Analysis by Zahra Hirji
Mon Aug 30, 2010 08:20 PM ET
The rapid expansion of biofuel production in Africa over the past decade has stirred up enormous controversy. Critics have questioned the efficiency of the alternative fuels, and charged rich countries with endangering the food security of developing nations by commandeering land that would be used to grow food crops.
In that vein, a new study (pdf) by the environmental group Friends of the Earth points a wagging finger at the European Union, among other international organizations, for buying over 19,000 square miles of land across Africa -- an area larger than the Netherlands -- to build massive biofuel projects that supposedly provide few returns for local communities.
Drawing upon case studies of "land-grabbing" (the leasing or selling of land to outside governments or corporations) from 11 different countries across Africa, Friends of the Earth argues that the only solution is for African states to, "immediately suspend further land acquisitions and investments in agrofuels."
But the report is steeped in alarmist language, and it oversimplifies the many complexities surrounding biofuel production in Africa and its effect on local economies.
Across the African continent, projects are supporting over a dozen different types of biofuels -- jatropha, sugar cane, and maize, to name a few. The efficiency of these projects is highly variable and depends on a collection of factors, including the type of biofuel production process, the technology being used, and geographical location.
Friends of the Earth (whose acronym is, ironically enough, FoE) highlights a trend of some African countries jumping on the biofuel production bandwagon without properly researching the productivity of certain crops. For example, many countries in Africa and elsewhere blindly threw large sums of money at jatropha farms, a plant with an oily seed that can be harnessed for fuel shown in the image above, only to find was not the miracle crop it had promised to be.
But such negative examples are only half of the African biofuel story. In the same countries that the FoE reports as suffering from biofuel production, well-recognized international donors, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and research programs, like the International Food Policy Research Institute, have shown the benefits of biofuel projects for local communities.
Biofuel farms often provide jobs and stimulate local economies. Moreover, the fuel is then distributed to both domestic and international markets (rather than only international markets, as touted by FoE).
Mozambique is a perfect example of an African nation that is going into the biofuels business with its eyes open. The government is investing lots of land (over 46,000 square miles) and money into biofuels, even though 35 percent of the country's population is "chronically food insecure." The country believes it can accommodate both food and biofuel production.
But if it cannot, the government will halt biofuel production, promising, "not to allow biofuel production to compromise food security in any way."
The key to successful biofuel production in Africa depends on crafting policies that safeguard the interests of local populations.
There are many examples of countries failing to do this in the past, but according to a recent review by the Forum of Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the continent is on track to strike a healthy balance between between its fuel and food needs.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
The Key to China’s Electric Car Market: Partnerships
By KATIE FEHRENBACHER of GigaOm
Published: August 30, 2010
Electric car makers that don’t have a “China-strategy” are overlooking the world’s largest market. Most do, and after interviewing a half-dozen EV startups over the past several weeks, it’s clear that partnering with Chinese battery and auto makers is one of the dominant strategies for U.S. electric car startups like Coda, AC Propulsion, and even ZAP. This morning, another China electric vehicle partnership has emerged. Called the New Energy Sustainable Transportation International Alliance, the group includes auto parts maker Eaton, IBM, development firm AECOM, automaker Beiqi Foton Motor Co., lithium-ion battery maker MGL, and electric motor producer Broad Ocean.
The group says their first project is to develop and sell electric buses in Chinese cities that will use products from Eaton, Broad Ocean and MGL, and the alliance says they will be focusing particularly on city-owned fleets, taxis, and commercial charging infrastructure.
There are a couple of reasons why China’s plug-in vehicle market (all-electric and hybrids) is so crucial. With about 35 cars per 1,000 people in China’s 1.3 billion-person population, roughly 80 percent of car sales in the country are currently made to first-time buyers. As Josie wrote for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), this potentially lowers the barrier to adoption of alternative vehicles. Nearly half of the more than 5 million electric vehicle charge point installations anticipated worldwide by 2015 will happen in China, according to Pike Research. In addition, the government-owned utility State Grid Corp. plans to invest $586 million in a smart grid buildout over the next five years.
China has been investing in a green economy across the board, including clean power, energy efficiency and plug-in cars. As investor David Anthony wrote in a column for us in April, China is looking to clean up its economy and its air pollution via EVs:
A 2007 World Bank study found that air pollution kills three-quarters of a million Chinese every year. This number so embarrassed the Chinese government that it prevented parts of the report from being released to the public. Although things have improved somewhat in recent years, clean air remains a scarce commodity in Chinese cities, and pollution-related diseases are still the leading cause of death in China.
Fast-moving U.S.-based electric vehicle startups have already started to put their stakes in the ground in China. Coda Automotive has teamed up with Chinese battery maker Lishen to create a joint venture — called Lio (oil spelled backward) — to make battery cells for Coda’s all-electric sedan due out before the end of this year. EV drive train maker AC Propulsion has been developing an electric minivan with Yulon, Taiwan’s largest automaker, which has an agreement to produce electric cars in a joint venture with mainland China. ZAP recently bought out half of Chinese automaker Jonway, plans to buy out the other half next year, and last week showed off its electric SUV that will eventually be used as a taxi in China.
Other U.S. players interested in the Chinese market include electric motorcycle startup Mission Motors, battery maker EnerDel (a subsidiary of Ener1), smart grid heavyweights General Electric and Cisco, and Atieva, a tight-lipped developer of battery pack management systems. IBM has its eyes on both electric vehicle IT management and the smart grid, and told us last year that it expects to generate a minimum of $400 million in smart grid revenues in China over the next four years.
Published: August 30, 2010
Electric car makers that don’t have a “China-strategy” are overlooking the world’s largest market. Most do, and after interviewing a half-dozen EV startups over the past several weeks, it’s clear that partnering with Chinese battery and auto makers is one of the dominant strategies for U.S. electric car startups like Coda, AC Propulsion, and even ZAP. This morning, another China electric vehicle partnership has emerged. Called the New Energy Sustainable Transportation International Alliance, the group includes auto parts maker Eaton, IBM, development firm AECOM, automaker Beiqi Foton Motor Co., lithium-ion battery maker MGL, and electric motor producer Broad Ocean.
