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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > 10:10 climate change campaign]
10:10 climate campaign gathers momentum
Actors, councils and big business sign up to movement to cut carbon emissions by 10%
Damian Carrington and David Adam
The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009 Article history

The mobile phone giant O2, Manchester city council and In the Loop actor Peter Capaldi have become the latest big names to sign up to the 10:10 climate change campaign.

The campaign, supported by the Observer and the Guardian, requires participants to cut their carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010 and has grown rapidly since it was launched on 1 September at London's Tate Modern. It now has 20,000 individuals signed up, along with almost 1,000 businesses, 500 other bodies such as schools and hospitals, and Gordon Brown and his entire government and the shadow cabinet.

The 10:10 organisers hope that, by demonstrating that so many people want action on global warming, they can pressure Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, into committing the whole country to a big emissions cut and to deliver a strong global treaty at UN talks in Copenhagen in December.

Film-maker Franny Armstrong, who founded 10:10 and directed the eco-documentary The Age of Stupid, said: "We couldn't be more delighted that 10:10 has been so enthusiastically taken up across every sector of UK society. It's also looking like it will soon go global, as we're getting inundated with groups wanting to set up 10:10 Australia and 10:10 USA and everywhere in between.

"I think everyone can see that the time for talking is over and that, by joining 10:10, they are joining forces with everyone else who is ready to start getting on with actually solving the problem."

Ronan Dunne, O2's chief executive, said: "Joining 10:10 both underlines our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint even further and gives us access to a wealth of advice on how to help us achieve this. We urge other UK businesses to join." O2, which has 20 million customers and 11,000 employees, is also undertaking annual green audits by environmentalist Jonathon Porritt and will aim to improve the energy efficiency of its transmitter network, which accounts for 80% of its energy use.

Other new business recruits include two FTSE-100 heavyweights, the insurance company Aviva and the commercial property company Land Securities, as well as estate agents Knight Frank, pollsters Ipsos MORI and consulting engineers Atkins.

Manchester City Council is the biggest local authority to join 10:10. It follows 27 others, including Oxford, Coventry, Wirral and five London boroughs. Richard Leese, Manchester city council's leader, said: "Cutting our emissions by 10% in one year is a bold target, but we are confident we can achieve this, sending a message to other organisations that it is possible to make substantial reductions."

The new recruits to 10:10 join a formidable array of politicians, including Ed Miliband and 120 other MPs. Other notable supporters include the Royal Mail, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, the Cheshire police force and celebrities such as designer Stella McCartney.

What you can do

> Pledge to cut your own emissions at www.1010uk.org.

> If you run a company, sign it up. If you work for a company, write to your bosses and ask them to join.

> Help 10:10 spread its message by offering financial support at 1010uk.org/donate.

> Read more on the 10:10 campaign, the huge response so far and how to sign up at guardian.co.uk/1010.


[News > World news > Burma]
British firm attacked over Burma dams
Villagers raped and killed during construction of huge projects, claim human rights campaigners
Rajeev Syal and Daniel Pye
The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009 Article history

The British construction company that helped to build two dams in Burma has been condemned by human rights campaigners amid reports that the projects led to the forced relocation of villagers.

Malcolm Dunstan and Associates, a Devon-based family-run firm, has been involved in concrete construction on the Yeywa dam in central Burma and the Ta Sang project on the Salween river in the north-east of the country. The projects, which will generate electricity for Thailand and China, have been targeted by human rights activists after reports that thousands of villagers had been removed from floodplains and opposition ruthlessly crushed.

Dunstan has defended his firm's work, arguing that he had consulted Burmese people who said that the dams should be built. But some of Burma's most respected campaigners have pleaded with the company and other British firms to stay away from the country.

Charm Tong, a Nobel prize nominee and director of Shan Women's Action Network, said: "We are very concerned about all of these so-called development projects between foreign corporations and the Burmese regime. We have documented increases of rape and forced labour [by the military] in the areas where dams are being built. We are talking about people who face killing and torture daily."

Nyo Ohn Myint, former political aide to Aung San Suu Kyi, said the company should vow not to work in Burma again. "Where [Malcolm Dunstan and Associates] is working is an area under martial law so there is no transparency or accountability. The weight of Asia's demand for energy should not rest on the shoulders of the people of Burma," he said.

