The two ships are Healy and Renda.

Renda is a Russian oil tanker loaded with fuel. It is trailing a US Coast Guard ice breaker named Healy.

This US-Russian expedition is bringing much needed fuel to Nome, Alaska, where diesel and gasoline supplies are running low.

This sea separates the Kamchatka peninsula from the Aleutian Islands and freezes up in places this time of year, making passage difficult.

The Bering Sea is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Ben Matheson of KNOM Radio(Nome, Alaska) about the unusual cooperation to bring fuel to the Alaskan coastal community this Winter.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: One of the countries that the inspectors of tomorrow may work in is Iran.  The West expects that the Islamic Republic is building an atomic bomb.  Iran denies the claim.  Still, the U.S., the United Nations and the European Union have imposed sanctions, and Iran’s government having to cut spending to make ends meet.  That includes slashing subsidies on lots of goods and services.  This weekend Tehran axed the subsidy for gasoline.  The BBC’s Iran Correspondent, James Reynolds is in London.  He says Iranian drivers are having a pretty bad day.

JAMES REYNOLDS: Going to the gas station now, what a shock for most ordinary Iranians when they pull up to the pump and find their petrol has gone up to $1.50 a gallon, which is about a 400% rise from what they used to pay.  Now, of course, this price doesn’t compare to what a lot of your listeners will have to pay in America or what listeners will have to pay in Europe.  Still, for ordinary people in Iran, that is a huge leap.

MULLINS: And why would the price of gasoline have to go up in a place like Iran, in particular?  And why would it have to have been subsidized in the first place?

REYNOLDS: It was subsidized in the first place because that was the overall policy back in 1980, make goods cheap for everyone.  And, essentially, it’s taken 30 years to find that policy might not work.  Iran, of course, has huge amounts of oil reserves but it refines very little of that oil.  It even has to import a lot of the oil, a lot of it’s petrol cause it simply can’t refine it properly.

MULLINS: Okay, so, presumably, that would have a knock on effect on the price of everything that’s transported by truck in Iran?

REYNOLDS: Yeah, and the taxi drivers now are already saying, look, they’re going to have to put up their meters.  They’re going to have to put up their prices. Anything that you have to fill up a car or a truck or a van for, you can expect the prices to go up.

MULLINS: Okay, so tell us more about the reaction in Iran so far?

REYNOLDS: Well, first of all, the government was extremely worried because when President Ahmadinejad gave warning of the price rises on Saturday night, we understand from people in Iran, that the police were sent to guard petrol stations or gas stations cause they were worried about unrest.  They were worried because in 2007, when some rationing was announced, there were riots.  So far, we haven’t heard of any riots or unrest, but clearly the authorities are uneasy, which is why the police are manning gas stations.

MULLINS: Aside from sending security forces out on the street, what else has the Iranian government done to try and soften the blow for Iranians?

REYNOLDS: Well, there’s really one idea the Iranian government’s got at the moment which is this: cash handouts to the Iranians for the next two months to get them through the initial shock of the price rises.  So, we expect families and individuals to get, perhaps, $8 a month, perhaps, a bit more over the next two months in order to allow them to pay for, for high gas prices, to pay for when they go to the store and find the bread is suddenly more expensive, to be able to pay for that.  But, here’s the key point.  This runs out after a couple of months.  After that, by and large, they’re on their own.

MULLINS: All right.  The BBC’s James Reynolds.  Thank you very much, James.

REYNOLDS: My pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• First US offshore wind farm approved
• Geo Quiz: Antarctica wind farm
• Environment coverage on The World

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Opponents of what would be the first off shore wind power project in the U.S. are vowing to take their fight to court.  This after yesterday’s approval of the project by the federal government.  The wind farm would be located five miles off Cape Cod in Massachusetts.  Supporters say it would be a big step forward for clean power and energy independence.  But opponents argue that area is the wrong place for a big wind farm.  Of course siting a wind power project just about anywhere in the U.S. can be a tough sell.  That’s one reason some U.S. power companies are looking outside the country.  One project on the drawing boards is a massive wind far in the Mexican desert, just south of the U.S. border.  Ilsa Setziol of KPCC in Los Angeles has our report.

ILSA SETZIOL:  The small town of La Rumorosa, Mexico takes its name from the near constant murmur of wind that sweeps through this part of Baja California.  A few years ago the regional government decided to start putting that wind to work.  It built five wind turbines to help light the nearby city of Mexicali.  Now thousands more windmills could follow.  Energy experts says there is enough wind potential in this region to power about two and a half million homes in southern California.  And that’s got American energy companies thinking big.

MIKE ALLMAN:  When we looked at wind, you look at where the best resource is.  And in our region it’s the Sierra Juarez mountain range.

SETZIOL: Mike Allman is President of southern California’s Sempra Generation.  It’s one of at least three U.S. companies that are proposing wind projects in and around the Sierra Juarez.

ALLMAN: The area where we’re going to build this wind project is very close to the transmission lines that run right on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, so that makes it an easy place to connect into the grid.

SETZIOL: It might also be easier than building a wind farm across the border in the U.S. itself.  California is hungry for green power, but projects there can run into a buzz saw of opposition.  Standing in a valley in the Sierra Juarez on the other hand, it’s easy to see the area as Mike Allman describes it, a lot of nothing.  You can go for miles here without hearing more than the tinkering of a few goat bells with the shushing of wind in the California Junipers and Jeffrey Pines.  But the quiet is deceiving.  Claudia Leyva is an ecologist with the Autonomous University of Baja California.  Leyva says the Sierra is one of the most important forests in Mexico.  The region is home to mountain lions, endangered big horn sheep, and arroyo toads, golden eagles and rare Sierra Juarez pinions.  Leyva says the new wind farms will require hundreds of kilometers of roads to be built or upgraded.  The roads will be barriers for native animals and plants, Leyva says.  She says they’ll also open up the area to invasive species.  We are going to sacrifice a whole natural system, Leyva says, to provide so-called green energy.  Mexican environmental attorney Carla Garcia Zendejas shares Leyva’s concern.  She says the landscape of Baja is already absorbing the impact of American energy consumption.

CARLA GARCIA ZENDEJAS:  There are power plants built in Mexicali, there are natural gas pipelines that were built through Tecate, we have a liquefied natural gas plant that destroyed a habitat there, and none of this is being used for Mexico’s benefit.

SETZIOL: But that doesn’t concern many officials here in Mexico.

DAVID MUNOZ ANDRADE:  It would be, in my opinion, morally wrong if we are selfish about our wind potential because global warming is global.

