March 29, 2024

I.H.T. Special Report: Business of Green: U.N. Climate Talks Promise Little Drama

The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change this year, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar, promises to be a more staid affair than the three previous sessions — in Copenhagen in 2009; Cancún, Mexico, in 2010; and Durban, South Africa, last year. While there is always the potential for a diplomatic disaster at any negotiation involving 194 countries, the agenda for the two-week Doha convention includes an array of highly technical matters but nothing that is likely to bring the process to a screaming halt.

“There’s pretty broad agreement that after three very high-key meetings, this is a far lower-intensity summit,” said Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’ll be all kinds of haggling, but there are no particularly huge minefields there.”

Despite the occasional chaos at Copenhagen, Cancún and Durban, negotiators achieved a number of significant steps, including pledges by most major countries to reduce their emissions of climate-altering gases, a promise by rich nations to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help more vulnerable states adapt to climate change, a system for verifying emissions cuts and programs to help slow deforestation.

The delegates in Doha hope to firm up these promises and create the concrete means to fulfill them.

“We hope that in Doha we will conclude the design phase of all these institutional arrangements and catapult them into implementation,” said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who serves as executive secretary of the U.N. climate convention. “It is high time, because we are so far behind our targets in every single report. The international response has not been enough.”

Last week, the U.N. Environment Program said the world was unlikely to meet the United Nations’ stated goal of keeping global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). The group said the current pledges were too weak and the rise in heat-trapping emissions was so fast that the world risked falling further behind without swift and ambitious new action.

In Durban last year, delegates affirmed the two degree Fahrenheit target and, after a contentious marathon negotiating session, signed a pledge to conclude a new global climate change treaty by 2015 to take effect starting in 2020.

Whether that accord can be reached remains an open question. The Copenhagen summit meeting three years ago, with more than 100 heads of government on hand, dissolved into failure on the final night. Delegates this time have three years’ planning time to fashion a new treaty, but the hugely difficult issues of national sovereignty, compliance verification and equity between rich and poor nations will not easily be resolved, no matter how much time is available.

Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute, said the success of the talks would hinge on the approach of the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters and most vibrant economies, the United States and China.

China has led the world in adoption of low-carbon energy sources, but also consumes growing quantities of dirty-burning coal every year. Its new leadership has given few signals on how it intends to approach the U.N. climate process, Ms. Morgan noted, but previous Chinese leaders have resisted any international regime that they perceive as limiting China’s economic growth.

As for the United States, Ms. Morgan said she hoped that the re-elected Obama administration would commit to a new international regime with a renewed strategy and a commitment to take domestic action consistent with its international pledges and its support of the two degree target.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/business/energy-environment/un-climate-talks-promise-little-drama.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

U.S.D.A. Ruling on Bluegrass Stirs Cries of Lax Regulation

The department said that an herbicide-tolerant Kentucky bluegrass being developed by Scotts Miracle-Gro was not subject to federal regulation because its creation did not entail use of any plant pests.

The decision, issued late Friday, frees Scotts to sell the grass, which is meant for lawns, without federal approval. The company also does not need federal permits to conduct field trials, even though a different type of genetically engineered grass escaped from company test plots in the past and established itself in the wild.

The genetically engineered bluegrass contains a gene that allows it to tolerate the widely used herbicide Roundup, also known as glyphosate. That allows the chemical to be sprayed to kill weeds without harming the grass.

Michael C. Gregoire, who oversees biotechnology crop regulation at the Agriculture Department, said in an interview Wednesday that the ruling did not represent “a change in policy or a relaxing or abandoning of the regulation of G.E. crops.” He said other genetically engineered crops, like a petunia, had been exempted from regulation in the past.

Still, the decision shocked some critics of biotechnology crops. “It’s a blatant end-run around regulatory oversight,” said George Kimbrell, senior lawyer at the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group.

Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said other companies might follow the same strategy, putting the Agriculture Department “out of the game of regulation.”

The critics say there have been other signs that the Agriculture Department has been looking to weaken regulation, like a proposed pilot project that would let companies provide more input into the environmental assessments of their crops.

While some environmental groups say regulation is too lax, some biotechnology executives and academic plant scientists say it is unnecessarily rigorous and slow, impeding development of important new crops.

The situation with the Kentucky bluegrass arises because genetically engineered crops are regulated under rules pertaining to plant pests.

The rules are really meant for pathogens and parasites, not corn stalks. Still, they could be stretched to cover the crops because most of them contain a snippet of DNA from a plant virus that functions as a genetic on-switch. And the foreign gene is often inserted using a bacterium that can cause a disease in plants.

But in creating its bluegrass, Scotts deliberately avoided using any material from plant pests. The herbicide resistance gene and the genetic on-switch came from other plants and were fired into the grass’s DNA with a gene gun, rather than being carried in by a bacterium.

The company then sent a letter to the Agriculture Department in September, arguing that the grass was therefore not subject to regulation.

The Agriculture Department agreed. It also declined to regulate the bluegrass as a noxious weed, denying a request from the Center for Food Safety.

Richard Shank, chief environmental officer at Scotts, said the company’s strategy “wasn’t designed specifically to get around regulations or anything like that. It just made more sense. There was a lot of concern about using plant pest materials in biotechnology and we wanted to get away from that.”

Still, the strategy means that the bluegrass will not encounter the regulatory problems that have beset Scotts’s genetically engineered creeping bentgrass, which does contain material from plant pests.

That grass, meant for golf courses, is still awaiting approval eight years after the company submitted its application.

Scotts was fined $500,000 in 2007 after the bentgrass escaped from field test sites in central Oregon and established itself in the wild. More recently the grass, presumably from a field test in Idaho, was found growing in nearby southern Oregon.

Mr. Shank said limited field testing of the Kentucky bluegrass would begin soon but the product would not come to market for years.

In a letter to Scotts on Friday, Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, told the company to work with others to make sure that the grass did not spread where it was unwanted, for example, pastures where organic cows graze. Mr. Shank said Scotts would do that.

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said many of the genetically engineered crops now under development did not use viral material so they could conceivably escape regulation.

But L. Val Giddings, an industry consultant, disagreed, saying most crops continue to use material from plant pests. Monsanto, the leading developer of genetically engineered crops, said products in its current pipeline would be regulated.

Stanley H. Abramson, a Washington lawyer who has represented biotech companies, said that genetically engineered food crops would not be accepted by the market without government approval. So only developers of nonedible plants like grass or flowers might try to exempt themselves from regulation, he said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c0c85f31c5ddaa357b38c30810656556