Climate 411

The author of today’s post, Kyle Meng, is a Research Fellow at Environmental Defense.

You probably haven’t heard much about it in the news, but the fourth meeting of the U.N. working group on action to address climate change is happening this week in Vienna, Austria. Negotiators are preparing for the next major international climate agreement – what happens when the Kyoto accord’s carbon market runs out at midnight, December 31, 2012. The goal is to strengthen the carbon market framework so it does an even better job of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The question is how best to achieve this.

The Environmental Defense International Climate Team is busy communicating with delegates from various countries to encourage broad participation. Major emitting nations must be part of the accord if we are to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change.

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The author of today’s article, Annie Petsonk, is International Counsel at Environmental Defense.

When European countries ratified the Kyoto Protocol, they pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. To prepare, they designed the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), now the world’s largest greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system.

Since the launch of the EU-ETS in January 2005, allowance prices have been volatile and are currently hovering around zero.

Click on graph to enlarge.

Many people point to these figures and proclaim the EU-ETS a failure. Here’s why they’re wrong.

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Today’s guest blogger, Annie Petsonk, is International Counsel at Environmental Defense.

The Group of Eight (G8) is an international forum of eight industrialized countries representing the lion’s share of the world’s economy. High on this year’s agenda is global warming, with European countries calling for a mandatory 50 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Recognizing that America must take the lead, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) has gone even further. This group of 27 leading U.S. companies and environmental groups has urged Congress to enact legislation [PDF] mandating that the U.S. cut emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050.

Today the G8 Summit reached an agreement.

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ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

George Will is at it again with his OpEd piece "Fuzzy Climate Math" in yesterday’s Washington Post. He makes a lot of pronouncements about global warming, and gets it all wrong. Although I already gave Richard Lindzen an Ignoratio Elenchi Award this week, Mr. Will’s piece is too deserving to go unrewarded.

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Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths“. Will says, “It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol.” He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost “tens of trillions”. And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.

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