By Joseph Coleman
    The Associated Press

    Thursday 06 December 2007

    Bali, Indonesia - American climate negotiators refused to back down in their opposition to mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions Thursday, even as a U.S. Senate panel endorsed sharp reductions in pollution blamed for global warming.

    The United States, the world's largest producer of such gases, has resisted calls for strict limits on emissions at the U.N. climate conference, which is aimed at launching negotiations for an agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

    That stance suffered a blow when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a bill Wednesday to cut U.S. emissions by 70 percent by 2050 from electric power plants, manufacturing and transportation. The bill now goes to the full Senate.

    U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson, however, said that would not impact Washington's position at the international gathering in Bali.

    "In our process, a vote for movement of a bill out of committee does not ensure its ultimate passage," he told reporters. "I don't know the details, but we will not alter our posture here."

    It was the first bill calling for mandatory U.S. limit on greenhouse gases to be taken up in Congress since global warming emerged as an environmental issue more than two decades ago.

    Republican critics of the bill argued that limiting the emissions could become a hardship because of higher energy costs.

    
    By Seth Borenstein
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 05 December 2007

    Washington - For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."

    A petition from at least 215 climate scientists calls for the world to cut in half greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It is directed at a conference of diplomats meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate the next global warming treaty. The petition, obtained by The Associated Press, is to be announced at a press conference there Wednesday night.

    The appeal from scientists follows a petition last week from more than 150 global business leaders also demanding the 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases. That is the estimate that scientists calculate would hold future global warming to a little more than a 3-degree Fahrenheit increase and is in line with what the European Union has adopted.

    In the past, many of these scientists have avoided calls for action, leaving that to environmental advocacy groups. That dispassionate stance was taken during the release this year of four separate reports by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    But no more.

    "It's a grave crisis, and we need to do something real fast," said petition signer Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "I think the stakes are way way too high to be playing around."

    
    By Frank Davies
    The San Jose Mercury News

    Thursday 06 December 2007

Backers build momentum despite GOP opposition.

    Washington - In a landmark effort to tackle global warming, a Senate committee Wednesday approved a sweeping program to slash greenhouse gas emissions through the first half of this century and mandate a low-carbon future for the U.S. economy.

    "This is the most far-reaching global warming bill in the world," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment Committee, who was jubilant and tearful after the 11-8 vote that sends the bill to the Senate floor next year.

    The measure still faces significant obstacles in the Senate and the House, and the Bush administration disagrees with some of the bill's mandates. But the bill's backers say political and moral momentum are on their side.

    "This is historic, and it sends a message to the Senate, White House and the world that the United States is ready to get into this fight and lead," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., one of the co-sponsors of the 300-page measure.

    The 10 Democrats and independents on the committee were joined by one Republican, John Warner of Virginia - the other co-sponsor - who predicted the bill would force members of Congress and presidential candidates "to do their homework and take a stand."

    The measure would establish a cap-and-trade program, administered by two new federal boards, and set emissions limits that get tougher every year after 2012. Utilities and industries would be granted allowances to stay under the cap, and could sell or trade those allowances.

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    By Mariah Blake
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Wednesday 05 December 2007

The country adopts legislation Wednesday to cut emissions 36 percent as delegates hammer out a post-Kyoto treaty.

    Hamburg, Germany - This week, delegates from more than 180 countries are gathered in Bali for a United Nations-sponsored conference, where they will try to hash out a road map for a post-Kyoto climate treaty. Meanwhile, Germany is forging ahead and adopting what experts here say is the most comprehensive climate-protection package ever enacted worldwide.

    Using a raft of measures - many aimed at boosting energy efficiency or cultivating renewable energy sources - the nation plans to reduce heat-trapping gases by 36 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

    By adopting the plan Wednesday, Germany aims to influence the negotiations.

    "We hope that the example set by our decisions will be followed and that we come together internationally to implement ambitious climate goals," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday in her weekly podcast.

    But at home the plan has gotten mixed reviews, particularly from environmental groups and climate scientists who say there are crucial gaps that reflect larger contradictions in the nation's policies.

    Germany has made bold strides in the fight against climate change and is one of only three European nations on track to meet its Kyoto obligations.

   
    By Glenn Hurowitz
    Grist

    Monday 03 December 2007

Bali conference could end deforestation overnight.

    Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. (Despite its green reputation, palm oil is anything but: a recent study in Science found that palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.)

    Companies like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables are paying top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel. That global demand has driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 (PDF) in some cases - providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people - who need them to survive.

    The Bali conference could immediately eliminate that perverse accounting by making sure forests and other wild lands around the world are financially valued for the carbon they store, and not just their potential as timber or agricultural land. The way to do that is to allow polluters to get credit for protecting forests that they can apply against their pollution reduction obligations, an idea called carbon ranching or avoided deforestation.

   
    By Charles J. Hanley
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 04 December 2007

    Bali, Indonesia - Victims of climate change, real and potential, appealed Tuesday for a vast increase in international aid to protect them from and compensate them for rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely impacts of global warming.

    "We cannot wait. We need to do something now," said climatologist Rizaldi Boer of Indonesia, some of whose farmers are already suffering from unusual dry spells blamed on climate change.

    The "Adaptation Fund," being developed under U.N. climate agreements to enable poorer countries to adjust to a warmer world, has thus far drawn a mere $67 million for a task the World Bank estimates will cost tens of billions of dollars a year.

    The almost 190 nations assembled here for the annual U.N. climate conference are taking up the fund's future among other issues on an agenda aimed chiefly at launching a two-year negotiating process to seal a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

    That 175-nation accord requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a key source of global warming, by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrial nation that has rejected Kyoto.

    The European Union and others are seeking a post-Kyoto agreement that would mandate much deeper reductions by industrial nations - including, they hope, the U.S. - in carbon dioxide and other such emissions from power plants, factories, vehicles and other sources.