Drought Warning: UN Climate Talks Running Dry

UN Climate Talks Running Out Of Cash

By Guest Column Dr. Benny Peiser (Bio and Archives)  Friday, May 25, 2012 | Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

The UN climate campaign is running out of money. Launched with high hopes, the global “Green Climate Fund” (GCF), set up by the United Nations to finance climate change projects in the developing world, is gridlocked due to an international power play. Meanwhile, the UNFCCC Climate Change Secretariat does not know how to raise five million Euros needed for its next climate conference.—Bernhard Potter, Die Tageszeitung,  24 May 2012

Bavaria’s stock exchange will abandon its carbon emissions certificate trading operations in the EU-traded CO2 market on June 30 after volumes in Europe “plunged to practically zero” in recent months, it said on Tuesday.—Reuters, 22 May 2012

An earlier Oxford Energy Comment forecast that the liberalised UK electricity industry was likely to die not with a bang (renationalisation) but with a whimper, suffocated by an increasingly complex network of regulation. With the government’s new Energy Bill, which was published as a consultation draft on 22 May, we seem already to have reached that point.—Malcolm Keay, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, 23 May 2012

We discussed the economy and noted that obviously the United States and Spain are both working diligently to put our people back to work and recover from what has been the worst recession in decades. And so we have enormous commercial ties between our two countries and we pledged to work diligently to strengthen them, particularly around key issues like renewable energy and transportation, where Spain has been a worldwide leader and the United States I think has enormous potential to move forward.—President Barack Obama, 13 October 2009

The most draconian spending cuts on record are plunging Spain’s cities and highways into darkness as ministries and mayors struggle to pay for basic services. Public lighting is one of the more visible casualties of the hard times.—Ben Sills, Bloomberg, 25 May 2012

Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank. –-Kerry Emanuel, MIT

The UK government should renationalise its electricity industry if major power companies continue to resist its changes to the British energy market. That’s the view of Alistair Smith, chairman of the power division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, who was speaking in the wake of the publication of the government’s draft Energy Bill yesterday. He said: If these reforms are rejected by the power industry because they don’t like certain elements, it may be time for the government to consider re-taking control of this essential element of our national infrastructure.”—Kelvin Ross, Power Engineering, 23 May 2012

With the hopes for a comprehensive global carbon treaty all but crushed, American greens have largely moved on to a new environmental threat: fracking. They remain steadfastly opposed to the expansion of fracking, calling for a total ban on its use. Greens have often praised Europe and Australia for their foresight in adopting forward-thinking carbon-trading schemes, while chastising America for its reluctance to do the same. Yet the numbers are out, and America has actually performed better than its carbon-trading peers. From an empirical standpoint, fracking has a much better track record at reducing emissions than the current green dream.—Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 25 May 2012