Copenhagen

[rehsifylf]

Wow - what a boobdoggle dog%$^&.

 

This is how serious Europe takes the issue.

 

"News of the document came as the European Union leaders agreed in Brussels to commit euro 2.4 billion ($3.6 billion) a year until 2012 to a short-term fund to help poor countries cope with climate change. The EU also conditionally lifted its commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels over the next decade, depending on better commitments by the United States and Canada."

 

For those counting, the European Union has about 500M people. This equates to a contribution of about $7.20 US per person per year. Equivalent to Alberta, with a population of 3.7M pledging $26M per year.

 

As for lifting the commitment s- another good one - Blame Canada - a country whose carbon consumption is nearly entirely driven by export products.

 

BTW - I know they are a "developing" nation, but can anyone tell me how much China's emission have grown since 1990? And even though China, if you can believe it, is considered to be part of the developing nation group (that is asking for funding from developed nations to help deal with the effects of man-made CO2, guess who is the largest producer in the world of CO2 - and has been for more than 4 years?

 

Canada - though well down the list of total CO2 production has been lambasted by the EU/greenpeace, and many of our own citizens because our projected avg annual growth in energy related CO2 emissions is .8% out to 2030. China's project growth during that period is nearly 4X higher at 2.8%. Let me do the math for you on that. In 2006 China had 6,103,493,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions and Canada had 544,680,000 metric tons as of 2006. At a rate of growth of 2.8% in China (and my belief is that it is rising much faster than that right now) - China's GROWTH in CO2 emissions between 2006 and now would be 712, 841, 734 metric tons - or about 28% more than Canada's TOTAL emissions in 2009. And we are going to pay China for our sins?

 

Ask yourself why, instead of browbeating the US (that has much lower total emissions than China in 2009), the fine folks in Copenhagen aren't going after China? I think we know the answer to that.

 

All is not lost - because China has committed to reducing their "Carbon Intensity" number by 40% in the next 10 years. Carbon intensity is the amount of CO2 produced for each dollar of GDP. Right now, China is only 300% worse than Canada on that, so assuming they live up to their committments on carbon intensity and Canada does as well - then they'd only be about twice as bad as Canada and the US.

 

Finally - for anyone who is still reading this - all of my data points are available on the IEA site, and my math is correct, but I intentionally made a massive leap of logic in the calculations to try and reinforce the fact that people will manipualte data to try to prove their points and unless you critically review the logic, you will be misled (think hockey stick).

[Crowsnest]

Wow - what a boobdoggle dog%$^&.

 

This is how serious Europe takes the issue.

 

"News of the document came as the European Union leaders agreed in Brussels to commit euro 2.4 billion ($3.6 billion) a year until 2012 to a short-term fund to help poor countries cope with climate change. The EU also conditionally lifted its commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels over the next decade, depending on better commitments by the United States and Canada."

 

For those counting, the European Union has about 500M people. This equates to a contribution of about $7.20 US per person per year. Equivalent to Alberta, with a population of 3.7M pledging $26M per year.

 

As for lifting the commitment s- another good one - Blame Canada - a country whose carbon consumption is nearly entirely driven by export products.

 

BTW - I know they are a "developing" nation, but can anyone tell me how much China's emission have grown since 1990? And even though China, if you can believe it, is considered to be part of the developing nation group (that is asking for funding from developed nations to help deal with the effects of man-made CO2, guess who is the largest producer in the world of CO2 - and has been for more than 4 years?

 

Canada - though well down the list of total CO2 production has been lambasted by the EU/greenpeace, and many of our own citizens because our projected avg annual growth in energy related CO2 emissions is .8% out to 2030. China's project growth during that period is nearly 4X higher at 2.8%. Let me do the math for you on that. In 2006 China had 6,103,493,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions and Canada had 544,680,000 metric tons as of 2006. At a rate of growth of 2.8% in China (and my belief is that it is rising much faster than that right now) - China's GROWTH in CO2 emissions between 2006 and now would be 712, 841, 734 metric tons - or about 28% more than Canada's TOTAL emissions in 2009. And we are going to pay China for our sins?

 

Ask yourself why, instead of browbeating the US (that has much lower total emissions than China in 2009), the fine folks in Copenhagen aren't going after China? I think we know the answer to that.

