Leaders from the developing world sharply criticized their counterparts from richer nations during talks at the Rio+20 sustainable development conference on Thursday, citing what they said is the historic responsibility industrialized nations have to clean up the globe.
Delegates from developed nations, meanwhile, said that a rapidly changing economic order and the rise of nations such as China, Brazil and India means that all nations must work together in protecting the environment.
Leaders or senior officials from 193 nations descended on Rio de Janeiro for the largest conference the United Nations has organized, with upward of 50,000 participants discussing hundreds of issues meant to get the world on a sustainable path that would allow economic growth without depleting the globe’s resources.
However, activists and many delegates blasted the document that will be signed at the conclusion of the three-day talks, which was finished by diplomats hours before the summit opened and won’t be formally debated by leaders before they approve it Friday, delegates said.
Rio+20: A future we don’t want
Al Jazeera, By Benedict Moran, June 21
A massive, thee-day global conference on sustainable development was officially launched in Brazil on Wednesday, but the tone was anything but optimistic.
Since the original Earth Summit, also in Rio, put sustainable development on the global agenda 20 years ago, humanity’s impact on the planet has only become more pronounced.
There are 1.5 billion additional people on the planet; the average temperature has increased by .4 degrees Celsius; and CO2 emissions have increased by 36 per cent.
Diplomats returned to Rio in an alleged attempt to change course. But the outcome document – announced a day before session began and the result of months of intense negotiations – leads to no major new proposals or binding promises.
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“Just to be clear, NGOs here in Rio in no way endorse this document,” Wael Hmaidan, Director of Climate Action Network, said near the end of negotiations. “It does not in any way reflect our aspiration.”
A number of organisations and individuals have signed a petition, called “The Future We Don’t Want”, that refuses the current text, and are planning on launching demonstrations across the convention centre here in Rio on Thursday.
But barring some major breakthrough in the next two days, the text is set to be adopted on Friday at the close of the session.
Humans haven’t evolved much from the Australopithecine who lumbered across the savannahs of Africa 4 million years ago. We are real good at reacting to things moving quickly in our peripheral vision like leopards springing to eat us. Not so good at reacting to slow-moving things like climate change, that require higher cortical reasoning. In short, we are fucked.
BBC, By Richard Black, June 22
The UN sustainable development summit in Brazil has ended with world leaders adopting a political declaration hammered out a few days previously.
Environment and development charities say the Rio+20 agreement is too weak to tackle social and environmental crises.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, author of a major UN sustainable development report 25 years ago, said corporate power was one reason for lack of progress.
Nations will spend three years drawing up sustainable development goals.
They will also work towards better protection for marine life on the high seas.
But moves to eliminate subsidies on fossil fuels – recommended in a number of authoritative reports as likely to boost economies and curb CO2 emissions – came to naught.
Plans to enshrine the right of poor people to have clean water, adequate food and modern forms of energy also foundered or were seriously weakened during the six days of preparatory talks.
And many governments were bitter that text enshrining women’s reproductive rights was removed from the declaration over opposition from the Vatican backed by Russia and nations from the Middle East and Latin America.
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The next key date on the sustainable development journey is 2015.
The sustainable development goals should be decided and declared by then; also, the UN climate convention will have what some, with trepidation, are calling its “next Copenhagen” – the summit that should in theory usher in a new global agreement with some legal force to tackle global warming.
Global carbon emissions rise is far bigger than previous estimates.
New analysis by the Guardian shows the world emitted a record 31.8bn tonnes of carbon from energy consumption in 2010.
The Guardian, By Simon Rogers & Fiona Harvey, June 21
Carbon dioxide emissions have risen by even more than previously thought, according to new data analysed by the Guardian, casting doubt on whether the world can avoid dangerous climate change.
The data has emerged as governments met in Rio de Janeiro to finalise the outcome of the Rio+20 conference, aimed at ensuring that economic growth does not come at the expense of irreparable environmental degradation, but which activists say has not achieved enough to stave off severe environmental problems.
Global carbon emissions from energy are up 48% on 1992, when the original Earth summit took place in Rio – a historic summit at which governments agreed to limit emissions in order to prevent dangerous climate change.
In 2010, the latest year for which figures have been compiled, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said the world emitted 31.8bn tonnes of carbon from energy consumption. That represents a climb of 6.7% on the year before and is significantly higher than the previous best estimate, made by the International Energy Agency last year, that in 2010 a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide were released from burning fossil fuel.
Increases in fossil fuel use of this magnitude are likely to carry the world far beyond the temperature rise of 2C by 2050 that scientists have estimated is the limit of safety, beyond which climate change is likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.
Via Charlie Pierce at Esquire: The Consequences of Believing Nonsense, June 21.
