Maybe he liked the city? Either way, President Barack Obama announced today that he will attend the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December. The climate summit is held between 7-18 December and is the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”.
“U.S. President Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen for a U.N. climate change meeting on December 9, hoping to add momentum to an international process despite slow progress on a domestic bill to cut carbon emissions”, Reuters reports.
“Obama planned to make a visit at the beginning of the climate negotiations in Denmark, an administration official told Reuters on Wednesday, before picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in neighboring Oslo.”
With him to the climate summit Obama has a pledge to cut emissions in the USA with 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, 30% by 2025, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050. But these numbers are much lower than those proposed by the EU and other industrialised countries such as Norway.
Big and exciting news are coming today from the UNFCCC climate talks currently being held in Bangkok, Thailand. Norway has announced a commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions with 40% by 2020 – based on 1990 levels.
This emission reduction promise from the Norwegian government is now the biggest commitment announced by any industrialized country. It beats the European Union (the now former climate leader) who has so far only promised a 20% reduction by 2020.
Adopt A Negotiator says in a statement that this is “a great day for ambition” in the climate talks and praises Norway for committing to a target that comes very “close to what the science demands”.
“Norway has shown that we can be ambitious in these negotiations. They have decided to break ice today, to avoid their glaciers melting and to avoid seeing more and more devestating climate consequences around the world.”
The car industry is currently undergoing a green revolution, with a number of exciting new technologies vying to challenge the predominance of petrol and diesel and put an end to the internal combustion engine’s negative effects on the environment.
For many years now, private cars have been a favourite target of environmental campaigners, mainly due to the harmful emissions that all internal-combustion engines release into the atmosphere. Their effect was illustrated starkly several times in the 1970s when ‘car-mad’ cities like Los Angeles and London were frequently shrouded in a thick, polluting smog. Car manufacturers have been working on improving their products’ environmental credentials for quite some time now. The most significant developments of the last quarter of a century include the rollout of unleaded fuel, as well as the mandatory fitment of catalytic converters, which remove many of the most harmful elements of vehicle exhaust fumes, to all new cars. But as the 21st century dawned, talk of diminishing oil supplies and the ongoing threat of global warming has incentivised both carmakers and governments to accelerate development of the technologies that will one day take over completely from those in the cars for sale today, which remain dependent on fossil fuels.
Norway Sets 2015 Target
Norway’s Finance Minster, Kristin Halvorsen, has proposed to ban petrol cars by 2015 in order to lower CO2 emissions and encourage car manufacturers to begin making more environmentally friendly models. That would mean only electric, biofuel, hydrogen or hybrid cars could be bought in the Scandinavian country by that date. Speaking about the proposal, Ms. Halvorsen said, “This is much more realistic than people think when they first hear about [it]. The financial crisis means a lot of those car producers that now have big problems know they have to develop their technology, because we also have to solve the climate crisis when this financial crisis is over.” However, the ban would not apply to used cars – petrol or diesel – bought before 2015.
This proposal is both interesting and surprising, as Norway is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter. Indeed, Ms. Halvorsen ’s proposition is likely to be subjected to heated debate, as the idea has some opponents, even within the government itself.
“The legislation follows lobbying by animal welfare groups, which have long argued that the clubbing of seal pups by hunters is barbaric.
Canada kills about 300,000 seals annually off its east coast – the biggest such hunt in the world.”
Stavros Dimas, European Commissioner for the Environment, welcomed the new ban and said that the new legislation “addresses EU citizens’ concerns with regard to the cruel hunting methods of seals.”
Caroline Lucas, MEP for the Greens in the UK, said that “today, nearly one million seals are slaughtered annually in commercial seal kills around the world”, and that this new legislation will help end “one of the most vile examples of animal cruelty.”
Kristin Halvorsen, Finance Minister in Norway, has together with her Socialist Left Party proposed a plan that would forbid the sale of new cars that run solely on gasoline after 2015 in the country.
According to her proposal new cars, bought after 2015, which only uses gas as their power source would be illegal. New hybrids, cars that run partially on gas, on the other hand would still be allowed to be sold in Norway. And cars already on the road would be unaffected by the new proposed law.
“The financial crisis also means that a lot of those car producers that now have big problems … know that they have to develop their technology because we also have to solve the climate crisis when this financial crisis is over,” Halvorsen was quoted as telling Reuters.
The proposal has already met some resistance in Norway where the skeptics say the proposed ban would undermine the country’s economy (Norway is the world’s number six oil exporter). But Halvorsen says that won’t be the case:
“Not at all … we know that the world will be dependent on oil and gas for many decades ahead but we have to introduce new technologies and this is a proposal to support that,” she said.
The whole idea with the Covenant of Mayors pact is to “go beyond” EU’s 20% greenhouse gas emission cuts and 20% renewable energy by 2020. The German city Hamburg plans to reduce emissions by 40 percent by 2020. Paris on the other hand says it hopes to reduce emissions by 25 percent over the same period.
EU’s Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said the plan, which will affect 80 million Europeans, is equivalent to reforest each year a surface larger than the whole of Hungary, or taking out from the streets more than 35 million cars or closing down 20 coal-fired 50MW power plants. At a conservative estimation the plan will save around €8 billion ($10.4 billion) in energy costs every year.
“Most of the energy produced in Europe is consumed in urban areas. The battle against climate change will have to fought and won in the cities. This is why, the commitment shown by Mayors across Europe by signing the Covenant of Mayors send us a strong message of hope, particularly in the difficult times that we are facing “, said Commissioner Piebalgs.
What is equality and development? And what kind of influence has the environment on both of these relations? For me, environmentalism has always been about caring about the well-state and equality of everyone and everything. Al Gore said, during the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in 2008, that you can’t solve climate change or poverty in the developing world “without dealing with the other”:
“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other (Gore, 2008)”.
So if we are to solve the equality in the world, our uneven development and environmental problems we just can’t work on one of them. They are all connected and thus we have to deal with all of them at once.
A new environmental study ranks Canada as one of the worst developed countries in the world. The study has been done by the Conference Board of Canada, an independent and not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada.
According to the study Canada performed poorly and received D grades in the areas of waste generation, water usage, and greenhouse gas emissions. But the study still gave Canada an overall C grade because the country performed “better than average on other measures of environmental performance”. The study notes that “Canada is not taking the necessary steps toward environmental sustainability”, and that Canada “stands almost at the bottom of the pack” alongside with USA and Australia.
Norway, a rich country in Scandinavia (in northern Europe) with a population of almost five million people enjoy the second highest GDP per-capita (after Luxembourg) and third highest GDP (PPP) per-capita in the world, and has maintained first place in the world in the UNDPHuman Development Index (HDI) for six consecutive years (2001-2006).
Most of the wealth comes from large fields of natural resources such as oil and gas. Norway is the third largest exporter of oil and gas worldwide. Only Russia and Saudi Arabia export more oil than Norway. In 2006, oil and gas accounted for 58% of all the services and products exported.
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Today the European Parliament voted 
