The UN has given green light to two new generations of carbon offsets that will bring carbon reductions to a mass market in developing nations.

The panel that oversees the running of the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) approved in principle last week a substantial project that will deploy over 30 million compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in Mexico.

Details of the project can be found in www.unfccc.int.

The project is designed by energy efficiency project developer Cool nrg International and the CFLs will be distributed in phases over the next 2-3 years with the purpose of generating up to 7.5m offsets under the Kyoto's CDM scheme called Certified Emission Reductions (CER).

Each offset will account for the equivalent of one tonne of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions.

CDM has been criticized for the high administration costs of rubberstamping the UN's approval. Trying to put together smaller projects that bring emissions reductions to significant numbers of people, such as energy efficient lighting schemes, is very expensive.

Under what is known as a programmatic CDM, developers deploy projects in unlimited numbers (in theory) providing each uses the same approved standards or methodologies from the outset. Therefore fees and redtape are kept to a minimum.

On the other hand, the UN also recently approved the the first agricultural methodology, or biological approach, for CDM projects. The UN’s announcement coincides with the USDA’s analysis report that shows the economic benefits to agriculture from the US cap-and-trade legislation.

The agricultural methodology, which will be used to design projects that eliminate the use of synthetic nitrogen on legumes like soybeans and cowpeas, was developed by Amson Technology LC, a greenhouse-gas-reduction and sustainability consulting firm, Becker Underwood Inc., a leading developer of bio-agronomic and specialty products and Perspectives GmbH, a Point Carbon company, a high-quality greenhouse gas reduction market solutions provider.

Carbonica very much supports these initiatives. We believe that they are very beneficial to developing nations, and they are pivotal in our global strategy to cut GHG emissions.

Brunella  

brunella@carbonica.org

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George Monbiot writes in yesterday's Guardian ("The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us", 25/11/08) saying that to prevent runaway climate change we need a total decarbonisation of our economy. 

 This is correct. Emission cuts on their own will not deliver the mitigation of climate change that we need.

"Mitigation" is a widely brandished term to talk about how to combat climate change. We talk of a "mitigation model" to prevent our planet from warming, and usually this involves CO₂ emission cuts, in the hope that we lessen the damage we are causing to the environment. This is not the same as reversing it.

We can take the analogy of an obese person who is getting fatter and fatter every day because they eat 20 hamburgers a day. Telling them to cut their intake and eat 10 burgers a day instead, will help them decrease the rate at which they are putting on weight, but it will not be a recipe for slimming. If they are more drastic and cut their intake to just a few a day, that will bring them closer to a stable situation, but to reverse this and start slimming requires other ingredients in their life, such as physical exercise.

Our atmosphere has a concentration of greenhouse gases of 430 ppm in CO₂ equivalent, which is tremendously high, and very close to the threshold of 450 ppm that is widely accepted to be a point where climate change can begin to take a very dramatic turn. It is time to start slimming. Eating fewer burgers or cutting down our emissions will not do the job. Any threshold of CO₂ emissions, however low, is a form of environmental vandalism and adds to the already existing problem.

The high concentration of greenhouse gases is already retaining an excess of heat in our planet and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (see our article on global warming).

Even if the UK's Climate Change Bill delivers the target of 80% emission cuts by 2050 and the world joins in with the successor of Kyoto (to be decided in Copenhagen next year) delivering the same level of cuts as the UK (which is very unlikely and over-optimistic), then all we will be able to say is that we have vandalised the environment much less than we would otherwise have done, but the problem of global warming in 2050 will still be much worse than it is now in any event, because during 4 decades of emission cuts there will be emissions nonetheless.

The crux of the matter is that to reverse the problem we must have negative net emissions. This means that our target must be to go beyond zero emissions, beyond decarbonisation and being simply carbon neutral, we must look into capturing carbon from the atmosphere on quite a gargantuan scale.

