一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day9 passage7
Passage 7 Loopholes in Climate Deal Could Render It Useless
哥本哈根协议漏洞百出 《新科学家》
Let us predict that there will be a deal here in Copenhagen.
And that, at first sight, some of the numbers may look impressive.
Not enough to ward off dangerous global warming maybe,
but enough to satisfy diplomatic honour.
But the devil, as always, will be in the detail.
And numbers released by WWF yesterday stressed that loopholes in draft texts
could render a global deal worthless.
EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas supported
one of the group's key points.
WWF's headline statistic is that industrialised nations
may walk away from Copenhagen having signed up to a promise
to cut their emissions by as much as 20 per cent from 1990 levels,
[01:02]when in truth they have written themselves a cheque
[01:05]to increase emissions by 5 to 10 per cent.
[01:11]The leakiest of the loopholes is "hot air" the emissions permits
[01:16]that Russia and other east European countries
[01:20]were granted under the Kyoto Protocol
[01:23]but didn't use because their industries collapsed post-1990.
[01:30]The emissions of almost all of these nations have dropped
[01:34]by more than one third since 1990,
[01:38]and their governments have hidden the permits, whose value increases
[01:44]with growing pledges to cut global emissions.
[01:48]Now it looks like Russia and others
[01:52]will be allowed to sell them right through to 2020.
[01:57]EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas agrees
[02:02]that hot air is a major loophole.
[02:05]He estimates that there could be some 10.7 billion tonnes of hot air permits
[02:13]on offer in 2012. That's roughly one third global annual emissions
[02:21]and nearly three times the EU's emissions.
[02:25]This is huge. It means the EU could compensate all its promised cuts
[02:33]between 2012 and 2020 with hot air
[02:39]even if it ups its promise from 20 to 30 per cent of 1990 emissions
[02:46]in the final days of the Copenhagen talks.
[02:50]Other loopholes, carbon compensation for instance, are familiar.
[02:56]Done well, compensation allows rich nations to keep carbon out of
[03:02]the atmosphere more cheaply. Done badly,
[03:07]they are little more than carbon fraud,
[03:10]allowing countries to concede their emissions by making small investments
[03:16]in low-carbon energy projects in faraway lands,
[03:20]many of which were going to happen anyway.
[03:24]The European Union has already announced plans to make half a billion tonnes
[03:31]in emissions reductions through compensation in developing countries
[03:37]between 2012 and 2020. Other nations could triple that figure, says WWF.
[03:48]There is a similarly sized loophole in the rules governing
[03:53]how countries can claim credit for avoiding emissions
[03:57]by managing forests or farming soils to retain carbon.
[04:03]And finally, there is the matter of the start-date for measuring new targets.
[04:10]By juggling their baseline dates, WWF warns,
[04:15]countries like the US and Canada,
[04:18]which have greatly increased their emissions
[04:21]since 1990 could effectively concede those increases.