climate change

As Jim Gabour seemed certain of all along, Hurricane Gustav spared New Orleans a return to the horrors and devastation of Katrina three years ago. Though eight people across the south of the United States died as a result of the storm's arrival, its impact has not been nearly as deadly as feared. The GOP now returns to the misfortune of staging a full convention that will pale in comparison to its Democratic counterpart. And national and international (particularly British) media will once again train their lenses on American political pageantry.

I'm unsettled by the media's total lack of interest in the reality of the storm. The story of Gustav was simply New Orleans. Of course, the city suffered dearly during Katrina. Journalists should investigate how well its refurbished defenses coped. But major media outlets paid disproportionate attention to New Orleans while ignoring the storm's real toll. The deaths of nearly one hundred people throughout the Caribbean passed without mention, or at best as a footnote. See, for instance, this distasteful article in The Telegraph which notes right at the end, as a one-line after-thought not worth dwelling upon, that "Gustav has already killed at least 94 people in the Caribbean".

Some reports claim that the death toll in the Caribbean has exceeded one hundred. Gustav killed at least 77 people in Haiti, while battering Jamaica, parts of Cuba, the Caymans and other islands. For more on the devastation of the storm read Global Voices Online's round-up of the Caribbean blogosphere.

The numbers are not that important; Gustav, after all, is certainly not the deadliest hurricane to sweep through the region. Rather, what is troubling is the absence of the Caribbean in the broadcasts and reports that build international consciousness. Over the weekend in the UK, Sky News transmitted live Mayor Ray Nagin's press conference from New Orleans. I wonder if the mayor knew that a British audience absorbed his dry traffic updates and announcements of road closures to Mississippi. We should never reject this immersion in a distant local experience - particularly one as brimming with human loss and endurance as New Orleans - but it is difficult to accept when its price is the elision of others. From the perspective of western TV, print and internet coverage, all roads lead to New Orleans; the Caribbean was but a path for the storm before it made its real landfall on our sense of what matters.

Kentucky's Republican senator Mitch McConnell has come out strongly against proposed climate change legislation at a time when real progress on the issue in Congress seems probable. In a piece written for The Hill he argues that:

Now is the time to be considering, and approving, legislation that would allow Americans to increase energy production within our own borders, and to accelerate the process of moving to clean nuclear energy. Now is the time to do something about $4.00 a gallon gasoline, not something that would cost us $6.00 a gallon gas down the road.

McConnell’s objections are interesting not only because they appeal to populist resentment about gas prices and job-losses, but because as an Appalachian Republican senator up for re-election, McConnell must grapple with the many new challenges facing American lawmakers as they seek to act on this issue.

John McCain, it seems, can’t stay out of trouble. After enraging most of the Republican blogosphere with his radical (for a Republican) proposals to fight climate change, he has now succeeded in also angering China.

chinadialogue.net last week translated and published McCain’s remarks and have since had to deal with an upset response. Readers have suggested that these policies are indicative of "anti-Chinese sentiment coming from the West" and that China and other developing countries are far from the "chief culprits" when it comes to climate change.

John McCain today set out his plan for tackling climate change, proposing to cut US greenhouse gas emissions 60% by 2050. McCain asserted his independence from the President Bush’s legacy of inaction and suggested that he would reclaim a position of leadership for the United States.

Most strikingly, he stated that:

"If the efforts to negotiate an international solution that includes China and India do not succeed, we still have an obligation to act."

This is a bold move by a Republican presidential candidate – Bush has for the last eight years made US participation in international efforts to reduce emissions contingent on the involvement of these countries. Obama and Clinton both propose larger cuts, as do Senators Warner and Lieberman, but it is striking that there is a firming cross-party consensus on the importance of acting on climate change.

The world wakes today to exciting news: US President George W. Bush has set a new national climate target. While others seek to reduce emissions, the US will now look to at least stop increasing them. By 2025.

As the clock winds down on the Bush era, it is worth considering the consequences of his decision to stand still on climate change. America is now at least eight years behind the rest of the world. It will take a long time and a lot of work to catch up and there is, as yet, little evidence to suggest that the next president can do enough.

The agreement reached in Bali on Saturday wasn't an end point , but the start of a process. There now follows at least another two years of intense negotiations to pull together an effective global climate deal.

Inevitably this means that there will now be a period of soothsaying commentary and interpretation before the true importance of the Bali agreement begins to be understood and acted on.

And already this coming week will see the start of attempts to tease out a more accurate understanding of what went on in Bali and where it is leading.

Following below are details of two events that Global Deal has interest in - unfortunately both on Tuesday 18th December.

With Bali's biggest decision now made, the media pack has rushed off to file stories, source reaction, or get drunk on the beach. But the action here in plenary is not quite done.

In a meeting under the ‘Kyoto track', countries have just signed up to the kind of ambitious goals that were washed out of the main Bali declaration.