The world has lost most of its forests in the last century. Redressing the balance involves a reforestation process on a vast and fast scale, in order to dramatically increase the Earth's ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere. The UN's working group on Climate Change has suggested financial compensations to tropical countries who halt deforestation and illegal logging. This is encouraging but not strong enough. Deforestation must stop immediately and we ought to be putting all our financial resources on a very ambitious and long-term reforestation effort.

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and its successor will be determined next year in Copenhagen. There is every sign that Copenhagen 2009 will not be ambitious enough to tackle climate change.

The UN is convening under the Framework Convention on Climate Change next month in Poland to discuss an action plan, following the "Bali action plan" for a framework of cooperation and mitigation that will pave the way to the Copenhagen treaty.

In preparation for this meeting, a UN working group has published a document that puts together the submissions of different countries, their expectations and wish-lists of what the future agreement should be like. The document is not very encouraging reading. As everything with the UN, a gigantic slow-moving organization, whose policies have a decades-lag of where we ought to be to see to the current needs, the document is a toned-down and unambitious action plan that is the outcome of putting together many conflicting interests.

The document suggests a "level of stabilization" of 2^oC for the global temperature increase, and states that we should make sure that temperature rises do not exceed 2.4^oC. This is amusing. We hope the UN knows that we do not have any control over temperature rises, not least because we cannot even predict them with entire certainty. We have in principle control over the level of greenhouse gas emissions, but not over how our atmosphere will react to this and the temperature increase that will follow.

Furthermore, emission cuts will diminish the rate of warming of our planet, but the temperatures will continue increasing over time for as long as the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (currently 430 ppm) remains high. Therefore the concept of any "level of stabilization" makes no scientific sense until the concentration of CO₂ returns to a sustainable level. In order to achieve that, we need to go beyond emission cuts and deep into the territory of carbon capture.

The document also discusses that the concentration of CO₂ should be kept below 450 ppm for as long as possible. However it is entirely possible that even within the current projected emission cuts, we will reach this level in about 10-20 years, at any rate much before 2050.

Norway makes the encouraging suggestion of offering financial help to tropical countries who commit themselves to halt deforestation. The importance of this is enormous. The document also makes the important point that rainforest restoration as a form of carbon capture is to be encouraged. We very much believe that it ought to be a key ingredient of the future agreement.  

This week marks a historic breakthrough in climate change legislation, with the passing of the Climate Change Bill in the House of Commons. It is great news that the UK is now committed to a drastic reduction of 80% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The bill is expected to become law before the end of the year, and it will be legally binding for future administrations to achieve this target.

The target of 80% is much more ambitious than the 60% that was discussed in previous versions of the Bill. The new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Milliband, has shown vision and boldness by adopting recommendations from climate change scientists (such as Lord Turner's Climate Change Committee).

Britain now needs to engage with its European partners to achieve similar targets across the EU. This Bill must be an example for other countries to follow, otherwise its purpose will be futile. Climate change is blind to countries and boundaries, it is a global issue and as such we must engage with all countries to participate in achieving the same goals. Ultimately the UN must be the right forum to tackle this global issue. A partnership where one saves for a rainy day and the other is gambling it all away is doomed to failure.

The successor of the Kyoto protocol ought to be the roadmap for greenhouse emission cuts. However, it is likely to disappoint and soon become obsolete because in all likelihood it will not be bold enough. The climate is now right for national governments to break new ground, show vision and leadership and set an example to others by passing ambitious legislation.

Emission cuts are only part of the picture. They are an integral part of the mitigation model to combat climate change. Whilst we must work towards a low-carbon economy, global warming can only stop if the excess concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is removed. Even in the hypothetical case that our greenhouse gas emissions were miraculously slashed to zero today and our  societies were able to function with a zero carbon footprint, our planet will still continue to steadily warm up due to the excess concentration of CO2 (see our article http://www.carbonica.org/carbon-footprint/global-warming.aspx). But we are not even anywhere near this (a completely enviable situation compared to where we arenow), and we think that emission cuts, however dramatic, will do the job. They will not.

Carbon capture is the second vital ingredient of any mitigation model. Emission cuts and carbon capture must go hand in hand and legislation needs to reflect this if its goal is to achieve a sustainable future.