The group says their first project is to develop and sell electric buses in Chinese cities that will use products from Eaton, Broad Ocean and MGL, and the alliance says they will be focusing particularly on city-owned fleets, taxis, and commercial charging infrastructure.
There are a couple of reasons why China’s plug-in vehicle market (all-electric and hybrids) is so crucial. With about 35 cars per 1,000 people in China’s 1.3 billion-person population, roughly 80 percent of car sales in the country are currently made to first-time buyers. As Josie wrote for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), this potentially lowers the barrier to adoption of alternative vehicles. Nearly half of the more than 5 million electric vehicle charge point installations anticipated worldwide by 2015 will happen in China, according to Pike Research. In addition, the government-owned utility State Grid Corp. plans to invest $586 million in a smart grid buildout over the next five years.
China has been investing in a green economy across the board, including clean power, energy efficiency and plug-in cars. As investor David Anthony wrote in a column for us in April, China is looking to clean up its economy and its air pollution via EVs:
A 2007 World Bank study found that air pollution kills three-quarters of a million Chinese every year. This number so embarrassed the Chinese government that it prevented parts of the report from being released to the public. Although things have improved somewhat in recent years, clean air remains a scarce commodity in Chinese cities, and pollution-related diseases are still the leading cause of death in China.
Fast-moving U.S.-based electric vehicle startups have already started to put their stakes in the ground in China. Coda Automotive has teamed up with Chinese battery maker Lishen to create a joint venture — called Lio (oil spelled backward) — to make battery cells for Coda’s all-electric sedan due out before the end of this year. EV drive train maker AC Propulsion has been developing an electric minivan with Yulon, Taiwan’s largest automaker, which has an agreement to produce electric cars in a joint venture with mainland China. ZAP recently bought out half of Chinese automaker Jonway, plans to buy out the other half next year, and last week showed off its electric SUV that will eventually be used as a taxi in China.
Other U.S. players interested in the Chinese market include electric motorcycle startup Mission Motors, battery maker EnerDel (a subsidiary of Ener1), smart grid heavyweights General Electric and Cisco, and Atieva, a tight-lipped developer of battery pack management systems. IBM has its eyes on both electric vehicle IT management and the smart grid, and told us last year that it expects to generate a minimum of $400 million in smart grid revenues in China over the next four years.
Why failure of climate summit would herald global catastrophe: 3.5°
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.
Two analyses of the Copenhagen Accord and its pledges, by Dr Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and by the Climate Action Tracker website, suggest that, with the cuts that are currently promised under Copenhagen, the world will still warm by 3.5C by 2100. Such a rise would be likely to have disastrous effects on agricultural production, water availability, natural ecosystems and sea-level rise across the world, producing tens of millions of refugees.
A month ago, in its annual State of the Climate report, published in conjunction with the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed 10 separate indicators of a warming planet, seven of them rising – ranging from air temperature over land and humidity to sea level – and three of them declining: Arctic sea-ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover. "The scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable," NOAA said.
Cancun, or "COP 16" as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world's defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the "gigatonne gap".
A gigatonne is a billion tonnes of carbon, and the emissions cuts currently promised by the nations of the world in the Copenhagen Accord – the last-minute agreement patched together by leaders after the conference in the Danish capital all but collapsed – will mean that, by 2020, when global emissions should be on a firmly downward trend, they will be several gigatonnes too high to limit the warming to C above the pre-industrial level. This is widely considered the most that human society can stand without serious consequences.
Yet the international community does not seem any closer to consensus on the need to make further reductions in carbon and at Cancun, which takes place from 29 November to 10 December, it is at best side issues on which any progress will be made.
Today, the Coalition's Climate Change Secretary, the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, will travel to Berlin to discuss strengthening the EU climate target in advance of the Cancun meeting from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, with his German and French counterparts, Norbert Röttgen and Jean-Louis Borloo.
Mr Huhne told The Independent: "There's hard work ahead to maintain and build on the level of commitment embodied in the Copenhagen Accord and to rebuild the credibility of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process.
"We in the EU still need to finalise our positions in advance of COP 16, but I think there's a real chance the negotiations could take important steps forward in Cancun, in particular to implement parts of what was agreed in Copenhagen and to work towards the global deal the world needs."
He added: "It's the UK's view – and one shared by my French and German counterparts – that the EU should raise its ambition and that the economic case for doing so stacks up.
"Cutting emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 would be a game-changer in shifting investment into new clean technologies, generating jobs and growth in supply chains across our economies. The great risk for Europe is in waking up late to these opportunities and losing out to other major blocs who are already eyeing up market share."
It is hard to exaggerate the dire effect which the failure at Copenhagen has had both on the climate change negotiating process itself, and on the belief of those involved that an effective climate deal might be possible.
A year ago, many environmentalists, scientists and politicians genuinely thought that the meeting in Denmark might produce a binding agreement to cut global CO2 by the 25-40 per cent, by 2020, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated is necessary to keep the warming to below C.
Today that optimism has vanished. The Danish meeting foundered on the disagreement between the developed countries and the developing nations over who should do how much, and when, in cutting emissions; the major point of disagreement was the Kyoto Protocol, the current treaty, which makes developed countries do a lot, and developing nations not very much.
The Kyoto treaty runs out at the end of 2012 and the developing nations, led by China and India, wanted it renewed, while developed countries, including Britain and the rest of the EU, want a completely new treaty to share out the carbon-cutting burden.
At Copenhagen last December, world leaders cobbled together an agreement which ended up devoid of any binding carbon emissions targets (but did recognise the need to stay under C for the first time). Instead of the legally-binding treaty which had been hoped for, nations were invited to "register" voluntary targets, saying by how much they thought they could cut their CO2 by 2020.
