ISLAND NATIONS: Island nations under threat from rising sea levels have been promised aid. Pictured: an island in the Maldives.
Image: Flickr/Ahmed Amir
The Obama administration will host a high-level meeting to discuss ways to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in annual international global warming assistance, State Department Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said in a recent speech.
Speaking to the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, Stern warned that there will be "enormous pressure" on donor countries to show they are making progress on a vow to generate $100 billion annually by 2020 for clean energy and adaptation.
The United States and other countries, he said, need to turn the focus toward ways of unlocking vast quantities of private-sector dollars and also "develop a narrative" of how nations intend to fulfill the pledge made at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.
"The key here will be to combine limited public funds with smart policies and instruments to leverage significant private-sector investment in clean energy and infrastructure in developing countries," Stern said.
"Given the slow pace and fraught nature of the U.N. negotiations, it is important to drive real action among willing partners that doesn't depend on treaties, negotiations, et cetera," Stern said. "This makes sense substantively and can also send a positive signal that concrete international action in the immediate term is possible and can deliver results."
Analysts and environmental activists praised the early spring meeting as a time to negotiate practical ways of unlocking private-sector dollars for climate change. Several said it is also a badly needed signal to other nations that the United States is thinking constructively about climate finance instead of continuing to reject others' ideas and avoid the discussion.
It also comes as the Obama administration considers several proposals that might signal a renewed domestic commitment to climate action, including a proposal for a White House summit (E&ENews PM, Jan. 9). Bob Doppelt, executive director of the Oregon-based Resource Innovation Group, who pitched the summit idea to the Council on Environmental Quality this week, said that whether the White House chooses that option or another, he's seeing a significant change in attitude and approach from the administration in this term.
"I'm pretty convinced, and I can be pretty cynical, that the administration is serious about how to figure out how the president can take a leadership role on climate change," Doppelt said.
Beginning of an international conversation
A State Department spokeswoman declined to offer details about the climate finance meeting preparations or its goals. But those familiar with the United States' intentions described it as the beginning of an unfolding conversation with finance ministers and others about the best ways to leverage private funding from limited public dollars.
"This sort of meeting can be valuable. It's part of an ongoing process, and I think it can be quite productive," said Gilbert Metcalf, an economics professor at Tufts University who led the creation of the Green Climate Fund at the U.S. Treasury Department before returning to academia this year.
Metcalf praised some ongoing work, like an effort to develop more private-sector involvement in the burgeoning Green Climate Fund. Still, he noted, climate negotiators are not generally experts in finance, and if nations are serious about raising big bucks to protect low-lying islands from sea level rise, to develop distributed solar generation or to do other much-needed work toward both mitigating emissions and building resilience against weather disasters, the conversation needs to shift.
"Bringing together smart people from ministries of finance might actually help work through how to deal with some of these ideas," he said.
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11 Comments
Add CommentMoney from "private sectors"= skewed science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFunding should come from sources without special interest & given to those who are experts in the field of science. Banks should not be involved. We are looking more ridiculous to the world by the minute.
Why the heck would a private company invest? Private companies try to produce goods or services for a profit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho said anything about science? Obviously some of the costs involved are for actual scientific research, monitoring, etc, but my guess is that the VAST majority is money directed at actual infrastructure, adaptation, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think we need to agree that climate change is actually happening before we will get any real commitments from Govenment or private interests. The problem is that there are vested interests pouring a lot of money into denial so they can maintain profits from poluting industries. Until we get the mentality sorted we won't get any real action.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am all for evolving our infrastructure(s) to produce less emissions, and I am willing to act responsibly in that effort. However, I am *totally* opposed to any sort of taxation and wealth-transfer scheme, and will fight politically to the best of my ability to make sure these schemes are stopped dead in their tracks. Climate change is happening, I agree. It has changed continually over time immemorial, and ocean levels have fallen and risen large amounts as a result, with or without humans. To what extent it is happening now because of human activity is open to question in my opinion (I know we are affecting it, but to exactly what extent?). I have absolutely no faith at all that taxing me and giving my money to the third world will affect that change one iota. I suspect it will end up buying new Bentleys, palaces and hookers for the local despot of the month, or supporting the armies of well-paid NGOs and bureaucrats (like the UN) who depend on donated money and taxes for their livelihoods. No thank you. Finally, even *if* we shrink the "carbon footprint" of every single human on earth (not likely), but earth's population doubles (very likely at current growth rates), we have accomplished nothing. Do the math. The resulting nuclear winters that will result from the inevitable human conflicts at those levels of growth will offset any fears of "global warming". My advice is to refocus the plan to relocate all people in low-lying seashores *away* from said seashores, and accept that oceans are likely to rise, regardless of what we humans attempt to do. Using public dollars to rebuild New Orleans and the Jersey Shore is the height of irresponsibility in my opinion, given what the models are telling us. If it's likely to flood, - news flash - do not build your homes and businesses there!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's former climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller, on the human contribution to climate change:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/28/602151/bombshell-koch-funded-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-on-the-high-end-and-essentially-all-due-to-carbon-pollution/
Here's a peer-reviewed study that determined humans could be responsible for OVER 100% of the observed changes in climate:
"Our results show that it is extremely likely that at least 74% of the observed warming since 1950 was caused by radiative forcings, and less than 26% by unforced internal variability. Of the forced signal during that particular period, 102% (90–116%) is due to anthropogenic and 1% (−10 to 13%) due to natural forcing…. The combination of those results with attribution studies based on optimal fingerprinting, with independent constraints on the magnitude of climate feedbacks, with process understanding, as well as palaeoclimate evidence leads to an even higher confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times."