SETZIOL: David Munoz Andrade is head of the Baja State Energy Commission.

MUNOZ ANDRADE: Since this area is so windy and the resource is so rich, the environmental impact per kilowatt hour here is much less than in other places in the States, for example.

SETZIOL: Munoz says the region’s wind could generate more electricity than local people could use.  The wind farms would also bring jobs to a region with few of them.  Outhouses are more common than indoor plumbing in the village of Jacume.  People here survive on a bit of ranching, occasional construction jobs, and the income from a few cell towers.  Now the cooperative that owns much of the land here has leased some of it to build turbines.  It looks good for me says Jesus Rodriguez, a middle aged man with firm cheeks and a soft belly.  He says the project is already providing a small sources of new income here.  But others aren’t so pleased.  In a tiny store down the street, owner Jose Mercado has the look of the local terrain, shrubby hair, weathered skin and sky blue eyes.  Families here won’t get ahead, Mercado says, because now they’ve lost the use of their land.  We’ve dedicated ourselves to the minimum wage the company is paying us, he says, just to serve you in the U.S.  Mexico’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete its review of the proposed wind farm this spring.  But the project will also have to meet California’s environmental standards.  Backers see that as a guarantee of the project’s environmental sensitivity.  For opponents, it’s another shot at scuttling the project.  For The World, I’m Ilsa Setziol, La Rumorosa, Mexico.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• EU considers general carbon tax
• Environment stories on The World

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Fossil fuels, like oil and coal, are the biggest sources of global warming pollution.  But governments around the world are having a hard time finding ways to wean their economies off the stuff.  Here in the U.S., Congress has been unable to agree on a new energy strategy, so states have been left to chart their own course.  It’s the same in Canada where provinces are experimenting with various approaches to the problem.  A year and a half ago British Columbia adopted North America’s largest carbon tax.  The World’s Jason Margolis has this report on how it’s working.

JASON MARGOLIS:  Jennifer Davies advertises her Hair Garden Salon in Victoria B.C. as an eco-friendly salon.  I was curious what that meant so I booked an appointment.  So the eco-friendly part of this haircut is coming?   Thus far it’s pretty standard.  I haven’t minimized my carbon footprint yet.  The eco-friendly part came when she washed my hair with organic shampoo.

JENNIFER DAVIES:  So as you can tell it’s not sudsing up because when you don’t have sulfate, you don’t get a sudsing effect.

MARGOLIS: Davies has other green tricks up her sleeve.  But truth be told I came to her shop to get more than a guilt-free haircut.  I wanted to hear how B.C.’s new carbon tax has impact her business.  When I asked her about it, the talkative stylist suddenly tensed up.

DAVIES: I find that, what am I trying to say, I’m focusing on your hair right now.

MARGOLIS: Davies seemed embarrassed that a green business person like herself just didn’t know much about the carbon tax.  But she’s not alone.  Most ordinary people I met in British Columbia didn’t know much about it either, which was surprising since during the last election here the carbon tax was the issue.  Even in Canada there’s no dirtier word than tax.

ALISON SHAW:  People were irate.  People were making their election choices based on whether they were in support of the carbon tax or not.

MARGOLIS: That’s Alison Shaw of the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.  This being the northwest, we met at a Vancouver coffee shop to talk about her research on the effectiveness of British Columbia’s carbon tax.  Shaw says she likes this approach to cutting carbon pollution because it’s easy to implement and it’s transparent.

SHAW: The carbon tax does a really good job at sending predictable price signals to business.

MARGOLIS: That price signal in B.C. is 3.6 cents on a liter of gas for now.  Or about 14 cents a gallon.  Straightforward.  Simple.  And palatable to many voters because the tax is revenue neutral.

SHAW: Which means that they are paying more at the pumps as consumers, but actually that revenue that is generated is coming back in tax breaks and tax incentives.

MARGOLIS: With one the government taketh, with the other it giveth right back.  That’s because the idea of the carbon tax wasn’t to raise revenue, but to change consumer and business behavior.  But for a tax like that to work, it has to pack some punch.  For example, tax British Columbia’s tobacco tax.  Every pack of cigarettes carries a tax of nearly $4.00.  That’ll curb your habit pretty quickly.  The carbon tax, on the other hand, adds only a small percentage bump the cost of polluting fuels like gasoline, natural gas and coal.

LISA DUNN:  It really doesn’t have a ripple on what we do.  It doesn’t create any kind of disincentive or incentive.

MARGOLIS: Lisa Dunn is with The Islands Trust, a local government that encompasses 450 island and 25,000 people off the coast of Vancouver.  The island have a very green ethic and Dunn supports the carbon tax.  In fact, she supports a higher tax.  She says when the carbon tax took effect in 2008 nobody much notice.

DUNN: Unfortunately, I guess the prices of fuel were skyrocketing at the time anyway, so it got basically buried in what was already being a 20% or so increase in fuel at the tank.  So it really wasn’t that visible.

MARGOLIS: Put another way, the carbon tax isn’t costing people enough to make them change their behavior.  So it may not be having its desired impact.

JOSEPH PALLANT:  I think as a good hip hop artist would say, cash rules everything around me.

MARGOLIS: That’s Joseph Pallant, he runs a small company called Carbon Project Solutions.  We also met in a coffee shop.  He favors a different approach to cutting carbon, the so-called cap and trade system that Europe adopted a few years ago. It’s more complicated than a carbon tax, but Pallant likes it because it sets a clear emissions limit for large polluters.

PALLANT:  I think that you need to push the cap and trade first for the large carbon emitters and then you put a carbon tax to sort of sweep up other elements of the economy that aren’t getting caught by that.

MARGOLIS: And before long, British Columbia will have both. The province has joined a regional cap and trade market of 11 U.S. states and Canadian provinces.  It begins in two years.  At that point, B.C. will become a laboratory to see whether a carbon tax or a cap and trade system is better at limiting greenhouse gases.  Or, as some argue, perhaps they’ll learn that they need both.  For The World, I’m Jason Margolis, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Environment issues on The World

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  The White House said today that President Obama is willing to work with Republicans on his legislative priorities including climate change. But yesterday’s election of a Republican to fill the senate seat held by the late Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy may put climate legislation further out of reach.  Senator-elect Scott Brown campaigned against a comprehensive climate bill now working its way through Congress.  And his victory could also dim prospects for international cooperation on greenhouse gas pollution.  The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson has more.

