I was listening to the pressconference that the European Union had the last two days. One would think that by now with all the high level people attending that they would have a clear and effective communication on what they want to achieve here in Copenhagen. More often than not the devil is in the details so one have to take to listen carefully what they really say.
During these two press conferences I found a few interesting contradictions and points worth to notice. The first interesting statement is made by Joe Lionel where he concludes the following:
“The Scientific community is asking for the upper level of 25-40 % for industrialized world. Let’s say that 20 % is definitely not enough, that’s the conclusion what the scientific panel has found. therefore 30 % would even not be enough, that would match half-way what we could then do. It is not a scientific definition but a political assesment.”
Here he completely agrees that neither 20 % of the European target nor their 30 % target is enough. We have to do more to come up to a scientific standard. So the question I ask here is why is a political agenda the driving force if the science is clear? If we are to keep below a 2 degree target we also need progressive action inline with science, not inline with the political assesment made.
The next interesting statement is made by Stavros Dimas where he is commenting the ‘great deed’ of financing CDM.
This past weekend around 50 000 people from around Germany protested in Berlin against nuclear energy. The demonstrators protested against threats from the current right wing government to extend a deadline for the country’s 17 nuclear reactors.
“In Berlin an estimated 50,000 people have joined a demonstration against nuclear power in the run-up to the German general elections.
The rally was headed by a convoy of 350 tractors, which drove past the office of Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports.
Back in 2001 the former Social Democratic chancellor, backed up by the Greens, pushed through a new legislation in 2001 that would phase out nuclear energy from Germany within two decades. But the Social Democratic and Green government lost the election in 2005 to a right-wing coalition consisting of the current Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats.
Angela Merkel, who successfully blocked a strong climate deal for the European Union last year, now wants to scrap the nuclear phase-out legislation that the SPD pushed through in 2001. This is similar to what is happening in Sweden after a coalition of right-wing parties won the recent election there. According to Merkel, Germany “cannot phase out nuclear energy as quickly as some imagine.”
I often hear people saying that overpopulation is the main problem to our environmental and ecological problems. Some people even claim that it’s responsible for global warming. I also agreed with this idea before. But after reading more about the subject over the years I have changed my mind.
The rich countries in the “North”, i.e. the West, have a “rapidly decreasing” population which is “expected to decline over the next forty years.” Developing countries such as India, China and most of Africa on the other hand is where we will see future population numbers increasing.
And yes. It seems so easy to blame countries with an overwhelming rising population for being responsible for wrecking our planet, climate and environment. Because surely more people must mean more pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Right?
Not really. The West is responsible for about 80% of the worlds CO2 increase. An average person living in Great Britain will in only 11 days emit as much CO2 as an average person in Bangladesh will during a whole year. And just a single power plant in West Yorkshire in Great Britain will produce more CO2 every year than all the 139 million people combined living in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique.
As Fred Pearce from the Yale Environment 360 blog notes, only a small portion of the world’s people are using most of the planets resources as well as producing the most of the greenhouse gases. And those are living in the West:
“Vattenfall, which won with 39% of the vote (about 2000 votes cast), was nominated for “its mastery of spin on climate change, portraying itself as a climate champion while lobbying to continue business as usual, using coal, nuclear power, and pseudo-solutions such as agrofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS).”
The energy company also played a key role in setting up the World Business Summit on Climate Change through the Combat Climate Change – a lobby group established by Vattenfall to promote the “climate-friendly technologies” such as carbon capture and storage and nuclear power, which are the company’s preferred options for tackling climate change.”
Climate Greenwash Awards Coordinator Kenneth Haar congratulated Vattenfall for their hard (read: dirty) work which resulted in their first place. Haar also gave a special mention the Danish Government for giving these dirty corporations easy access to the climate talks:
Green political parties from across Europe made a successful European parliament election this past week. The European Greens gained 11 new seats in the parliament and will now have a total of 46 Green MEPs, an increase with 31%. The Greens/EFA Group is now likely to have 53 MEPS (46 Greens and 7 EFA MEPs).
“To have increased the number of Green MEPs from 35 to 46 is a great success. Our showing is even more remarkable when you consider that we have 11 more seats than before in a parliament with 49 fewer MEPS and that all other groups have shrunk”, said EGP Co-Spokesperson Philippe Lamberts, who has been elected a MEP for the Belgian French-speaking Green Party Ecolo.
In France the green political party Europe-Ecologie gained 16% of the votes and will thus send 13 green MEPs to the European parliament. Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are other countries where the greens will receive more MEPs than from the last EU election. In Greece 3.48% of the people voted for Ecologoi-Prasinoi and as a result Greece will be able to send their first green MEP to the European Parliament.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (more known as brokep) the co-founder of the Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, also wants you to vote green in the upcoming European elections.
The upcoming European Elections are just a few days away. And when it comes to saving the climate this EU election is one of the more important ones. And I believe it’s definitely something you must take part in if you care the slightest about the climate, your children and their future, the environment or just the well state of your country.
Find your country’s green party and vote for it in the upcoming EU election. It really isn’t harder than that! This is our chance to vote for change. Don’t waste it.
In Gothenburg, the second-largest city in Sweden, climate activists from Klimax and the Friends of the Earth “decorated” cranes with banners, planted trees and even had a breakfast on the construction site to highlight and protest against the climate highway madness being built in Sweden.
“It’s bad enough that large amounts of taxpayers’ money is being wasted on projects that won’t work, but these road projects will even lead to an increase of carbon dioxide emissions. It’s ironically that that we activists’ risks getting arrested while the real criminals, who on a consciously and cynically way make decisions that will lock us into a continued increase of carbon dioxide emissions will go free. We just can’t sit quiet while climate criminal politicians threaten future generations living condition; it’s every citizen’s obligation to put pressure on the decision makers so they make climate friendly choices”, said Lovisa Börjeson from Klimax in Gothenburg.
The upcoming European Elections are just a few weeks away. And when it comes to saving the climate this EU election is one of the more important ones. And I believe it’s definitely something you must take part in if you care the slightest about the climate, your children and their future, the environment or just the well state of your country.
As you probably already know by now time is no longer on our side when it comes to fighting man-made climate change. We need radical actions now if we are to have the slightest chance to stop the worst doomsday scenarios. That is why this election is so important. Because whatever you like it or not the decisions which are being made in the European Parliament affects all member states. So this is our chance to vote for meaningful actions against climate change that will affect politics and regulations both in Europe and around the world. Don’t wait until the next European Parliament elections in 2014, because then it will be too late.
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.
Sweden might be the host for Europe’s largest wind farm if the Swedish government approves the proposed plans. The wind farm will be located in Markbygden near Piteå in northern Sweden and will have a total of 1,101 wind turbines.
“This would be Europe’s, if not the world’s, biggest wind farm,” Caj Noren, a spokesman for the board, told AFP. Construction could begin in two-and-a-half years and would be completed after about a decade, Noren said.
Once constructed the wind farm will produce between 8 to 12 terawatt hours per year and would alone meet Sweden’s national wind power target to reach 10 terawatt hours by 2015. The wind farm is expected to cost about 55 billion Swedish Kronor (around $6.9 billion or €4.5 billion) to construct.
The Swedish right-wing government recently announced that they will reverse a nearly 30-year-old ban on building nuclear power plants. Its madness when we can get cheap, clean renewable energy and at the same time create thousands of new jobs from wind farms like this one.
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I was listening to the pressconference that the European Union had the last two days. One would think that by now with all the high level people attending that they would have a clear and effective communication on what they want to achieve here in Copenhagen. More often than not the devil is in the details so one have to take to listen carefully what they really say.