As we wind into the weekend, the blog thought you needed a little somethin’-somethin’ to worry about over the grill. One of the things that many climate scientists believe, but will not say out loud, is that the planet we live on may already be cooked well beyond our ability to uncook it it. And, yes, you may consider “cook” a euphemism for a word the Supreme Court declared on Thursday that Cher now accidentally could say on television. Quoth the Guardian:
In other words, we’re all going backwards, and not forwards, on the most critical environmental issue in the history of the planet. The Chinese are going backwards because they’re hopelessly overindustrialized and because they’re short-sighted. We’re going backwards just because we’re stupid and an entire half of our acceptable political dialogue — most certainly including one of our two political parties — is palpably insane.
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Agenda 21, and its attendant conspiracy theories, was a product of the original Rio conference. Now what do you suppose is going to be the general reaction to the data produced by Rio+20 if it says what the Guardian indicates it might say — namely, that we all might be pretty well, ah, cooked? You know very well what it’s going to be. Half of the legitimate political dialogue is going to start with the lavishly financed skree-skree-skreeing. Several actual elected congrescritters are going to start raving about UN plots and Alger Hiss. (No kidding. If you dive deep enough into the fever swamp of anti-Agenda 21 lunacy, he’s in there.) One of our major cable news networks is going to dedicate itself to complete misinformation, and the rest of the “legitimate” news media are going to treat the propaganda channel as though it were a serious news operation, and not Romper Room for angry shut-ins. The AM radio dial is going to be a constant drumbeat of nonsense. And, because sensible people will be unwilling or unable to counter all this, nothing actually will get done.
If you consider the truth to be as malleable as we do in our current political climate, then you wind up with grim consequences. There are serious dangers to a self-governing republic if enough people are willing to believe, and to act, on nonsense. (Someone should write a book.) But, of course, what do we care? We’re not Eskimos.
Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Get Serious About Global Warming
The secretary of state’s new plan to deal with pollutants other than fossil fuels could be a game changer, write David G. Victor, Charles F. Kennel, and Veerabhadran Ramanathan.
Daily Beast, By David G. Victor, Charles F. Kennel, & Veerabhadran Ramanathan, June 21
This United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit happening now is a reminder of how little has been achieved since 1992, the last time diplomats gathered there to focus on global environmental perils. The final segment of the Rio+20 meeting opened yesterday with no coherent agenda and is likely to close tomorrow with few practical outcomes.
Back in 1992 at the first Rio summit the world rightly made climate change its signature issue because sustainable economic growth and protecting the planet’s ecology are impossible to achieve if the planet’s climate system is way out of whack. But the bold vision for stopping global climate change hasn’t inspired much serious action. World emissions of warming pollutants today are about 40 percent higher than they were in 1992 and will rise even higher in the future.
The good news is that it far from the big U.N. halls, where talk outweighs action, a new and much more effective climate change strategy is emerging. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fleshed out a scheme with Sweden and a few other like-minded nations to cut warming pollution by working in a small, nimble group rather than the whole United Nations. Supported by the U.N. Environment Program and an array of leading scientists, the effort focuses on controls that don’t just slow global warming but also deliver tangible benefits to health and food security.
That’s why Secretary Clinton’s trip to Sweden was so important. It signals a new way to tackle global problems by investing in practical, local actions that align with the self-interests of the world’s biggest polluters. So far, the effort is underfunded and hasn’t yet enticed China and India. But the G8 announced its support last month at Camp David, and momentum is building.
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A fresh start to climate diplomacy would emphasize that carbon dioxide is not the only warming pollutant. At least 40 percent of current global warming can be blamed on four other types of pollutants: dark soot particles called black carbon, methane, lower-atmospheric ozone, and industrial gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used as coolants in refrigerators. These pollutants have life spans of just a few weeks to a decade—much shorter than that of carbon dioxide. But although their tenure is brief, they are potent warmers. Emitting one ton of black carbon, for example, has the same immediate effect on warming as emitting 500-2,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Because the impacts of these short-lived pollutants on the climate are severe and swift, limiting them could curb warming quickly, allowing more time for serious effort to reduce carbon dioxide.
It’s Happening, but Not in Rio
New York Times, By Jim Leape, June 14
Rio De Janiero – For the past two weeks, representatives from around the world met here for Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, to define a global plan of action that would take humanity toward a cleaner, greener future.
They failed. The text they agreed upon on Friday is a caricature of diplomacy. It “acknowledges†many challenges and “encourages†action, but there are few real commitments.
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Yet there is hope. If you looked around in Rio last week, you saw where the action really is — local and national governments, companies, NGOs, labor unions finding ways to get on with it.
Governments are coming together in regional initiatives to manage the resources they share.
In the Coral Triangle, stretching from Malaysia and Indonesia to the Solomon Islands, governments have joined forces to protect the world’s richest coral reefs, which provide food and livelihoods for more than 100 million of their citizens.
The article continues at the link, running down various green initiatives. Jim Leape is Director General of the WWF.