PETER THOMSON: The chances of getting a comprehensive climate bill through the Senate this year were never good.  With yesterday’s Senate election in Massachusetts, its chances may have fallen toward zero.

FRANK MAISANO: I think it really punctures that balloon that we were going to have a climate bill this year that democratic leaders were still holding out for.

THOMSON: That’s Frank Maisano, an Energy Specialist at the firm of Bracewell and Guiliani. He represents energy companies and other big greenhouse gas emitters.  Maisano says it’s not just that the Senate may have lost a sure vote in favor of the pending climate bill.  It’s also that yesterday’s results showed that even voters in solidly democratic states are worried about the costs of climate legislation.  The Senate bill, sponsored by Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, would institute a cap and trade system for climate pollution.  That system would raise the cost of fossil fuels and, the argument goes, nudge industry toward cleaner energy.  Senator-elect Scott Brown campaigned against the bill, saying it would hit already reeling consumers in their pocketbooks.  And Frank Maisano says Brown’s victory likely will lead wavering senators in other key states to reject the bill as well.

MAISANO: It just won’t give folks who have to go back to those states in the Midwest and the Southeast and the mountain states, and it won’t give them any interest in supporting something that’s going to increase those costs to their constituents.

THOMSON: Supporters of the cap and trade bill say it includes mechanisms to reduce the economic impact on consumers.  But the bill is complicated, and those mechanisms would be indirect at best.  And yesterday’s election suggests that voters don’t seem to be in much of a mood to trust such promises. And that’s left even some supporters of strong action on greenhouse gas emissions saying its time to step back and simplify.

EILEEN CLAUSSEN: We need to do something that is simple and understandable and doesn’t include a lot of side deals.  And we could never pass a 2,000-page bill.

THOMSON: Eileen Claussen is the President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.  She agrees that the sweeping Boxer-Kerry bill is dead.  But she says it may still be possible to do something less sweeping but still important.  Claussen says there may well be sufficient support for an energy bill that’s more narrowly focused on how electricity is produced.

CLAUSSEN: Either a limit on utility emissions or some kind of a clean energy performance standard that requires us to be producing carbon-free electricity.

THOMSON: But if cap and trade really is off the table, at least for now, that could further cloud negotiations with other countries on an international deal to reduce greenhouse pollution.  The U.S. has already come under fire for proposing fairly modest emissions cuts at the recent Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen.  But even those targets were tied to the cap and trade bill.  And without a firm commitment from the U.S., other countries may waiver on their own promised emissions cuts. For the World, I’m Peter Thomson.

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• Our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Peter Thomson’s Copenhagen photos
• BBC coverage

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  The reviews are in and most give thumbs down on the Copenhagen climate summit.  The critics include Britain’s Prime Minister.  Gordon Brown called the non-binding agreement at best flawed, at worst chaotic.  His government accused China of blocking major agreements.  China responded that it’s already doing a lot to deal with global warming.  One of the more positive assessments of the summit came from its Danish hosts; they called it better than nothing.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson is back from Copenhagen.  Better than nothing Peter?  Is that the best that can be said?

PETER THOMSON: Well even President Obama who was the catalyst in brokering this agreement said that it was insufficient, far insufficient to meet the task and really just a first step.  So there really is a sense even from those who made the final agreement happen that it’s far less than we need, far less than they hoped for.

MARCO: Now you mentioned the one thing that was actually put back in, into the final draft of the agreement that you had not heard until actually today, right?

PETER: Yeah.  Well I mean this document has been in play since well into the last week and even over the weekend I was looking at what I thought was the final version of it and then this morning I come in and I look at the UNFCCC’s, the UN’s official final version and it’s got an interesting number back in there that had not been in there over the weekend.

MARCO: What is that?

PETER: That is one point five degrees Celsius.  It says at the top of this document that we recognize that the science says that we should try and keep global temperatures under a rise of two degrees Celsius as the threshold for dangerous climate change.  At the end of the document, previous versions had said we should reassess that in a bit and maybe think about one point five.  That was out of what I thought was the final version.  Now it’s back in and the final version says that we should look in the future to come back and look at this temperature threshold of a one point five degree rise and that’s really crucial because a lot of the least developed countries, the countries that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, are saying we have to hold global temperatures to one point five degree rise.  And they were some of the ones who were the most critical of this accord.  So that’s back in and that’s interesting.

MARCO: That half a degree Celsius would make a huge difference for countries that are low lying like Vanuatu and Tuvalu who are facing sea rises.

PETER: Sure.  Nobody knows exactly what it’s going to mean but certainly I mean, even that what sounds like a small difference, half a degree Celsius could be life and death.

MARCO: Now top British officials used words like chaotic and farcical even to describe the talks in Copenhagen.  How did it feel for you on the conference floor?

PETER: Well sure as has heck chaotic.  I mean all weeklong I arrived on Monday and from the get go when it took me six hours just to get into the building and I was lucky.  There were colleagues of mine, journalists accredited who didn’t, who sat in line for ten hours outdoors and did not get in; to Friday when talks seemed on the verge of collapse we had all this back and forth between Obama and Premier Wen of China.  Nobody knew what was going to come out of it and then finally about 9:00 in the evening after the official program was supposed to have finished by noon, we have word that Obama has brokered this deal and we hear about how it happened.  We hear that maybe he burst into this meeting of China and Brazil and India, or maybe he was invited, nobody really knows.  And all of that is sort of off the official program.  The official program is supposed to be 192 countries negotiating stuff together, and what we have actually is like the world’s biggest players going off into a back room someplace and hammering something out, and ultimately getting this agreement between the two biggest players which are the US and China which had seemed totally out of reach just hours before.

MARCO: It does seem kind of crazy there on the floor.  One thing that you know we might have forgotten in all of the discussion of the treaty and agreements, is that there is kind of a trade show quality to this with a lot of green activists and people selling stuff on the sides and countries having their booths in a convention center.

PETER: Yeah I mean nobody was actually selling stuff per se but there was a whole section that was devoted to NGOs and business and countries to sort of promote their position and their technology.  It was, it really did have a trade show feel to it.  And then of course there were the country delegation offices, which were off in another whole other side of the building.  And an interesting thing is that every country had one office for their delegation, except for the United States, which had two.  And this really came back to the crux of the problem to a large degree, was the split between our administration and our congress.  The administration has certain goals, congress has been reluctant to go along with them.

MARCO: And you really mean that Congress had a booth and the White House had a booth.

PETER: Yeah.  They weren’t booths they were offices.

MARCO: I see, okay.

PETER: They were delegation offices.  And that was something that a lot of people remarked on, yeah.

MARCO: So the key question is what happens next, Peter.  There are talks slated for Bonn in Germany next summer then again in Mexico City a year from now.  What are the goals?

PETER: Well I mean there’s a lot going on here and the talks in Bonn and Mexico City are part of this official Kyoto UN framework convention on climate change process that continues even though this document did not actually have sort of the force of their stamp of approval coming out of that.  They will attempt, you know to continue the dialogue, move things forward.  But there are important things that are going to happen before then.  One is that this document, the Copenhagen Accord has this annex that countries have to submit their national plans for emissions reductions by January 31^st of 2010, just a month, a little more than a month from now, and that’s a key thing that the US got these countries to agree to, China and India in particular was to put on paper for the rest of the world to see these are the things to which we are committing.  That has to be done by January 31^st.  That’s very important. It’s important in part because it’s going to pressure the Senate and part of, a lot of what was going on here was an effort to essentially assuage the concerns of the Senate that China and India were not going to commit to real reductions in their emissions and to oversight.  There’s also a provision in here for oversight of those developing countries, those large developing countries’ economies.  And that is also starting to be in progress.  So this is in some ways all aimed at the Senate in Washington.  And John Kerry has promised coming out of this meeting that he will push through a bill in Washington to commit the US to hard targets for carbon reduction.  So we have the official Copenhagen UN process, we have the US process in Washington, those are on different tracks but they have to converge.  And that’s kind of what people are hoping will come out of this is that Obama has somehow managed to put it on a track for those two to converge and only then do we really get progress.

MARCO: We’ll see where these two tracks end up.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson just back from Copenhagen thanks a lot.

PETER: Thanks Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Copenhagen deal reaction in quotes

President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers. The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark. Instead, after two weeks of frantic negotiations, the 193-nation conference ended on Dec 19th with delegates merely taking note of the deal. At the end of the conference President Obama described the accord as a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

Key points of Copenhagen Accord

Dec 21: Summit aftermath
Marco Werman discusses with our environment editor Peter Thomson where global efforts to combat climate change stand after the Copenhagen summit.
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Evolution of the accord: some of the Copenhagen drafts (pdf):

Draft 1
Draft 2
Draft 3
Draft 4
Draft 5
Near final draft

UN’s Copenhagen Climate Summit homepage with final version of the “Copenhagen Accord”

In his address to the conference, the President had called on world leaders to come together to strike a deal on the final day of the two-week UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Video of President Obama’s full address to the climate conference

Coverage on The World:

Dec 18: “meaningful agreement”
Marco Werman talks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson about the deal reached in Copenhagen.
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Dec 17: deadlock continues
World leaders remain deadlocked on a host of issues just a day before the Copenhagen climate summit is scheduled to end. Anchor Marco Werman gets an update from The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, who is in Copenhagen.
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Peter Thomson’s photos from the Copenhagen summit

Dec 17: China in Copenhagen
China has resisted calls for it to agree to binding verifiable targets for reducing emissions. But people in China say their government should be willing to make a commitment in Copenhagen. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.
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Dec 16: Time running out
Chances are growing slim that world representatives meeting in Copenhagen will come up with a deal on climate change. The World’s Peter Thomson reports on chaos at the conference.
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Demonstrators march toward the Bella Center where the UN climate summit is taking place (Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Dec 16: climate deal still possible?
Anchor Marco Werman speaks with former US climate negotiator Kathleen McGinty. She was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Kyoto climate summit back in 1997. She says a climate agreement is still possible in Copenhagen.
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Dec 16: Climate change in Peru
Climate change is having an effect on agriculture in Peru. Farmers in the Peruvian mountains are adapting to rising temperatures by planting at higher and higher elevations. Jon Beaupre reports.
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Illustrated transcript of this story

Dec 16: Parsing global climate change polls
Have you ever wondered why two polls on climate change, both done by credible organizations and both asking not dissimilar questions, can come up with strikingly different results? Science journalist Dan Grossman tried to find out from political scientist Richard Worthington.

Read Dan’s blog from Copenhagen

Dec 15: Climate change and the oceans
During the conference, Peter Thomson had the chance to talk with Margaret Caldwell, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program at Stanford University, about the impact of increasing greenhouse gas emissions on the oceans.  Despite being a major part of the climate system, oceans are not on the agenda at the conference.
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Dec 14: Crunch time in Copenhagen
There’s little time left for climate negotiators at the conference in Copenhagen. The summit has less than a week to go. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, who is in the Danish capital to cover the summit.
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Dec 14: Climate migrants in Bangladesh
Scientists say droughts, floods and rising seas could drive millions of so-called climate migrants from their homes by later this century.
Floods have already been a very real problem in low-lying Bangladesh. Joanna Kakissis reports from southwestern Bangladesh.
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Dan Grossman’s Copenhagen blog
Science reporter Daniel Grossman is in Copenhagen to cover the climate summit. He is also blogging for The World: in his first entry, Daniel describes a visit to an unassuming, but very eco-friendly dwelling just outside the Danish capital.
Daniel Grossman’s Copenhagen blog

Impact of climate change
As world leaders gather in Copenhagen for the Climate Change Summit 2009, BBC reporters have traveled the globe to see the impact of the issue on people and the places they live in:
View the interactive map with BBC video reports

Dec 11: EU pledge to climate fund
The European Union has pledged $ 10.5 billion over three years to help developed nations deal with climate change. Now it’s looking to other big polluters, like the US and China, to make a contribution. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.
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Dec 11: Canada’s rush toward energy reform
The Canadian province of Ontario has embraced renewable energy. But the province’s headlong rush into solar, geothermal and wind power has angered some residents. Anita Elash reports.
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Dec 10: Underground energy concerns
To produce cleaner energy, companies and governments are looking underground. That’s got project neighbors worried. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Landau, Germany.
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Chief Engineer Joerg Baumgaertner and Geox CEO Branka Rogulic at their geothermal power station. This plant provides enough power for about 6,000 homes. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

More pictures for this story

Dec 9: Conflict in Copenhagen
There has been tension at the Copenhagen climate summit – but it wasn’t a dispute between industrialized countries and developing nations. Developing nations started arguing among themselves. Anchor Marco Werman talks the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black.
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Richard Black’s ‘Earth Watch’ blog

