Environmental & Geopolitical Catastrophe

The private sector should provide leadership regarding climate change and economic sustainability, and the government’s role should be limited to providing the enabling policy framework, says former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres. Could this mean a bigger role for Sir Richard Branson? Meanwhile, Chris Huhne, UK secretary of state for energy and climate change, warns – not for the first time – that the world must act now to avoid “unprecedented environmental and geopolitical catastrophe”, needed to ensure that global greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2020, and that global warming is limited to 2C.

Tshepo Mashego, Business Times, South Africa (10 September 2011)

Private sector must drive climate change: Figueres

The private sector should provide leadership regarding climate change and economic sustainability, and the government’s role should be limited to providing the enabling policy framework, says former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres.

” Of course there was a political backlash against the tax – we dropped at least 10 points at the polls. But then, what do you get elected for? At the end of the day it paid off…

Figueres, who was in SA last week, said companies working together can achieve greater progress on the sustainability agenda. “To successfully address the issue of sustainability we have to do it from a business perspective. Sustainability is the most important issue on the development agenda today.”

According to Figueres, the public sector moves too slowly, especially when this involves international treaties to tackle a global problem.

“I do not think we should wait for international agreements to be put together, we all know governments move slowly and that creating international agreement is even slower.”

Figueres was called on to address a conference in Johannesburg due to his country’s singular success in embracing sustainability as an economic growth imperative while he was president in the 1990s .

He explained some of the reforms his country made as far back to 1995, which have made Costa Rica one of the greenest countries in the world.

“Back in 1995 Costa Rica passed legislation enacting a carbon tax, a tax on carbon emissions. The tax was payable at the fuel pump.”

However, pushing through such an ambitious reform package did not go down well with the electorate initially, he said. “Of course there was political backlash against the tax, we dropped at least 10 points at the polls, but then what do you get elected for? At the end of the day it paid off.

“The money for the carbon tax, we put it into an environmental services fund. The income from the fund began to finance environmental services, for example farmers who had been producing rice, which is a short-term cash crop were being left without a job as a result of cheap imports, started planting trees to trap carbon dioxide, we incentiviced that programme.”

As a result of the application of pro-sustainability reforms the Costa Rican economy is now 99% powered by renewable power, the majority of it being hydropower.

Source: www.businesslive.co.za

Climate change: summer in the city

As the human numbers grow, so do the cities, and so does the pressure for economic growth

Editorial in The Guardian (11 September 2011):

Chris Huhne, secretary of state for energy and climate change, warns – not for the first time – that the world must act now to avoid “unprecedented environmental and geopolitical catastrophe”. He is, of course, talking once again about the need to ensure that global greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2020, and that global warming is limited to 2C.

That means a global agreement to act by 2015: this parliament, he warns, is the last one with a chance to help avert catastrophic climate change. He is hardly a lone voice, and on the latest evidence the global barometer seems set for stormy weather.

On Friday a team of researchers in Boston calculated that even with only a 2C rise, summer temperatures now regarded as “extreme” will become normal. This is the second such warning from the US this summer. Europeans in 2003 and Russians in 2010 had lethal experience of heat waves. Americans in Oklahoma, Texas, New Jersey and Washington DC have all this summer experienced record-breaking temperatures, along with Atlantic hurricanes, floods in the midwest and on the Mississippi, devastating tornados in the prairie states, and drought and wildfire in the south-west.

In July the reinsurance giant Munich Re predicted that 2011 – on the evidence of the first six months alone – will be the costliest year ever for disasters triggered by natural hazard. Total global losses by June had reached $265bn, far outstripping the $220bn record set for the whole of 2005.

The good news is that lives so far have been spared: in the first six months there have been fewer than 20,000 disaster-related deaths; in 2010 the grim tally reached 230,000. The bad news is that climate-linked disasters are on the increase, with increasing hazard from windstorm, heatwave, flood, drought and winter blizzard.

Some of this hazard exists because the number of potential victims is also swelling: shortly the global population will pass the 7 billion mark. But as the human numbers grow, so do the cities, and so does the pressure for economic growth, and so does the burden of greenhouse gases. In Britain, the price of rail travel is rising ahead of inflation: in a low carbon world, public transport would be so cheap that urban motorists would gladly abandon their cars.

In the US, according to a Rasmussen poll, seven out of 10 Americans now think that climate scientists – and that term embraces the meteorologists, oceanographers and glaciologists of competing institutions and academies in Europe, Asia and America – are likely to have faked their research data to support a belief in global warming. So Mr Huhne is right to issue his warning. There is no great evidence that fellow politicians are listening very intently.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk