April 14, 2014 - Delivering the latest stark news about climate change on Sunday,
a United Nations panel warned that governments are not doing enough to avert profound
risks in coming decades. But the experts found a silver lining: Not only is there
still time to head off the worst, but the political will to do so seems to be rising
around the world. In a unveiled in Berlin, Germany, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change found that decades of foot-dragging by political leaders had propelled
humanity into a critical situation, with greenhouse emissions rising faster than ever.
Though it remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level,
only an intensive push over the next 15 years to bring those emissions under control
can achieve the goal, the committee found. “We cannot afford to lose another
decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee
that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to
achieve climate stabilization.” The good news is that ambitious action is becoming
more affordable, the committee found. It is increasingly clear that measures like
tougher building codes and efficiency standards for cars and trucks can save energy
and reduce emissions without harming people’s quality of life, the panel found. And
the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar power are falling so fast that its
deployment on a large scale is becoming practical, the report said. Moreover, since
the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, far more countries,
states and cities have adopted climate plans, a measure of the growing political interest
in tackling the problem. They include China and the United States, which are doing
more domestically than they have been willing to commit to in international treaty
negotiations. Yet the report found that the emissions problem is still outrunning
the determination to tackle it, with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rising almost
twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades
of the 20th century. That reflects a huge rush to use coal-fired power plants in developing
countries that are climbing up the income scale, especially China, while rich countries
are making only slow progress in cutting their high emissions, the report said. The
report is likely to increase the pressure to secure an ambitious new global climate
treaty that is supposed to be completed in late 2015 and take effect in 2020. But
the divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that have long bedeviled
international climate talks were on display yet again in Berlin. Some developing
countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could
have been read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries — including
the United States — struck out language that might have been seen as implying that
they needed to write big checks to the developing countries. Both points survived
in the full version of the report, but were deleted from a synopsis meant to inform
the world’s top political leaders. The new report does not prescribe the actions
that governments need to take. But it does make clear that putting a price on emissions
of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, either through taxes or the sale of
emission permits, is a fundamental approach that could help redirect investment toward
climate-friendly technologies.