Climate: A "Plan B" for Team Obama

by William S. Becker

Congress’s failure to act on global climate change was one of the reasons the diplomatic atmosphere was so chilly last year in Copenhagen.

Congress has chilled the atmosphere again, four months before the international community meets in Cancun to resume its marathon crawl to a global climate treaty. From Bonn, where nations were attending five days of pre-Cancun negotiations this week, the Associated Press reported the Senate’s failure to act on a climate bill has “deepened the distrust among poor countries about the intentions of the United States and other industrial countries” to cut their emissions.

The response from members of the Obama team has been: a) the president is not backing off his commitment to legislation or a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; and b) there is more than one way to skin this cat. Hints of executive action are in the wind.

Also in the wind is a renewed discussion about the role states can play in cutting our carbon emissions. For example, the World Resources Institute concludes that if states are “go-getters” with the policies they already have in place, they can make a significant contribution to the President’s 17 percent goal.  Continued...

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International Findings from EPA Analysis of the American Power Act

by Jake Schmidt

The Obama Administration has just released the US EPA analysis of the American Power Act and it shows that US action coupled with reasonable actions by other countries will put us on a path to preventing the worst impacts of global warming.  It also shows that a lengthy delay in the deployment of international offsets will have a very minimal impact on the cost of the program.  Both findings address issues that opponents to comprehensive climate and energy legislation use to argue that we shouldn’t take action or that it won’t really be as cheap as everyone says (my colleague summarizes how EPA’s analysis shows the draft bill is affordable, equitable, and effective).

So let’s take each of these points in turn.   

1.  US Action Spurs/Solidifies Action of Other Countries.  One of the chief talking points of opponents of US clean energy and climate legislation is the claim that the US taking action would have little impact on global warming.  Taking US action in isolation, they claim that reducing US emissions won't make much of a dent in world emissions and future temperature increases. 

But those critics miss two important points:

1. Other countries besides the US are taking action and have committed to emissions cuts (as I’ve discussed here); and
2.  US action spurs/solidifies those actions (as I’ve discussed here).

This new EPA analysis shows the impact of these two realities in a tangible way.    Continued...

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Tools for Supporting International Action on Global Warming: American Power Act

by Jake Schmidt

The draft of the American Power Act is now out (see NRDC's first read summary of the entire bill).  The core global warming pollution limits in the bill, covering all major pollution sources, are a solid foundation for Senate legislation to put a final bill on President Obama’s desk this year.  So how does this legislative proposal address the critical international investments that aid our international efforts to address global warming?

The bill includes most of the key tools to aid the world in addressing global warming but doesn’t provide the necessary funding to aid developing countries in deploying clean energy, reducing deforestation, and adapting to the impacts of climate change (as a coalition of 24 environmental, development, and religious groups has highlighted).  The bill contains broad authorizing language for a program to reduce deforestation, provides for only a small and belated effort to help the most vulnerable developing countries, and doesn’t have any program for clean energy exports.  Failure to provide the president with the needed tools to promote international cooperation will prove penny-wise but pound-foolish (this is one of the carbon program problems that must be fixed).

It is critical that the US become a strong component of international efforts to address global warming by passing a climate and energy bill this year.  To aid in achieving strong international action and providing the US with the necessary tools to support other countries in addressing this challenge such a bill needs several key components  Continued...

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Obama's Push-Back Against China Is Bitter Medicine

by Sam Sedaei

For the past number of years, the prevailing view in foreign policy circles in Washington has been that China's economic growth of 9%, along with the recent economic recession that hit the United States, has shifted the balance of Sino-U.S. relations in China's favor. During a recent conversation I had with David Bosco, the author of Five to Rule Them All, he pointed out that while for most of the Cold War and twenty-first century, the Soviet Union -- and then Russia -- led the efforts to challenge Western authority on the international stage, China has been becoming the leading voice of opposition in the United Nations Security Council in recent years.

And ever since President Obama's inauguration, China has been especially uncooperative on a number of global issues. Kenneth Lieberthal -- director of Brookings Institution's China Center in Washington -- says such testy relations in the first year of American administrations have historic precedence as the two countries are more willing to test each other. Nonetheless, China has shown to be particularly resistant to respond positively to Obama's international charm offensive. 