Britain is part of the EU target of a 20 per cent cut, on a 1990 baseline, which may be raised before Cancun to 30 per cent. (Britain's own domestic target is one of the highest, to cut CO2 by 34 per cent by 2020.) Other targets include 25 per cent for Japan, Australia by 5 to 25 per cent and the US by 17 per cent on a 2005 baseline – although the legislation to achieve it is firmly stalled in the Senate. Among the developing nations, China has promised to reduce the energy intensity of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020.
Various analyses of all these pledges suggest they amount to cuts of the global CO2 total of between 11 and 19 per cent by 2020, instead of the 25 to 40 per cent which the IPCC says is needed. This can also be expressed in real amounts of CO2, of which the world is currently emitting annually about 45 gigatonnes – 45 billion tonnes of carbon.
If the world continues with these levels of emissions it is thought this will increase to between 51 and 55 gigatonnes by 2020. Lord Stern of Brentford, author of a landmark report on the economics of climate change, has calculated that if, instead, global CO2 could be cut back to 44 gigatonnes by 2020, the world would be on a credible path to stay below a rise of C. Yet analysis suggests the Copenhagen Accord pledges will leave the figure at 48-49 billion tonnes – the gigatonne gap which Cancun is not going to close.
What the conference may do is agree the architecture for the new major climate funds to help developing countries which were agreed in Denmark – a "fast-start" fund of $30bn (£19.4bn) per year in new money for the years 2010-12, and a fund of $100bn annually to be set up by 2020.
If there are no further breakdowns, it is possible that the meeting may at least restore faith in the UN climate process. "Nobody thinks Cancun will be a big-bang moment," said Keith Allott, head of climate change for the World Wide Fund for Nature. "What the world needs to do is put some wheels back on the climate truck."
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.
Two analyses of the Copenhagen Accord and its pledges, by Dr Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and by the Climate Action Tracker website, suggest that, with the cuts that are currently promised under Copenhagen, the world will still warm by 3.5C by 2100. Such a rise would be likely to have disastrous effects on agricultural production, water availability, natural ecosystems and sea-level rise across the world, producing tens of millions of refugees.
A month ago, in its annual State of the Climate report, published in conjunction with the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed 10 separate indicators of a warming planet, seven of them rising – ranging from air temperature over land and humidity to sea level – and three of them declining: Arctic sea-ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover. "The scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable," NOAA said.
Cancun, or "COP 16" as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world's defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the "gigatonne gap".
A gigatonne is a billion tonnes of carbon, and the emissions cuts currently promised by the nations of the world in the Copenhagen Accord – the last-minute agreement patched together by leaders after the conference in the Danish capital all but collapsed – will mean that, by 2020, when global emissions should be on a firmly downward trend, they will be several gigatonnes too high to limit the warming to C above the pre-industrial level. This is widely considered the most that human society can stand without serious consequences.
Yet the international community does not seem any closer to consensus on the need to make further reductions in carbon and at Cancun, which takes place from 29 November to 10 December, it is at best side issues on which any progress will be made.
Today, the Coalition's Climate Change Secretary, the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, will travel to Berlin to discuss strengthening the EU climate target in advance of the Cancun meeting from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, with his German and French counterparts, Norbert Röttgen and Jean-Louis Borloo.
Mr Huhne told The Independent: "There's hard work ahead to maintain and build on the level of commitment embodied in the Copenhagen Accord and to rebuild the credibility of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process.
"We in the EU still need to finalise our positions in advance of COP 16, but I think there's a real chance the negotiations could take important steps forward in Cancun, in particular to implement parts of what was agreed in Copenhagen and to work towards the global deal the world needs."
He added: "It's the UK's view – and one shared by my French and German counterparts – that the EU should raise its ambition and that the economic case for doing so stacks up.
"Cutting emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 would be a game-changer in shifting investment into new clean technologies, generating jobs and growth in supply chains across our economies. The great risk for Europe is in waking up late to these opportunities and losing out to other major blocs who are already eyeing up market share."
It is hard to exaggerate the dire effect which the failure at Copenhagen has had both on the climate change negotiating process itself, and on the belief of those involved that an effective climate deal might be possible.
A year ago, many environmentalists, scientists and politicians genuinely thought that the meeting in Denmark might produce a binding agreement to cut global CO2 by the 25-40 per cent, by 2020, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated is necessary to keep the warming to below C.
Today that optimism has vanished. The Danish meeting foundered on the disagreement between the developed countries and the developing nations over who should do how much, and when, in cutting emissions; the major point of disagreement was the Kyoto Protocol, the current treaty, which makes developed countries do a lot, and developing nations not very much.
The Kyoto treaty runs out at the end of 2012 and the developing nations, led by China and India, wanted it renewed, while developed countries, including Britain and the rest of the EU, want a completely new treaty to share out the carbon-cutting burden.
At Copenhagen last December, world leaders cobbled together an agreement which ended up devoid of any binding carbon emissions targets (but did recognise the need to stay under C for the first time). Instead of the legally-binding treaty which had been hoped for, nations were invited to "register" voluntary targets, saying by how much they thought they could cut their CO2 by 2020.
Britain is part of the EU target of a 20 per cent cut, on a 1990 baseline, which may be raised before Cancun to 30 per cent. (Britain's own domestic target is one of the highest, to cut CO2 by 34 per cent by 2020.) Other targets include 25 per cent for Japan, Australia by 5 to 25 per cent and the US by 17 per cent on a 2005 baseline – although the legislation to achieve it is firmly stalled in the Senate. Among the developing nations, China has promised to reduce the energy intensity of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020.
Various analyses of all these pledges suggest they amount to cuts of the global CO2 total of between 11 and 19 per cent by 2020, instead of the 25 to 40 per cent which the IPCC says is needed. This can also be expressed in real amounts of CO2, of which the world is currently emitting annually about 45 gigatonnes – 45 billion tonnes of carbon.
If the world continues with these levels of emissions it is thought this will increase to between 51 and 55 gigatonnes by 2020. Lord Stern of Brentford, author of a landmark report on the economics of climate change, has calculated that if, instead, global CO2 could be cut back to 44 gigatonnes by 2020, the world would be on a credible path to stay below a rise of C. Yet analysis suggests the Copenhagen Accord pledges will leave the figure at 48-49 billion tonnes – the gigatonne gap which Cancun is not going to close.
What the conference may do is agree the architecture for the new major climate funds to help developing countries which were agreed in Denmark – a "fast-start" fund of $30bn (£19.4bn) per year in new money for the years 2010-12, and a fund of $100bn annually to be set up by 2020.
If there are no further breakdowns, it is possible that the meeting may at least restore faith in the UN climate process. "Nobody thinks Cancun will be a big-bang moment," said Keith Allott, head of climate change for the World Wide Fund for Nature. "What the world needs to do is put some wheels back on the climate truck."
An Unlikely General in Climate-Change War
Global-Warming Evangelist Pachauri Began His Career Building Diesel Locomotives, Advocating for the Right to Burn Coal.
Text By JEFFREY BALL
In 2002, when Rajendra Pachauri was elected head of the world's top climate-science body, Al Gore and other environmentalists condemned him as a favorite of the fossil-fuel industry.
Today, the 70-year-old chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is under fire for the opposite offense: being a green zealot.
On Monday, the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies, released its report on its investigation into the IPCC under Mr. Pachauri's leadership. Though it said the organization is "successful overall," it suggested a number of changes to the IPCC's managerial structure and to its vetting process designed to reduce errors and bias creeping into the IPCC's widely watched reports.
Mr. Pachauri said the recommendations were in line with reforms he has tried to institute already. They are "essentially an intensification, a detailing, of what I've wanted to do myself," he said in an interview Monday.
Mr. Pachauri was pressured to request the probe after mistakes were disclosed in an IPCC report that helped win the panel the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Pachauri was an unlikely general in the war on global warming. He started his career in an Indian diesel-locomotive factory. As an academic, he staunchly defended his country's right to burn coal.
But over the years he underwent a transformation and became convinced of the dangers of global warming. He voiced strong convictions that later exposed him to a more intense backlash when the handful of problems with the IPCC's work came to light.
He made high-profile statements playing down uncertainties about global warming. He added new responsibilities, becoming director of an energy institute at Yale University, even as his IPCC workload increased. And when his organization faced criticism for errors, he initially argued the IPCC could investigate itself.
After the IPCC won the Nobel, he "became a bit of a global rock star," said Daniel Esty, a Yale professor and friend of the IPCC chairman. "I think he got spread very thin and personally should have been more careful in overseeing the team below him" managing IPCC scientific work.
Mr. Pachauri said that the IPCC "is a very decentralized organization," and that the production of its reports is overseen by highly competent scientists who "wouldn't appreciate the chairman looking over their shoulders and trying to look for errors."
Mr. Pachauri receives travel expenses but no salary as IPCC chairman. His paid job is as head of a New Delhi think tank, The Energy Research Institute, or TERI. He has advised several Indian and Western companies during his IPCC tenure, but says he has given the money he has received for that work to TERI. A KPMG audit, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, confirms that about most of the money. It doesn't address a small amount, which he says he gave to charity.
The investigative report released Monday called for the IPCC to implement a conflict-of-interest policy for its chairman and other top officials. The IPCC needs to "maintain the integrity of, and public confidence in, its results," the report said.
Mr. Pachauri was born in 1940 in Nainital, a town in India that looks out onto the Himalayas. Everything in his early career suggested support for fossil fuels.
In his late 20s, he managed the production of train engines at an Indian factory. In his 30s, at North Carolina State University, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on ways that some coal-dependent states could cheaply meet rising electricity demand.
In 1982, he became the head of TERI. He still holds the job nearly three decades later, earning an annual salary equivalent to about $46,000.
The IPCC was founded by the United Nations in 1988. Mr. Pachauri's involvement was hardly surprising, since he was a prominent energy expert in one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
In 1997, he successfully ran against an incumbent to become one of the IPCC's vice chairmen. In 2002, he challenged the IPCC's then-chairman and won.
The George W. Bush administration backed Mr. Pachauri, in part, as a less strident environmentalist than the IPCC's prior chairman. Mr. Pachauri "was going to be a lower-key chair," said a former Bush administration official involved in international climate negotiations at the time.
Within days of Mr. Pachauri's election as IPCC leader, Mr. Gore assailed him in a New York Times op-ed piece. The former vice president cited the Bush administration's backing of Mr. Pachauri as a reason for concern.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he wouldn't comment. Mr. Pachauri said the two are now good friends.
Mr. Gore had reason to soften on Mr. Pachauri. He became "an advocate for emissions controls that are a lot more radical than he was talking about or almost anyone was talking about 10 years ago," said David Victor, an international-energy expert at the University of California, San Diego.
Mr. Pachauri's views were on full display in his Nobel address in 2007, when he warned climate change could cause "chaos and destruction." Mr. Pachauri says such language is deliberate. "If you want people to take action, then you obviously would make the arguments that require a certain set of actions."
Monday's report found that some summaries the IPCC wrote of its 2007 climate-change findings failed to adequately reflect scientific uncertainty. One of the summaries contained claims "that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly," it said.
Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who contributed to the 2007 IPCC report, said of Mr. Pachauri: "He obviously wasn't sensitive enough to some of these uncertainties."
Mr. Pachauri says neither the most recent report nor other recent climate-science probes have questioned the IPCC's overall conclusion about the dangers and causes of climate change.
The IPCC controversy was sparked in November 2009 when more than 1,000 hacked emails from a climate-research center at the University of East Anglia were posted online. The emails showed some climate scientists involved in IPCC reports trying to squelch criticism of the conclusion that humans are causing climate change.