The company helped to construct the Yeywa dam, 100 miles east of Mandalay. According to the firm's website, it was still involved in the project in December 2008, but declined last week to say whether it was still working on the site. Villagers within the floodplain of the Yeywa dam have been forcibly evicted without compensation over the past four years, according to one local report. The villagers had depended on the river for their livelihoods.

Maung Aung, 32, a peasant farmer who lived nearby, said he and his family of five were forced off the plain around five years ago. "We were never informed about this project and it has completely changed our world," he said.

The Ta Sang dam is expected to cost £4.5bn. It will flood an area that was once home to more than 100 villages. Hso Nang, 45, now lives in a refugee camp in Thailand after being forcibly removed a decade ago. He said: "The livelihoods of those who lived along the Salween will perish together with the river itself."

Dunstan confirmed that his firm had been involved in the Ta Sang project but said that its work was completed some years ago. In emails sent to Burma Campaign UK last December, he argued that the Yewya was an "acceptable" project because there was no military input. He insisted he did not believe any of the labour force had been "pressed" or were prisoners. He added that many of the dam's benefits would go to civilians.

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > World news > Natural disasters and extreme weather]
Dust storms spread deadly diseases worldwide
Dust storms like the one that plagued Sydney are blowing bacteria to all corners of the globe, with viruses that will attack the human body. Yet these scourges can also help mitigate climate change
John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009 Article history

Huge dust storms, like the ones that blanketed Sydney twice last week, hit Queensland yesterday and turned the air red across much of eastern Australia, are spreading lethal epidemics around the world. However, they can also absorb climate change emissions, say researchers studying the little understood but growing phenomenon.

The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia's interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

As diplomats prepare to meet in Bangkok tomorrow for the next round of climate talks, meteorologists predict that more major dust storms can be expected, carrying minute particles of beneficial soil and nutrients as well as potentially harmful bacteria, viruses and fungal spores.

"The numbers of major dust storms go up and down over the years," said Andrew Goudie, geography professor at Oxford University. "In Australia and China they tailed off from the 1970s then spiked in the 1990s and at the start of this decade. At the moment they are clearly on an upward trajectory."

Laurence Barrie is chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system. He said: "I think the droughts [and dust storms] in Australia are a harbinger. Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution. The minute particles act like urban smog or acid rain. They can penetrate deep into the human body."

Saharan storms are thought to be responsible for spreading lethal meningitis spores throughout semi-arid central Africa, where up to 250,000 people, particularly children, contract the disease each year and 25,000 die. "There is evidence that the dust can mobilise meningitis in the bloodstream," said Barrie.

Higher temperatures and more intense storms are also linked to "valley fever", a disease contracted from a fungus in the soil of the central valley of California. The American Academy of Microbiology estimates that about 200,000 Americans go down with valley fever each year, 200 of whom die. The number of cases in Arizona and California almost quadrupled in the decade to 2006.

Scientists who had thought diseases were mostly transmitted by people or animals now see dust clouds as possible transmitters of influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth, and increasingly responsible for respiratory diseases. A rise in the number of cases of asthma in children on Caribbean islands has been linked to an increase in the dust blown across the Atlantic from Africa. The asthma rate in Barbados is 17 times greater than it was in 1973, when a major African drought began, according to one major study. Researchers have also documented more hospital admissions when the dust storms are at their worst.

"We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust implications on health," said William Sprigg, a climate expert at Arizona University.

The scale and range of some recent dust storms has surprised scientists. Japanese academics reported in July that a giant dust storm in China's Taklimakan desert in 2007 picked up nearly 800,000 tonnes of dust which winds carried twice around the world.

Dust from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts is often present over the western United States in the spring and can lead to disastrous air quality in Korean, Japanese and Russian cities. It frequently contributes to the smogs over Los Angeles. Britain and northern Europe are not immune from dust storms. Dust blown from the Sahara is commonly found in Spain, Italy and Greece and the WMO says that storms deposit Saharan dust north of the Alps about once a month. Last year Britain's Meteorological Office reported it in south Wales.

Some scientists sought to attribute the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak to a giant storm in north Africa that carried dust and possibly spores of the animal disease as far as northern Britain only a week before the first reported cases.

The scale and spread of the dust storms has also surprised researchers. Satellite photographs have shown some of the clouds coming out of Africa to be as big as the whole land mass of the US, with a major storm able to whip more than a million tonnes of soil into the atmosphere. Sydney was covered by an estimated 5,000 tonnes of dust last week, but the WMO says Beijing was enveloped by more than 300,000 tonnes in one storm in 2006.

