Green Options

With US lawmakers failing to agree on a number of domestic issues like choice of energy sources and economic aspects of reducing carbon emissions, it seems unlikely that an agreement on the new climate treaty would be reached at Copenhagen this December.

Developed nations have proposed weaker carbon emission reduction goals at the Bonn climate negotiations. If the rising carbon emissions are to be tamed it is necessary that they set ambitious targets.

As we evolve towards a new global climate change policy regime at Copenhagen later this year via the negotiations currently going on in Bonn, a willingness to step in each other’s shoes gets more and more critical and primary.

Excuse Me, Waiter? What Year is this Carbon?

We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The UNFCCC wants to make the next climate treaty a success but in order to do that it must bring transparency and accountability into the carbon credits trading mechanism.

As negotiations get under way in earnest at the two-week United Nations Climate Conference in Poland, recent surveys suggest a majority of people in both developing and industrialized nations seek substantive action on global warming and want their governments to agree on carbon emission targets.

The UN’s Yvo de Boer briefs the press at day two of the UNFCCC climate meeting in Poznan, Poland.

Yvo de Boer briefs the press on the strategic goals of the COP14 UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland,

The meeting is the fourth of its kind this year. And even though the U.S. delegation in Poznan will be comprised of the outgoing Bush team, the pending change in American leadership is palpable in Poznam, as global climate conferees see Barack Obama potentially ushering in a new era of U.S. leadership on the environment.

The UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, starting today is raising hopes and fears across the green spectrum. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

A year-long push to devise a new global climate-change treaty – one that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off – gets under way Monday in Poland, with delegates from more than 190 nations set to resume grappling with the thorny issues of how much more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and who will pay.

The talks, in their first round, are focused on reducing human influence on climate from occurring, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). More or less, this means keeping global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels by the end of the century. Expectations however are low for this meeting.

President-Elect Obama’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gases to pre 1990 levels in the next 12 years notwithstanding, this group has a lot of challenges ahead. This first round of talks is primarily to develop working groups to tackle the various issues surrounding climate change in both developed and developing countries. But, with the global economic crisis on everyone’s mind, it will be hard to keep the conversation on track and work toward lower carbon emissions.

And while they are working to devise ways to reduce carbon emissions, they’ll create quite a few. AFP reports: