UN climate change conference in Bali
I’m back! And it was lovely to come home to the news that Australia has (finally) ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and that the US was unsuccessful in trying to derail the negotiations in Bali.
So what exactly was agreed to in Bali?
- to halve emissions by 2050
- to negotiate a binding set of short-term targets in 2009
- to help developing nations with reducing their emissions and adapting to changes
The US was being difficult throughout the process, and managed to get references to the IPCC and the science removed from the documents. But at the last minute they decided to let everyone have their agreement, after everyone else in the world made it clear that they’d be outcasts if they didn’t.
The general feeling is that the US will continue to stand in the way of negotiations until President Bush is gone in 2008 (they have 2-term limits over there), and after that we’ll all be able to get on with things. This is pretty depressing, because the situation is incredibly urgent. What I don’t understand is why the US can have any impact at all - they haven’t ratified the agreement, so why do they get a say in the final Bali conference documents?
Still, it would be great to see the same grassroots environmental action in the US that put environmental issues on the table during the Australian election. Grist.org has an article about how we got climate change to be talked about here, and what would need to happen in the US for the same result.
At any rate, Australia now has to work out what our precise options are. When Rudd became opposition leader, he commissioned the Garnaut report. It’s a review of the economic impact of dealing with climate change, and the costs of possible strategies we can use. In theory, it should be similar to the Stern report, only specifically for Australia.
The only problem is that the Garnaut report isn’t due until September next year. I’d like to see some action sooner, but I’d also like our action to be fully informed (rather than the back-of-a-Weeties-packet kind of research Howard did). So it looks like we’ll be waiting a while for specific targets to be announced. I’ll be campaigning for some actions to be taken before then - such as efficiency measures for households and businesses, which have an economic benefit no matter what our final targets are.