Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Barack Obama, United States president-elect, has appointed Harvard physicist John Holdren as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. British government adviser David King described the appointment as superb. "Holdren is a top-rate scientist and his position on climate change is as clear as you could get. This is a signal from Barack Obama that he means business when it comes to dealing with global warming," he said. Holdren considers that "there is already widespread harm... occurring from climate change. This is not just a problem for our children and our grandchildren."

Carol M Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been appointed presidential assistant for energy and climate change and this too is seen as a sign of Obama's commitment to action on the environment. "Time and time again, when the nation has set a new environmental standard, the naysayers have warned it will cost too much," Browner commented. "But, once we have set those standards, American ingenuity and innovation have found a solution at a far lower cost than predicted," she continued. Steven Chu, currently director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will head the Department of Energy. Chu has long advocated the development of technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

While initial spending to limit climate change may have to be high, the return on later investments will be much greater. Concern that costs may start low then soar are unfounded, according to a new study. "It gets easier once the world gets going," said Michiel Schaeffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The study concludes that, with average annual global investments of two per cent of gross domestic product over the rest of the 21st century, there was a 90 per cent chance of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius above 19th century levels.

A recent analysis concludes that few developing countries will be able to afford climate-friendly technologies. "There is simply no evidence that developing countries will somehow become wealthier and be in a position to install more environmentally-friendly technologies," reported Patricia Romero Lankao, sociologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States. "We always knew that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was going to be a challenge, but now it looks like we underestimated the magnitude of this problem." The study found that the economic disparity between the industrialized world and most developing nations had increased since 1960 and that, if present trends continue, it would continue to grow for at least the next 20 years.

"CDM and the carbon markets as a whole are one of the great success stories of international co-operative action on climate change," said Achim Steiner, United Nations Environment Programme executive director, as the latest annual report on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was released. The number of CDM projects in Africa has risen from two, in 2004, to 87, though there remains considerable scope for growth. South Africa accounts for a large proportion of the total, with 30 projects either registered or in the pipeline.

It is accepted that the CDM requires improvement. There are concerns about the reality of the greenhouse gas reductions associated with CDM projects. Bureaucratic delays continue to slow down project development and deployment. Another challenge facing the CDM is to surmount problems holding back projects in areas such as the building sector. Most CDM projects involve renewable energy, 2,659 to date, whereas only 14 projects have dealt with energy efficiency in buildings. It has been proposed that, in future, CDM credits would only be validated if a sector-wide emissions reduction takes place. "The CDM of the Copenhagen agreement will be very different from the CDM of the current state, especially for major emerging economies," said Jake Schmidt at the Natural Resources Defense Council in the United States.