Un Leader Fears Second Economic Slowdown
The United Nations’s climate leader said the world must avoid a "cheap and dirty" fix for the economy that could cause major damage to the fight against global warming.
Yvo de Boer said the world risked a second financial crisis if leaders across the globe reacted to economic slowdown by building cheap, high-polluting coal-fired power plants that would possibly have to be left behind if the damage to the climate was overwhelming.Â
"What concerns me most is that the financial crisis will lead to a second set of bad investment decisions," he said.
"I hope that the second financial crisis is not going to have its origins in bad energy loans," he said.
De Boer said short-sighted investments could lead to a need to build new low-carbon solar or wind power plants in 10-20 years.
The UN is trying to reach a new climate pact by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which forces 37 industrial nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions until 2012.
De Boer said the economic slowdown was a chance to improve the world economy.
"We must now focus on the opportunities for green growth that can put the global economy onto a stable and sustainable path," he said.
It will be an "incredible challenge" to reach an agreement within just a year in Copenhagen and negotiators had to review what was achievable, he said.
Talks are complicated by the change of U.S. President to Barack Obama in January 2009, but de Boer praised Obama’s goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 as "ambitious."
U.S. emissions are now 14 percent above 1990.
"In a way I’m pretty happy with what he’s already committed to do," de Boer said of Obama’s stated goals.
An economic slowdown in Europe has exposed doubts about the costs of an EU goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
U.N. host Poland, which gets 93 percent of its electricity from coal, and Italy are leading a drive for concessions in a package meant to be agreed at a December 11-12 summit of EU leaders in Brussels.
The Poznan meeting examines a new climate treaty, based on an 84-page compilation of ideas on ways to slow rising temperatures that could bring more droughts, disease, floods and rising seas.
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