Weeks later, IPCC officials were confronted with a factual error in their 2007 report: a projection that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. Climate scientists say it is essentially impossible to project the demise of a glacier by a particular year.
Within days, Mr. Pachauri and his top IPCC lieutenants issued a statement expressing "regret" over the claim. But criticism mounted, and by mid-February the IPCC informed governments it would appoint a committee to investigate itself. A few weeks later, Mr. Pachauri asked an outside agency, the InterAcademy Council, to conduct the probe.
Text By JEFFREY BALL
In 2002, when Rajendra Pachauri was elected head of the world's top climate-science body, Al Gore and other environmentalists condemned him as a favorite of the fossil-fuel industry.
Today, the 70-year-old chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is under fire for the opposite offense: being a green zealot.
On Monday, the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies, released its report on its investigation into the IPCC under Mr. Pachauri's leadership. Though it said the organization is "successful overall," it suggested a number of changes to the IPCC's managerial structure and to its vetting process designed to reduce errors and bias creeping into the IPCC's widely watched reports.
Mr. Pachauri said the recommendations were in line with reforms he has tried to institute already. They are "essentially an intensification, a detailing, of what I've wanted to do myself," he said in an interview Monday.
Mr. Pachauri was pressured to request the probe after mistakes were disclosed in an IPCC report that helped win the panel the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Pachauri was an unlikely general in the war on global warming. He started his career in an Indian diesel-locomotive factory. As an academic, he staunchly defended his country's right to burn coal.
But over the years he underwent a transformation and became convinced of the dangers of global warming. He voiced strong convictions that later exposed him to a more intense backlash when the handful of problems with the IPCC's work came to light.
He made high-profile statements playing down uncertainties about global warming. He added new responsibilities, becoming director of an energy institute at Yale University, even as his IPCC workload increased. And when his organization faced criticism for errors, he initially argued the IPCC could investigate itself.
After the IPCC won the Nobel, he "became a bit of a global rock star," said Daniel Esty, a Yale professor and friend of the IPCC chairman. "I think he got spread very thin and personally should have been more careful in overseeing the team below him" managing IPCC scientific work.
Mr. Pachauri said that the IPCC "is a very decentralized organization," and that the production of its reports is overseen by highly competent scientists who "wouldn't appreciate the chairman looking over their shoulders and trying to look for errors."
Mr. Pachauri receives travel expenses but no salary as IPCC chairman. His paid job is as head of a New Delhi think tank, The Energy Research Institute, or TERI. He has advised several Indian and Western companies during his IPCC tenure, but says he has given the money he has received for that work to TERI. A KPMG audit, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, confirms that about most of the money. It doesn't address a small amount, which he says he gave to charity.
The investigative report released Monday called for the IPCC to implement a conflict-of-interest policy for its chairman and other top officials. The IPCC needs to "maintain the integrity of, and public confidence in, its results," the report said.
Mr. Pachauri was born in 1940 in Nainital, a town in India that looks out onto the Himalayas. Everything in his early career suggested support for fossil fuels.
In his late 20s, he managed the production of train engines at an Indian factory. In his 30s, at North Carolina State University, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on ways that some coal-dependent states could cheaply meet rising electricity demand.
In 1982, he became the head of TERI. He still holds the job nearly three decades later, earning an annual salary equivalent to about $46,000.
The IPCC was founded by the United Nations in 1988. Mr. Pachauri's involvement was hardly surprising, since he was a prominent energy expert in one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
In 1997, he successfully ran against an incumbent to become one of the IPCC's vice chairmen. In 2002, he challenged the IPCC's then-chairman and won.
The George W. Bush administration backed Mr. Pachauri, in part, as a less strident environmentalist than the IPCC's prior chairman. Mr. Pachauri "was going to be a lower-key chair," said a former Bush administration official involved in international climate negotiations at the time.
Within days of Mr. Pachauri's election as IPCC leader, Mr. Gore assailed him in a New York Times op-ed piece. The former vice president cited the Bush administration's backing of Mr. Pachauri as a reason for concern.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he wouldn't comment. Mr. Pachauri said the two are now good friends.
Mr. Gore had reason to soften on Mr. Pachauri. He became "an advocate for emissions controls that are a lot more radical than he was talking about or almost anyone was talking about 10 years ago," said David Victor, an international-energy expert at the University of California, San Diego.
Mr. Pachauri's views were on full display in his Nobel address in 2007, when he warned climate change could cause "chaos and destruction." Mr. Pachauri says such language is deliberate. "If you want people to take action, then you obviously would make the arguments that require a certain set of actions."
Monday's report found that some summaries the IPCC wrote of its 2007 climate-change findings failed to adequately reflect scientific uncertainty. One of the summaries contained claims "that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly," it said.
Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who contributed to the 2007 IPCC report, said of Mr. Pachauri: "He obviously wasn't sensitive enough to some of these uncertainties."
Mr. Pachauri says neither the most recent report nor other recent climate-science probes have questioned the IPCC's overall conclusion about the dangers and causes of climate change.
The IPCC controversy was sparked in November 2009 when more than 1,000 hacked emails from a climate-research center at the University of East Anglia were posted online. The emails showed some climate scientists involved in IPCC reports trying to squelch criticism of the conclusion that humans are causing climate change.
Weeks later, IPCC officials were confronted with a factual error in their 2007 report: a projection that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. Climate scientists say it is essentially impossible to project the demise of a glacier by a particular year.
Within days, Mr. Pachauri and his top IPCC lieutenants issued a statement expressing "regret" over the claim. But criticism mounted, and by mid-February the IPCC informed governments it would appoint a committee to investigate itself. A few weeks later, Mr. Pachauri asked an outside agency, the InterAcademy Council, to conduct the probe.