Two of those major issues have been climate change and Iran. China sent a low level diplomat to negotiate with President Obama during the Copenhagen Conference on climate change in 2009 and unilaterally ensured the conference's minimal success by resisting enforcement mechanisms for any agreement on carbon emissions. And, as the military rulers in Iran proceed with horrific human rights crimes and lack of cooperation to address concerns about their nuclear program, China has shown unwilling to cooperate on sanctions on Sepah-e Pasdaran, also known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.  Continued...

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COP 15: Accepting Responsibility

by William S. Becker

Imagine you’re a well-to-do person attending a dinner of your peers. The food is top-rate and there’s plenty of it. Course after course is laid upon the table.

A group of less-advantaged people has been watching from the sidelines. When the dinner is done, you invite them to join you at the table. After the restaurant staff has served coffee, the bill comes. You and your rich peers insist that everyone now at the table must share in paying the entire bill.

If that seems unfair, then you have just understood the position of the delegates from emerging economies, now negotiating with their wealthier colleagues from the North over a climate deal at Copenhagen.

Some poorer nations have taken the position that because the industrialized world is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere – in effect exhausting the environment’s capacity to cope with carbon – rich nations must pay “damages” or “reparations”. These payments presumably would be used by emerging economies to cope with the climate changes that already are devastating some of them, and to increase their standards of living while minimizing their emissions.

But the United States’ chief negotiator, Todd Stern - an attorney and by all accounts a very good and moral man – rejects that argument. Speaking at COP-15, he repeated President Barack Obama’s recent promise that the United States will pay a “fair share” of financial assistance to emerging economies. But, he said: "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that."  Continued...

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Saboteurs at Copenhagen

by William S. Becker

COPENHAGEN – With the announcement that a delegation from the Congressional Republican Flat Earth Caucus will show up to embarrass President Obama in Copenhagen next week, we hope the White House finally decides to man-up on climate change.

What manning up means in the present context is that the Obama Administration must get serious about using its regulatory authority to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions well below the levels being considered on Capitol Hill.

So far, Obama has been scrupulous in not “getting out ahead” of Congress on climate change. He has announced he will appear in Copenhagen on Dec. 18 to commit the United States to the goal passed by the House – a reduction in emissions of only about 4 percent by 2020. That is embarrassingly low compared to the European Union’s goal of 20 percent and to the opinion of leading climate scientists that industrialized nations should be shooting for 40 or 45 percent below our emissions in 1990.

With EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s formal finding Monday that greenhouse gases endanger public health and safety, the Administration now has the legal tool to establish a goal more in line with climate science, and to make sure the goal is met. The question is whether Obama plans to use regulation as a small crowbar to pry a bill from Congress, or as a game-changer in the economy.  Continued...

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The Consequences of Climategate

by Janet Ritz

In response to growing pressure following the release of hacked emails from the U.K.'s University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced yesterday that they would be conducting their own investigation:

The United Nations yesterday announced an investigation into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Critics of the scientific consensus on climate change claim emails from the unit’s servers show researchers manipulated evidence to support their theory.

Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has dismissed the claims as “complete rubbish” but the scandal has thrown the scientific world into turmoil and has been raised by some countries as a reason not to strike a deal in Copenhagen.

British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has weighed in on the controversy, stating: "With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate skeptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

The Union of Concern Scientists: "Unfortunately for these conspiracy theorists, what the e-mails show are simply scientists at work, grappling with key issues, and displaying the full range of emotions and motivations characteristic of any urgent endeavor. Any suggestions that these e-mails will affect public and policymakers' understanding of climate science give far too much credence to blog chatter and boastful spin from groups opposed to addressing climate change.  Continued...

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Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Fifty-six+ newspapers will feature this editorial today.  Written by The Guardian's editorial staff after consultation with editors from 20+ news services, it is intended to send a message to the leaders gathering in Copenhagen that the time to act is at hand.

Tomorrow 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targetsby the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow* by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

Copyright: Guardian News & Media Ltd 2009 - reprinted by permission.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial/print

Please read and share.


* Publish date: December 7, 2009

Road to Copenhagen - Part 6: Money-Changers in the Temple of Democracy

by William S. Becker

There is a scene in the New Testament (Matthew 21:12) where Jesus throws the money-changers out of the temple. We could use some of that in the halls of Congress.

