s a blunt instrument. It affects some people more than others.

British Columbia's tax has been introduced gradually and reaches about 5% of the price of fuel. The review will tell us whether or not it has made any difference at all to consumption levels. The jury is yet out.

Hansen distrusts "cap and trade" agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, and says why in chapter 9 of his book Storms of My Grandchildren.

But that isn't stopping Korea and China from going ahead with their own local schemes emissions trading schemes. On November 15 a presidential decree in Korea will see a mandatory ETS introduced from 2015 for 60% of South Korea’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The purpose of an ETS is to minimise the cost of meeting a set emissions target. The Korean ETS and most of the Chinese pilot schemes have watched the European Union's ETS become swamped with excess credits and the price of carbon bomb to an ineffectual level.

To prevent this happening in their schemes, they plan to include the use of market stabilising checks and balances to enable them to adjust to external factors such as significant and sustained changes in gross domestic product. These are said to include: a strategic reserve, limitations on banking and borrowing and a ceiling and/or floor price.

Japan has its own scheme, as do Switzerland, New Zealand, California and a number of other American and Canadian states linked together in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the Western Climate Initiative.

If such schemes become more common and the European scheme can overcome its current problems, international trading in permits is an attractive way of achieving reductions at the lowest possible cost. This is because it is cheaper to abate or eliminate a ton of carbon dioxide in some countries than in others, and the market automatically gravitates towards the cheapest solution.

In other words, is not such a blunt instrument. On the other hand, a huge amount of money gets wasted and goes into the wrong pockets.

The question is, whether any of these proposals will get us where we want to be fast enough. The answer depends upon the level of political ambition for the level at which an overall target for, or cap on carbon emissions is set, which in turn depends on the amount of public concern.

European environment ministers met at the end of October to discuss the European Union negotiating position at Doha, and what to do about the EU ETS' glut of allowances.

It emerged from their talks that Europe has already beaten its target of 20% emission reductions by 2020 with eight years to spare.

A leaked draft of the Commission's report on the EU ETS says that there will be a surplus of at least two billion allowances next year, rising in the following years. Removing just 1.4 billion of these would be sufficient to let Europe reach a 30% target by 2020.

This would align the scheme with Europe's 2050 climate goal of reducing emissions up to 95% below 1990 levels.

It's this kind of ambition, at least, which is necessary.

The British government supports a 30% target. It should do, it is already ahead of the game. Officials have been arguing for it for some time.

Europe should immediately adopt such a position and, in three weeks time, take it to Doha and challenge the world to follow suit.

Governments must work harder to avoid global catastrophe

Governments of developed countries must work harder to secure a climate pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, and avoid an approximately 3.2 degrees rise in average global temperatures this century.

Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, made this call last Friday, at the end of two weeks of fraught and only slightly productive climate talks in Bonn.

Bonn Climate Change Conference June 2011
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"There is a growing realisation and acknowledgment that resolving the future of the Kyoto Protocol is essential this year and will require high level political guidance," Figueres said.

Ambassador Jorge Arguello of Argentina, Chairman of the Group of 77 and China (G77) agreed, adding, "The chance to reach a successful outcome in Durban to consolidate and strengthen the climate change framework still depends on the level of political will that Parties can show."

Durban is the location of the next top level meeting in November/December. The EU and others have now conceded that an all-encompassing agreement on binding carbon emissions is unlikely to be achieved there.

What is the scientific position?

According to Climate Action Tracker, based on current commitments by nations, the world is headed for an approximately 3.2 degrees rise in average temperatures this century.

Dr. Sivan Kartha, senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), said that while developing countries have made credible commitments to address their part of the emissions gap, developed countries' promises are such that, with the current accounting loopholes on the table, their emissions could actually increase when they should be rapidly declining.

"You can't negotiate with science," he said. "You can't negotiate with the Earth's natural limits. At the moment, emission reduction pledges take us far over those limits."

Some progress made

The Kyoto Protocol remains fundamental and critical to success because it "establishes the key rules to quantify and monitor the mitigation efforts of countries" and "contains the market-based mechanisms which allow countries to reach their mitigation levels at cost effective levels," Figueres said in her concluding remarks to the conference.

"Climate [change talks] are the most important negotiations the world has ever seen, but governments, business and civil society cannot solve it in one meeting," she added, in response to criticism that progress is too slow.

Some progress was made at Bonn, on technical issues such as designing a scheme for sharing clean energy technologies, on a system for the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of national emissions, on the financing of a $100bn-a-year Green Climate Fund to support adaptation and emission reduction efforts in developing countries, as well as in forest protection and carbon markets.

Despite this, developing nations are feeling that they must resign themselves to expect a weaker deal from the developed world.

"This process is dead in the water," commented Yvo de Boer, former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) during the talks. "It's not going anywhere".

Pablo Solon, head of Bolivia's delegation added that "there has been no advance in the substantive issue of pledges for reductions in emissions" by developed nations.

