Does this mean Cap and Trade is dead for now?

I love that somebody knows how to tell the rich No! Maybe we can send our Dems to a leadership session.

Heh. I wonder how the UN would handle Lieberman?

How radical that developing countries should want to be paid for what the developed countries stole from them. They should just stfu and stay in their place.

democracynow is broadcasting from Copenhagen for the entire duration of the convention. The only decent coverage around.

Poor nations need portable cheap Solar ovens to cut down on cutting trees to cook food. Cheap Portable green power would be good for places without power lines.
However the poor nations get old cars from us. We need to build better more fuel efficient cars and then market them to places like Cuba and Africa.
A Cash For Clunkers program in the third world would get our workers working decrease pollution and reduce the third world’s need for oil.
If we drop oil demand we drop the price of oil this is good for our economy.

Wait until there was something he wanted like aid to Israel then walk out:)

The western powers basically want all the oil to burn for their own profligate purposes and leave the developing nations to cope with energy needs in other ways, so long as it’s not nuclear or anything the U.S. or Israel would have to destroy post haste and without warning as part of the pre-emption foreign policy towards less-developed nations, so-called*.

Another thingy the west likes muches is this newfangled buy-a-rainforest plan where they can be even greater polluters without bearing any of the cost of the externalities. What a concept!

——
*The U.S. presumably is still unaware that it’s a third-world country.

Yep they know they got leverage and are Not Afraid to use it Cap and Trade was suppose to make the banks some money but no poor nations on board no deal.
I expect Rahm to go after them in an impotent rage any second. Troll attacks on the Lake should drop too.

Perhaps. I’ll bet they wouldn’t reward his obstruction with a gavel.

The trolls have been pesky here lately. Way too much anger seeping into the threads. Can’t we just scroll or mock instead of escalating the anger?

The US budget for dealing with climate change, that is to effect an economically stable transition to a low-carbon economy, should, according to people like Jeffrey Sachs, be on the order of 1-3% of GDP, or $120 billion to $360 billion per year. Now if 10% of that is tithed (giving a tenth) to poor countries, it would be $12 billion to $36 billion a year. The EU is presently offering $3 billion to $22 billion a year through 2020, depending on whether wealth or emission levels are the criterion for the transfers.

Suppose instead of military aid we gave our friends GM Volts this way we put our workers back to work, create demand for our products later on and drop world wide oil use?
Ask Israel if they feel safer when oil is at $30 a barrel or when oil is at $60 a barrel? Ask rich plantation owners in South America if the peasants are quieter when oil is at $30 a barrel or at $60 a barrel?
Reduce costs throughout the system reduce strain throughout the system.

True he would never be let near a job with real power.

I’m thinking with the talks dead they will take a break. The oil trolls feared Cap and Trade because the Bank Trolls wanted it.
I say we open up Cars for Clunkers to the world but only for cars like the GM Volt. How many people in poor countries can roll in a clunker cough up a few grand and make payments?
Not many but when you add them all up world wide well this idea will stimulate the economy a lot more than the bank bailout ever did.

This story lays out some key issues.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=anvc_pvQXRnI
“China to Block Climate Deal Without African Payouts, Meles Says ”

I believe that these issues are resolvable. China, India and Brazil need to be able to exact, for their own popular constituencies, some type of concession – possibly mainly rhetorical – from the US in particular and the west in general – acknowledging culpability for “historical damage.” Which is why they’re backing the African revolt – which demands up to a $67 billion a year facility to help the most impoverished nations on that continent deal with the effects of climate change, caused by the major world polluters.

The actual financial implications of the African demands are peanuts, so I suspect that there is a deal to be done here.

Even more than money, what the West really needs to do is issue a “mea culpa” declaration accepting blame, not just proposing prospective future reductions on someone else’s back, and committing to help LDCs in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific and Indian Ocean island states deal with the consequences to them of past emissions.

Cutting the US and EU down to size politically is right now more important for China and India to sell this deal domestically than hard numberse.

Such an acceptance of blame by the US and the west would give the Chinese the political capital they need back home to propose a much more aggressive deal of their own, which will hopefully shame the US into improving its own miserable net 33% intensity cut. IMO, though, the US offer is abysmally inadequate.

This was suppose to be an Obama triumph the State Dept is going to catch hell for this.

my bigger question isn’t whether the US can cut some type of deal with the Africans that will let the Chinese say that they did their part in standing up for their AU allies, but whether ANY US deal can pass our Congress. This deal could get done here and blown to heck 6 months from now when the rethugs and conservadems force the president to renege on his commitments to the rest of the world, yet again.

My suspicion is that this time, the Africans and other G-77 LDCs, aren’t just going to sit by and watch the US and its westerns allies renege on yet more commitments, as they did to undermine Kyoto. Since the Chinese are just playing domestic politics here, I suspect there’s a good chance they’ll throw the Africans under the bus in the end and allow the US to undermine yet another deal, no matter what they’re saying now. The difference this time is that I suspect their African allies are going to prove to have longer memories.

Agreed

Hope so!

hoping the our country will demonstrate leadership on this issue is kind of like depending on a bunch of heroin addicts to successfully work out a plan for their own detox program.

like I predicted, compromise reached!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i9TuMrvrknh-ZXwqmZ2N-48kff3wD9CJ70FG0

Everybody’s back to the table now, for the continuation of this funerary dirge for humanity. Let the pavane continue….

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/slideshow/ALeqM5i9TuMrvrknh-ZXwqmZ2N-48kff3wD9CJ70FG0?index=0

Just watch. ExMo and the Pentagon will get their way (#1 and #2 producers). CO2 production levels in the US will not decline any time soon. Who is standing up to Massey Coal? Even China has a more progressive stance then the US. We need to get out of our cars and walk, or bike!