While the U.S. Capitol is not the National Cathedral, members of Congress are the custodians of a sacred trust: to protect the vitality and integrity of the extraordinary experiment the Founders began. For example, the debate about climate change isn’t just about polar bears and energy prices. It’s about whether a free people will be a responsible people, a capitalist economy will be a caring economy and a democracy will protect the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, even those not yet born.

Some of this sacred trust is codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Some is unwritten and implied. And although the Constitution dictates that we keep government and religion separate, there are places in public policy where secular values and moral values overlap. Stewardship of nature and its resources – called “creation care” in religious circles – is one of those places.

Government’s stewardship responsibility is recognized in the body of laws past congresses developed once we realized that burning rivers, poisoned water, dangerous air, carcinogenic fish and toxic wastes were not in the national interest. In the landmark National Environmental Policy Act, for example, Congress declared:

It is the continuing responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, to improve and coordinate Federal plans, functions, programs, and resources to the end that the Nation may . . . fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations . . . Continued...

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Road to Copenhagen – Part 5: Big Hairy Audacious Leadership vs. Nattering Nabobs of Negativism*

by William S. Becker

Change your thoughts and you change your world.

Norman Vincent Peale

We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the power of a positive vision of an abundant future…
Rob Hopkins, “The Transition Handbook”

During his 10 months in office, President Barack Obama and his team have assembled a respectable list of accomplishments on energy and climate policy. One might conclude the President has done about all he can do with the powers of his office.

One would be wrong. What energy and climate security require – what the future of the American Dream demands – is audacious big-picture ideas that capture the imagination, stir the emotions, speak to the souls, rally the support and win the involvement of the American people. That’s been lacking so far in the President’s climate leadership.

I don’t see evidence that the American people have reached a “yes, we can” moment on climate action. My bet is that most people are still asking “yes we can what?” President Obama speaks of a “new energy economy”, but that’s an abstraction for many of us. Unless you’re a policy wonk, the climate debate probably is mumbo-jumbo, all about carbon pricing, cap and trade architecture and auction allowances. This is not the rhetoric that ignites a mass movement.

I suspect there is a sizeable segment of the American people waiting to be engaged, waiting to have their imaginations triggered, waiting to understand what a new energy economy looks like and what they can do to build it. I’m not saying that citizens can’t act without top-down leadership. Indeed, as President Obama hinted recently in his “Grab a Mop” speech, there’s fundamental unfairness, guaranteed stasis and more than a little buck-passing when we citizens stand on the sidelines, some expecting the White House to do everything, others protesting it is doing far too much. Continued...

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Road to Copenhagen - Part 4: A New Social Contract

by William S. Becker

As we approach the climate conference in Copenhagen, politicians are balking and diplomats are burning the midnight oil, deprived of sleep. But we can take heart. Some unlikely new heroes may come to the rescue.

One prospective hero is The Citizen-Consumer. Consumers are not the first group that pops to my mind when I think about environmental leadership. Unbridled consumption without regard for consequences has much to do with the mess we’re in.

Then came a poll by TIME magazine over the summer. It found that nearly four of every 10 American consumers over age 18 regularly and deliberately choose products made by “socially responsible” companies. If conspicuous consumption got us into this mess, can it be that conscionable consumption will get us out? Maybe. Based on its poll and several other factors, TIME concludes:

In America, we are recalibrating our sense of what it means to be a citizen, not just through voting or volunteering, but also through what we buy…We are seeing the rise of the citizen consumer – and the beginnings of a responsibility revolution.

We might be tempted to assume these green consumers – TIME calls them the “responsibles” – come from the liberal wing of America’s vast customer base. We’d be wrong. According to TIME’s poll, “responsibles” are almost equally divided between people who classify themselves as conservatives, moderates and liberals.

The second unlikely hero is The Corporation. New evidence suggests that companies around the world are beginning to discover that “green” is golden. A significant number of companies apparently are committing to social responsibility and sustainability. Continued...

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Road to Copenhagen - Part 3: Re-Tooling Industry

by William S. Becker

In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International.

Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes:

Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialization over the next five years (emphasis mine)…World governments have a window that will close between now and 2014. In that time they must establish fully operational, low-carbon industrial architecture. This must drive a low-carbon re-industrialization that will be faster than any previous economic and industry transformation…Today, only three out of 20 industries are moving sufficiently fast enough.

By “low carbon re-industrialization”, the authors mean energy efficiency and clean generation technologies, low-carbon agriculture, and sustainable forestry. They have identified 24 critical resources and industries the world will need to develop quickly to avoid climate catastrophe. Among their conclusions:

o By itself, emissions trading will not be enough to cause the necessary re-industrialization of the world economy. We will need massive private investments; tens of trillions of dollars from the investment community; and more aggressive government action to create a stable long-term investment environment.

“Starting with the least-cost mitigation solutions and working our way forward to higher-cost solutions as carbon prices rise – that approach will take too long,” says Sean Kidney, Climate Risk’s manager in Europe. “We need to tackle all solutions at the same time.” Continued...

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Road to Copenhagen – Part 2: Risky Business

by William S. Becker

The evidence is irrefutable: Climate change poses enormous risks to economic stability, public health, ecosystem services, and national security, as well as to the environment.

How should we manage those risks? The first step is to acknowledge them. The second is to start listening to the experts who manage risks for a living.

Over the past two months, I’ve attended several meetings of military and civilian experts in security, intelligence and risk assessment. They were unanimous in concluding that 1) the risks of climate change are growing rapidly; 2) those risks are routinely underestimated by policy makers; and 3) little is being done to plan for contingencies, even in those regions of the world likely to suffer the most and even though the suffering already has begun.

One meeting of security and risk experts was organized by Nick Mabey, a former advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and now the leader of E3G, a nonprofit organization based in Europe to promote sustainable development. Our mission was to explore how the science of risk assessment and management should be applied to climate change. In a Whitehall Paper written last year, Mabey explained:

Climate change will be one of the critical forces shaping the coming century…it will fundamentally alter the way we live, the risks we face and how we interact in an increasingly interdependent world.

While scientists and environmentalists have been sounding warnings for years, an open discussion of the security risks of climate change started only a couple of years ago. In November 2007, the Center for Strategic and International Security and the Center for a New American Security issued “The Age of Consequences”; in June 2008, a blue-ribbon panel of high-level former military leaders, convened by the Center for Naval Analysis, concluded that global warming is a “threat multiplier” that will destabilize some of the world’s most volatile regions.

That finding was confirmed a year later by the National Intelligence Council in its first-ever assessment of climate change. It was confirmed again recently by the CIA’s creation of a new Center on Climate Change and National Security to centralize its expertise on “the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic, and social stability overseas.”

On Oct. 28, retired U.S. military officers warned the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the risks that climate change and fossil energy pose to national security. “Our economic, energy and climate change challenges are all inextricably linked,” retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn testified. “If we don’t address these challenges in a bold way and timely way, fragile governments have great potential to become failed states ….a virile breathing ground for extremism.”

A day later in Washington, D.C., the same message was delivered in a joint statement issued by active and retired military leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin American and the United States. In addition to calling on all governments to work for an “ambitious and equitable” international agreement at Copenhagen, the officers urged governments to make sure the security implications of climate change are integrated into their military strategies.

Mabey notes that climate risks – including drought and famine, loss of fisheries, coastal inundation, invasive migrations of climate refugees, natural disasters and water shortages – could go two ways. They could motivate nations to collaborate more on conflict prevention, contingency planning, economic development and disaster prevention and response; or, they could cause more tensions within and between countries, leading to conflict. Continued...

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Road to Copenhagen - Part 1: Doing the Climate Shuffle

by William S. Becker

There’s a familiar dance being performed on the world stage. It’s called the Climate Shuffle. It has been going on for decades, but more people are watching now and every nation is practicing the steps.

The dance is not complicated. The goal is to get everybody dancing together, a kind of Clean Electric Slide. But first, insist you won’t get on the dance floor until everybody does. If you get there and find that everyone is doing his own thing, try the Unilateral Slide (one step forward, two steps back, moving in circles). Most of all, be prepared to dance fast because the music is speeding up.

In this strained metaphor, the music is the increasing pace of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. As it turns out, the scientific evidence on which negotiators and policy makers have depended – particularly the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – significantly underestimated the speed at which global warming is occurring.

