India

The scene outside the global climate talks in Copenhagen is a cornucopia of innovative artwork, inspiring panel discussions and provocative characters with fascinating stories to tell, the InvestigateWest team reports.

In fact, there were so many interesting events and people that the sheer number made it hard to focus on any one today, InvestigateWest correspondent Alexander Kelly told me by Skype just now.

But he’s focused enough to know that he will be doing a piece on the critique of cap-and-trade, which many economists and politicians promote but which many environmentalists in Copenhagen this week oppose.

[caption id="attachment_6879" align="alignleft" width="226" caption="In this panel discussion at a symposium known as KlimatForum09, Hanne Marstrand Strong, president of the Manitou Foundation, based in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado speaks of her group, which provides land grants and financial support to religious organizations and environmental groups. InvestigateWest photo by Mark Malijan."][/caption]

And he’s considering writing about ocean acidification, which is a big concern to the maritime community of the Pacific Northwest.

Folks -- are there climate-related topics you’d like to hear about that probably are being discussed in Copenhagen?

You listen to Lester Brown, and you have to wonder what the big fuss is all about at the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. I mean, the guy is saying we don't really have to fight over this, because the technologies available right now could cut greenhouse gas emissions by ... drumroll, please... 80 percent by 2020. Yes! (It really puts into perspective President Obama's pledge today to cut emissions 17 percent over the same time period, eh?)  

[caption id="attachment_6332" align="alignright" width="226" caption="Lester Brown "][/caption]

Now, we've written about Brown before, and we may be guilty of featuring him entirely too much, but the man is talking sense. Today he was doing that right here in Rain City on KUOW's Weekday with Steve Scher, revealing how this seemingly magical transformation can happen. A couple of quick examples from his latest tome*, the unassumingly named Plan B 4.0 --  Mobilizing to Save Civilization: 

• You want energy efficiency? We got energy efficiency. Replace the world's incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and you get a 75 percent reduction in energy use. Replace them with Light Emitting Diode, or LED, lights and combine that with smart technology that, for instance, turns lights out when a room is empty. Then the savings is 90 percent. (Los Angeles is replacing its 130,000 streetlights with LEDs at a savings of $11 million a year.
  

Events are beginning to move at warp speed as the December talks aimed at reaching a global climate-change treaty swing into view not far ahead on the calendar:

• India and China have inked a pact committing each country to doing stuff to combat climate change, my old colleagues at United Press International report. Recall that the Kyoto Protocol's absence of emissions limits on developing nations -- and especially those two countries -- was the ostensible reason the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected the treaty. This five-year deal between China and India doesn't have a lot of teeth in it. The significance is that it signals that India won't bolt from the so-called Group of 77 developing nations, as had been rumored.  (Grist.org also cobbled together a short item based on wire reports.)
• President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao spoke by phone this week about the climate talks, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, quoted in the same New Dehli-datelined UPI dispatch that reported the China-India deal.
• We reported from the recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference that Obama administration officials already were losing hope for a climate deal in Copenhagen. Well, now it looks like the rest of the world is also starting to think about Plan B. Nature.com's Jeff Tollefson reports that those pushing for a deal have "tempered (their) expectations and begun to look for a graceful exit. ... Even staunch optimists are now rethinking their definition of success in Copenhagen." A lot will depend on an upcoming negotiating session Nov.