Climate Panel Faces Heat
Investigation Calls for 'Fundamental Reform' at U.N. Group on Global Warming.
By JEFFREY BALL
An independent investigation called for "fundamental reform" at the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying the organization's 2007 report played down uncertainty about some aspects of global warming.
The probe of the IPCC, a preeminent climate-science body that won the Nobel Peace Price three years ago, was conducted by the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies. Leaders of the IPCC asked the council to conduct the probe following the disclosure of a few errors in its 2007 climate-science report, which concluded, among other things, that climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by human activity.
The investigation comes at a precarious time for the IPCC and for advocates of tough measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. For months, critics of such steps have cited the errors in the IPCC's 2007 report as reason to question the group's basic conclusion about climate change. As the InterAcademy Council's report notes, recent polls suggest the controversy over IPCC errors has caused public confidence in climate science to fall. Meanwhile, the recession has dimmed the enthusiasm of some politicians to push for major changes in energy production and consumption.
Some critics, in the wake of the disclosure of the errors, called for IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri to resign. But Mr. Pachauri, who has said those errors were minor, said Monday that he hopes to serve until his term ends after the publication of the panel's next major climate-science study in 2014. "I was instrumental in requesting this review, and now that we've got it, I believe my responsibility is to take it forward," he said.
Partisans on both sides of the climate debate saw Monday's report as significant. Advocates of deep emission cuts said the investigation, and the reforms it suggested, should boost public confidence in the IPCC's assertions about the dangers of allowing greenhouse-gas emissions to increase. Critics said the investigation underscored problems with the way the IPCC assesses climate science. They said the agency ignored scientific nuances and dismissed minority viewpoints in its 2007 report.
The investigation will likely factor into the next U.N. climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, in December, when governments will try to come up with a global agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. A similar conference last year in Copenhagen failed to come up with a major agreement.
Harold Shapiro, the economist and former Princeton University president who led the InterAcademy Council's review, said in a press conference announcing the report that the IPCC "has been a success and has served society well."
In addition to raising questions about the procedures the IPCC used in coming up with its conclusions, the report was critical of the organization's management. It recommended that the IPCC chairman and other top leaders each serve only one six-year term, and that the IPCC institute a conflict-of-interest policy for its top leaders. This was partly a response to criticism that during his tenure, Mr. Pachauri has served as an adviser to energy and financial companies. These companies, said critics, could be affected by energy policies that rested in part on the IPCC's scientific pronouncements.
German Utilities Warn Tax May Herald End of Nuclear Energy. Access thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More.Mr. Pachauri, in an interview, said he supports the investigation's call for a conflict-of-interest policy and for clearer explanations about areas in which climate science is uncertain. He said the IPCC already has begun work on some of those changes and would consider further action when it holds a major meeting in October in Korea. Mr. Pachauri said his work on corporate boards doesn't interfere with his position as IPCC chair, adding that he has given all proceeds from that work to an energy think tank he heads and to charity.
Mr. Pachauri stressed that neither the InterAcademy Council report nor several other climate-science investigations that have been conducted in recent months have questioned the IPCC's conclusion about the existence of climate change or its likely human cause. Claims to the contrary amount to "gross distortions and ideologically driven posturing," he said. Taken together, the investigations should "strengthen public trust so that we can move forward," Mr. Pachauri said. "Science has confirmed that climate change is real."
Critics of the IPCC said the report validated many of their concerns.
"If these recommendations are followed to the letter and spirit, I think the IPCC could indeed be improved," said John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who was consulted by the InterAcademy Council for its review. Mr. Christy participated in the writing of two IPCC reports and said his doubts about evidence of man-made global warming were largely pushed aside both times.
One U.S. company played down the investigative report's importance, saying the political debate over climate change had moved beyond the question of what's causing it to the question of what to do about it.
"We're kind of beyond the science," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., a Charlotte, N.C.-based power company that is one of the country's major greenhouse-gas emitters. "What we're after are the rules of the road," he said, explaining that Duke believes U.S. limits on greenhouse-gas emissions are inevitable and wants to shape the rules to the advantage of its customers.
The IPCC, created by the United Nations in 1988, is a sprawling organization. Thousands of scientists and other experts around the world volunteer their time to help write its massive reports approximately every six years that assess what's known and what isn't about the causes and effects of climate change. Its reports influence government policies on energy and the environment around the world.
The InterAcademy Council investigation, like several other investigations into climate science in recent months, didn't question whether human activity is causing global warming. Instead, it focused on the IPCC's process for forming conclusions, including one that projected Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. The investigation noted that some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges "were not adequately considered," the InterAcademy Council's investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report.
Mr. Shapiro said the IPCC needs to tighten many of its procedures and its enforcement of the rules already on its books, given that climate change is such a hotly debated topic and that the IPCC's reports influence environmental policy world-wide.
A particular problem in the 2007 report was that it didn't consistently reflect uncertainty in some aspects of climate change, the investigation found.
Although the IPCC has guidelines in place for measuring uncertainty, those rules were "not consistently followed" in the 2007 report, "leading to unnecessary errors," the investigation said.
For instance, the investigation noted, the 2007 IPCC report said it had "high confidence" that climate change could halve the output of rain-fed agriculture in Africa by 2020.
But a fuller explanation about how the IPCC came up with that "high confidence," the investigation said, "would have made clear the weak evidentiary basis" for that statement. The InterAcademy Council panel recommended that IPCC reports assign specific probabilities to projections "only when there is sufficient evidence" to justify them.
The InterAcademy Council also faulted the IPCC for failing to stress in its 2007 report when some claims were based on literature that hadn't undergone the scientific process of peer-review. The IPCC should impose tougher guidelines to make sure non-peer-reviewed information is clearly "flagged," it said.
The investigation also said the IPCC sometimes failed to adequately reflect "properly documented" views of scientists who disagreed with the consensus conclusions.