The minimum goal envisaged by developing nations is for a core group, led by the European Union, to extend the Kyoto Protocol.

Canada, Japan and Russia have all said they will not sign up to a second commitment period, and the world's two largest greenhouse gas emitters - China and the United States - are not bound by the Protocol. This leaves the European nations as the keystone nations upholding it.

During negotiations, the EU was challenged to sign up to the second period unilaterally, but the European Commission negotiator, Jurgen Lefevere, said renewal of the Kyoto Protocol alone "is not going to cut it", since it accounts for just eleven percent of world greenhouse gases. "We need a solution for the remaining 89 per cent as well," he observed.

The problem of transport

There is one big issue on which China and the United States, the world痴 two biggest emitters, agree: they both oppose the EU's scheme to regulate and reduce emissions from air and marine transport (known as 澱unker emissions.

These emissions were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol because countries could not agree on what to do about them.

They are the subject of a UNFCCC working group which made little progress at Bonn, as they are stalled pending the result of a legal case.

Earlier this year, the EU has got fed up with waiting for these sectors to take action on reducing their own emissions and proposed that they be included in the revised EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) from 1 January 2012.

China and four US airlines are challenging this in the courts and the European Court of Justice is to hear the case in July. The Court will probably not issue its judgment before the EU-ETS enters into effect. Until it does, the UNFCCC working group feels it cannot move forward.

Meanwhile, a proposed objective to cut the EU's transport emissions by 60% by 2050 was considered "too ambitious" by a majority of the EU's 27 transport ministers, meeting in Luxembourg last week, who want the goal to remain aspirational. They believe it would disadvantage European companies compared with their competitors in Asia or the US.

"In order to maintain the Union's competitiveness, similar commitments should be sought at international level. Today there are no alternative to fossil fuels [that is] competitive in terms of technology and price," ministers admitted in a statement.

It is the newer Eastern European members who are the most opposed to a binding 60% target. Others, such as Austria, believe it is achievable and should even be increased.

Soil carbon

Observers at the talks reported that some countries were introducing new market-based proposals such as 'soil carbon' markets into the negotiations which were unproven and had delayed the talks.

Michele Maynard, Policy and Advocacy Officer of thePan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) said, "These markets are a false solution that will only fuel the land-grab in Africa and seriously undermine the ability of poor Africans to feed themselves."

Kate Horner, senior analyst at Friends of the Earth (US) said the United States continues blocking progress on the most important issues in negotiations, including how they will meet their pledges to the Green Fund.

"Perhaps the biggest contribution the US government could make to these talks would be to cut the carbon of sending people to negotiations who refuse to negotiate," she said.

What happens next

The next major milestone is the 17th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC and the 7th Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, to be held in Durban, South Africa, in November /December 2011.

Before then, there will be a meeting about the Green Fund in Tokyo in July. A ministerial conference is planned for 2 to 3 July in Berlin, and ministers will also meet approximately a month ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in South Africa.

South Africa is also considering a third ministerial consultation this year, and the incoming South African presidency and the current Mexican presidency are planning to engage heads of state and governments on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in September.

Europe's progress to Kyoto targets is slow - league table of countries

The EU has published its assessment of where Europe is on the track towards its 2012 Kyoto target of reducing emissions.

I've made the chart below from its figures, which shows the percentage each of the 26 countries and Europe as a whole is along the path. The worst achiever is at the top of the chart, Spain is leading way ahead.


The UK is in the bottom half of achievers, 10th from the bottom and 16th from the top.

The EU says it needs the purchase of emission credits from third countries and forestry activities that absorb carbon from the atmosphere and further measures in order to meet the (inadequate) 8% reduction target for 2012.

It says it's on line to cut EU-15 emissions in 2010 to 7.4% below levels in the chosen base year (1990 in most cases) - just short of the target.

The figures show just what a long way we have to go, even to reach this inadequate target.

> read the full report

Bali: good to talk, but hold your breath 'til '09

The IPPC report issued at the weekend was the last warning salvo fired by the scientific community at heads of government before the next round of significant talks between them over what to do about climate change when the Kyoto agreement runs out in just over four years' time.

In the 'Washington Declaration' agreed on February 16, 2007, Presidents or Prime Ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa agreed in principle on the outline of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

They envisage a global cap-and-trade system that would apply to both industrialized nations and developing countries, and hoped that this would be in place by 2009.

At these talks, to be held from 3-14 December in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, it is doubtful whether anything meaningful will be achieved, a source close to the British team which has been out there preparing for the talks for some time, has told me.

However, useful horse-trading and line-drawing will be done.

The British position is essentially that the timing is right for a significant breakthrough in a couple of years, but that we have to wait and hope that Bush's successor will be more onboard.

If it's Hillary Clinton, then it's assumed she will sign up to carbon reduction targets, taxes, and trading.

