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New database shows big warming emitters
H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press
There’s growing worry about global warming, but how much of it is the work of that power plant just outside town? And if Congress limits heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will it affect utility and electric bills? And who’s the biggest corporate culprit when it comes to climate change?
Answers to these questions may be only a couple of computer clicks away.
A new interactive online database unveiled Wednesday provides maps, color-coded categories and detailed information about who is putting 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually from power plants around the world — about a fourth of it from the United States.
The Web site, which includes information from 4,000 utilities and 50,000 plants, shows not only the biggest CO2 emitters, but also the facilities and companies that are most green, releasing little if any carbon.
“We’re trying to provide complete, balanced information. It’s an open site,” said David Wheeler, a senior researcher at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the creation of the massive database.
Using an array of information filters, a user can find out how much CO2 comes from electricity plants in a particular city or county, in a congressional district, from a specific company, or an individual plant.
Dubbed the Carbon Monitoring for Action database, or CARMA ( www.carma.org ), it proclaims itself as “the world’s best place for power-plant voyeurism.”
(14 November 2007)
The CARMA site meets with the approval of The Oil Drum posters:
doug fir: This is one of the most informative links I’ve seen in a long while. Amazing-learned more about local generation here in a couple minutes. Both CO2 and total megawatt production.
In new take on carbon-trading, Indonesia may get paid to save trees
Simon Montlake, The Christian Science Monitor
For decades, conservationists have sought to halt the wholesale clearance of Indonesia’s tropical rainforests by loggers and plantation companies. But repeated calls for sustainable forestry practices to safeguard biodiversity haven’t succeeded in stopping the chain saws.
Now, help may be arriving in the shape of a carbon-trading program that would effectively pay Indonesia and other forest-rich countries not to chop down their trees. Behind the initiative is the potential monetary value – as yet unrealized – of tropical forests as vast stocks of carbon that the industrialized world can offset against greenhouse-gas emissions.
Advocates of carbon-credit trading want to put these forests into play as policymakers prepare for a major UN climate-change summit next month on the island of Bali. The summit will chart a course for a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on capping emissions after it expires in 2012. Given the growing consensus on the extent of manmade global warming, any future rules are likely to be much tougher.
(14 November 2007)
Climate change to take just years
Marian Wilkinson, Sydney Morning Herald
AUSTRALIANS will begin to see the stark effects of climate change within the next few years, not the next decades, a leading Australian scientist has warned.
Graeme Pearman, the former head of CSIRO’s atmospheric research unit, yesterday released a report showing that evidence of global warming has dramatically increased in the past 12 months.
Dr Pearman told the Herald: “If you think climate change is on the agenda, just wait another couple of years. Every day the media are going to be reporting people seeing changes as a result of things we have already done and the implications of these all over the world: like the breeding patterns and migration patterns of birds and animals, the flowering times, the production capacity of farms and the impact of coastal erosion. We are going to get more of them, not in the next few decades but the next few years.”
His report for the Climate Institute comes just days before the United Nation’s peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is due to release the last of four reports by the world’s leading scientists and policy-makers on the worsening effect of climate change on the planet.
(15 November 2007)
Climate injustice: The rich are hiding behind the poor
Ananthapadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal, InfoChange India
In India, 150 million people who belong to the upper-income groups already emit more than 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per annum. A new Greenpeace report states that India’s rich consuming class is hiding its significant carbon footprint behind legions of poor. Shouldn’t the government, which demands differentiated responsibility in the international arena, establish the same within India?
… [this study] asks the question – is there climate injustice happening in India?
It presents a case for the government to implement the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ amongst the various socio-economic groups in the country.
The report is based on a first of its kind face-to-face survey across the country ranging from the metros to medium and small towns and rural areas on domestic energy consumption and transportation. Energy consumption patterns in 819 households have been converted into CO2 emissions and then assigned to seven different income classes.
The findings plainly illustrate that the considerably significant carbon footprint of a relatively small wealthy class (1% of the population) in the country is camouflaged by the 823 million poor population of the country, who keep the overall per capita emissions below 2 tonnes of CO2 per year.
…Conclusions
This study clearly shows that Indian climate politics fall short if it only refers to national per capita CO2 levels. As at the international level, where there is common but differentiated responsibility, there needs to be an intra-national common but differentiated responsibility too. Developed nations need to cut their CO2 emissions not only to prevent climate change but also to give space to the developing world to catch up, without cooking the planet. The same is true within India; if the upper and the middle class do not manage to check their CO2 emissions, they will not only contribute to global warming, they will also deny the hundreds of millions of poor in the country, those who will be the most severely impacted by climate change, access to development. As long as economic growth is not decarbonised, the simplistic view that economic growth will automatically result in an increase in prosperity for all stands disproved. It is now accepted by scientists and economists that increasing CO2 emissions due to economic development will destroy the foundation of millions of livelihoods on this planet. In order to build social justice in the country, India not only has to put pressure on the developed world to cut their CO2 emissions, it also needs to do its share to mitigate climate change.
So does India need to stay poor and should the burgeoning middle class stop consumption and abandon the newfound upward mobility? Not necessarily, if it manages to decarbonise its development.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Hiding Behind the Poor’, a report by Greenpeace on climate injustice, October 2007, authored by Ananthapadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal
(November 2007)