"The 2-3 billion tonnes of fine soil particles that leave Africa each year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and biological productivity," said Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute research group in Washington DC. "Those big storms take millions of tonnes of soil, which takes centuries to replace."

Brown and Chinese scientists say the increased number of major dust storms in China is directly linked to deforestation and the massive increase in numbers of sheep and goats since the 1980s, when restrictions on herders were removed. "Goats will strip vegetation," said Brown. "They ate everything and dust storms are now routine. If climate change leads to a reduction in rainfall, then the two trends reinforce themselves." China is planting tens of millions of trees to act as a barrier to the advancing desert.

However, research increasingly suggests that the dust could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients. Iron-rich dust blown from Australia and from the Gobi and Sahara deserts is largely deposited in oceans, where it has been observed to feed phytoplankton, the microscopic marine plants that are the first link in the oceanic food chain and absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, the upper layers of the rainforest in Brazil are thought to derive much of their nutrient supply from dust transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara.

Just as scientists struggle to understand how dust is affecting climate, evidence is growing that another airborne pollutant, soot, is potentially disastrous. Minute particles of carbon produced by diesel engines, forest fires and the inefficient burning of wood in stoves is being carried just like dust to the remotest regions of the world.

A study by the United Nations Environment Programme has just concluded that the pollutant has played a major part in shrinking the Himalayan glaciers and has helped to disrupt the south Asian monsoon.

"Soot accounts from 10% to more than 45% of the contribution to global warming," said Achim Steiner, director of the UN's environment programme. "It is linked to accelerated losses of glaciers in Asia because soot deposits darken ice, making it more vulnerable to melting."

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > World news > Iran]
Iran and United States on collision course over nuclear plantTension grows ahead of Geneva talks after secret uranium plant is revealed and Obama considers tougher sanctions
Julian Borger New York
The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009 Article history

The US and Iran raised the stakes yesterday ahead of this week's nuclear showdown in Geneva, with threats of global strife if no resolution is found.

The sharpened rhetoric followed Friday's revelation that Iran had been building a secret uranium enrichment plant under a mountain near Qom, and it points towards a new wave of sanctions that go far beyond the targeted financial measures imposed on Iran so far.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Barack Obama declared: "Iran is on notice that when we meet with them on 1 October they are going to have to come clean, and they will have to make a choice." The alternative to sticking to international rules on Iran's nuclear development, he said, would be "a path that is going to lead to confrontation".

At the meeting the US will demand access to the plant within the next few days and to all other sites within three months, the New York Times said last night. It will tell Tehran to open all notebooks and computers to inspection and answer questions about its suspected efforts to build a nuclear weapon.

But the Iranian government showed no signs yesterday of being prepared to compromise. Instead, the chief of staff to the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, appeared to relish the prospect of confrontation. "This new plant, God willing, will soon become operational and will make the enemies blind," said Mohammad Mohammadi-Golpayegani, according to the semi-official news agency, Fars. He described the newly revealed enrichment plant as a sign that Iran was at the "summit of power".

The remarks reflected the degree to which the Tehran regime has made the nuclear programme a matter of pride and national identity. It insists that the programme, the existence of which was revealed in 2002, is for generating electricity and medical research and is entirely within Iran's sovereign rights.

Iran's nuclear chief said yesterday the UN nuclear agency would be allowed to inspect the facility at Qom. But Ali Akbar Salehi did not specify when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could visit the site.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dodged a question at the UN over whether Iran had succeeded in enriching enough uranium to make a bomb, but said nuclear weapons "are inhumane". Anyone who pursued such goals was "retarded politically".

Raising tensions further, Iranian media reported yesterday that revolutionary guards would hold missile defence exercises. Western officials say the Qom site is on a revolutionary guard missile base.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is due to fly to Geneva for Thursday's meeting with senior diplomats of the six nations that handle talks on the Iranian nuclear programme – the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. The US will be taking a full role in the talks for the first time, reversing the stand-off policy pursued by the Bush administration.

A deal under which Iran would suspend uranium enrichment in return for a package of economic assistance and help with the construction of a civilian power industry has been on offer for more than a year and has so far been flatly rejected by Iran. Hopes of a breakthrough in Geneva are at a low ebb.