The next United States presidential election is scheduled to be held on November 4 next year.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who will host the talks, commented on the IPCC's pronouncements by singling out the United States and China, the world's top two emitters of greenhouse gases, which have no binding goals for curbs, as key countries in the process.

"I look forward to seeing the US and China playing a more constructive role starting from the Bali conference," Ban told a news conference. "Both countries can lead in their own way."

Ban said he had just been to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile. He also visited the Amazon rainforest, which he said was being "suffocated" by global warming.

"I come to you humbled after seeing some of the most precious treasures of our planet - treasures that are being threatened by humanity's own hand," he said.

"These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie," Ban said. "But they are even more terrifying, because they are real."

The summary says human activity is causing rising temperatures and that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are needed quickly to avert more heat waves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels.

The scientists and officials from the 130-state Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) boiled down the findings of three reports of more than 3,000 pages issued this year and said ths time it hadn't been watered down.

"The strong message of the IPCC can't be watered down - the science is crystal clear. The hard fact is we have caused climate change, and it's also clear that we hold the solution ... in our hands," said Hans Verolme, Director of environmental group WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.

Sources close to the discussions said the US had tried to change or even remove a key section of the report which lists five main reasons for concern about the effects of warming.

"This has been a very tough week and we've had to debate and defend everything we wanted but the draft report that we submitted has remained intact and has even had additions made in terms of emphasis and even facts that have come to light," IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri told Reuters.

"When you're on strong scientific ground, you don't yield any ground. We have to make sure that scientific truth is not supressed."

Summary of the findings

• "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level."
• "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in ... greenhouse gas concentrations" from human activities.
• Global total annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have risen by 70 percent since 1970. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years.
• Temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cms and 59 cms (seven and 23 inches) this century.
• Africa, the Arctic, small islands and Asian mega-deltas are likely to be especially affected by climate change. Sea level rise "would continue for centuries" because of the momentum of warming even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilised.
• "Warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible". About 20-30 percent of species will be at increasing risk of extinction if future temperature rises exceed 1.5 to 2.5 Celsius.

Five reasons for concern

• Risks to unique and threatened systems, such as polar or high mountain ecosystems, coral reefs and small islands.
• Risks of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves.
• Distribution of impacts - the poor and the elderly are likely to be hit hardest, and countries near the equator, mostly the poor in Africa and Asia, generally face greater risks such as of desertification or floods.
• Overall impacts - there is evidence since 2001 that any benefits of warming would be at lower temperatures than previously forecast and that damages from larger temperature rises would be bigger.
• Risks or "large-scale singularities", such as rising sea levels over centuries; contributions to sea level rise from Antarctica and Greenland could be larger than projected by ice sheet models.

Solutions/costs

• Governments have a wide range of tools -- higher taxes on emissions, regulations, tradeable permits and research. An effective carbon price could help cuts.
• Emissions of greenhouse gases would have to peak by 2015 to limit global temperature rises to 2.0 to 2.4 Celsius over pre-industrial times, the strictest goal assessed.
• The costs of fighting warming will range from less than 0.12 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year for the most stringent scenarios until 2030 to less than 0.06 percent for a less tough goal.
• In the most costly case, that means a loss of GDP by 2030 of less than 3 percent.

What is the IPCC?

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization to give governments scientific advice about climate change.
• Run from Geneva, it draws on work by about 2,500 climate scientists from more than 130 nations and has issued three reports so far this year, totalling more than 3,000 pages. The previous set of reports was in 2001.
• The IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore.

What is the summary?

The IPCC condenses the main findings of three reports earlier this year:

• In February, the IPCC squarely blamed mankind for global warming. It said it was "very likely" or more than 90 percent probable that human activities led by burning fossil fuels had caused most of the warming in the past half century.
• It said warming was "unequivocal" and projected a "best estimate" that temperatures would rise by 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) this century.
• In April, the IPCC outlined the likely impacts of warming and said rising temperatures could lead to more hunger, water shortages and ever more extinctions of animals and plants.
• It said crop yields could drop by 50 percent by 2020 in some countries and projected a steady shrinking of Arctic sea ice in summers.
• By the 2080s, millions of people will be threatened by floods because of rising sea levels, especially around river deltas in Asia and Africa and on small islands.
• In May, in a third report on confronting climate change, the IPCC said costs of action could be moderate, or less than 0.12 percent of global gross domestic product a year, but that time was running out to avert the worst effects. The toughest scenario would require governments to ensure global greenhouse gas emissions start falling by 2015.

Previous reports

• The IPCC's first report in 1990 outlined risks of warming and played a role in prompting governments to agree a 1992 UN climate convention.
• In 1995, the IPCC concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate", the first recognition that it was more than 50 percent likely that people were stoking warming. The report paved the way to the Kyoto Protocol, now the main UN plan for curbing warming.
• A 2001 IPCC study said there was "new and stronger evidence" linking human activities to global warming and that it was "likely", or 66 percent probable, that humans were the main cause of warming in the past half century.