asia

Doha snapshots 5: Turkish Ambassador's climate confusion / Tweets everywhere / Monckton evicted / Aviva builds in ESG / Amazing fact of the day

Submitted on Sat, 2012-12-08 12:19

At one of the final side events by the Turkish industry and business association, TÜSİAD, the talk is at first all about carbon. But carbon credits are not going to be a big driver of emission reductions in Turkey.

 

Turkey is growing fast, and energy demand is growing even faster as the middle class expands; but 70% of primary energy supply is dependent on fossil fuel imports, largely from sometimes capricious Russia. These fuel imports are responsible for the bulk of Turkey's sizeable current account deficit.

Doha 3: India supports GCF leveraging / Torben wants Climate Bonds / What Brooks said to Barker / UK goes for emission-target wrecking gas / And Bopha blasts / Bianca Jagger tweets forests / WB rpt says ME to get hotter (is that possible?) / Amazing fact

Submitted on Thu, 2012-12-06 08:17

Big news: India is apparently OK with the Green Climate Fund being used to guarantee loans for climate finance – exactly what we’ve been pushing hard for at Climate Bonds. India’s lead climate negotiator Mira Mehrishi said it “would be extremely welcome because we are always looking to leverage money that’s available”.

 

She even said that India may consider agreeing to rules set down by the fund! Expect that to include removing remaining fossil fuel subsidies.

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Doha snapshots: Negotiations? pffft / IEA+WB+UNEP+PwC+WMO: big gun reports fire away / meanwhile, in Uganda ....

Submitted on Tue, 2012-12-04 06:23

- I’m in Qatar, a place slightly smaller than Connecticut, prosaically described in my travel guide app as “mainly flat and barren desert, covered with loose sand and gravel”. There’s not a lot of desert left in its capital, Doha, just a vast sea of choked-up highways (serious SUV traffic!) and low-rise buildings punctuated by monumentalist skyscrapers, all thanks to huge natural gas resources. Pity we're going to have to leave a large part of that gas in the ground if we're going to avoid catastrophic climate change.

 

Painful truth from Jeffrey Sachs / Mongolia to Japan grid will halve Japanese energy prices / China $284m wind bond / MIGA needs a push / IEA supports climate bonds / Korea shoots for 2% of GDP going into green growth

Submitted on Fri, 2012-05-11 01:52

> In Korea, in the centre of dynamic Seoul, Jeffrey Sachs has just spelt out the painful truth in his speech to the Global Green Growth Summit:

“We are in deep trouble. Things are not working to fix the biggest problem we’ve had to fix. We have failed to do what, 20 years ago, we set out to do. We have squandered that 20 years.

This is an issue where you can feel good about a demonstration project here and there; but the scale of the impact is overwhelming us all.