Date Posted: 28-Aug-2008

SOUTH ASIA FLOODS KILL 1000

Floods in south Asia this monsoon season have killed more than 1,000 people mostly in India's states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh as well as Nepal and Bangladesh.

Indian authorities issued a warning of more floods in eastern India with heavy rainfalls expected to continue this week.

Overflowing Eastern India rivers swamped land and homes. This month's torrential rains have affected more than 2 million people.

United Nations Children's Fund reported many thousands of cases of fever and diarrhea. "Given the scorching heat, unsafe drinking water and poor hygiene conditions, cases may soon increase," according to a UNICEF statement.

Date Posted: 28-Aug-2008

INCENTIVES TO HALT DEFORESTATION

After agreeing to what forests in the world had been decimated - and that poor countries should be compensated for halting deforestation - a package of solutions to reduce human-made emissions will put together and presented at the next round of UN climate meetings to held in Poznan, Poland in December.

The next US President will be elected a few weeks before the Poznan talks, and whether a framework for a climate treaty can be pushed forward, would be dependent on the willingness of the post Bush administration to negotiate and close a deal, asserted Jake Schmidt, of the National Resources Defense Council.

A negotiating text for a binding climate change emissions package is now likely following the progress made at the Accra, Ghana climate talks this week that discussed limiting carbon emissions by specific industries such as steel, cement or power generation.

The third round of climate talks for a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol had focused on setting out ways that developing countries could benefit from switching to clean energy.

Delegates told Daily Planet Media that a general compromise had been reached that developing countries would face no binding targets on their economies as a whole, and that those countries where forests have been largely depleted, the governments should be rewarded for conserving and expanding their remaining forest cover.

New proposals were discussed for raising the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to help poor countries grapple with the effects of climate change, with the understanding that poor countries like Africa were expected to suffer harsher drought and severe floods with many millions of people likely to be affected by water shortages.

The weeklong conference of 160 nations was the latest round in a two-year process that is due to end with the signing of an accord in December 2009 at Copenhagen.

The UN panel of scientists said that climate change is already imploding, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and warned there would be severe effects if emissions did not peak within the next 10 years.

"We are running out of time on this problem, from the scientific point of view," said Bill Hare, a scientist for Greenpeace who said he had received reports that methane gas was bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean, possibly from the warming of the sea.

Hare said scientists had long feared that such an event was "a potential trigger of rapid and abrupt and extreme climate change."

Date Posted: 27-Aug-2008

SMART TAX FOR CLIMATE FIX

GOVERNMENTS TOLD TO END FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES

Smart tax breaks, financial incentives and better market mechanisms would benefit both the environment and economy, according to a UN study report released to delegates at the climate meeting of governments in Ghana.

The report said governments should use the smart approach and abolishing subsidies on fossil fuels that would cut world greenhouse gas emissions and spur economic growth.

Energy subsidies involving mostly fossil fuels totaled about $300 billion a year or 0.7 percent of world gross domestic product.

"Many fossil fuel subsidies are introduced for political reasons but are simply propping up and perpetuating inefficiencies in the global economy," Achim Steiner, head of the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme told the climate gathering.

Biggest energy subsidies were in Russia where $40 billion a year was spent to make natural gas cheaper.

Iran spends $37 billion on fuel subsides and China, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Egypt spent more on subsidies than on health care.

Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) subsidies in India totaled $1.7 billion in the first half of 2008.

Energy subsidies were standing in the way of more environmentally friendly technologies," Kaveh Zahedi, UN climate change coordinator, told Daily Planet Media.

Date Posted: 27-Aug-2008

CONGRESS REVOKES AMAZON LAWS

Peru's Congress has revoked controversial laws that would have opened up Amazon tribal land to development.

Indigenous leaders complained they had never been consulted on the laws intended to benefit the free trade agreement Peru has signed with the United States

Economists estimate $US3.5 billion worth of timber, mineral and oil products are locked in 92,000 square km Amazon basin.

Some 12,000 Peruvians from 65 tribes occupied oil and electricity plants in the Amazon basis before agreeing to a truce subject to the laws being repealed.

