Tiempo Climate Newswatch

As the April 2010 Bonn Climate Change Talks got underway, Bruno Sekoli of Lesotho, speaking for the least developed nations who want tougher emissions cuts than cited in the Copenhagen Accord, called for a post-Copenhagen reassessment of the situation. Wendel Trio of Greenpeace said that many of the national targets submitted under the Accord had to be toughened if global warming was to stay below two degrees Celsius. "The pledges so far will probably take us to somewhere between 3.5 and 4 degrees Celsius," he said, warning that that would generate dangerous changes such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, more species extinctions and rising sea levels.

Before the talks, Yvo de Boer, outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, said that he did not believe that the Copenhagen Accord would become the new legal framework. He hopes that the end-of-year summit in Cancún, Mexico, will agree a basic architecture "so that a year later [at the next summit to be held in South Africa], you can decide or not decide to turn that into a treaty." de Boer sees the Bonn talks as an opportunity to rebuild confidence in the process after what many see as the setback of the Copenhagen climate summit, "to rebuild confidence that the way forward will be open and transparent on the one hand, and efficient on the other." There has been criticism of the slow debate of lengthy negotiating texts and the entrenched defence of national interests, as well as the apparent mistrust and suspicion between political blocs, evident during the United Nations process and culminating in the disappointing Copenhagen outcome.

The World Bank has approved a US$3.75 billion loan to South Africa in support of the nation's energy security plans. Part of the loan concerns wind and solar power projects and low-carbon energy efficiency measures, including a railway to transport coal and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "Eskom will pilot 100 megawatts of solar power with storage and wind power, the biggest grid-connected renewable energy venture in any developing country," said Vijay Iyer, the World Bank's energy-sector manager for Africa. "We are optimistic that the lessons learned from these projects will facilitate the scale-up of the renewable energy industry across Africa," he continued.

The bulk of the loan, US$3.05 billion, however, covers the completion of the Medupi coal-fired power station and this has attracted strong criticism. The governments of the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and Norway opposed the loan and abstained from voting on the decision. "I am not going to give them points for abstaining," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth. "This was totally the easy way out. If the United States were to follow its own clean coal guidance for multilateral development banks it would have had to vote no on this loan." Michael Stulman of Africa Action described the project as misguided, saying that it would do little to help poor South Africans. "This is one of those stereotypical development disaster stories," he added.

The Solar Impulse aircraft, which will attempt to fly round the world on solar energy, has completed its first test flight. "There has never been in the past an aeroplane of that kind to fly. It was a huge question mark for us and it's an extraordinary relief," said Bertrand Piccard, co-founder of the project. Powered by four ten-horsepower electric motors, the 'plane flew for 87 minutes. The aircraft weighs only 1600 kilogrammes, though its wingspan is comparable to that of an Airbus A340 airliner. Around 12,000 solar cells on the wings fuel its battery packs. A non-stop 36-hour flight through darkness is planned, leading up to a five-stage flight around the world in 2013.

Plastiki, a catamaran made from 12,000 recycled plastic bottles, has set sail on a 100-day voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. The aim of the trip is to highlight oceanic waste accumulation, including the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. "What we wanted to do with this project is to create something that was designed to show efficiency... and to say that these [plastic bottles] can be used again as a resource rather than being thrown out as waste," said David de Rothschild. Over 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of ocean, according to a recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP). Plastic waste is blamed for killing as many as one million sea birds and hundreds of thousands of sea mammals annually. "It’s the most dangerous type of litter in the ocean," commented Elisabeth Guilbaud-Cox from UNEP.