Political funding:

Snippet from an article by the thoroughly wonderful George Monbiot:

The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

Quite.

Bali. Heh. What is it good for...

It's been an up and down week.

While the heavy hitters have been at play in Bali this week, there's been a fair amount of pressure (see here) exerted on The United States to take their heads out of the sand (regarding Global Warming). The argument apparently revolving around the CO2 reduction targets (25-40%) actually appearing in the new treaty. One tends to wonder what purpose the treaty would serve if it does not have any targets. However, I have no doubt that the oil and energy sector, coincidently where the Bush family have notable interests, would prefer the targets to be as vague as possible. But I digress...

My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.
-- Al Gore

Anyway, moving on... Agreement was reached. All seems rosy and expressions like U-turn and reversal were being used to describe the US position.

However... and this is one big b*stard of a however... this unusual generosity of stance was, naturally, not related to anything meaningful on the United States' part. The US had wanted firmer commitments to CO2 reduction from the developing countries. That is, they wanted the countries that were not responsible for the huge problem we have now to do more to reduce the polution that they undoubtedly will create in the future. While this is not a bad point, it does rather deflect attention away from the vast amount of CO2 the US have been producing and continue to produce. So, the great U-turn was to allow this to slip by but in the final text of the treaty the emission reduction targets have disappeared.

As such, the "Bali Roadmap", as it has been named, seems to be lacking in directions.

Bali Conference quotes:

At the high-level event on climate change in New York in September, world leaders called for a breakthrough in Bali. This is your chance to live up to what the leaders have been calling for. If we leave Bali without such a breakthrough, we will not only have failed our leaders, but also those who look to us to find solutions, namely, the peoples of this world.

This is the moral challenge of our generation. Not only are the eyes of the world upon us. More important, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future.
-- Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general

Every nation must become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
-- Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesian president

We must make the leap forward or be condemned to the Planet Of The Apes.
-- Yvo de Boer, Head of the UN climate secretariat

For Australians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. Our rivers are dying, bushfires are more ferocious and more frequent and our natural wonders -- the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, our rainforests -- are now at risk.
-- Kevin Rudd, Australian Prime Minister

2013 - No summer ice in the arctic:

This summer, the ice sheet in the arctic decreased to its lowest size ever. Beating the previous record, set in 2005, by an area five times the size of the UK.

A study by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski and presented to the American Geophysical Union indicated that the northern polar waters could be ice-free by the summer of 2013.

Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.
-- Professor Wieslaw Maslowski

Leaving aside the ecological disaster - the total loss of natural habitat for polar bears - that's a substantial amount of fresh water that will be added to the north Atlantic current.

Well, What a Surprise:

The Americans have adopted their usual, flexible, forward-thinking "No way, Jose" stance at Bali. The only surprise is that it took them a week to get there.

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a "roadmap" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

"We don't want to start out with numbers," [US chief negotiator Harlan] Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on "many uncertainties" and a small number of scientific studies by the U.N. Climate Panel.
[Reuters]

Yes, and a heck of a lot of studies by the science community all around the world, supporting the U.N. findings.

Before the conference in Bali started:

• Professors David King and John Schellnhuber, science advisers to the UK and German governments, said that the world is more than 50% likely to experience dangerous levels of climate change. Also, that politicians have been too slow to cut emissions. Neither scientist believed that the world would achieve the goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of stabilising emissions by around 2015.
• A MORI poll conducted in the UK suggested that 66% of the people do not believe World leaders will solve climate change.

On a historical note:

• 1992 - Rio Earth Summit. World leaders signed the non-binding UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Emissions continued to rise.
• 1997 - Kyoto protocol. The USA and Australia pulled out, which undermined the effort to reduce emissions, and corroded the will of other governments. Japan - a signatory to Kyoto - should have cut by 6% but it has increased emissions by 7%. Italy (+7.4%) and Spain (+59.8%) are missing their targets by a mile.

Basically, since World leaders started committing themselves to tackle climate change, the World's CO2 emissions have gone up 22%.

Makes you wonder what the other 33% in the MORI poll were thinking about.

United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off today:

I anticipate that this conference will probably result in further CO2 being omitted into the atmosphere... mainly from the mouths of the governmental delegates from the 180+ countries represented.

Apparently, the aim of this two-weeks of negotiations is "not to deliver a fully negotiated and agreed climate deal, but are rather aimed at setting the necessary wheels in motion for a future climate change regime."

So, two-weeks in Bali with the intention to ... um ... agree to meet again. How about Cancun next? It's a tough job but someone's got to do it.

The big question for me is: Ministers, what is your political answer to what the scientific community is telling you so very clearly?
-- UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer

The UN: We have 10 Years...

As an introduction to the Human Development Report, the UNDP issued the following stark warning:

There is a window of opportunity for avoiding the most damaging climate change impacts, but that window is closing: the world has less than a decade to change course. Actions taken—or not taken—in the years ahead will have a profound bearing on the future course of human development. The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest.

How true.