"This signals a new dawn for Amazon peoples," said Alberto Pizango, leader of the Inter-Ethnic Association of the Peruvian Forest.

However, an angry President Alan Garcia warned it was a serious, historic mistake to revoke the development laws.

The Garcia administration contends that the controversial laws were aimed at improving the livelihood of Indigenous communities by developing their farming, livestock and mining activities so they can better integrate with the country's economy.

Date Posted: 26-Aug-2008

SUPPORT FOR UN FOREST SCHEME

The likelihood that the United Nations will soon finalize a scheme to slow deforestation in the African and Amazon regions had increased following overwhelming approval from delegates attending the UN's latest climate meeting.

"We're getting beyond some of the rhetoric," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said while referring to the 160-nation meeting in Ghana that included 1,500 delegates. "People are beginning to understand each other better."

The  Accra gathering had set out to embrace the broad objective to define the building blocks of a new UN sponsored global warming pact slated for agreement by the end of 2009.

Specifically, the meeting was looking to find the best approach to help developing nations slow deforestation.

Cash from rich countries to slow deforestation was widely seen as the best incentive to get poor nations to start slowing their rising emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

Date Posted: 26-Aug-2008

CLIMATE CHANGE IMPLOSIONS

PRESSSURE ON THE USA BORDER

Military strategists have briefed USA and the United Kingdom of the consequences of imploding climate change that could result in worldwide famines, floods and conflicts over resources.

Military analyst Dr Gwynne Dyer, author of the book Climate Wars, said there was a sense of suppressed panic from scientists and military leaders.

Having spent the past year doing high-speed research on climate change, Dr Dyer has spoken to some of the most senior advisors to world governments.

Even the least alarmist scenario for the next couple of decades involves enormous pressures on the US border, contends Dr Dyer.

"That border's going to be militarized. I think there's almost no question about it because the alternative is an inundation of the United States by what will be, effectively, climate refugees," he said.

"They're scared, they're really frightened. Things are moving far faster than their models predicted. You may have the Arctic Ocean free of ice entirely in five years' time, in the late summer. Nobody thought that would happen until about the 2040s - even a couple of years ago.

"If you're talking about 1 degree, 2 degrees hotter - not runaway stuff - but what we're almost certainly committed to over the next 30 or 40 years, there will be countries that get away relatively cost free in that scenario, particularly countries in the higher latitudes."

Countries closer to the equator in the relatively arid zone were likely to experience serious droughts, claimed Dr Dyer, who has served in three navies and held academic posts at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and at Oxford.

African, northern Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Turkey could be expected to suffer huge losses in their ability to support their populations, he said.

Dr Dyer contends that even the most hopeful scenarios about the impact of climate change have hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation, mass displacement of people and conflict between countries competing for basic resources like water.

Governments will be playing climate change catch-up in the next 30 years. And, according to Dr Dyer, if the world does not decarbonise by 2050 "you don't want to be there."

Date Posted: 25-Aug-2008

HYDROGEN CARS CHEERED IN USA

Zero emission hydrogen fuel cell technology took a giant step forward when nine different types of hydrogen cars finished a 13 days road trip across United States last weekend.

California Fuel Cell Partnership Executive Director Catherine Dunwoody told Daily Planet Media there was a lot of curiosity about the hydrogen vehicles with people lining up to cheer the cars and their drivers.

The first-ever cross cross-country trip for hydrogen powered vehicles highlighted the need for more hydrogen fueling stations as there are just 60 hydrostation in US and - and only two open to the public.

Along the cross-country circuit there were stretches where the hydrogen vehicles had to be carried on the back of trucks due to a lack of fuel stops from Rolla to Missouri and from Albuquerque to New Mexico. But for the record the event ran from Portland, Maine, to the Los Angeles Coliseum.

One of purposes of the Hydrogen Road Tour '08 was to demonstrate the need to build more fuelling stations if the new technology is to develop.

The tour stopped in 31 cities in 18 states with the California Fuel Cell Partnership as the major supporter.