LATIN AMERICA: Frightening Numbers

By Emilio Godoy | IPS

MEXICO CITY, Nov 22 – The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean need billions of dollars to deal with the economic impact of climate change — funding that is not easily found on the international market.

A World Bank study presented Friday, the first day of a Nov. 21-23 congress of legislators from the Americas meeting in Mexico City to discuss the challenges of the global financial and climate crises, says natural disasters related to climate change, like storms, drought and flooding, cost 0.6 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the affected countries, on average, in Latin America and the Caribbean.

If the frequency of natural disasters increases from one every four years to one every three years, per capita GDP could shrink by two percent per decade in the region, according to the report presented by Laura Tuck, director of the World Bank’s department of Sustainable Development for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The economy of the Caribbean region alone could experience six billion dollars in losses by 2050 in tourism, coastal protection, and the pharmaceutical and fishing industries.

Although Latin America accounts for a small proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, the region will need to take measures for staying on a high-growth low-carbon track, Tuck said at the meeting taking place in the Mexican legislature.

A total of 77 lawmakers are taking part in the Americas Legislators’ Forum on Climate Change, held under the auspices of the Mexican Congress, the World Bank, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE), the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (COM+), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

This is the first time politicians from the entire region have come together to discuss measures to address climate change.

“We need funds to take measures against climate change, but financing is scarce,” Jamaican legislator Noel Arscott told IPS.

Over the next five years, Jamaica will need one to two billion dollars to develop renewable energies in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Latin America is responsible for 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which according to the scientific community are causing global warming and climate change. Brazil and Mexico, Latin America’s giants, are the biggest emitters in the region.

“We can adopt measures to modify our energy base, but what we need is adaptation,” for which funds must come from industrialised countries, “which are the ones who must take measures to cut emissions,” Salvadoran legislator Lourdes Palacios told IPS.

El Salvador needs 130 million dollars to carry out water and environmental sanitation projects. The legislature of that Central American country recently gave the go-ahead to a decision to take out an Inter-American Development Bank loan for 20 million dollars for that purpose.

This weekend’s GLOBE meeting is intended to open up discussions ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland next month.

The Dec. 9-10 conference in Poland will assess compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, which went into force in 2005, setting specific targets for industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

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New Senate to get major global warming bill

 

AFP

WASHINGTON — The US Senate will take up two sweeping global warming bills in January, in the latest sign that Barack Obama’s election could quickly reverse years of US footdragging on climate change.

Democratic Senators, openly gleeful that years of fierce struggles against George W. Bush’s Republican administration on the issue were drawing to a close, proclaimed the United States would undergo a “sea change” in environmental policy.

“The time to start is now,” said Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, vowing to step up to Obama’s challenge to combat climate change and create millions of “green jobs” in the reeling US economy.

Her intervention came two days after Democrat Obama, in one of the few public policy pronouncements since his historic victory two weeks ago, told the world that “denial” would no longer be the US policy on climate change.

Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, said one bill would combat harmful gas emissions by providing 15 billion dollars a year to spur clean energy innovation and the development of advanced biofuels.

The other piece of legislation will direct the US Environmental Protection Agency to set up a cap-and-trade system to stem greenhouse gas emissions.

“Instead of denial we will have resolve, instead of procrastination, we will have action. Instead of listening to the voice of the stagnant status quo, our committee hears the voice of our president-elect,” Boxer said.

“We are facing a sea change,” Boxer said, arguing that Obama’s election and the big gains in congressional elections for Democrats would transform the attitude of the United States to global warming, the world’s biggest polluter.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders said Obama would transform US environmental policy.

“It’s not only that you have a president who understands the severity of the problems, but he is willing to be aggressive in addressing it from a global warming perspective.”

Boxer agreed. “We have a president now, President Bush, who simply felt the best action was voluntary, really no action, no action. And for all these years, we have wasted time.”

It was not yet clear however if proponents of global warming legislation had the majorities in both chambers of Congress to push through action that some critics may see as damaging to the economy.

But in another encouraging sign for reformers, California congressman Henry Waxman, an advocate of global warming legislation, unseated Democrat John Dingell for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce committee.

Dingell, 82, represents a district in auto-industry capital Michigan, and was seen as more hostile to attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

On Tuesday, Obama told a California-based meeting of US governors and global warming experts in a video-taped message that he would “engage vigorously” in global climate change talks.

The president-elect also addressed his message directly to delegates at United Nations climate change talks in Poland next month.

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NASA scientist cites ‘global-warming emergency’

 

by Chris Kenrick  | Palo Alto Online

Time is running out to prevent catastrophic consequences from global warming, a leading climate scientist warned a packed audience Thursday at Stanford University.

Physicist James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said hundreds of millions of people will lose fresh water sources and hundreds of millions of others will be displaced by rising sea levels if fossil fuel emissions remain on their current course.

“We’ve reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don’t know that,” Hansen told a packed Stanford audience Thursday night.

“There’s a big gap between what’s understood about global warming by the scientific community and what is known by the public and policymakers.”

Hansen, who first warned about climate change in testimony to Congress in the late 198s, said a path out of the crisis is, “barely, still possible.”

Introduced as an “iconic leader” in the science of climate change by biology professor Stephen Schneider, he spoke in a free public lecture sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society in a series called “The Ethics of Food and the Environment.”

China has surpassed the United States as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Hansen said. However because of the long lifetime of the compound, the U.S. is over three times more responsible than any other country for the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere, and will remain so for decades to come.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is already at 385 parts per million, well over the 350 parts per million, or less, that is considered “safe,” Hansen said. And more warming is already in the pipeline because of inertia in the climate system.

“To preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, we must draw down carbon dioxide to less than 350 parts per million,” he said.

Hansen advocates a “carbon tax with a 100 percent dividend,” with funds returned to households based on how much they reduce their carbon footprints.

Fossil fuels should be taxed at their source—the wellhead or port of entry—to create incentives for the most efficient behavior. For example, he said, “we import food from New Zealand because there’s no tax on aviation fuel, even though it makes no sense from a planetary standpoint.

“If you had a 100 percent dividend, there would be a big incentive to reduce carbon emissions and a motivation to develop technologies that reduce carbon emissions. The person who does better than average in reducing their carbon footprint will actually make money.”

Aside from the carbon tax and strict efficiency standards for vehicles, construction and appliances, he called for development of renewable energy and an improved electric grid to get the energy to where it’s needed.

He also advocated possible use of the next generation of nuclear power, which creates smaller and shorter-lived volumes of waste. “Most environmentalists are beginning to realize that they probably need to soften their attitude toward nuclear power if they’re going to solve the greenhouse problem.”

The single most important thing to do immediately, he said, is to impose a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. “Because coal is available and relatively cheap, China and India have relied mainly on that,” he said. “They’re getting a big public reaction to local air pollution. There have been a lot of riots there, which the government tries to keep quiet.”

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