 

All is not lost - because China has committed to reducing there "Carbon Intensity" number by 40% in the next 10 years. Carbon intensity is the amount of CO2 produced for each dollar of GDP. Right now, China is only 300% worse than Canada on that, so assuming they live up to their committments on carbon intensity and Canada does as well - then they'd only be about twice as bad as Canada and the US.

 

Finally - for anyone who is still reading this - all of my data points are available on the IEA site, and my math is correct, but I intentionally made a massive leap of logic in the calculations to try and reinforce the fact that people will manipualte data to try to prove their points and unless you critically review the logic, you will be misled (think hockey stick).

 

 

I believe there is a book out called 'How to lie through statistics'. I've been meaning to get that.

[canadensis]

I believe there is a book out called 'How to lie through statistics'. I've been meaning to get that.

 

There is also a book called "How to make the data match your conclusion"; maybe the same author?

 

But really Copenhagen is not about any data, CO2, global warming, etc.. Think of it as Kyoto's big brother on steroids.

[calkid75]

Copenhagen equals only one thing = Wealth transfer from developed nations to developing.

 

I say screw the UN and Canada should stay out of any and all agreements. Ask Russia how it done. The EU is a dangerous organization that is removing the autonomy of all its member nations. No country should give up its control to any world organiization. Lets pull out of any talks and our membership in the UN, that organization is a joke!

 

 

[Taco]

[unclebuck]

 

I'm with taco - I thought this thread was going to be about chew! I'm a little disappointed

[canadensis]

It takes 1200 limos to save the world

 

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

 

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

 

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

 

 

Capitalism can lead the way on climate changeMs Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

 

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

 

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

 

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen's clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city's famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week "Climate Bottom Meeting," complete with a "storytelling yurt" and a "funeral of the day" for various corrupt, "heatist" concepts such as "economic growth".

 

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

 

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

 

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

 

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

 

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

 

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

 

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week's unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change "saboteurs" reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

 

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. "If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence," said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. "Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys."

 

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners' apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

 

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. "If Martin Luther King had come along and said 'I have a nightmare,' people would not have followed him," he said.

 

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

 

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

 

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama's decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a "victory" for the talks.

 

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure

[Weedy1]

It takes 1200 limos to save the world

 

 

 

Love this:

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen.

 

You would think they could have one big massive conference call, maybe internet based so that those that don't give a *hit could turn their internet device off without fear of being ostracized by their peers.

 

 

 

Monday morning, crap it’s too cold and work sucks rant over.

[canadensis]

Love this:

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. [/b]

 

You would think they could have one big massive conference call, maybe internet based so that those that don't give a *hit could turn their internet device off without fear of being ostracized by their peers.

 

 

 

Monday morning, crap it’s too cold and work sucks rant over.

 

 

Alot of people, including on this board think that the small things do make a difference. I find it tough to swallow that the leaders cannot lead by example?

 

What about a shuttle bus or some kind of transportation that makes a statement about what they want to achieve.

 

People this should be a wake up call about what Global Summits such as Copenhagen are all about.

[jksnijders]

 

 

Hypocrisy always amazes me. Just like the Auto Executives that flew private jets to Washington to go cap in hand asking for bailout money, with a sob story about how they were going to "streamline" their operations.

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Love this:

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. [/b]

 

You would think they could have one big massive conference call, maybe internet based so that those that don't give a *hit could turn their internet device off without fear of being ostracized by their peers.

 

 

 

Monday morning, crap it’s too cold and work sucks rant over.

 

 

Shuttle buses good...electric hybrids bad... The electricity used to power these cars comes from power plants run by carbon based fuel. The efficiency of making electricity then powering a car then running the car is very poor compared to directly using gasoline to power the car.

 

Hopefully they can use transit...way more efficient. Also fly only if the plane is full. Even better...why could they all not just teleconference. The carbon footprint to get all the politicians, their entourage, all the protesters etc.

[SupremeLeader]

I would speculate that considering the number of protesters and potential security issues coupled with the logistical coordination, mass transit is not an option for foreign delegates, diplomats, etc.

 

Teleconferencing on this scale would also logistically be difficult.