"When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite," Obama said. "That's not the preferred course of action. I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path."

The president did not rule out a military option, but added: "I will also re-emphasise that my preferred course of action is to resolve this in a diplomatic fashion."

Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, echoed that view. "No sane person looks at the military question of engagement with Iran with anything other than real concern," he said. "That's why we always say we are 100% committed to the diplomatic track."

Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, went further. "The reality is that there is no military option that does anything more than buy time," he said, adding that Iran could have nuclear weapons within one to three years.

Western officials believe that the revelation of the Qom enrichment plant has solidified international support for sanctions. The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, restated his conviction that sanctions could become inevitable. The US has suggested taking action against international companies that sell petrol to Iran. However, European states are sceptical. They point out that the experience of Iraq demonstrated the ease with which petrol can be smuggled across land borders. The regime might also use such sanctions as a pretext for cutting petrol subsidies, blaming the west.

Other options under consideration are an embargo on investment in Iran's oil and gas sector, an end to loan guarantees to all companies investing in Iran, a ban on Iranian businesses trading in euros, and a prohibition on foreign companies insuring Iranian shipping.

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
4 degrees warming "likely" without CO2 cuts: study
Sun Sep 27, 2009 11:00pm EDT
By Gerard Wynn

LONDON (Reuters) - Global temperatures may be 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the mid-2050s if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, said a study published on Monday.

The study, by Britain's Met Office Hadley Center, echoed a U.N. report last week which found that climate changes were outpacing worst-case scenarios forecast in 2007 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Our results are showing similar patterns (to the IPCC) but also show the possibility that more extreme changes can happen," said Debbie Hemming, co-author of the research published at the start of a climate change conference at Oxford University.

Leaders of the main greenhouse gas-emitting countries recognized in July a scientific view that temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, to avoid more dangerous changes to the world's climate.

The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its fourth assessment report, or AR4. One finding was that global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees by the end of the 2050s. Monday's study confirmed that warming could happen even earlier, by the mid-2050s, and suggested more extreme local effects.

"It's affirming the AR4 results and also confirming that it is likely," Hemming told Reuters, referring to 4 degrees warming, assuming no extra global action to cut emissions in the next decade.

One advance since 2007 was to model the effect of "carbon cycles." For example, if parts of the Amazon rainforest died as a result of drought, that would expose soil which would then release carbon from formerly shaded organic matter.

"That amplifies the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere and therefore the global warming. It's really leading to more certainty," said Hemming.

DRASTIC

Some 190 countries will try to reach an agreement on how to slow global warming at a meeting in Copenhagen in December.

Chinese President Hu Jintao won praise for making a commitment to limit emissions growth by a "notable" amount, at a U.N. climate summit in New York last week. Other leaders made pledges to agree a new climate pact.

Temperature rises are compared with pre-industrial levels. The world warmed 0.7 degrees last century, scientists say.

A global average increase of 4 degrees masked higher regional increases, including more than 15 degrees warmer temperatures in parts of the Arctic, and up to 10 degrees higher in western and southern Africa, Monday's study found.

"It's quite extreme. I don't think it's hit home to people," said Hemming. As sea ice melts, the region will reflect less sunlight, which may help trigger runaway effects.

Such higher Arctic temperatures could also melt permafrost, which until now has trapped the powerful greenhouse gas methane, helping trigger further runaway effects, said Hemming.

"There are potentially quite big negative implications."

The study indicated rainfall may fall this century by a fifth or more in part of Africa, Central America, the Mediterranean, and coastal Australia, "potentially more extreme" than the IPCC's findings in 2007.

"The Mediterranean is a very consistent signal of significant drying in nearly all the model runs," said Hemming. A 20 percent or more fall is "quite a lot in areas like Spain already struggling with rainfall reductions in recent years."

(Editing by Andrew Roche)


[Green Business]
Promises? Leaders must act to spur climate talks
Sun Sep 27, 2009 1:42pm EDT
By Jeff Mason - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World leaders pledged last week to step up efforts to reach a U.N. deal to fight climate change, but they will have to match rhetoric with rapid action to break a crippling deadlock before a December deadline.

At a United Nations meeting on climate change in New York and a subsequent summit of G20 leaders in Pittsburgh, leaders from U.S. President Barack Obama to Chinese President Hu Jintao laid out measures to advance talks on global warming.

It was not enough.