Poor and low-lying nations already are suffering its effects. Some of the first climate refugeesare being forced from their ancestral islands in the South Pacific because of rising sea levels. Livestock is dying in parts of Africa parched by drought.

The World Health Organization estimated earlier this year that 150,000 deaths occur annually in low-income countries due to climate-related crop failure, malnutrition, diarrheal diseases, malaria and flooding. Nearly 85 percent of the dead are young children.

Rich nations are not exempt. In June, the U.S. government’s Global Change Science Program reported to Congress that damaging climate impacts are here and likely to get worse. Continued...

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Dressing for Copenhagen

by William S. Becker

In the Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, an Emperor goes out among his subjects in his underwear. Two swindlers posing as tailors have convinced him he’s wearing a suit made from cloth that’s invisible to anyone who is stupid. Not wanting to accept that he’s stupid, the Emperor parades through his empire believing he’s fully dressed.

It now is up to the U.S. Senate to make sure Uncle Sam is not only fully dressed, but dressed for success when he shows up in Copenhagen Dec. 7 to work on a global climate deal.

As far as wardrobes go, President Barack Obama and his team have done a pretty good job packing their suitcases with climate initiatives they’ve launched under their own authority this year. As The Economist puts it, “America will now not have to go naked into the conference chamber” at Copenhagen.

Even so, without an affirmative vote by the Senate on a respectable climate bill, Uncle Sam will be only half-dressed in the eyes of the global community. Continued...

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President Obama in Cophenhagen: The meeting his critics missed

by Janet Ritz

President Obama's trip to Copenhagen to support the Chicago Olympic bid has been pilloried by his critics who cite more pressing matters, such as the economy and war. What these critics have missed was that President Obama was in Copenhagen for exactly those two reasons: the economy and war. The economy because Chicago could have used the jobs and war because of the meeting between President Obama and the General Stanley McChrystal, the officer in charge of the war in Afghanistan.

President Obama squeezed a 25-minute council of war into his Copenhagen visit yesterday, meeting General Stanley McChrystal aboard Air Force One before returning to Washington.The general was summoned to the airborne White House on the day it was announced that four more British and American servicemen had died in Afghanistan. He was on his way back to Kabul from London, where he made a powerful public pitch for more troops to be sent to the battlefields.

Until yesterday, General McChrystal had been in direct contact with Mr Obama only twice since taking up his post as Nato commander in Kabul six months ago - once via video link to the Oval Office and then as a participant in a major Afghan strategy meeting on Wednesday, again via videolink.

If you haven't heard about that meeting, it might have been because it didn't play into the howls from the president's critics over the Olympics. But with a hot war raging in Afghanistan against those who attacked us on 9/11, it could have been one of his most important meetings. Continued...

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Hollywood Joins Politicians, Artists and Environmentalists in Hard-hitting UN Campaign to Combat Climate Change

by Joanna Benn

Climate change is here and threatens us all. That's the message from Hollywood actors, film directors, environmentalists and politicians in a new UN public service announcement series:

With less than 80 days to go until the crucial UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen, there is no time to lose in getting the message out.

The series is aimed a promoting public awareness and catalyzing action at the highest and humblest level to boost the prospects for a wide-ranging and transformative agreement in December's meeting. Continued...

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Making heads or tails of the G8 and the Major Economies Forum in Italy

by Jake Schmidt

If you aren't in Italy you might not realize, but two events are occurring on global warming pollution where leaders of the 17 largest emitting countries are trying to make progress in the run-up to Copenhagen (this December).

The first event is the annual Group of Eight (G8) which brings together the 8 largest industrialized countries and now regularly has global warming on the agenda (as I discussed last year here). The second is the "Leaders Summit" of the Major Economies Forum (as I discussedhere) which brings together the world's 17 largest emitting countries. -- The G8 declaration has been released on July 8th (available here) while the Major Economies Forum statement was released on July 9th (available here).

These meetings are notorious for taking small steps and are often criticized as being "big on grand statements and small on detailed actions". But how often do you get the leaders of the world's biggest countries in one place making joint political declarations? And given the critical need for Heads of Government to weigh-in if we are going to have any chance of success in Copenhagen (as I discussed here), these events come at an important juncture. Continued...

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