Discussions of climate change keep running head-long into a barrier: China, India, Brazil and the other countries of the global South need to develop.
No leader of an underdeveloped country will ever agree to a climate change proposal that will take away that country’s right to develop. This isn’t so odd. Try explaining to the Chinese government that because the United States and Western Europe flooded the atmosphere with CO2 by burning readily accessible cheap fossil fuel for 150 years, their citizens will have to live without a decent standard of living, while we imperiously assert that we won’t divert more than a smidgen of our government budget to clean energy development and will keep occupying the country’s freeways and streets with gas-guzzlers.
China, India, South Africa and Brazil — the so-called BASIC bloc of nations — said the nonbinding deal that came out of the Copenhagen climate summit was just a "political understanding" and that future climate negotiations must not be based on that plan.
The skeletal Copenhagen Accord was brokered among the BASIC nations and the United States in the frantic final hours of the December talks. The UN Conference of Parties 'took note' of its existence but fell short of the full support needed to adopt it.
In a statement released on Jan. 24, the newly powerful BASIC bloc said that it supports the Copenhagen Accord but that formal climate talks must move along two tracks only — one that would extend the Kyoto Protocol for the 184 nations that signed it and another that would add an agreement to govern the United States and emerging economies.
Brazil is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of current global GHG emissions.
Maybe this isn’t shocking. It’s a huge country. Its south is speckled with major population centers, and it has a southern industrial belt. Yet most of its emissions don’t come from its cities or its factories. At least not directly. They come from its land.
Two themes are emerging from the second Governors’ Global Climate Summit in California: "Copenhagen, can you hear us now?" and "Don’t leave out the forests this time".
This week’s summit seems intent on building on the success of last year’s international agreement on forest protection, starting with a push from the host state.
First, Sierra Pacific Industries, the largest private forest owner in California, announced a major agreement Wednesday to create the nation’s largest carbon sequestration project, expected to cover 60,000 acres and sequester 1.5 million tons of CO2, equivalent to taking some 300,000 cars off the road for a year.
Louisiana Green Fuels (LGF), a Colombia Business Group, is taking a step that a lot of people in the ethanol industry will be watching carefully: It’s opening America’s first commercial-scale sugar ethanol plant in Louisiana next year.
