US, India and China Talk Climate

Byoliveridley

The Obama administration is hoping to win new commitments to fight global warming from China and India in back-to-back summits next month, the Guardian has learned, including the first Indian emissions trading scheme.

The US hopes the new commitments will breathe life into the moribund negotiations to seal a global treaty on climate change in Copenhagen in December, by setting out what action each country will take. But many observers say such bilateral deals also risk seriously weakening any Copenhagen agreement by allowing the idea of a global limit on greenhouse gas emissions to be abandoned.

The Guardian

So, as part of Blog Action Day 2009, which is focusing on climate change, I bring you news that the US administration is back, taking some kind of a leadership role in climate change by talking to India and China. The notion that somehow what the US, Europe and Canada do in response to climate change is pointless because China and India are not going to participate is misleadingly inaccurate, sometimes deliberately so. I had written in June about India’s very ambitious solar policy, and China has similar, fairly comprehensive programs on climate change.

The concern that bilateral talks will somehow sabotage the multilateral Copenhagen negotiations is, I think, overstated. More talk is always better, and good things happen when the world’s most high profile polluter signals its willingness to talk, and even initiate talks with countries whose development paths are at a critical stage.

I have not been super hopeful about how things are going to turn out in the next few years. But things have changed quite a bit in the past year. The US appear to have their own climate bill brewing. Europe makes the right noises and has a head start,making the mistakes early. Unfortunately, Canada has given up the ghost thanks to our troglodyte oil man administration. Our main hope now is that the US passes a strong enough bill to affect Canada. Or there is an election leading to a change in administration and Mr Michael Ignatieff and the “liberals” are true to their word on a new, sustainable energy policy.

Canada is now the worst laggard, having extremely high per capita emissions and policy to increase these emissions while actively sabotaging climate talks. We emit a full 2% of all global warming contributors while accounting for about 0.5% of the world’s population. It is understandable given our development path how we got there, but not trying to fix it is criminally negligent and morally bankrupt.

Apparently, the Canadian people could care less, polls indicate that the business as usual administration is increasing its support among Canadians. What is the average Canadian’s responsibility if he/she knowingly supports policy that could lead to mass homelessness, flooding, starvation, wars, species extinction, etc?

On Climate blog action day, I am sad to report that my adoptive country will do nothing but soldier on in its destructive behaviour. No point calling my local MP, she agrees with me!

Similar Posts

  • Bisphenol A Linked to Breast Cancer

    Byoliveridley

    Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Bisphenol A May Trigger Human Breast Cancer

    Soto and her colleagues exposed pregnant rats to bisphenol A at doses ranging from 2.5 to 1,000 µg per kg of body weight per day. By the time the pups exposed at the lowest dose reached the equivalent of puberty (50 days old), about 25% of their mammary ducts had precancerous lesions, a proportion three to four times higher than among the nonexposed controls. Mammary ducts from all other exposure groups showed elevated levels of lesions. Cancerous lesions were found in the mammary glands of one-third of the rats exposed to 250 µg/kg/day.

    Bisphenol A is used in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. It is found in many food and beverage containers, including baby bottles. It is also found in canned food linings and dental composites, and it leaches from all of these products. In one study, Soto notes, urine samples from 95% of the human subjects contained the chemical.

    The Environmental Protection Agency has set a safe human intake dose of 50 µg/kg/day for bisphenol A. “On the basis of the effects observed in recent studies, this seems to be an unsafe level,” Soto says.

    Bisphenol A is old news, BTW, people have known for a while about this chemical’s propensity to carcinogenicity. Of course, there’s that whole argument about pregnant mice being more susceptible to chemicals than humans, etc. So, the jury is still out. but Soto is right, 50 µg/kg/day seems to not provide enough of a safety factor. The EU uses 10 µg/kg/day, though they do say that

    realistic worst-case estimates of consumer exposure via foodstuffs, range from 0.00048 mg/kg bw/day for adults to 0.0016 mg/kg bw/day for infants, which is well below the maximum exposure level

    Of course, who knows what additive effects this chemical may have with the multitude of other chemicals floating around. Doing tests of single chemicals and trying to link that to epidemiological data is a perilous undertaking, the connections are tenuous most of the time and the plastics companies routinely fund studies that prove otherwise, because as you know, if you know what you’re going to find before you study it, you will find it!

    Read the wikipedia stub on polycarbonates. Us yuppies who drink religiously from Nalgene bottles to avoid phthalates and nasty tastes would do good to take note! I guess glass is the best, though it does have that annoying tendency to shatter when dropped… Water from glass bottles do have the best taste, though.

  • Climate change infographic

    Byoliveridley

    This infographic came my way via Learnstuff and it looked interesting. I have a love-hate relationship with infographics and this one evokes the same feelings of “I really appreciate the effort someone put into this and it looks great” vs. “how is this going to influence our policy makers, or create the intensity (read this link, it’s really good stuff by David Roberts of Grist) that is required to foster the system change we need”?