 

Another point is that these types of events allow people to mingle and discuss options at the several smaller venues that occur over the length of the conference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Crowsnest]

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2007/0...-or-hummer.html

 

The Recorder argues that when the environmental costs of building a Prius are factored in -- such as mining the nickel for its battery -- the race between the Hummer and the Prius for the Green Riband isn't even close. (hat tip: Samizdata) A quotation from the article demonstrates the power with which a change in perspective can alter the accounting of what seemed at first glance to be an easy decision.

 

As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

 

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

 

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

 

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

 

Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet. When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

 

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

 

One of the most subtle problems in public policy is to decide what exactly one is trying to optimize. By changing the definition of Green-ness to include total pollution rather than simply minimizing a "carbon footprint" it may well be the case that a Hummer is Greener than a Prius. But given that Canada is a friendly country an energy security case might be made for being more dependent on nickel from Ontario than oil from Saudi Arabia. By that measure a Prius might be better than a Hummer. The sage advice of all public policy professors is to redefine a problem until it is expressed in terms favorable to one's self. And, faced with the energy security argument, it might be countered that since a Prius is made by a "foreign" corporation, then that additional factor might make it "better" to buy a Hummer after all. And so on.

 

The sad fact about most of these environmental question is that it may require us to trade off one set of objectives against another. Maybe the "world" should decide which it values more. In the case of "Global Warming" for example, many of the policies designed to reduce "Greenhouse Gases" may exacerbate poverty in the Third World. How does one rank different goals -- such as for example reducing "greenhouse gases" and reducing hunger -- and combine them into a single policy?

 

What is nearly certain is that the process of arriving at the tradeoffs will be hard. Nobel Prize Winner Kenneth Arrow formulated what would later come to be known as the Arrow Impossibility Theorem in 1950. "In voting systems, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, demonstrates that no voting system based on ranked preferences can possibly meet a certain set of reasonable criteria when there are three or more options to choose from."

 

The need to aggregate preferences occurs in many different disciplines: in welfare economics, where one attempts to find an economic outcome which would be acceptable and stable; in decision making, where a person has to make a rational choice based on several criteria; and most naturally in voting systems, which are mechanisms for extracting a decision from a multitude of voters' preferences.

 

The framework for Arrow's theorem assumes that we need to extract a preference order on a given set of options (outcomes). Each individual in the society (or equivalently, each decision criterion) gives a particular order of preferences on the set of outcomes. We are searching for a preferential voting system, called a social welfare function, which transforms the set of preferences into a single global societal preference order.

 

Arrow's theorem says that if the decision-making body has at least two members and at least three options to decide among, then it is impossible to design a social welfare function that satisfies all these conditions at once.

 

So it turns out that it is hard to create a consensus of our acceptable tradeoffs even in principle. Which is why some wags have remarked that "the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship," which would suit the Greens just fine. So maybe we do need some nature "activists" like Frank Albrecht of the preceding post to simply tell us what Gaia thinks. And it seemed like buying a Green-friendly car was a simple task.

[calkid75]

The statistics are funny though. (Or not so funny depending on how you look at it) Chew on this for a moment. In the period from 2002-2008 China's population grew by over 100 Million people. ( Now this compares to Canada's total population of roughly 33 million people) China wants CO2 per person but is growing at this alarming rate. But apparently everyone has lost sight of the ball, we are going to try to treat a symptom and not the problem. What we need is a real commitment by all nations to reduce population. Again a nasty topic. Pull up some stats on population density around the world. It is a little scaring. Considering the earth has fixed resources, not just oil, and gas but plant and animals for food. I do not think the current world population can easily be sustained by this. Each country should have the goal of being able to provide enough for its own, and that includes the bad years. I think Canada would be one of the few who could accomplish this. If we look at nature we always find that populations get balanced by the earth, and if we don't react soon we will start to see this on a larger scale with man. I am just glad to live where I do because you can see some locations on the planet being hit by the nastiest droughts and famine we have ever seen. Too bad so many have been conviced to try to treat a symptom (CO2) and not the disease (over population).

[canadensis]

The bottom line is the more money you have, the greater your net worth, the bigger your carbon footprint is; there is no way around this fact. Same goes for countries based on their per capita GDP. In Calgary the people with the smallest carbon footprint are the homeless (except of course those in the morgue), and those with the largest footprint live in Mt Royal, and all varying degrees in between. Sorry, but just because mama drives a hybrid and fills the blue box every week does not change this either.

 

Personal wealth is what Copenhagen has the potential of attacking, in a BIG way!