Dec 9: Campaigning for Kiribati
Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Alex Randall, a volunteer with the group UN-fair-Play. He’s in Copenhagen to help small countries with environmental concerns get heard at the summit.
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Dec 9: Paris heat wave offers lessons on climate change
In 2003, Europe was hit by a major heat wave. It caused the death of about 1,200 people in Paris. Now the city is trying to learn from that tragedy, as it plans for the kind of extreme temperatures climate change could bring. Reporter Daniel Grossman has the story.
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Daniel Grossman’s Copenhagen blog

Dec 8: Assessing India’s green energy promises
As climate negotiators huddle in Copenhagen, India is promising to reduce its greenhouse emissions with a big boost in green energy. But as Miranda Kennedy reports, there are big question marks as to whether India can deliver.
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Dec 8: Climate activists get creative
Activists are staging creative demonstrations at the climate change summit in Copenhagen. The World’s Marina Giovannelli looks at how different protest groups are vying for a spot on the international stage, and whether or not their efforts will sway the outcome of the negotiations.
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• Website for Climate Justice Action
• Video performance by The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home

Dec 7: Pride v practicality in India’s climate stance
India is resisting steep binding cuts in greenhouse emissions. Reporter Miranda Kennedy tells us why.
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Dec 4: Climate science fracas
The United Nations is conducting an investigation into claims that British scientists manipulated data on global warming to support their argument that it’s man made. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story.
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Dec 4: China and US jockey on climate
China is set to play a big role at next week’s climate talks in Copenhagen. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Orville Schell of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, about the steps China is taking to clean up the environment, and its image.
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From the BBC:

• Copenhagen Summit 2009
• An animated journey through the Earth’s climate history

Other weblinks:

• COP15 Copenhagen homepage
• The White House blog: on the ground in Copenhagen
• New York Times: Copenhagen Climate Talks
• Washington Post: The Climate Agenda
• Greenpeace International
• Environmental Protection Agency at Copenhagen 2009

• Video: The President’s address to the climate conference
• Our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Peter Thomson’s Copenhagen photos
• Environment coverage on The World
• BBC coverage

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. It’s been a hectic day at the Copenhagen climate summit for President Obama. Early on the president urged delegates to reach an agreement on how to combat climate change even, he said, if it’s an imperfect agreement. Mr. Obama may have gotten his wish. Just as the climate summit was about to close a US official told reporters that President Obama has reached a meaningful agreement with other world leaders and that official said the agreement is not sufficient to fight climate change but is an important first step. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson is there at the summit in Copenhagen. Peter what are you hearing about this agreement? What makes it meaningful?

PETER THOMSON: Well we just don’t know. And in fact I’m not sure that anybody who was in the room with the president when he announced that knows. My understanding is it was just a small pool of White House reporters with the president and I’m not sure that any details were given to them and those details that they got are sort of only slowly washing across the conference center here in Copenhagen.

WERMAN: And any sense about how it’s going to kind of jive with the two degree Celsius level that everybody’s looking at?

THOMSON: Well I’ll tell you if the deal they’re talking about now reflects at all the latest draft of the accord that I’ve seen not very well. The previous drafts were pretty weak. This is even weaker. And again this was the latest draft that I saw and it could be out the window by now. But it even … . It mentioned two degrees as the target not to exceed that in terms of total warming over an undetermined amount of time. But it didn’t give a timeline for that. And it didn’t give any particular targets for how to achieve that. So they’re saying meaningful. What we’re seeing here is a little less meaningful.

WERMAN: What else happened today in Copenhagen Peter that led up to this kind of unofficial announcement of a meaningful agreement? There was a lot of stuff happening behind closed doors.

THOMSON: Oh there sure was. And I mean you said a minute ago that this agreement came just as the meeting was about to close. The meeting was actually supposed to close many hours ago. They were supposed to wrap things up this morning Copenhagen time and have this sort of big handshake and picture taking session and signing ceremony and everything this afternoon. That’s long gone. All that’s been canceled. People have been running around. Meetings have been being held behind closed doors. Other things have been cancelled. Just a moment ago as I was waiting to come on here I heard that the EU was holding a press conference. It’s the first press conference that we’ve actually heard announced today that’s going to be held as scheduled. And the EU obviously is a very significant player here so stuff is popping right now. And we are well past the deadline. The big issues are verification. The US is determined to get China and other developing countries to provide verification for the emissions cuts that they say they are going to make and to make sure that the international community can count on those being made. It’s the old Ronald Reagan term trust but verify. The administration is dead set on that and the Chinese are dead set against it. They say that’s a violation of their sovereignty. But they are making small moves in terms of talking about increased transparency and better means of communication and the like.

WERMAN: And Peter apparently Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premiere, met twice today. Do have any sense of what was going on in those meetings?

THOMSON: Well nobody really knows for sure but apparently Wen Jiabao was fairly upset by some of the language that President Obama used in his speech to the assembly today on that question of verification and took some offense at it. And it seems that it took two meetings to work out that diplomatic snafu. Exactly where they came out of it we don’t know but we are hearing that China is party to this new agreement that also involves Brazil and South Africa and the US. Now obviously those are only four players. Three of them are quite big players. But it doesn’t involve everybody yet.

WERMAN: Peter with just a few seconds to go, give us the mood right now as delegates in Copenhagen wait for some announcement.

THOMSON: Well I think there’s a sense of the sort of increase chaos. It’s been chaotic all week but things are suddenly just picking up and nobody knows what’s going on but everybody knows something is going on. There’s this incredible anticipation but I think there’s also an expectation that what ever does happen it’s still going to be a very, very weak document coming out of here.

WERMAN: The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson at the summit in Copenhagen. We’ll stay in touch. Thanks a lot Peter.

THOMSON: Thank you Marco.

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• Our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Peter Thomson’s Copenhagen photos
• Environment coverage on The World
• BBC coverage

• All of our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Environment stories on The World
• Offical Copenhagen webcast
• BBC photos from Copenhagen

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  It was a raucous day at the global climate summit in Copenhagen.  Danish police fired pepper spray at protesters outside the conference venue.  Meanwhile disputes inside left major issues unresolved.  The president of the European Commission said he was disappointed with the lack of progress toward a climate treaty and time is running out.  The meeting ends in two days.  The World’s Peter Thomson is at the conference and has this report.

PETER THOMSON: The climate of the climate talks here in Copenhagen has been growing more acrimonious.  Delegates of poor nations staged a sort of work stoppage earlier in the week.  Rifts have been deepening between key players, including the US and China.  Meetings and events are being cancelled without explanation.  And then there are the protesters.  Many of them have been squeezed out of the meeting site as the UN tightens security with the arrival of scores of government ministers and heads of state.  In the snow outside the conference center this morning, a small group of observer delegates who say they’ve been barred from the conference site burned their credentials in protest.  Seno Tsuhah was among them.  She came here to represent thousands of farmers in India.

