News
News
Ten Downing Street
GORDON Brown's global warming battle was branded a sham yesterday after his own buildings came BOTTOM of the energy efficiency league.
Nearly a third of government sites were given the worst possible G rating, including the HQ of energy regulator Ofgem and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
The PM did little better with 10 Downing Street rated E.
A study of Display Energy Certificates showed fewer than one in 20 buildings has an A or B rating. And one in six even broke the law by not displaying ratings, compulsory since 2008.
A government spokesman said it was "on course" to cut its buildings' CO2 emissions by 12.5 per cent by next March.
Countdown to Copenhagen
In December, delegates from 192 countries and regions will be involved in two weeks of talks in Copenhagen, with the aim of establishing a new global treaty on climate change. The Copenhagen talks mark the end of a two-year period of negotiations. Technically known as the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP15 for short, the talks take place within the framework of the UNFCCC, which was established at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, and which is an international environmental treaty aimed at stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would 'avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate.'
Updates have subsequently been made to the treaty - these have included setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual nations. The principal update so far has been the Kyoto Protocol, which was officially adopted in 1997, and came into force in 2005.
The Kyoto Protocol commits 37 industrialised countries (plus the European Union, but not including the United States) to reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases by five per cent on average in relation to 1990 levels. The Kyoto Protocol's targets are due to expire in 2012, however. Governments around the globe are therefore looking for a successor to the Kyoto agreement.
A draft negotiating text for finalisation at Copenhagen has been publicly circulated, and it has been discussed at a series of meetings before Copenhagen.
Members of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy have been involved in many different ways in the discussions leading up to the Copenhagen talks.
By following the links on this page, you can read the contributions that a number of different researchers who are connected with the CCCEP are making to the pre-Copenhagen process.
Lord Stern. The World's Future is Being Decided this Weekend. The Observer, 18 October 2009.
The Countdown to Copenhagen Debate, Friday 13 November at the University of Leed
Bob Ward. Presentation at the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative side event, 'Climate Risk Insurance and Institutional Options', at the Barcelona Climate Change Talks, 2 November 2009.