G7 leaders commit to human extinction

Make no mistake this is not climate news - it is political news and has little significance beyond endorsing a headlong run for the extinction goalposts and a committment to 'business-as-usual'

G7 leaders agree to phase out fossil fuel use by end of century

German chancellor Angela Merkel announces commitment to ‘decarbonise global economy’ and end extreme poverty and hunger

the Guardian,
8 June, 2015

The G7 leading industrial nations have agreed to cut greenhouse gases by phasing out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century, the German chancellor,Angela Merkel, has announced, in a move hailed as historic by some environmental campaigners.

On the final day of talks in a Bavarian castle, Merkel said the leaders had committed themselves to the need to “decarbonise the global economy in the course of this century”. They also agreed on a global target for limiting the rise in average global temperatures to a maximum of 2C over pre-industrial levels.

Environmental lobbyists described the announcement as a hopeful sign that plans for complete decarbonisation could be decided on in Paris climate talks later this year. But they criticised the fact that leaders had baulked at Merkel’s proposal that they should agree to immediate binding emission targets.

As host of the summit, which took place in the foothills of Germany’s largest mountain, the Zugspitze, Merkel said the leading industrialised countries were committed to raising $100bn (£65bn) in annual climate financing by 2020 from public and private sources.

In a 17-page communique issued after the summit at Schloss Elmau under the slogan “Think Ahead, Act Together”, the G7 leaders agreed to back the recommendations of the IPCC, the United Nations’ climate change panel, to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions at the upper end of a range of 40% to 70% by 2050, using 2010 as the baseline.

Merkel also announced that G7 governments had signed up to initiatives to work for an end to extreme poverty and hunger, reducing by 2030 the number of people living in hunger and malnutrition by 500 million, as well as improving the global response to epidemics in the light of the Ebola crisis.

Poverty campaigners reacted with cautious optimism to the news.

The participant countries – Germany, Britain, France, the US, Canada, Japan and Italy – would work on initiatives to combat disease and help countries around the world react to epidemics, including a fund within the World Bank dedicated to tackling health emergencies, Merkel announced at a press conference after the summit formally ended on Monday afternoon.

Reacting to the summit’s final declaration, the European Climate Foundation described the G7 leaders’ announcement as historic, saying it signalled “the end of the fossil fuel age” and was an “important milestone on the road to a new climate deal in Paris”.

Samantha Smith, a climate campaigner for the World Wildlife Fund, said: “There is only one way to meet the goals they agreed: get out of fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

The 350.org campaign group put out a direct challenge to Barack Obama to shut down long-term infrastructure projects linked to the fossil fuel industry. “If President Obama wants to live up to the rhetoric we’re seeing out of Germany, he’ll need to start doing everything in his power to keep fossil fuels in the ground. He can begin by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and ending coal, oil and gas development on public lands,” said May Boeve, the group’s director.

Others called on negotiators seeking an international climate deal at Paris later this year to make total decarbonisation of the global economy the official goal.

“A clear long-term decarbonisation objective in the Paris agreement, such as net zero greenhouse gas emissions well before the end of the century, will shift this towards low-carbon investment and avoid unmanageable climate risk,” said Nigel Topping, the chief executive of the We Mean Business coalition Merkel won praise for succeeding in her ambition to ensure climate was not squeezed off the agenda by other pressing issues. Some environmental groups said she had established herself as a “climate hero”

German chancellor Angela Merkel’s announcement on G7 climate change goals

Observers said she had succeeded where sceptics thought she would not, in winning over Canada and Japan, the most reluctant G7 partners ahead of negotiations, to sign up to her targets on climate, health and poverty.

Iain Keith, campaign director of the online activist network Avaaz, said: “Angela Merkel faced down Canada and Japan to say ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to carbon pollution and become the climate hero the world needs.”

The One campaigning and advocacy organisation called the leaders’ pledge to end extreme poverty a “historic ambition”. Adrian Lovett, its Europe executive director, said: “These G7 leaders have signed up ... to be part of the generation that ends extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.” But he warned: “Schloss Elmau’s legacy must be more than a castle in the air.

But the Christian relief organisation World Vision accused the leaders of failing to deliver on their ambitious agenda, arguing they had been too distracted by immediate crises, such as Russia and Greece. “Despite addressing issues like hunger and immunisation, it was nowhere as near as ambitious as we would have hoped for,” a spokeswoman said.

Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust said the proposals would “transform the resilience of global health systems”. But he said the success of the measures would depend on the effectiveness with which they could be coordinated on a global scale and that required fundamental reform of the World Health Organisation, something the leaders stopped short of deciding on.