SENO TSUHAH: We are burning our badges because we are angry, to show our anger, that we want to tell the world that there should be no legitimacy without communities’ voices.

THOMSON: The mood was no less angry inside.  Just beyond the first security gates, delegates from Friends of the Earth International sat on the floor, saying they’d been denied access to the meeting hall itself.  Nnimmo Bassey, who came here from Nigeria, is Friends of the Earth’s chair.

NNIMMO BASSEY: We all have badges, we have secondary badges and were are all expecting to go in and we’ve been stopped.

THOMSON: Have they given you a reason?

BASSEY: The reason is security, and I don’t know what that means.  We believe it’s not just, it’s not right and it should not be tolerated.

THOMSON: Some of the demonstrations and sloganeering had a sort of pro-forma, pre-packaged feel to them and it’s possible that a good number of such supposedly spontaneous outbursts were planned long ago.  But the concern that this meeting could lead to no agreement, or to an agreement that falls far short of what’s needed, isn’t limited to protesters. Many delegates, scientists, and long-time observers of the treaty process fear the summit could end up being a failure.  Now, with two days left, many who’ve been most deeply involved in pushing for dramatic action are dramatically scaling back their expectations, and talking about it as just another meeting.  Elliot Diringer is with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

ELLIOT DIRINGER: I think that an outcome here is very likely to be disappointing in some respects to everyone who feels the need to move forward urgently.  But it’s the process we have.  We have to look to it to deliver as much as possible.

THOMSON: It’s possible that with President Obama and more  than 100 other world leaders arriving in the next 24 hours, things could quickly change.  But Diringer and others say that even if Copenhagen doesn’t produce an agreement on climate change, they hope it moves the world a little further in that direction.  For The World, I’m Peter Thomson, in Copenhagen

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Marcelino Cruz

Cruz: “There used to be more rain in the past. These days, it seems as if it’s escaping.”

Reporter: It’s not much better during the dry season. Between the months of May and September, Cruz and his neighbors get their water from the nearby Copa Glacier. But temperatures here have been rising, and the glacier is rapidly diminishing. Over his 34 years, Cruz says the glacier has retreated about a mile and a quarter. The lack of water has affected production, Cruz says. Yields from his farm have decreased by forty percent in the last decade.

Cruz:“And it’s not just the water. We also have new pests. And frost – something we never used to have.”

Copa Glacier (photo: Kate Dunbar)

Reporter: Cruz is seeing the effects of what researchers have confirmed–that his small part of the world is experiencing a significant shift in its climate. The effects of climate change are also being felt a day’s journey away, at the edge of the Amazon jungle. That’s where a long and slim balsa takes us across the Marañon River to Yamayaka – to meet with Simon Wipe Bejus, a leader of the Awajun. It’s a steamy, 100 degrees or so here. Bejus is dressed in a headband of beans and feathers, with wide belts of red, white and black beans crossing his chest .

Bejus: “The climate is changing, The rain is scarce and the sun feels like three times what it used to be. The mountains are getting drier. And the River is much smaller. It really worries us here in the Amazon.”

Reporter: The Awajun grow plantains, yucca, maize and rice. But as in Copa up in the mountains, Bejus says their traditional lifestyle here is threatened.

Bejus:“The jungle is our market. Nature is our pharmacy. But with climate change, mining, oil exploration and illegal deforestation, the Amazon is getting polluted.”

Huancayo potato market

Maria Scurrah: This is another one, Paseña from Huancavelica. Loved in the market for its purple color…

Reporter: 400 miles away in Huancayo, plant breeder and pathologist Maria Scurrah guides me through the potato market. Peru is the birthplace of the potato, and the plentitude at the market is just a fraction of the thousands of varieties of potatoes grown here.

Scurrah: You can see that they native varieties are easy to tell because, you can see that plant breeders go for big, round, no eyes. Whereas the ancient varieties are the opposite; small, shriveled and deep eyes.

Reporter: Scurrah says that lately, Peru’s potato farmers have had to adjust to their changing climate :

Scurrah: “Well, one of the key adaptations that the farmers in the Andes are doing is really climbing up with their crops – only ten years ago you wouldn’t have seen a crop above 4,000 (meters) and those are all the bitter potatoes that are frost tolerant. And the top potatoes would have been at 3,900 (meters) – and now it’s very common to find crops at 4,200 (meters).”

Reporter: Growing potatoes at above 13,000 feet used to be unheard of. But Scurrah says there is a limit.

Scurrah: “As the globe heats up, people move up with their crops until the edge of what used to be highland pastures, not agriculture, And they will have nowhere to go after reaching that top line.”

Reporter: Peru itself is responsible for only about half a percent of all greenhouse gas pollution. But as climate change begins to affect life all over the country, the Peruvian government has adopted an ambitious plan to fight it. The goal is to decrease the country’s emissions by 47 percent by 2020. And to stop net deforestation in the Amazon entirely in just ten years as well. Eduardo Durand runs the government’s special agency for climate change.

Durand: “The reduction has to be very aggressive and very important in the first twenty years.”

Reporter: Durand believes Peru’s goals… and those of much of the rest of the world… can – and must be met:

Durand: “Otherwise we will have a very serious situation, and a very high cost of adaptation in the long term. So it’s better for everybody – developed and developing countries – to have a very bold and ambitious goal of reduction in the next step up until 2020.”

Reporter: Back up in Copa Grande, Marcelino Cruz is getting ready for the night shift as a guard at a rose plantation . Like many other farmers here, Cruz needs the extra income to support his family. Moving his farm somewhere else is not an alternative, he says. They probably don’t have enough water either. But as the climate continues to change, here. Cruz says he doubts own children will be able to stay in Copa Grande:

Cruz: “I hope my children will get a good education and get a job somewhere else. These fields will not be able to support them.”

• The World’s coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• More environment coverage on The World
• Audio slideshow: Saving Peru’s native potatoes

• More photos for this story
• Ashley Ahearn on carbon sequestration research in Iceland
• Environment coverage on The World

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Climate negotiators hunkered-down today for the fourth day of their two week summit Copenhagen.  They’re trying to find the right mix of financial incentives, political commitments, and investments in new technologies to patch-together a new global treaty to fight global warning.  For many governments and energy companies, some of the most promising new technologies are those used underground.  One technology taps geothermal heat for electricity; another is used to capture greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and store that pollution underground.  Both concepts face significant hurdles, including a public that’s sometimes wary of what’s going on “beneath its feet.”  The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Landau in der Pfalz, Germany.

GERRY HADDEN:  At the bakery in downtown Landau, Frau Schumacher is not used to watching her chocolate covered pastries suddenly tremble and flop to the floor.  So when that happened one morning last August, she thought the world was ending.  (Audio clip of Frau Schumacher, speaking in German.)  She says, “I didn’t know what was happening.  I live upstairs on the third floor, and I thought the building was going to come down.”  What happened was an earthquake.  It was minor.  It had jolted sleepy little Landau for a couple of seconds, and it got residents like Schumacher pointing fingers at a nearby geothermal electricity plant.  Engineers there have been drilling deep holes into the earth to tap super-hot water for energy.  (Audio clip of Audio Clip of Schumacher speaking in German.)  “We see the plant as negative,” Schumacher says.  “We are afraid that it will cause our houses to fall down.”  Investigators still aren’t sure whether the Landau facility’s deep drill holes provoked the quake.  On a tour of the plant, engineer Jerg Baumgaertner concedes they might have.  Other geothermal plants have triggered similar events, but Baumbaertner says people shouldn’t be alarmed by what he calls minor seismic movement.

JERG BAUMGAERTNER:  If we call every noise from the underground an earthquake, then I think we have a real communication problem, because it’s not what it is.  This is known since 200 years, that the rock reacts to the volume which is extracted from the underground.  The same is true for oil the gas; but nevertheless, there are towns on top and cities on top, and they all still alive.

HADDEN:  Since the quake, Landau’s plant has been running without incident or protest, and it does provide a public benefit—clean energy for the equivalent of 6000 homes—but the public scare was part of a trend that’s been dubbed “numbyism,” or “Not Under My Back Yard”—that is, growing resistance to new energy technologies meant to operate “under our feet.”  Just ask VatenFall, the Swedish energy giant.  Their experimental coal-fired power plant here in Spremsberg, on the other side of Germany, is designed to catch 90 percent of its CO₂ emissions, and pipe the gas more than a mile underground; where backers say, it will remain trapped forever.  The process is called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, and much of the world is pinning its climate hopes on the technology.  VatenFall’s plant is one of its first proving grounds.  It was supposed to open a year ago, but local resistance has so far kept it closed.  As in Landau, people here are afraid of its possible impacts, including earthquakes, or even escaping CO₂.  Jeff Chapman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, an industry group based in London, says he’s not surprised at the delay.

JEFF CHAPMAN:  I think it’s quite understandable that local people will be concerned to understand if there is any risk associated with CO₂.storage.

HADDEN:  Chapman says CCS is safe, even though it’s still largely untested.  But more important, he says, it’s indispensible.

CHAPMAN:  Unless we adopt Carbon Capture and Storage technology, there is absolutely no way whatsoever that we will be able to address climate change.  And that’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, for example.  It’s the conclusion of the European Commission.  And most people who know about this situation will realize that inevitably we are locked-in to burning fossil fuels …

HADDEN:  But environmental groups, such as Friends of the Earth, are backing nervous neighbors.  Tina Loeffelsint, of the German chapter, calls CCS “one giant question mark.”  She says nobody is really sure how long the CO₂.will stay underground or how it might react with rocks and minerals over time.  The unknowns, she says, make it too risky.

TINA LOEFFELSINT:  We have better and cheaper and reliable technologies at hand today, like renewable energies, efficiency technologies, with which Germany could easily reach its climate targets.  CCS, at this point in time, looks like a solution just for energy industry—for them to not change their mix of energy.

HADDEN:  Scientists working on CCS insist the technology isn’t just “smoke and mirrors.”  This is another test site, in [PH] Catseen, outside of Berlin.  Lead scientist, Hilke Wuerdeman says the goal is to develop better systems to monitor and control the gas once it’s underground.  CO₂.is a voracious solvent and can leach toxic minerals from the deep rocks into underground reservoirs of salt water.  Wuerdeman wants to make sure that mixture never reaches fresh water sources.

HILKE WUERDEMAN:  Of course, it’s all the part of the research to enhance the pressure only to an amount where fluids will not leave the reservoir.  So if the fluids may leave the reservoir, then it is possible that they reach a new reservoir.  But the main idea is to limit the pressure increase, so that you have no movement.

HADDEN:  Wuerdeman insists that Carbon Storage will bring minimal risks, and even less with constant monitoring.  But that begs the question of who should be responsible for such oversight.  Again, Tina Loeffelsint, from Friends of the Earth.

LOEFFELSINT:  If you assume that our government says the CO₂ would have to be stored safely and endlessly; and they mean like for 10,000 years or more; like the time span is just far too long.

HADDEN:  The uncertainty on this question has some investors hesitating, along with potential neighbors of CCS projects, and that raises still more questions about its potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions soon.  As it is, one Harvard study says the technology won’t be commercially viable for at least 20 years.  For The World, I’m Jerry Hadden, Ketzin Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage of the Copenhagen conference
• Environment coverage on The World

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MARCO WERMAN: Alex Randall is in Copenhagen to help small developing countries get heard.  Randall is a volunteer with a group called, Unfair Play.  His organization examines data and climate maps produced by the UN’s inter-governmental panel on climate change.

ALEX RANDALL: We looked at the countries which were most vulnerable to effects of climate change and also looked at the countries which weren’t sending many negotiators to the Copenhagen conference.  And what we found that some of the really, really vulnerable countries were actually almost unable to represent themselves at the negotiations simply because they couldn’t send enough people to Copenhagen to go to all the meetings to read the documents to be everywhere they needed to be.

WERMAN: And so you basically offered two countries your services.  Who are you helping?

RANDALL: Caribous and Nauru both of which are island states in the Pacific.

WERMAN: Right, how would Caribous be adversely effected by climate change?

RANDALL: There are multiple problems that they would have if global temperatures rise.  The first one is essentially from rising sea levels.  A lot of the Island of Caribous is only two meters above sea level so it doesn’t really have to rise very much before they have serious problems.    The second problem they face is as the sea levels do begin to rise salt water begins to get into their drinking water supply and that obviously causes enormous problems.  The problem they have at the negotiations is that I can briefly describe what it’s like here.  There are probably 12 or 15 streams of negotiations going on all at once and they need to be in all those talks in order to

get the climate deal that’s going to protect their people but with such a small delegation it’s very hard for them to cover all those meetings and to represent themselves adequately.  There are also hundreds of hundreds of documents that they need to read in order to prepare to go into the negotiations.  So we take some of the strain off them by going to some of the sessions and taking notes so we can update them later, or sometimes just trawling through the thousands of pages of  documentation that they need to understand before going into the talks.

WERMAN: We just heard the dividing lines between developing countries like Caribous but also Tuvalu and Sierra Leone, and other developing countries like India and China.  I mean Caribous is a country with about 100,000.  Their main exports are coconut and fish.  I’m just wondering, do you think they’re going to be some countries that end up by being like sacrificial lambs in order for other developing countries to emerge unscathed?

RANDALL: Well, let’s hope not because I think what we really need at the end of Copenhagen is a deal that protects all nations however vulnerable or small they are.  So for a country like Caribous, they really are on the front line of the front line.  It’s not just that they’ll be adversely affected.  It’s they’ll be one of the first countries to feel the effects.  So I don’t think that it’s a really a viable position to say that we’re going to sacrifice some nations in order to wake the world up to what’s going on here.

WERMAN: Alex Randall in Copenhagen.  Very good to speak with you.  Thanks a lot.

RANDALL: Alright, thank you.

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• Miranda’s report on India’s resisting steep cuts in greenhouse emissions
• BBC coverage of the Copenhagen summit
• Impact of climate change (interactive map)
• Environment coverage on The World

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  As climate negotiators meet in Copenhagen, polls suggest that the US is one of the few countries where concern about climate change is falling.  Today, we learned of a possible reason.  Temperatures in North America have actually been on the cool side in recent years.  The UN’s weather agency presented that finding today at the international summit on climate change.  The bigger picture is more sobering, though.  The figures show that globally, the current decade has been the warmest since records began 160 years ago.  India has been especially vulnerable to global warming.  That fact is leading the Indian government to soften its position on greenhouse gas emissions.  Yesterday, we reported on India’s internal debate on climate policy.  Today, in her second report from New Delhi, Miranda Kennedy tells us about India’s promises on green energy.

REPORTER: Well our top focus this evening remains the crisis that has been caused by incessant rains across southern India, across Kanatica–

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Earlier this fall, when there was unprecedented flooding in southern India, environmentalists took to the TV talk shows to try to stir people up about climate change.

BITTU SAHGAL: With climate change, our food security is at risk, our health security is at risk, our water security is at risk.

KENNEDY: Bittu Sahgal, the editor of the magazine Sanctuary Asia, says India’s long coastline and proximity to the Himalayan Mountains make the country especially vulnerable to the impacts of rising sea levels and melting glaciers.  But he worries that few Indians understand the seriousness of the problem, and that the government hasn’t done enough to raise the alarm.

SAHGAL: The prime minister should get on the air, and he should talk to farmers, he should talk to the urban and rural poor and he should tell them what climate change is. If there was an external threat from another country that’s what he would do.

KENNEDY: Government officials, though, say such criticism is unfair.

MONTEK SINGH AHULWAHLIA: The idea that India’s not willing to do anything is just completely wrong. Because in our own national action plan for climate change, we’ve said we must do something.

KENNEDY: That’s Montek Singh Ahulwahlia, the prime minister’s chief economic policy maker. He’s referring to new legislation that would dramatically limit the growth of India’s carbon emissions.

AHULWAHLIA: Starting with a statutory requirement that you’ve got to purchase X percent of your electricity from clean sources.  We have decided to launch a program for development of solar thermal electricity, which is actually more expensive than coal, but the idea is the government will subsidize the difference.

KENNEDY: The legislation would ensure that India get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources with ten years.  It would also set the country’s first mandatory energy efficiency standards for vehicles, appliances and buildings.  Environment minister Jairam Ramesh says efforts like these show that India is doing its part on climate change.

JAIRAM RAMESH: We aren’t part of the problem but India wants to be part of the solution.

KENNEDY: Since announcing the new energy policies, Ramesh has become a target of criticism at home, with many legislators accusing him of selling India out to the West.  But the promises actually come with a big caveat.  India wants developed countries to help fund the transition to a lower-carbon economy.  And that could be a big sticking point, especially since India continues to refuse the binding emissions caps that some in the West are demanding.  But without such aid, India’s homegrown green energy industry may continue to spin its wheels. Government scientists have been researching clean technologies here in this sprawling solar development facility outside Delhi for more than 30 years.  India created a ministry devoted to renewable energy back in the 1970s.  But in all that time, researchers haven’t made any major breakthroughs. When I came by for a scheduled tour mid-morning on a weekday, there didn’t seem to be much urgency to the solar mission here. I was told that only five full-time scientists work here, and they were all out of the office.  A couple of researchers sheepishly offered me a soda and led me around. One of them, Nikhil Girka, started up what he calls a sun simulator machine, which tests the ideal conditions for solar thermal panels.

NIKHIL GIRKA: We calculate what is the VOC, what is the fail factor, what is the short circuit current–

KENNEDY: Indian researchers have helped improve solar heaters and lanterns for use in rural areas. Wind power is also taking root in some parts of the country.  But while other countries, from Germany to Japan, have made big strides in clean energy, India has little to show for its efforts. And it still depends on highly-polluting coal for more than half of its electricity. Still, many here believe that India is already on a less polluting path than industrial nations took,  including Chandra Bhushan, a climate researcher with the Center for Science and the Environment in Delhi.

CHANDRA BHUSHAN: Our energy consumption is increasing at a much lower rate than our growth which is a very good sign.

KENNEDY: For that, Bhushan partly credits the Indian government, which charges industry some of the highest energy rates in the world, in an effort to conserve resources. He says Indian companies must also report their energy use.

BHUSHAN: India was probably the first country in the world to demand energy data disclosure in the financial reports. Every company in this country has to say what they’ve done for conservation of energy.

KENNEDY: Bhushan agrees that there’s plenty of room for improvement, though. Roughly a third of India’s electricity is lost to theft and leakage. And while India’s per capita carbon emissions are among the lowest of the major world economies, that’s because more than half the population has no access to electricity at all.  It’s inevitable that will change.  India is now promising that many of those hundreds of millions will get their power from renewable sources. Much of the rest of the world is hoping the country makes good on that promise.  For The World, this is Miranda Kennedy, New Delhi.

WERMAN: Miranda Kennedy’s reports from India were produced with the assistance of the International Reporting Project.

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