    Climate-Change

  • Pothole power for cars

    Byoliveridley

    Via the TNR E&E blog comes this story of capturing some of the energy wasted when a vehicle moves over bumps and potholes on the road. Indian drivers are waiting with bated breath for this prototype to become a reality! The takeaway messages are that most of the mechanical devices we use today have many points where waste energy can be captured and put to use.

    A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers.

  • |

    Turtles, Arribadas, Science, Policy and Implementation

    Byoliveridley

    turtle Read stuff like this (hat tip to my mom for telling me about this report she’d seen on TV in Madras), and you begin to doubt your utility as a scientist.
    IBNLive : Orissa turtles neck-deep in danger

    Nearly 3,000 Olive Ridley turtles have died off the Orissa coast this season. Beaches have become turtle graveyards.

    Orissa is one of the three places in the world where the Olive Ridleys come for their annual mass nesting.

    Mechanised trawlers are the biggest culprits for this slaughter. When the trawlers go to the sea, turtles are trapped in their fishing nets. The turtles are unable to disentangle themselves and suffocate to death.

    See the video report too. In her own breathlessly indignant style, the reporter explains the science behind turtle excluder devices (well known and established), the regulation expressely forbidding shrimp trawling close to the coast, especially during the arribada, the money set aside in the budget to purchase a few speed boats for the coast guard, who are well aware of the problem, so wot’s, uh, the deal?

    The investigative reports contradict each other, the first one linked said there was no patrolling, the second one gushingly praises the coast guard for vigorous enforcement and patrolling, so which is it? I need to find out, call on some old friends… But clearly, there are issues if net catch mortality is on the rise.

    The three pillars of any regulatory action are the science, the policy, and the implementation. The science here is very clear (though the US administration seems to not think so any more?), shrimp nets with turtle excluder devices cause decrease in mortality. The policy is clear, use these nets when shrimp fishing, and completely ban fishing activity during the arribada (the number of turtles in an arribada, 50000 in a night and perhaps 300000-400000 over the course of a week is staggeringly large, so, shrimp net or not, you’ll kill a lot of turtles just by being there).

    So, like anything else in India, where is the implementation? The people running the trawlers know they are illegal anyway, so they don’t bother with the TEDs. The owners of the trawling boats never face the consequences, only the poor hapless fishermen running the boats. No attempt is made to coopt the people being regulated, it is a top down “we tell you what to do” kind of situation where the law is selectively enforced, no explanations are given, the regulation may just be an excuse to get some kickbacks. The fishermen see the excluder device as an inconvenience as they are not shown how to use it. Some low level bureaucrat in charge of buying high speed boats for the state’s forest service either does not realize the importance of getting this policy on the road, or is on the take. You can pick any, or all of these reasons and you’ll see why just like most other things in India, the road to hell is paved with good intentions 🙁

    Why be a scientist and come up with cool new techniques to do things when you don’t pay equal attention to the implementation of techniques invented 20 years back? As a responsible scientist, I must look at policy and implentation with as much interest and passion as I look at the science – New career paths?

  • |

    NC smoking bill extinguished?

    Byoliveridley

    Laura Leslie has the scoop…

    Monday: Snuffed Out? — North Carolina Public Radio WUNC

    Looks like House Maj. Leader Hugh Holliman’s smoking ban may be in trouble. The first sign of trouble was that it didn’t come up for a floor vote in the few days following its 9-4 approval in J1 committee. Today, Holliman told NCNN’s Matt Willoughby he’s planning to pull the bill off the calendar when it comes up tomorrow.

    It’s only a matter of time, they can fight it all they want, the smoking bans will pass throughout the country in a a decade or less, that’s a bold prediction!

    Most critics say the legislation goes against private property rights in banning all workplace smoking, regardless of the context. But supporters point out the government has been regulating workplace safety on issues like asbestos for a long time, even on private property. Since secondhand smoke is an environmental toxin, they say, it should be regulated, too.

    As I mentioned in comments on an earlier post, property rights is a catchall rhetorical tool that can defend just about anything, good bad or neutral. So, I am not surprised it is being used here. The obvious counter argument that property rights do not give you the right to pollute is apparently lost on this debate. But this is not really about property rights, is it? It is about protecting the tobacco industry, good old plut-prot-principle!

3 Comments

  2. I was also excited about the topic of Blog Action Day this year. I’m v. interested to read an int’l enviro policy blog from the perspective of someone outside the US… I’m used to the heaps of American guilt about emitting so much CO2 while having relatively so few people, but I didn’t really think about the fact that we aren’t the only ones in that boat! Definitely going to read more. The eco-fem slant also intrigues me [mentioned on about page??], I took a class in enviro ethics by a very serious eco-feminist.

    I’m also impressed with how long you’ve kept your blog up, and your turtle is adorable. 🙂

    http://jenclinton.wordpress.com

  3. Jen:

    Thanks for the kind words. I used to be a lot more serious about blogging a few years back, but I’ve kept this going as a reminder that while writing for me is a lot more difficult now than it used to be, it will come back soon enough 🙂

    Guilt, yeah, reasonably effective, but righteous anger is better!

Comments are closed.