“We urge world leaders to consider establishing an independent body within the WHO with the authority and responsibility to deliver this,” he said.

Merkel, who called the talks “very work-intensive and productive” and defended the format of a summit that cost an estimated €300m (£220m), said that the participants had agreed to sharpen existing sanctions against Russia if the crisis in Ukraine were to escalate.

She also said “there isn’t much time left” to find a solution to the Greek global debt crisis but that participants were unanimous in wanting Greece to stay in the eurozone.

Demonstrators, about 3,000 of whom had packed a protest camp in the nearby village of Garmisch Partenkirchen, cancelled the final action that had been planned to coincide with the close of the summit.

At a meeting in the local railway station, the head of Stop G7 Elmau, Ingrid Scherf announced that the final rally would not go ahead “because we’re already walked off our feet”. She denied the claims of local politicians that the group’s demonstrations had been a flop. “I’m not at all disappointed, the turnout was super,” she said. “And we also had the support of lots of locals.”

Only two demonstrators were arrested, police said, one for throwing a soup dish, another for carrying a spear.

Canada pledges to end fossil-fuel use by 2100, cut emissions by 2050

Canada has joined other Group of Seven leaders in pledging to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century, but Stephen Harper says it will be technology, not economic sacrifice, that achieves this ambitious goal.

Meanwhile, in this country, Geoff Bertram (for whom I have a lot of respect) has spoken out about the government's "consultation process"

"The numbers are lousy. People are being stampeded into making the wrong decisions."

"It's treated the public essentially as an inert, ill-informed mass to be manipulated."

Government spewing hot air on climate change, economist says

Propaganda tactics have been used on the public by the Government when setting climate change targets, a leading economist says.

Tim Groser, minister of Treaty Negotiations is on of New Zealand's leading criminals in a criminal government

Stuff,

8 June, 2015

Retired senior Victoria University lecturer Geoff Bertram is disappointed with the way the Ministry for the Environment consulted the public on the greenhouse gas emissions target New Zealand would set for itself between 2020 and 2030.

The country will have to present this target at a United Nations conference in Paris in December.

Bertram believes the ministry, under direction from Climate Change Minister Tim Groser, has already made up its mind to do as little as possible about cleaning up New Zealand's rising greenhouse gas emissions. The documents released in the consultation greenwash this position using a skewed selection of figures to make it palatable to the public, he said.

"The numbers are lousy. People are being stampeded into making the wrong decisions."

"It's treated the public essentially as an inert, ill-informed mass to be manipulated."

But Ministry for the Environment natural resources policy deputy secretary Guy Beatson said ministers had not made a decision on the country's target. "We're under no instructions."

The Government commissioned two sets of projections on the costs of climate change action to be made, one by Crown research institute Landcare Research and the other by economics consultancy Infometrics. Bertram said it was concerning that only the more expensive projections by Infometrics were included in public documents.

Beatson said the ministry had struck a balance between "pie-in-the-sky and not so conservative that it's disputable". It had since released projections that were not completed and peer-reviewed on time.

Bertram said the cost of switching to low-carbon was trivial, though this was not clear.

"At the end of 30 years [our GDP growth is] one to two per cent below where we might have been. It's money we haven't even got yet ... It's the sort of thing that happens when the Fonterra milk payment drops off a dollar or two, the sort of thing we see all the time in the New Zealand economy."

Bertram said any worries about a loss of competition on the international market was bluster - any carbon tax or similar initiative could solve this if it began and ended at the New Zealand border, much like GST does.

But Beatson warned such a border-adjustment policy could come up against World Trade Organisation rules.

Bertram was similarly critical of how the uncertainty around the world in 2020 and 2030 was "waved in this document in our faces to scare us".

Yet governments, companies and even sports teams like the All Blacks started initiatives such as winning the 2015 Rugby World Cup in an uncertain world every day, he said.

"It's completely uncertain, so what do we do? We select them, train them, we select coaches, we criticise the coaches, we organise Super Rugby competitions and watch the players go through and we put the best team up we can and we motivate them to do the best job they can do. We cover all the bases to minimise our potential regret."

But Beatson said the rules around how countries could meet their targets - even if they could buy carbon credits off each other - would not be known until the Paris conference: "if that".

Infometrics chief economist Adolf Stroombergen said some economic projections he did for the ministry, such as what would happen if agriculture was subject to a carbon price, came out with uncertain results.

"It comes down to information ignorance, but there wasn't a lot of time to put together these summaries. Maybe with more time some of these other information requirements could have been sought out and data obtained

"Whether there's an agenda there, I don't know - maybe there is, maybe there isn't."

Several calls seeking comment from Minister Groser for this article went unreturned. Consultation on setting the government target closed last Wednesday.