This decision affects all countries that have ratified Kyoto (most of the world other than the USA).  This includes Australia. For the first time, it expressed "strong support" for a goal of reducing rich country emissions by 25-40% by 2020, from a 1990 baseline.

BBC News 24 has just announced on air that a short draft agreement has been issued in Bali. Ban Ki Moon is flying back in to Bali to participate in the final push.

They hope to speak to Roger Harrabin in Bali shortly... And here he is, before I can even hit publish:

'Urgent language but no numbers' is the headline.

It seems that the confusion in Bali is still not yet over, not even for the BBC's news gathering resources.

Just over an hour ago, the Bali negotiations were the first item on the Radio 5 Live news bulletin, for what seems like the first time this week. They quoted UK Environment Minister Hilary Benn as saying that a deal had still not been reached.

Yet over on the BBC website, the latest news on their Bali section is that

A rolling post, updating the tortuous path towards a Bali agreement. Update 1: a tentative agreement that will be debated further, 8am tomorrow morning. Update 2 (the next morning): the agreement begins to unwind. Update 3: misprint in the text! Update 4: farce. Update 5: Shameful scenes - Yvo de Boer in tears. Update 6: Just when it seemed impossible, Bali roadmap agreed. Update 7: De Boer returns.

A sobering review of progress from the G77 and China, whose Chairman just complained bitterly about the pressure developing countries were coming under to make concessions.

Unspecified countries - probably the US and Canada, and possibly Japan as well - had threatened trade sanctions if the developing world refused to take on commitments to reduce or limit their emissions, Munir Akram told us.

Negotiators are hitting the pain barrier here in Bali, as they press on in search of an agreement after catching only a few hours' sleep last night.

But the rest of us have spent the day in the doldrums. Press conferences have been scheduled and cancelled, and any news that has percolated out has just been more of the same.

We're still fighting over the same issues. How ambitious will the roadmap be? What kind of commitments will developed and developing countries be negotiating over the next couple of years?

The next announcement is scheduled for an hour's time. We'll all turn up and wait for it to be postponed yet again. Who knows when this will end? I will be happy to get out of here before the sunrise tomorrow - but we could still be sitting around sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Last night, we reported on the bombshell proposal from US negotiators to give all countries targets, based on their levels of economic development.

Talks broke up acrimoniously at 3.30, with a plethora of counter-proposals on the table. As he left, Yvo de Boer pronounced himself ‘confident' about reaching agreement - but I think he was joking.

A late night update from the UN climate conference, where the US has thrown a hand grenade into the talks on the Bali roadmap.

It's close to 1am and the negotiators are still arguing about two main issues:

"My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," Al Gore told Bali this evening, to ecstatic applause, putting the blame for any failure to reach agreement firmly in the Bush administration's court.

But he told the people who applauded his words they had a choice. They could get cross with America, and risk derailing the Bali agreement, or they could skirt around the country, leaving a ‘blank space' in the Bali roadmap for a new administration to fill in.

There is growing evidence that the EU has threatened to boycott the US major economies process on climate change, "unless there is a substantive outcome" from Bali.

Bali is turning into an asymmetrical battle. The EU badly needs everyone to agree a deal, while the US only needs a few countries to object if it decides to derail the negotiations.

But an EU boycott of US-sponsored talks would be a major slap in the face for the Bush administration. It represents one of the few negotiating cards the EU holds at these talks.

The story has been circulating since yesterday evening, when the French environment minister was said to have had an acrimonious meeting with Paula Dobriansky, head of the US delegation.

Some of the sticking points here in Bali are incredibly trivial and technical.

There's been a collapse on capacity building, for example, where the US has blocked progress on the deal that is on the table.

What's going on here?

The aim is to provide money for developing country governments to participate fully in negotiations, but the US has blocked agreement on the issue.

Two slightly different accounts of why.

According to the UN's Yvo de Boer, the US has said that it wants capacity building to be linked to developing country effectiveness in reporting its progress on tackling climate change. If they do a good job, they get money to invest in expertise.

"I am very concerned by the pace of things," was Yvo de Boer's sobering assessment of the state of play at lunchtime today.

De Boer is worried that so many issues are now linked that the ‘whole house of cards could fall to pieces' as the negotiations get frenzied over the next couple of days. There's also a chance that inadequate logistics could play a role...

What should we call NGO blogs? Given how they are increasingly appearing in a new space beyond the traditional media, I wonder whether we need a new term for activist-reporter-bloggers. How about blongos? Or blongeurs?

Whatever we call them, one thing is for sure - blogging is providing an effective means of communicating the hopes and frustrations of frontline lobbyists back to memberships and activists. It's still a minority pursuit at present - look through the long list of accredited NGOs and you'll find just a handful trying to connect beyond the boundaries of the conference compound. But that will surely change over the next 2 years of climate activism.