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Why the climate problem is so hard

Why the climate problem is so hard
Published 26 Nov 2014   Follow @SamRoggeveen

UPDATE: Here's an interview with China's chief climate negotiator on the US-China deal.

In case there is any residual euphoria left over the China-US climate agreement, here are a couple of pieces to put a dampener on it. First, here's Alex Evans, a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, writing at Global Dashboard:

The policies and measures unveiled in yesterday’s US-China announcement are awfully thin. There’s a “renewed commitment” to technology cooperation, with no funding numbers attached. Some stuff about a demonstration project on carbon capture and sequestration, which people have been talking about for over a decade now – it’s starting to sound like nuclear fusion. More cooperation on reducing HFC emissions, which do have massive global warming potential, but are incredibly easy for China to reduce – cynics like me think that China was actively inflating them so as to score Clean Development Mechanism permits, and is only now talking about a phase out because demand for CDM permits has collapsed along with EUETS prices. There’s a “climate smart low carbon cities initiative” which is basically a plan to convene a summit. And that’s pretty much it.

This was an eye-opener:

I was talking last night to a veteran climate negotiator from a developed country government, who observed that the climate priesthood has, for years, been having far too nice a time meeting up every six months for drinks and per diems. No one wants the party to end. There is no sense of urgency. No real deadline. She’s absolutely, 100% right. I started going to UN climate summits when I was a student. Next summer I’m 40. And the conversations in Warsaw last winter had basically not moved on since the first one I went to in the Hague a decade a half ago. The only way this will ever end, she continued, is if policymakers give them six months to work out a solution, and make clear at the outset that at the end of this period, they can all piss off home.

The second article is by two engineers at Google who worked together on the company's now abandoned renewable energy initiative called RE

Suppose for a moment that (REstill wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE

The piece seems unduly pessimistic to me, given that it barely mentions the effect carbon pricing would have on the economics of renewables.



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