By Ryan Dicovitsky
16 October 2009 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: With two months to go until world leaders put pen to paper for a historic climate change agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, tensions are running high and the international community is trying to ensure a comprehensive and effective deal.
This week, a panel of experts and United Nations officials involved in the negotiation process appeared before the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly, reporting on the state of climate negotiations and recommending how to address energy use in developing nations.
“Many developing countries have pilot programs to support renewables but a big push of the scale needed to bring down the costs dramatically will require international support,” Tariq Banuri, director for the Division of Sustainable Development at the United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) and a widely respected climate change expert, told MediaGlobal.
Financial support for greener technologies in developing nations is but one issue the international community has yet to agreed on in the lead up to Copenhagen. Banuri emphasized what he views as a sustainable framework for new energy use: public investment.
“In my judgment, the private sector needs a level playing field and predictable incentives,” Banuri explained to MediaGlobal. “An irreversible commitment by the public sector (national or international) can create the requisite degree of predictability.”
He continued, “If investments are stimulated through targeted subsidies for the most dynamic sectors, and if the total volume of production is scaled up rapidly…these subsidies would self-eliminate in a short span of time—as little as ten years if the scale of expansion is high.”
According to Massimo Tavoni, a senior researcher at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and research associate at the Princeton Environmental Institute, the poorest people across the globe could still use fossil fuels without further harming the environment. In doing so, he said, they would be able to raise their levels of development at a sustainable rate.
Tavoni told MediaGlobal that half of global emissions are generated by a mere 11 percent of the world population. “Such disparities,” he said, “need to be evaluated and discussed extensively, and national responsibilities to the global problem of climate change should be linked to the actions of all their citizens, not only of the average ones.”
This stark inequality in energy use means that the world’s poor would not be making much of an impact by burning fossil fuels. “We estimate that in 2030 one third of the world population will live with less than [one ton of] CO2,” said Tavoni. “Allowing these three billion people to meet their basic energy demands with fossil fuels would increase emissions by only 1.5 [gigatons of] CO2, a small number compared to the mitigation job that is required by that date.”