Monday, November 30, 2009 10:03 AM
Need-To-Know Memo, Nov. 30
By Amy Harder, NationalJournal.com
1) Both the United States and China offered specific emissions targets for 2020 last week: The U.S. said it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels and China said it would lower its emissions relative to the size of its economy by 40 percent to 45 percent (Washington Post). While these announcements give new life to the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen next week, key details have yet to be resolved, including how much money industrialized countries would give poorer ones (Post).
2) Russia's insistence that it get credit for its emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol could complicate a new agreement. Some experts say that Russia's cuts from 1990 levels shouldn't count because they're attributable more to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy than to any particular green policies (Washington Post).
3) The battle over a peat swamp forest in Indonesia is emblematic of the challenges world leaders will face in Copenhagen when discussing ways to save forests. The peat forest is one of the world's biggest repositories of carbon dioxide; canals from surrounding rivers are draining and drying the land, which releases carbon into the atmosphere (New York Times).
4) Iran announced Sunday that it "plans to build 10 more nuclear facilities for enriching uranium." President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "they would produce nuclear fuel to provide 20,000 megawatts of energy by 2020, though Western officials suspect that Iran wants to build an atomic bomb" (Wall Street Journal).
5) "A crude oil and natural gas pipeline spilled an unknown amount of fuel at BP Plc's Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska, the state regulator said. The spill has affected 8,400 square feet (780 square meters) of tundra" (Bloomberg News).
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