Wampum

We've a year to get a new global climate-change treaty – one that picks up where Kyoto leaves off – and that year begins today, in Poznan, Poland, with talks for the next 12 days. How much to cut GHG and who pays.

I came across Ardeshir Cowasjee oped piece in Dawn a few days ago, the part of the paper not eaten by the Mumbai mass-murder suicide operation by a Lashkar-e-Taiba group, In self-destruct mode? He draws the link from Pakistan (and India's) increase in coal use, to China, and the cost of coal-fired energy.

Some weeks ago, Sepa held an EIA public hearing for two allied projects at Sonda-Jherruck in Thatta district, some 160 km from Karachi: a coal (dirty/poor quality) mine with a production of 1.8 million tons per annum, and a 405 MW mine-mouth steam power plant to be established by a Chinese firm, Global Energy Development (Pvt) Ltd, a subsidiary of China National Machinery Import & Export Corporation (CMC).

Coal is a dirty fuel and is used extensively in China with terrible environmental consequences. For example, Linfen, in the heart of China’s coal/industrial belt, is one of the most polluted places on earth. The World Bank situates 16 out of 20 of the world’s worst polluted cities in China. Worldwide, the extraction and combustion of coal has severe health and environmental impacts. In the United States, 47 workers were killed in coal mine accidents in 2006, while China’s State Work Safety Supervision Administration reported a staggering 4,746 deaths. Pollution emitted by coal-burning power plants and factories affects the health of millions of people. A recent World Bank study identified coal combustion as China’s largest source of outdoor air pollution, to which it attributed 350,000 to 400,000 premature annual deaths.

Inadequate details were provided in the EIA reports, with the proponents promising to do whatever was necessary to mitigate any adverse affects of the mining (rehabilitation of land, acid mine drainage, control of dust and noise pollution, etc) or the power plant (control of oxides of sulphur SOx and nitrogen NOx, reduction of greenhouse gases CO2 and methane, decrease in fly-ash and particulates, etc). Also presented were features of a previous showcase project undertaken in Bangladesh, at Barapukuria.

President-elect Obama has recently pledged to reduce US greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by an additional 80 percent by 2050. Kick the can down the road and leave the leadership for the next president. Politics as usual, free of meaningful change. The Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions among industrial countries to fall an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, so whether the Bush/Cheney Regime or the Obama/Biden Administration is dictating US carbon policy, neither is meeting the goal set at Kyoto. This probably explains why there are no Cabinet positions which require Al Gore to make climate and energy policy consistent with the climate and energy policy of the outgoing Bush/Cheney Regime and its climate and energy policy continuation, the Obama/Biden Administration.

Not Transportation. Not Interior. Not Energy. Not even freaking Education.