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1327.html#/
It's possible that human emissions are responsible for more than 100% of observed warming since 1950 is because our sulfate and other aerosol emissions cool the climate, masking a portion of the warming from our CO2 emissions.
Look, we can argue about how precisely hot it's going to be in 2050, but it will never change the FACT that human emissions are changing the climate in dangerous ways. The money we will HAVE to pay to rebuild after the Sandys and Katrinas of the future would be better spent preventing them in the first place with efficiency, conservation, and clean energy. Charging a modest carbon tax to account for a portion of these costs will allow the market to find the cheapest solutions to this problem.
Pretty simple really. Spend a yur $B annually on nuke power. Done deal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with your post in general. There is absolutely no need to panic. Panicky decisions so often turn out to be wrong decisions. I would further warn that climate change was a non starter in the recent American poll. In Australia before our last poll, the socialist government on numerous occasions promised there would be no carbon tax. Specifically our present Prime Minister Julia Gillard (now popularly known as JuLiar Gillard) stated on numerous occasions - there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead. Almost immediately after winning government she introduced a $20 per ton carbon tax. Obama & Julia pose as great friends. Do not be surprised if before our elections later this year Obama introduces legislation that will allow Gillard to claim the U.S is following our lead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJune 2011, ScientificAmerican.com Pages 84 & 85.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll references deleted from SIAM electronic searches. Mann objected.
Part of the Q & A interview.
How did the BEST project come about?
A colleague of mine drew my attention to some of the issues that were raised by Anthony Watts, who was showing that many of the stations that recorded temperature were poorly sited, that they were close to building and heat sources. I also separately learned of work done by Steve McIntyre up in Canada, who looked at the “hockey stick” data [the data behind a 1999 graph showing temperatures remaining more or less steady for 1,000 years, then rising sharply in the 20th century, like the blade of a hockey stick].
I reviewed the paper that the hockey stick was based on, and I became very uncomfortable. I felt that the paper didn’t support the chart enough.
A few years later, McIntyre came out and, indeed, showed that the hockey-stick chart was in fact incorrect. It had been affected by a very serious bug in the way scientists calculated their principal components. So I was glad that I had done that.
There were other issues, too. There were three major groups analyzing temperature, and issues began to be raised. One of them was: Why had they used only a small fraction of the available temperature stations? We looked into this and realized that they did it because their methods of statistical analysis really were fine with a small number of stations, and they worked better when they had long, continuous records. So they were selecting stations that had such records.
This raised a legitimate question: Is there an inherent bias when you choose stations that have long, continuous records? There’s a possibility that could happen because if you have a station that’s been around for 100 years, it may have started out as being rural and then later was inside of a city, and that could have given it an anomalous warming. We see this in stations in Tokyo, for example. It’s called the urban heat-island effect.
The full document can be recovered here. It is in PDF format but can be accessed via the link in this document. Very interesting. Thanks for reminding me about it. Notice the ice age Poster Watch the video of Mann’s rant. http://climatecrocks.com/2011/05/23/get-popcorn-mike-mann-throws-down-with-scientific-american/
To Bob Doppelt: Your sentence: "I can be pretty cynical" is simply stupid, the Bible praises "Those who do not seat in the meeting of Cynics", and the word Cynic comes from the Cynic's school of Greek philosophers, to which Diogenes belonged, that had among their activities practising sex with their spouses in front of everybody, as dogs do. (Cynic, meaning similar to a dog, comes from the Greek word for dog). I won't trust somedy who doesn't know the meaning of his/her words!.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell that is simple. Change the definition. Our female Prime Minister frequently called our opposition leader a misogynist as a defence against is legitimate criticisms of her polices. When his wife defended him, pointing to his relationship with her, their daughters, his female deputy leader & various other females proving he was not a misogynist, our university linked Australian Macquarie dictionary redefined the word to water down it meaning. Now that is socialists working together. Doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, you are being a little pedantic I am afraid.