And Africa will become a drought plagued furnace? Thanks Obama for your vision but your hope seems to be only rhetoric.

Sen Jim Inhofe (R-SuicidePact) on the conference:
“We know the bill [the US climate bill, which will implement any commitments made by us a Copenhagen] is never going to go to a vote. It’s dead. It’s gone.”

The Africans and Third World know the Europeans and the US aren’t serious about a deal so they have opted to play to their local constituencies and “stand up” to the Europeans. China is backing them because it is a chance to earn points with its resource suppliers. But even more importantly, it would like to block a deal which might contain its growth but it would prefer others take the blame for the failure.

Nothing serious was ever going to come out of Copenhagen. Some comuniqué will be released at the end touting progress or some understanding with no teeth in it.

Why a deal is so difficult:

Population Intensity of Carbon Emissions:
Carbon Dioxide Emissions (metric tons)/person
US 18.7
Russia 11.0
EU 8.0
China 4.6
India 1.3
Africa 0.8

As you can see, neither a reduction of either GDP intensity or an absolute reduction can be equitably constructed across the board.

I wrote a diary about this over at Orange… it got the usual response…

Human overpopulation is destroying what is left of the natural world. Humans need to cut their reproduction rates by 90% to 99% to allow the natural world a few decades to recover. Especially the most greedy and most over-consuming humans of them all: North Americans.

Give a hoot: don’t reproduce.

I fundamentally reject this argument. You cannot argue that world population and faster LDC growth rates are the problem when the US uses 20x the per capita carbon footprint (and probably 16x the composite resource footprint) of your average LDC citizen. In this context, blaming climate change on population growth is basically a form of racism.

I’m sure the developing world would be happy to talk about initiatives to reduce world population growth if the US first agrees to reduce per capita carbon intensity by 80% or more. Unless we do so, forget about it. You’d never even get the LDCs to agree to come to the table. Frankly, they’d think they’d be better off ganging up and declaring war on us. Morally, they’d have a very good point.

So say the self-appointed representatives of the consumer nations.

yep. Thanks for that link. That’s precisely the real problem.

The world can now be divided into three camps:
- rich countires that want to keep on consuming as they are, even if they have to permanently suppress the right to develop for everybody else (US, EU)
- rising countries that want to stop us from locking them out of this exclusive club (China, India, Brazil, Russia)
- the LDCs (aka, the rest of the world), who are just plain getting ticked off, in a permanent state of justifiable and apoplectic outrage, and who view this as a basic social justice issue

I’m sure third camp will agree to cut back on population growth by Oval’s 90-99% just so that the first camp can buy more high-energy-consumption large-screen TVs for their citizens. Of course they will. Yep. Sure. /s

by the way, I could make an argument that carbon intensity per GDP unit (as opposed to per capita) should stabilize at 2005 EU levels, which is what the US de facto 33% proposal does – roughly 0.27 metric tons of CO2 per $1,000 of GDP. This would imply a 49% reduction for China over the alotted timeframe, given their likely GDP growth rate (versus the 45% they’ve offered). It’s very achievable, given the investments they’ve made and plan to make in energy efficiency and mass transit.

This is probably the reasonable amount of negotiation we and the Europeans should push for with China, and frankly I think the Chinese would agree to it (per capita intensity justice be darned). They’re on track to achieve 50% anyway. We should also push the Chinese on verification mechanisms, and I think there’s probably some compromise to reach with them on it that’ll make everybody happy. Frankly, they are under more pressure than we are, politically, to cut a deal, so we have a bit more leverage if we can just pull them out from under the Africans’ coat tails and get them to stop grandstanding (which means we have to stop grandstanding too).

None of this solves the LDC problem, and Africa will still be expremely effed off no matter what deal with cut with China and the EU.

There is also the fundamental problem that transnatl corps are not under UN designation, not that they should be either since they already wield too much power too brazenly, but even if we pledged an 80% cut in carbon what is to stop ExMo etc from just setting up shop elsewhere. They are not controllable by anyone.

The World Bank, now run by a Goldman Sachs hack, wouldn’t reign any of them in either unless they smelled profit.

And until we see continued storm devastation or agricultural collapses and food price increases in America, nothing will be done. I have no faith in the will of our ‘elected’ leadership, and the public are trapped in a modernized debtors prison

This assessment,by the Indians, sums it up nicely:

http://www.cseindia.org/AboutUs/press_releases/press-20091127.htm

After you sort through the math, the US is proposing NOTHING at all, and we’re proposing to use derivative-like offsets to cover any requirements toward our nothing goals by creating a new bubble of a capital market (in tradable credits). According to the Indians, who I actually believe on this after a manner, the Chinese are not doing nearly enough and their proposal is grossly inadequate, but the BAU/intensity-based approach they are taking (which will not allow cap-and-trade offseting, according to subsequent clarifications from Beijing) is at least real in that it creates enforcibility around the real reductions they are already in target to achieve, as opposed to the US approach, which seems to reject the very premise Business-as-Usual baselining for a Goldman, Sachs house of mirrors.

We’re being lied to on this, and so are the LDCs. Every word from the our government on this subject is a lie. Corporatist interests have written their dream cap-and-trade-boondoogle-but-no-change proposal and this administration has bought into it as US policy, lock-stock-and-barrell.

There are always two main camps:

1) the owning class and its servants. This class may be divided into various fractions (e.g. the “rich nations,” the “rising countries”), but they share a common class interest.

2) everyone else.

Once again, my diary on this topic…

There’s the winner. Cap is good, Trade ruins it. This is why the right is so pissed off at Gore. He’s set to rake it in on this. If pollution=money, then green technology will NOT be developed or sold to competing countries.

Oil companies bought new battery technology to stop electric car development, no to move us over to them. Deja Vu..