A Carbon Tsunami in Doha

A Carbon Tsunami in Doha
Posted on Dec 5, 2012

By Amy Goodman



DOHA, Qatar—The 18th U.N. climate-change summit is taking place in the small but immensely wealthy Gulf emirate of Qatar, the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Delegates, press, dignitaries and the legions of low-paid, foreign guest workers here at the opulent Qatar National Convention Center all pass under an enormous spider, a 30-foot-high cast-bronze statue called “Maman,” by the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois. It was chosen by the emir’s wife, and snapped up for a reported $10 million. The Obama administration has been accused, rightly, of derailing the UN climate negotiations in recent years, which makes the spider an appropriate symbol, as famously described by the lines from an 1808 poem by Sir Walter Scott,
“Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!”

Here at the summit, referred to as the COP 18 (18th Conference of Parties), I met up with climate scientist Bill Hare, one of the lead authors of a new World Bank report, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4 Degree C Warmer World Must Be Avoided.” With the U.S. media focused on the so-called fiscal cliff, I asked Hare how the world’s historically largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States, could be expected to contribute to a global fund to combat climate change:

“We have a climate cliff. ... We’re facing a carbon tsunami, actually, where huge amounts of carbon are now being emitted at a faster rate than ever. And it’s that carbon tsunami that’s likely to overwhelm the planet with warming, sea-level rise and acidifying the oceans.”

Just a day after I interviewed Hare, a powerful typhoon hit the Philippines. I spoke with the lead climate negotiator from the Philippines, Naderev Sano, just minutes after the news of the typhoon broke. “It is sobering for us to know that a typhoon like this normally doesn’t hit that part of the country,” he told me. “In half a century, this is the first time that a typhoon that has crossed as far south as Bopha has.” I asked Sano what he was hoping for in Doha:


“The single biggest measure of success in Doha is, first and foremost, the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. That is something we hold very dearly, because that is the jump-off base for enhanced ambition for the whole world.”

The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally binding global treaty that forces nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Unless action is taken, it will lapse at the end of this month. Sano explained: “When we reach the first day of 2013, if we don’t have any success here in Doha, then we end up with nothing. We end up with a ... system where climate change faces a world that has not found the political will to address the climate crisis.”

Another participant at the summit is Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International. I last interviewed him via phone as he was hanging from a Russian Gazprom oil rig in the Arctic, getting hosed down with water intended to dislodge him. Naidoo wrote before coming to COP 18: “Doha is already infamous for dead-end trade talks. One more failure and it will be forever known as the place where global deals go to die.”

At a press conference held here, Naidoo directed his own rhetorical fire hose at the Obama administration. Noting Barack Obama’s reference to climate change in his Nov. 6 victory speech, Naidoo said, naming Obama’s climate negotiators, “Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing have come to Doha with their needle stuck in the groove of obstructing the U.N. process, an art they have perfected. It is disrespectful of President Obama to inflict on us two negative negotiators who act as if the comments he made after his election were never made. He should either pick up the phone and tell his delegates to follow his lead or alternatively call them back to Washington.” When I asked Pershing to respond to Naidoo, whether he was following President Obama’s wishes, he replied, “No comment.”

While the expectations for the Doha climate summit are low, even grim, and while attendance at this summit is a fraction of what we saw at the last three in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban, there is here a strong core of committed people who care about the future of the planet, who are taking action to protect it from human-induced climate change. It is these people who the giant spider in the lobby also represents.

The sculpture is protecting a sac of eggs, and, as Louise Bourgeois explained: “The Spider is an ode to my mother. ... Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. Spiders are helpful and protective.”

From Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines to Superstorm Sandy in the United States, the web of climate activists is not tangled, but growing stronger, leading the way. If only the politicians would follow.


Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_carbon_tsunami_in_doha_20121205/

World Bank: Arab World Hit Hard By Climate Change

by The Associated Press

 

DOHA, Qatar December 5, 2012

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=166544663

 

 

The audio of this program is pending -- well worth listening --

 

World Bank Issues Alarming Climate Report

 

Nearly 200 countries have sent representatives to the Gulf state of Qatar to talk about climate change. The goal is to find ways to cut global emission and slow down the rate at which the earth is warming. One of the world's biggest multilateral organizations, the World Bank, recently issued an alarming report on climate change. Renee Montagne talks about this with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

 

U.S. Failure To Act Swiftly On Global Warming Imperils The U.S. And The World

By Sherwood Ross

06 December, 2012
Countercurrents.org

America’s failure to get serious about Global Warming recalls the story of the German bureaucrats who, as the Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in April, 1945, were busy working on Hitler’s paperclip requirements for the third quarter of the year. If they had only looked out their window they would have known the Third Reich was kaput.

If nothing else, Hurricane Sandy gave Americans an opportunity to look out their windows to recognize there’s been a sea change in the weather. The giant storm killed more than 100 people, unhoused tens of thousands, forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands more, turned off the lights for eight million souls, and inflicted an astounding $50 billion worth of damage. It even set back scientific research by drowning thousands of laboratory animals being used in clinical experiments in East Coast laboratories.

As the Nov. 5 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek reported, the number of natural disasters inflicting damage of $1 billion or more since 1996 more than doubled compared with the previous 15-year period. Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” the American public now believes, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” A Pew Research Center poll last October found two-thirds of Americans think there is “solid evidence” the earth is getting warmer. This ain’t the America those of us over 40 grew up in and we know it.

Only this week, AP reported from New Bataan, The Philippines, “A powerful typhoon that washed away emergency shelters, a military camp and possibly entire families in the southern Philippines has killed almost 350 people with nearly 400 missing, authorities said Thursday.”

More bodies were retrieved from hardest-hit Compostela Valley and Davao Oriental provinces and six others impacted by Tuesday's storm, the Office of Civil Defense reported.

At least 200 of the victims died in Compostela Valley alone, including 78 villagers and soldiers who perished in a flash flood that swamped two emergency shelters and a military camp.

"Entire families may have been washed away," said Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, who visited New Bataan on Wednesday. The farming town of 45,000 people was a muddy wasteland of collapsed houses and coconut and banana trees felled by ferocious winds.(Italics added.)

In an essay titled, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” assistant managing editor Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek points out that Munich Re, the big German reinsurance firm, published a new report saying, “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” From 1980 through 2011, Barrett says, weather disasters caused losses totaling $1.06 trillion.” (If the U.S. doesn’t care about the Filipinos, it should realize its greenhouse gases are imperiling its own.)

Ominous as changing weather patterns have become, there is every prospect the lack of leadership in D.C. will make them worse. A major GW trigger will be the Keystone XL oil pipeline to tap the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.

If built, “Essentially, it’s game over for the planet,” said James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is quoted by reporter Jane Mayer in the Nov. 28th, 2011, issue of “The New Yorker” magazine as making the statement to environmental activist Bill McKibben.

Building the pipeline would hasten the extraction of exceptionally dirty crude oil, using huge amounts of water and heat, from the tar sands, which would then be piped across the United States, refined, and burned as fuel, releasing a vast new volume of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, reporter Mayer writes.

“The tar sands’ oil deposits may be a treasure trove second in value only to Saudi Arabia’s, and the pipeline, as McKibben saw it, (and) posed a powerful test of America’s resolve to develop cleaner sources of energy, as Barack Obama had promised to do in the 2008 campaign,” Mayer wrote. McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, Vt.

The very idea of pumping more toxic greenhouse gas into the atmosphere when people’s homes and lives are being washed away from New York to New Bataan is appalling. But anything can happen when a threat of this magnitude was virtually blacked out during the presidential debates and your myopic bureaucrats don’t look out the window. #

(Sherwood Ross formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. Currently he runs a public relations firm “for good causes.”Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com).

 

http://www.countercurrents.org/ross061212.htm