Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The United Kingdom is proposing legislation to set binding limits on domestic greenhouse gas emissions. The draft Climate Change Bill defines five-year carbon budgets, leading to a 60 per cent cut in emissions by the year 2050. "This bill is an international landmark," environment minister David Miliband said. "It is the first time any country has set itself legally-binding carbon targets. It is an environmental contract for future generations." There will be annual, transparent reporting on progress to the parliament.

Andrew Pendleton, at Christian Aid, welcomed the bill but called for greater emissions reductions. "If the final legislation is not significantly stronger, the process would represent a massive lost opportunity. It is the first step on a long journey," he said. Edward Hanna of the University of Sheffield echoed this view, saying that the emissions reduction schedule "doesn't go far enough, fast enough, to confidently combat the significant threats posed by human-induced global warming. I fear that as we are closing the stable door, the horse has already bolted." Friends of the Earth would like to see cuts of three per cent a year. The bill now goes out for public consultation.

James Wolfowitz, head of the World Bank, has joined the chorus of calls for greater attention to be paid to supporting adaptive responses to climate change in developing countries. "There are a lot of people concerned about mitigation. There are not that many concerned about adaptation, and adaptation is a problem in the poorest countries who are our main concern," he said in an interview with Reuters.

Speaking at the conference Financing Clean Energy in London, United Kingdom, he said that rich countries should lead by example not only in moving toward low carbon strategies, but also with "direct support to developing nations. We need both to reduce poverty and reduce carbon emissions." Reducing emissions should be viewed as "an opportunity to generate funds to invest in a different energy path - one that not only makes less use of carbon, but which diversifies the world’s energy sources, which preserves the worlds forests, and which enables a long-term shift away from finite and limited fossil fuels and toward greater reliance on renewable energy and on technological innovations."

A world market in ethanol may not lower carbon dioxide releases, according to Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. There needs to be proper norms for biofuel production and innovations in making ethanol from tough cellulosic materials like grasses and corn husks. "We're [seeing] the expansion of ethanol production in many parts of the world, and we're in the early stages of understanding the implications of that development," he said, after meeting with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil earlier this month. "Nobody should take any conclusion as given." Brazil is a major ethanol producer.

More new ethanol plants are likely to come on-stream in the United States in 2007 that are needed to meet increased demand, undermining prices, according to analysts. "We think there will be more corn-based ethanol capacity in the near term" than needed for blending with gasoline, said Guy Caruso of the United States Energy Information Administration. "We're looking [for] a relatively softer market for ethanol this driving season." Even with demand up by 15 per cent to 30 per cent from last year if greater discretionary blending occurs with lower ethanol prices, "there will still be this ethanol overhang in the market," reckons Nathan Schaffer of PFC Energy in Washington DC.