With only two and a half months to go before 190 nations gather in Copenhagen to forge a successor to the emissions-capping pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, urgency for a breakthrough on key topics of disagreement is growing.

Progress on those outstanding roadblocks did not emerge from either meeting. Industrial and developing nations remain at odds over how to spread out greenhouse gas emission curbs.

Hu promised China would reduce its emissions compared to economic growth and Obama got G20 leaders to agree to phase out subsidies on oil and other fossil fuels, but the issue of climate finance -- aid from industrial countries to developing nations dealing with climate change -- went largely untouched.

"We will intensify our efforts, in cooperation with other parties, to reach agreement in Copenhagen," G20 leaders said in a final statement on Friday, directing finance ministers, again, to study climate finance issues and report back at their next meeting.

That has happened before.

At a July G8 meeting in Italy, Obama said leaders had tasked G20 finance ministers to report back on the financing issue in Pittsburgh, but arguments over whether the G20 was the right body to do such work hampered negotiations, and leaders could not agree on even a basic framework in Pittsburgh despite lofty promises made at the United Nations days before.

"It was like the tale of two cities," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "You started on a high note in New York and it ended on a low note in Pittsburgh."

FINANCE DEADLOCK, OBAMA EYED

Developing nations are waiting for their industrial counterparts to pony up promises of cash before they will agree to discuss emissions curbs for their growing economies.

"The burden really falls on the U.S., Europe and Japan to rectify this before Copenhagen or there's not going to be the basis for a meaningful agreement," Meyer said.

"Among leaders at this point in time, the least common denominator on climate financing turns out to be zero, and that's doesn't augur well."

Leaders acknowledged the urgency. French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for heads of state and government to meet again before December to discuss climate, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi indicated a meeting of some kind would take place in New York in the coming weeks.

U.S. deputy national security adviser Michael Froman, Obama's top G20 aide, said no meeting was planned but leaders realized they held the key to moving the talks forward.

"My sense is they will continue to have conversations because they did conclude that their involvement in this issue will be important to making Copenhagen a success," Froman told reporters on Friday.

Obama will be eyed especially in the coming weeks.

The U.S. president's leadership on climate change has been called into question as chances dim that the Senate will pass a bill before December to cut U.S. emissions -- a step seen as crucial to the international process.

"How much work can the Senate get done between now and Copenhagen depends in part on how much the administration presses the Senate to get done," said Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.

With healthcare reform dominating the congressional agenda, Obama's commitment to pushing for lawmakers to act on a climate bill, too, was an "open question," she said.

"The fact that he put the fossil fuel subsidies issue on the table was a leadership step, but countries were expecting considerably more steps than that one," she said.

Climate negotiators meet in Bangkok on Monday for formal U.N. talks and again on November 2 in Barcelona. The Copenhagen talks begin on December 7.

(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
China official warns on "too fast" nuclear plans
Sun Sep 27, 2009 12:12pm EDT
By Eadie Chen and Lucy Hornby

QINGDAO, China (Reuters) - China may have to put the brakes on the construction of nuclear power plants to ensure the plants are safe, the country's top energy planning official told reporters on Sunday.

Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, warned of signs of "improper" and "too fast" development of nuclear power in some regions.

China had previously set a goal of 40 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity by 2020, which would entail building about two reactors a year.

Some government officials have suggested aiming for 60 to 70 GW, or 5 percent of total generating capacity. The expanded goal is driven in part by China's $585 billion stimulus plan, put in place late last year to offset a collapse in export markets.

"We'd rather move slower and achieve less than incur potential safety concerns in terms of nuclear energy," Zhang told reporters on the sidelines of the Sino-U.S. Energy Summit.

China will need to more than double the proportion of renewable energy in its total power generation in order to get 15 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, a target reiterated by President Hu Jintao during this week's G20 meeting.

Of renewable energy sources, hydropower accounts for the biggest share, or 6 percent of China's total primary energy mix. Nuclear makes up about 0.6 percent and other sources such as wind power and solar power account for a trivial proportion, Zhang said.

On Sunday, the company that built the Three Gorges hydropower dam said it planned to move into solar and wind power as part of a diversification drive, Xinhua news agency reported.

Despite the focus on renewables, China is also developing new hydrocarbon energy sources.

U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips on Sunday signed an memorandum of understanding with top Chinese oil firm CNPC to develop shale gas in Sichuan province.