IPCC leaders say they have already begun discussing how to better characterize uncertainty and to be more transparent about whether information has been peer-reviewed.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com
By JEFFREY BALL
An independent investigation called for "fundamental reform" at the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying the organization's 2007 report played down uncertainty about some aspects of global warming.
The probe of the IPCC, a preeminent climate-science body that won the Nobel Peace Price three years ago, was conducted by the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies. Leaders of the IPCC asked the council to conduct the probe following the disclosure of a few errors in its 2007 climate-science report, which concluded, among other things, that climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by human activity.
The investigation comes at a precarious time for the IPCC and for advocates of tough measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. For months, critics of such steps have cited the errors in the IPCC's 2007 report as reason to question the group's basic conclusion about climate change. As the InterAcademy Council's report notes, recent polls suggest the controversy over IPCC errors has caused public confidence in climate science to fall. Meanwhile, the recession has dimmed the enthusiasm of some politicians to push for major changes in energy production and consumption.
Some critics, in the wake of the disclosure of the errors, called for IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri to resign. But Mr. Pachauri, who has said those errors were minor, said Monday that he hopes to serve until his term ends after the publication of the panel's next major climate-science study in 2014. "I was instrumental in requesting this review, and now that we've got it, I believe my responsibility is to take it forward," he said.
Partisans on both sides of the climate debate saw Monday's report as significant. Advocates of deep emission cuts said the investigation, and the reforms it suggested, should boost public confidence in the IPCC's assertions about the dangers of allowing greenhouse-gas emissions to increase. Critics said the investigation underscored problems with the way the IPCC assesses climate science. They said the agency ignored scientific nuances and dismissed minority viewpoints in its 2007 report.
The investigation will likely factor into the next U.N. climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, in December, when governments will try to come up with a global agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. A similar conference last year in Copenhagen failed to come up with a major agreement.
Harold Shapiro, the economist and former Princeton University president who led the InterAcademy Council's review, said in a press conference announcing the report that the IPCC "has been a success and has served society well."
In addition to raising questions about the procedures the IPCC used in coming up with its conclusions, the report was critical of the organization's management. It recommended that the IPCC chairman and other top leaders each serve only one six-year term, and that the IPCC institute a conflict-of-interest policy for its top leaders. This was partly a response to criticism that during his tenure, Mr. Pachauri has served as an adviser to energy and financial companies. These companies, said critics, could be affected by energy policies that rested in part on the IPCC's scientific pronouncements.
German Utilities Warn Tax May Herald End of Nuclear Energy. Access thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More.Mr. Pachauri, in an interview, said he supports the investigation's call for a conflict-of-interest policy and for clearer explanations about areas in which climate science is uncertain. He said the IPCC already has begun work on some of those changes and would consider further action when it holds a major meeting in October in Korea. Mr. Pachauri said his work on corporate boards doesn't interfere with his position as IPCC chair, adding that he has given all proceeds from that work to an energy think tank he heads and to charity.
Mr. Pachauri stressed that neither the InterAcademy Council report nor several other climate-science investigations that have been conducted in recent months have questioned the IPCC's conclusion about the existence of climate change or its likely human cause. Claims to the contrary amount to "gross distortions and ideologically driven posturing," he said. Taken together, the investigations should "strengthen public trust so that we can move forward," Mr. Pachauri said. "Science has confirmed that climate change is real."
Critics of the IPCC said the report validated many of their concerns.
"If these recommendations are followed to the letter and spirit, I think the IPCC could indeed be improved," said John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who was consulted by the InterAcademy Council for its review. Mr. Christy participated in the writing of two IPCC reports and said his doubts about evidence of man-made global warming were largely pushed aside both times.
One U.S. company played down the investigative report's importance, saying the political debate over climate change had moved beyond the question of what's causing it to the question of what to do about it.
"We're kind of beyond the science," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., a Charlotte, N.C.-based power company that is one of the country's major greenhouse-gas emitters. "What we're after are the rules of the road," he said, explaining that Duke believes U.S. limits on greenhouse-gas emissions are inevitable and wants to shape the rules to the advantage of its customers.
The IPCC, created by the United Nations in 1988, is a sprawling organization. Thousands of scientists and other experts around the world volunteer their time to help write its massive reports approximately every six years that assess what's known and what isn't about the causes and effects of climate change. Its reports influence government policies on energy and the environment around the world.
The InterAcademy Council investigation, like several other investigations into climate science in recent months, didn't question whether human activity is causing global warming. Instead, it focused on the IPCC's process for forming conclusions, including one that projected Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. The investigation noted that some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges "were not adequately considered," the InterAcademy Council's investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report.
Mr. Shapiro said the IPCC needs to tighten many of its procedures and its enforcement of the rules already on its books, given that climate change is such a hotly debated topic and that the IPCC's reports influence environmental policy world-wide.
A particular problem in the 2007 report was that it didn't consistently reflect uncertainty in some aspects of climate change, the investigation found.
Although the IPCC has guidelines in place for measuring uncertainty, those rules were "not consistently followed" in the 2007 report, "leading to unnecessary errors," the investigation said.
For instance, the investigation noted, the 2007 IPCC report said it had "high confidence" that climate change could halve the output of rain-fed agriculture in Africa by 2020.
But a fuller explanation about how the IPCC came up with that "high confidence," the investigation said, "would have made clear the weak evidentiary basis" for that statement. The InterAcademy Council panel recommended that IPCC reports assign specific probabilities to projections "only when there is sufficient evidence" to justify them.
The InterAcademy Council also faulted the IPCC for failing to stress in its 2007 report when some claims were based on literature that hadn't undergone the scientific process of peer-review. The IPCC should impose tougher guidelines to make sure non-peer-reviewed information is clearly "flagged," it said.
The investigation also said the IPCC sometimes failed to adequately reflect "properly documented" views of scientists who disagreed with the consensus conclusions.
