What Climate Change?

Posted by Jeffrey St. Clair on November 20th, 2008 | Link

Meltdown trumps fears at APEC

JOSEPH COLEMAN
Associated Press

LIMA, Peru (AP) - Countries on both sides of the Pacific have reason to be very afraid of climate change. Rising sea levels could swamp coastal farms, higher temperatures wipe out entire species and increasingly violent storms exact a widening human and financial toll.

But at this week’s summit of 21 Pacific Rim nations, global warming is barely on the agenda. In its place: the financial crisis.

“The interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat,” said Woo Yuen Pau, CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Financial issues are a natural fit for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, which includes the United States, China, Japan and Russia, among others. Its annual summits traditionally focus on nuts-and-bolts issues such as spreading free trade and bolstering regional networking.

The agenda is often driven by the host nation, and in Australia last year, that meant global warming. APEC leaders in Sydney signed a non-binding agreement to improve energy efficiency and increase forest cover.

Expectations for a follow-up at this year’s meeting, which was officially beginning with a dinner Thursday, are rock-bottom.

The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council announced Wednesday that climate change was the summit’s No. 7 priority, based on an annual survey of regional government officials, business people and academics. Last year, it was No. 4.

Among the issues ranking above climate change this year: trade talks, food and energy security and reforming the APEC bureaucracy.

Top on the list was, of course, the credit crunch on Wall Street that has sent global markets plummeting. Many of the APEC leaders attended a summit in Washington last week at which 21 major economies pledged tighter cooperation to battle the financial meltdown.

Even as the leaders converged on Lima, the pain continued: Global stock markets tumbled Thursday and fears of a protracted recession sent Wall Street to it lowest point in five years.

Advocates say that despite the immediate threat of a global depression, climate change could become a much greater problem in the long run. If it isn’t dealt with now, they say, it will be far more costly down the road.

“We do not have any more time to defer the transformation of the way we do business,” said Rick Duke of the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York.

But there has been little urgency among world leaders of late, in part because of the expectation that the new U.S. administration will radically change course in environmental policy.

Outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush has argued that addressing global warming could hurt the economy by imposing costly pollution controls on businesses. The International Energy Agency estimated in a June report that the world needs to invest $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But global warming activists say such measures could in fact hasten the end of the economic downturn, for example by weaning major economies from fossil-fuel dependence and developing renewable energy.

President-elect Barack Obama’s team agrees with that view, according to Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Clean energy investments and making the economy more efficient - they see that as a key part of the economic revitalization strategy,” he said from Washington. “The solutions to global warming are the same things as the solutions to the economy.”

Such solutions could include large-scale development of solar energy, refitting factories to emit fewer pollutants and run more efficiently and pumping carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs in a process known as carbon sequestration.

Eileen Clausson, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said from Virginia that business leaders in the United States are increasingly on board with Obama’s plans to tackle global warming.

“You are talking about activities that are going to end up creating jobs,” she said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.