Specific plans still need to be worked out, Yan Cunzhang, a senior CNPC official, told Reuters.

Yan also said substantial progress in joint gas exploration and production by Royal Dutch Shell and CNPC in Sichuan would be seen in the near future.

(Editing by David Holmes)


[Green Business]
EU to propose climate action on planes, ships
Sun Sep 27, 2009 7:58am EDT
By Pete Harrison

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Aviation and shipping should cut their respective carbon dioxide emissions to 10 and 20 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade, the European Union is likely to propose at global climate talks this week.

EU diplomats said the cuts might be linked to a tax on fuel to generate billions of dollars of revenues to help poor countries cope with climate change -- a key contribution to finding a global climate deal by December.

"We are concerned about the slow international negotiations and are keen to shift gear," said an EU diplomat involved with the proposal. "This is a concrete measure from the EU side in order to contribute to this step-up."

After fine-tuning the proposal, the EU will present it at a meeting in Bangkok where climate negotiators from up to 190 nations will try to revive momentum toward a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol from 2013.

Aviation and shipping are not covered by Kyoto, the global climate change treaty agreed in 1997.

Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and most eastern European states have already indicated support for a cut of 20 percent or more to shipping emissions, compared to 2005 levels, according to a document seen by Reuters.

But seafaring nations including Malta, Cyprus, and Spain favor easier reductions. There is also debate over the base-line year.

CLIMATE FUNDING

"It's good that the EU is moving forward on capping emissions from these two sectors, not least because it creates significant potential for raising funding for developing countries," said Tim Gore, a campaigner at anti-poverty group Oxfam.

The proposal has been put forward by Sweden, which holds the EU's rotating presidency, and is based on a report three weeks ago by the EU's executive, the European Commission.

The Commission calculated the two sectors could generate revenues as high as 25 billion euros ($36.7 billion) a year in 2020, if their emissions were capped at 30 percent below 2005 levels.

Some countries with big airlines or a heavy reliance on air links have put up opposition. France, Finland, Italy, Malta and Austria have suggested airlines get an easier target than 10 percent.

"How these targets should be met should be decided by the International Civil Aviation Organization and International Maritime Organization," said the EU diplomat. "Should they fail, the EU will come back to the issue in 2011."

A system of taxes might meet more political resistance than a cap and trade scheme, which would force polluters to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide.

Shipping would be best served by a cap and trade scheme, the industry associations of Australia, Britain, Belgium, Norway and Sweden argued in a report last week that did not set targets.

The UK Chamber of Shipping estimated a trading scheme for emissions would cost the seaborne industry up to 6 billion euros a year, depending on the price of carbon.

(Reporting by Pete Harrison; editing by Robin Pomeroy)


[Green Business]
China sees emission trading pilot in next econ plan
Sun Sep 27, 2009 2:32am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - China plans to include a pilot emissions trading system in its five-year plan for economic development until 2015, the Environment Ministry said on Sunday, but declined to comment on whether it would cover carbon dioxide.

The government is already experimenting with small-scale schemes to tackle acid-rain causing sulphur dioxide and other pollutants using market mechanisms.

It has been coy about the potential for expanding these, or adding greenhouse gases to the list of pollutants that can be controlled and traded, but is apparently keen to at least continue exploring their potential.

A trial system for trading in permits to pollute was listed as one of four main emissions reductions goals in official comments about a blueprint for growth in China from 2011 to 2015, which bureaucrats are still thrashing out.

"Carry out trial work on trading emission and pollution permits, and ecological transformation," the ministry said in the statement handed out at a news conference on tackling the country's environmental problems.

The country's top climate change official, Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, declined to clarify how large the trial would be, or whether it would cover greenhouse gases.

China is now the world's top annual emitter, and President Hu Jintao pledged at the United Nations to take on a "carbon intensity" goal that would oblige it to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each dollar of its economic output.

Many carbon traders hope this could pave the way for a market like the one currently used in Europe, and have been rushing to secure a potentially lucrative foothold in China even though it is unclear how easy it will be to make money there.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), owned by UK-based Climate Exchange Plc, has signed a deal to set up a Chinese emissions exchange, but has declined to say how much it will invest or when trading might start.

French emissions exchange BlueNext has taken steps toward a carbon trading platform in China, joining with the China-Beijing Environment Exchange to offer clients a database of Chinese carbon-cutting projects and a carbon market standard.

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison)