Other experts echoed that but said the administration needs to think even more broadly. Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said he thinks the best way to generate fresh ideas that will actually work is to have the big banks be part of the discussion. Moreover, he said, the focus should be on understanding what companies need to provide financial backing to potentially risky projects in developing countries, rather than on just raising the cash.
"Who will go? You can almost measure the success of the thing by who is there and who is not there. Until Goldman Sachs is sitting around the table, then you haven't created an investment that is going to be at scale," Liebreich said.
"There's a lot of thinking on climate finance that focuses on the supply of money, but actually you need to think about the demand," including what the money should be used for and why the private sector isn't already doing a particular project. "What the private sector needs to do is surgically fill gaps rather than fill a pool," Liebreich said.
Barbara Buchner, head of the Climate Policy Institute Europe, who has written some of the leading policy papers on climate finance, noted that the $364 billion that went to clean energy activity globally last year is a pittance compared to the $1 trillion that the International Energy Institute says is needed annually. That, she noted, doesn't even take adaptation into consideration.
Moving nations out of 'comfort zones'
The scale of the need, combined with the unlikelihood of big increases in taxpayer-funded aid from the United States or Europe, she said, makes private-sector participation all the more important. From feed-in tariffs to risk guarantees, she said, governments need to talk out the different types of policy incentives that could unlock private capital in various parts of the world.
"There is a need to make progress in this area, and it is one area where we can make progress. But there's no one solution fits all," Buchner said. She called the proposed meeting "a positive signal that there are some policymakers that are going to drive the agenda."
Some activists, though, said they are concerned that the United States will focus entirely on private-sector funding and will once again sidestep ways of raising public money, including from "innovative sources," like a tax on bunker fuels or airline emissions.
"This needs to not just be a perceived conversation where everyone is trying to duck the issues that are complicated to them," said Jake Schmidt, international policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. While developing countries will need to move away from some ideological positions that demand public dollars as a form of retribution for climate damages, he said, the United States, in turn, will also have to move out of its comfort zone in order for any finance meeting to be productive.
"The U.S. needs to be prepared to have a discussion about what the public finance component looks like. What innovative finance measures would work for them?" Schmidt said.
Athena Ballesteros, who leads work on climate finance for the World Resources Institute think tank, said, "If this meeting will help contribute to the goal of coordinating countries plans and actions to mobilize the $100 billion pledge, that would be most welcome, and part of the conversation is to find innovative sources of finance that would complement the scarce public resources being made available."
What that conversation will look like remains unclear. Metcalf, the Tufts University professor, said he does not believe the United States or other governments should even be held to a minimum level of public funding to build up the $100 billion.
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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.