Dire climate warning linked to China and India

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

ROME: The average global temperature will rise to a devastating level by 2030 if China and India do not begin curbing energy use and carbon emissions immediately, officials of the International Energy Agency predicted Wednesday.

Speaking at the World Energy Congress, the officials noted that 60 percent of the global increase in emissions from 2005 to 2030 would come from India and China. By next year, China will overtake the United States as the leader in carbon emissions, the agency predicts; some studies suggest that this has already occurred.

Citing a World Energy Outlook from the agency last week, the officials said that if current development trends continued unchanged, total carbon emissions would rise by 57 percent by 2030, leading to a global temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius, or 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2030.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations entity that presents its final report in Valencia, Spain, on Saturday, has estimated that global emissions would cause a warming of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Many scientists say 2 degrees is the threshold beyond which there would be significant social and economic disruption.

The agency officials said that by 2015, China, the United States and India would be ranked 1, 2 and 3 respectively in global emissions, accounting for more than half of the world's total, the officials said. "So without moving these three countries, we should expect no realistic results in reducing emissions," said Fatih Birol, chief economist of the agency and the report's chief author.

Such pronouncements by the agency in the past week have put new pressure on China and India, as well as the United States, to participate for the first time in global environmental treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol, that specify emissions limits. That treaty expires in 2012 and world leaders will meet in Bali, Indonesia, next month to develop a follow-up program.

China and India have resisted inclusion in global climate-change pacts, saying that emissions limits would be a severe handicap for their economies and efforts to improve the lives of citizens. The United States has refused to participate in plans that involve emissions caps, especially if developing countries are not included. Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, noted that emerging economies deserved help in environmental improvement, which is often costly. "It is a question of sharing the burden and how to do it. That is at the heart of the negotiations," he said by telephone.

Indeed, T. Sankaralingam, managing director of NTPC, India's largest utility, said climate concerns inevitably took a back seat in countries that were still trying to pull millions of people out of poverty. "The priority for our country is economic growth and accessibility to energy for the people," he said at the energy congress. "We need to build power plants, and transportation systems." He noted that 600 million people in India have no access to electricity. "People below the poverty line should not be denied the benefits of economic growth," he said.

Nobuo Tanaka, the designated executive director of the International Energy Agency, recognized the needs of people "striving for social and economic change" and the "concerted efforts" China and India have made recently to begin to address environmental problems. Still, he called the current trajectory "unacceptable." "We are all for China to grow, but we want it to grow with policies," he said. Who should bear responsibility for installing cleaner technologies in developing countries like India and China remains a huge open question.

"We in the developed world will have to help pay for the transformation not only in our own country but in other countries as well," said Kurt Yeager of World Energy Council Energy and Climate Change Study Group, USA.

But in recent weeks, agency officials have stressed that if a solution was not found to curb the growth of energy use and improve energy efficiency in India and China, the trend would become harder and harder to reverse. China and India are building huge numbers of power plants to meet energy over the next 10 years, and 90 percent will burn coal. Coal is a highly polluting but relatively inexpensive source of power, making it the choice for developing countries. While technology exists to make coal plants somewhat cleaner, it is expensive.

"What choices China and India make will be with us for 60 years," said Birol, the agency economist. "These are locked in investments."

Birol added: "Here in Europe in Brussels, in Paris, we talk about biofuels and photovoltaic cells. But in the world it is coal that increases most in the energy mix, especially in India in China." Likewise, choices made in construction and manufacturing today in developing countries will leave a long-lasting legacy. Cheap but low efficiency appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners being manufactured in countries like China to supply upwardly mobile populations will create emissions for years to come.

Measured in square meters, one half of the world's construction is in China, Birol said, and the quality of windows and walls is poor, so the resulting buildings waste enormous amounts of energy. "They will be with us for decades," he said.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)