Why The Base Year Matters

By J. Taj Schottland

The best revelations come when sitting in a pub with friends having a good old fashioned political argument. Our discussion started over Afghanistan and the War on Terror. The conversation quickly heated up when we tackled President Obama’s recent speech outlining his plan to send 30,000 more US soldiers to the area. We had our differences in opinion regarding whether Obama was making a good choice. We realized that a lot of our dialogue hinged on whether we were convinced by Obama’s stylish rhetoric.

Since we are on day one of our Copenhagen adventure, the talk quickly shifted to climate change rhetoric. What would effective climate rhetoric entail?

I raised the possibility that there is one particularly important aspect of climate rhetoric that we need to address: that is the use of differing baselines that industries and countries are using to make their emission reduction pledges look impressive. Up until recently most countries have made their pledges based on 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions. To put it simply, a country stated how much greenhouse gas they emitted during the year 1990. Then they made a pledge to reduce their emissions by a certain percentage below their 1990 levels of emissions by a specific future date. Recently the slick rhetoric machines of big developed countries have realized that if they use a more recent base year, say 2005, then their percentage reduction will look impressive. When their percentage reduction is announced the media and the general public often fail to notice that the percentage reductions are below recent base years, rather than the traditional 1990 base year.

This matters why? The US put forth the pledge of reducing emissions between 17 and 20 percent by the year 2020. This is good right? Actually this emission reduction is extremely weak compared to what is required. Yes, a 20% reduction compared to 1990 would be awesome, but the US pledge of 20% reduction is below 2005 levels. Based on 2005 levels the pledge is simply not good enough because it only equals a 3.5% reduction below 1990 levels. This does not approach the necessary reductions required to reverse the dangerous effects of human induced climate change.

My question is this: how do we educate the general public to understand and care about emission pledges and specifically how those pledges are deeply affected by the base year used? Any thoughts?

And the waiting begins!

By Noah Hodgetts

The Journey to Copenhagen for COP15 has officially begun for three more of us – Taj, Lindsay, and myself. As I sit here in Terminal E at Logan counting away the minutes until our flight to Zurich boards, I am excited beyond words. Everything the 14 of us having been preparing for over the past three months in Doreen’s Road to Copenhagen class is finally coming to fruition. No matter what happens at the conclusion of the the two weeks of talks, I will know that we couldn’t have gone in more prepared, something I don’t say lightly.

It is also exciting that our hard work and presence at the negotiations has recently been noted by several news outlets. This past Monday November 30th the Boston Globe published an article on the front page of the paper titled “New England sending a crowd to climate talks.” I am proud to say that Neil, Lauren, and myself were all quoted and Neil even has his photo in the print edition. The article can be accessed at http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/11/30/new_england_sending_a_crowd_to_climate_talks/

Brooke was also featured in an interview on Maine Public Radio with Morning Edition host Irwin Gratz: http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/9968/Default.aspx

The flight is now boarding. On to Copenhagen!

Negotiating their forests

By Juan Carlos Soriano

Every living person on this planet depends on forests for our survival, and the 60 million indigenous people who live in forests worldwide have been their primary guardians. An agreement on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) under the climate negotiations will affect the rights of indigenous peoples.

Currently the language of the negotiating text on REDD is vague; “Forest” can be interpreted as “monocrop plantations.” The “Right to participate” does not mean  “Indigenous rights, as some are trying to say. This afternoon The Indigenous Environmental Network rejected having REDD as part of a climate agreement. They call for language in the text that acknowledge the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the principles Free Prior and Informed Consent.

Despite the opposition, an agreement on a REDD mechanism is likely to be adopted in Copenhagen.

By Lauren Nutter

This morning as soon as we hit the conference center and felt the building energy of youth gather for an action our morning grogginess subsided.  The youth in Bangkok hosted an action calling countries to sign onto a pledge and agree to protect forests and the rights on indigenous peoples in a climate agreement.  We all put on our bright blue “forests for our future” t-shirts, pulled out our banners, and were even joined by a Thai student drum choir.  We chanted loudly, and tried to stop every party member entering the center to ask if they would support the pledge.  We were elated to have Papa New Guinea and Indonesia, among others, sign our petition.

Talking climate in Bangkok

(Our bikers Juan Carlos Soriano and Lauren Nutter are currently attending the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2009)

by Lauren Nutter

After waking up at 3:30 in the morning to head to the airport, and finding frost on my car already thanks to the lovely Maine climate, I was happy to arrive to the warmer weather of Bangkok.  More importantly, I was excited to see some progress at the next negotiating sessions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) here in Bangkok.  After an array of global summits and meetings this past month—G-20 meeting, the Major Economies Forum, UN General Assembly high-level on climate change—I hoped that there would be a renewed sense of urgency and commitment from countries to take the next steps needed to combat climate change.

Under this international negotiating framework, countries are set on a path to design what will hopefully be the next global commitment to stop climate change and deal with its current effects.  They have been working up to this for almost three years now; and there is still much left to do.  With an overwhelming 200 pages of varying ideas for how to tackle all of this, countries are voicing their concern to finish on time and pushing for full negotiating mode.  However as one negotiator from the Philippines commented, “We are late, but not too late on our work: negotiation is the art of the possible”.

So far in my time here, I have been focusing on the discussion around technology transfer—how will we get developing countries the technology they need to mitigate and adapt to climate change?  The chair of this discussion started of the session giving all the negotiators nutcrakers and referring to the challenges of reaching a consensus agreement said, “as we talked about in Bonn, we have hard nuts to crack, but I hope the outcome on technology transfer will be more then peanuts”.  Hopefully, we can make progress here and crack some of these “hard nuts” from the divergence of country’s views.