This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali and background on the meetings.
As I prepare to send this account to New York by email, we know how it all ended.
But I had to suffer through 40 hours of nearly sleepless sturm, drang, chaos and emotional suspense to find out. I’ll take you through some of that, too.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.
Sex and the Socket – Hilarious video on why CFLs are better. View below, or click link for hi-res version.
This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali
The ministers have arrived – environmental ministers, energy ministers, finance ministers, ministers ordinary and plenipotentiary, and ministers who will one day wind up in the penitentiary. They are driving to and fro in limos with police escorts, blaring their horns at those of us on bicycles.
What this means is that we are entering the last 72 hours of the conference. The nights are getting longer, and the strokes shorter.
But measured even against the background experience that large international conferences frequently undergo a moment of dark despair before dawn brings some sort of last-minute agreement, the last two nights of discord have been dismaying.
This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Click here for his previous dispatch from Bali.
In the second and final week of climate talks here in Bali, wisps and patches of a larger fabric are beginning to appear.
An informal non-group, with unofficial non-co-chairs from South Africa and Australia, has given birth semi-anonymously to a text which issued from an informal non-meeting and has been widely circulated as a non-paper. It addresses tentatively, with conflicting opinions on some key points, the major open issues facing this conference. These include the touchy questions of what the developing countries should be expected to do, and how to advance the talks on incorporating deforestation into the broader climate framework from which they were excluded a decade ago.
This post is by Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense.
A federal judge in California today rebuked the auto industry’s attempt to block California and 16 other states from setting tough new limits on global warming pollution from automobiles, calling these efforts “the very definition of folly.”
This post is by Nat Keohane, Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense.
In his December 11 post on Grist, Ross Gelbspan argues that we’ve already passed the point of no return with global warming, and climate activists are full of "hollow optimism".
There’s no doubt we’re already seeing signs of global warming. In our Climate 411 blog, we post signs of it all the time (see here, here, here, and here, for example). But just because the boat has started to leak doesn’t mean it can’t still get much worse. Our most dangerous response to climate change is despair. Now, more than ever, we need to act.