IPCC leaders say they have already begun discussing how to better characterize uncertainty and to be more transparent about whether information has been peer-reviewed.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com
Angela Merkel risks Germans' ire with fresh commitment to nuclear energy
German chancellor adds 15 years to scheduled phase-out of country's nuclear power plants
Kate Connolly in Berlin guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 August 2010 18.35 BST
German chancellor Angela Merkel has announced an extension to the nation's nuclear power plant operations for up to 15 years beyond a scheduled phase-out, in a move critics fear might signal that atomic power is here to stay.
The decision comes after a panel of experts advised that keeping the plants open was the only way of ensuring climate protection and economic goals were met and that electricity prices did not soar out of control.
Merkel, who spent last week touring some of the country's 17 plants, said phasing them out by 2021 – as had been planned – was unrealistic if the country wanted to meet certain environmental goals.
"Nuclear power is desirable as a bridging technology," she said.
Renewable energies will supply half the country's energy needs by 2050, according to the centre-right government's goals. Nuclear and coal power should continue to be central to the country's energy policy until all power supplies could be replaced by clean energy, the experts advised.
Merkel's announcement, which has the backing of her coalition partner, the Free Democrats, is a heavy blow for the left. The nuclear phase-out was secured under the government of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democrats (SPD), and was considered one its most significant achievements.
Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the SPD, said his party was ready to launch a constitutional challenge to the extension and accused Merkel of being a pawn of the nuclear lobby.
Gabriel said: "The chancellor is selling off public safety by allowing ailing and ageing nuclear power plants to stay online longer and by taking money for it." He added that her plan showed her goal was clearly "not to achieve a sustainable energy plan".
The Green party, which was part of the Schröder government when it struck the deal, announced an anti-nuclear demonstration in Berlin on Wednesday.
Some politicians in favour of a nuclear extension, such as Norbert Röttgen of Merkel's Christian Democrats, said they nevertheless feared it might reduce the pressure on the energy industry to research into and develop renewable technologies.
Merkel's decision is also likely to prove highly unpopular amongst the electorate. According to a recent poll, 56% of Germans are against extending the lives of nuclear power plants, citing fears of accidents and terrorism.
Kate Connolly in Berlin guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 August 2010 18.35 BST
German chancellor Angela Merkel has announced an extension to the nation's nuclear power plant operations for up to 15 years beyond a scheduled phase-out, in a move critics fear might signal that atomic power is here to stay.
The decision comes after a panel of experts advised that keeping the plants open was the only way of ensuring climate protection and economic goals were met and that electricity prices did not soar out of control.
Merkel, who spent last week touring some of the country's 17 plants, said phasing them out by 2021 – as had been planned – was unrealistic if the country wanted to meet certain environmental goals.
"Nuclear power is desirable as a bridging technology," she said.
Renewable energies will supply half the country's energy needs by 2050, according to the centre-right government's goals. Nuclear and coal power should continue to be central to the country's energy policy until all power supplies could be replaced by clean energy, the experts advised.
Merkel's announcement, which has the backing of her coalition partner, the Free Democrats, is a heavy blow for the left. The nuclear phase-out was secured under the government of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democrats (SPD), and was considered one its most significant achievements.
Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the SPD, said his party was ready to launch a constitutional challenge to the extension and accused Merkel of being a pawn of the nuclear lobby.
Gabriel said: "The chancellor is selling off public safety by allowing ailing and ageing nuclear power plants to stay online longer and by taking money for it." He added that her plan showed her goal was clearly "not to achieve a sustainable energy plan".
The Green party, which was part of the Schröder government when it struck the deal, announced an anti-nuclear demonstration in Berlin on Wednesday.
Some politicians in favour of a nuclear extension, such as Norbert Röttgen of Merkel's Christian Democrats, said they nevertheless feared it might reduce the pressure on the energy industry to research into and develop renewable technologies.
Merkel's decision is also likely to prove highly unpopular amongst the electorate. According to a recent poll, 56% of Germans are against extending the lives of nuclear power plants, citing fears of accidents and terrorism.
Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change
Exclusive 'Sceptical environmentalist' and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world
• Climate change voice who changed his tune
• Rajendra Pachauri under pressure to stand aside
Juliette Jowit guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 August 2010 20.17 BST
The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.
Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.
But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.
In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.
His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.
The fallout from those rows continued yesterday when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came under new pressure to step down after an independent review of the panel's work called for tighter term limits for its senior executives and greater transparency in its workings. The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming, provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel peace prize with former the US vice-president Al Gore. The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC's processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of world science bodies.
The IAC said the IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess.
Although Pachauri once compared Lomborg to Hitler, he has now given an unlikely endorsement to the new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. In a quote for the launch, Pachauri said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."
Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."
But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".
The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other "solutions" including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.
"If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?" was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes - of which Lomborg has long been critical - were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.
Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.
Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause "really bad stuff" to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an "obligation to at least look at it".
He added: "This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."
In a quote for the book launch, Pachauri - who once likened the author to Adolf Hitler - said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today's Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: "If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money."
• Climate change voice who changed his tune
• Rajendra Pachauri under pressure to stand aside
Juliette Jowit guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 August 2010 20.17 BST
The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.
Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.
But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.
In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.
His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.
The fallout from those rows continued yesterday when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came under new pressure to step down after an independent review of the panel's work called for tighter term limits for its senior executives and greater transparency in its workings. The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming, provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel peace prize with former the US vice-president Al Gore. The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC's processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of world science bodies.
The IAC said the IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess.
Although Pachauri once compared Lomborg to Hitler, he has now given an unlikely endorsement to the new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. In a quote for the launch, Pachauri said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."
Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."
But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".
The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other "solutions" including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.
"If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?" was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes - of which Lomborg has long been critical - were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.
Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.
Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause "really bad stuff" to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an "obligation to at least look at it".
He added: "This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."
In a quote for the book launch, Pachauri - who once likened the author to Adolf Hitler - said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today's Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: "If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money."
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