Climate talks break down
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| Wed, 06-10-2009 - 8:10pm |
We are preparing to quadruple our energy costs via tax and government policy to supposedly relieve our world of the CO2 menace. The U.S. is not the only CO2 producer. Even if CO2 warms our climate, it is imperative that China and India agree to limit production if the world is to see lower CO2 numbers.
The One has failed to get China to love him as much as our liberal media does. The fortunate (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) consequence is China will not limit its growth, destroy its economy, impoverish itself and its people thus reducing a nation to a non-21st century standard of living. This fate seems to be particularly reserved only for residents of the United States.
Anyway the story is here - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eef40346-55d4-11de-ab7e-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html
Climate talks between US, China break down
China and the US failed to achieve a breakthrough at their latest round of climate talks on Wednesday raising the stakes in the global effort to fight world climate change.
The two countries responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions ended three days of negotiations in Beijing.
While there are still months to go until the December meeting in Copenhagen, where 181 countries, led by the United Nations, plan to work out a new climate pact, the two biggest emitters’ glacial pace towards compromise is likely to discourage others from making concessions during a pre-Copenhagen round of negotiations under way in Bonn, which is set to wrap up on Friday.
Todd Stern, US president Barack Obama’s special envoy on climate change, and his delegation tried hard to sound optimistic when they ended their China visit but could hardly conceal that little had been achieved.
“In our meetings, we deepened our dialogue with our Chinese counterparts through a candid discussion of the challenges we must overcome and the opportunities we must seize if we and the world are to reach an international climate agreement,” the US delegation said in a leaving statement.
“In addition, we explored opportunities to strengthen co-operation between the US and China on clean energy and efficiency, including building efficiency, research and development, renewables, and carbon capture and sequestration.”
“These meetings were a step in the right direction on the road to Copenhagen and to charting a global path to a clean energy future,” the Americans added.
A number of US lawmakers expressed optimism last month when they toured the Chinese capital for discussions on climate change.
But the two countries’ positions on what they could and should contribute show an almost ideological divide which observers say carries the risk of antagonising the rest of the world along the lines of developing and developed nations.
Meanwhile, China has raised the stakes by demanding that rich countries should in future commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels – the upper end of the range that Beijing has named for years – and be required to pay 0.5 to 1 per cent of their annual economic worth to help pay for carbon emission reduction schemes in poorer nations including China.
“I think it is perfectly fair for China and other developing countries to hold their stand in this issue,” said Lin Erda, a senior scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He added: “Now cutting 40 per cent by 2020 is just one goal. We also expect an 80 per cent cut by 2050.”
China’s comparatively hard stance is not directed at the US alone. Yu Qingtai, Beijing’s climate envoy, criticised Japan’s target to cut its emissions by 15 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 as too little.
“It would be much below what Japan as a country would need to do to meet its obligations,” Mr Yu told Reuters in Bonn. “Developing countries are victims of global warming created by many years of cumulative emissions by the developed countries in their process of industrialisation.” But given the weight China and the US carry, this was exactly the wrong message, said a diplomat. “You couldn’t expect that much, given that these were the first such US-China talks on climate change,” he said.

It's not surprising.
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Care to elaborate on who came up with that $2000 figure?
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There you go again, asking for facts.
It appears that China will move along whether or not the US does:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/09/china-green-energy-solar-wind
China launches green power revolution to catch up on west
• Plan to hit 20% renewable target by 2020
• $30bn for low-carbon projects
China’s ambitious wind and solar plans represent a direct challenge to Europe’s claims of world leadership on cutting carbon emissions. Photograph: Keren Su/Getty
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarification column, Thursday 11 June 2009.
Below we confused the absolute with the incremental in reporting yesterday that a rise in temperature of 2.7C corresponds to an increase of 36.9F. It is 4.9F.
China is planning a vast increase in its use of wind and solar power over the next
I'm going to chalk that one up to sleep deprivation. ;)
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