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There will be a lot of spin from the White House and others about how the unsurprising but disappointing failure in Copenhagen is a “meaningful agreement, a “step forward,” or a “continuation of the dialogue.”  Thank goodness for Friends of the Earth, who are not afraid to tell the truth:

Friends of the Earth U.S. Reaction: Sham Deal Requires Nothing, Accomplishes Nothing

Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries. This is not a strong deal or a just one — it isn’t even a real one. It’s just repackaging old positions and pretending they’re new. The actions it suggests for the rich countries that caused the climate crisis are extraordinarily inadequate. This is a disastrous outcome for people around the world who face increasingly dire impacts from a destabilizing climate.

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The devastation will extend to those of us who live in wealthy countries. If we cannot find a way to cooperate with others to produce a real agreement to solve this problem, climate change impacts will devastate the U.S. economy, undermine our security, and inflict irreparable harm on future generations.

The failure to produce anything meaningful in Copenhagen must serve as a wake up call to all who care about the future. It is a call to action. Corporate polluters and other special interests have such overwhelming influence that rich country governments are willing to agree only to fig leaf solutions. This is unacceptable, and it must change.

Recently, we created a Green Committee at work. Even though we are an environmental organization, we realized that we could be doing a better job at a few things. For example, why doesn’t the office have a green bin, even though the county has a composting program for green waste?

A few people in the office asked us to specifically look at carbon offsets, and whether we recommended purchasing them for air travel. The New York Times published an article on the subject last month, titled Paying More for Flights Eases Guilt, Not Emissions. Their conclusion:

Yahoo and the House of Representatives decided to stop buying offsets, deciding their money was better spent investing in energy efficiency improvements.

Here is a quick list of some of the available information and guidance on carbon offsets from a friend at Friends of the Earth:

• Clean Air Cool Planet was one of the first to come out with a Consumer’s Guide to Offsets. People still use it a lot, although it is getting dated.
• The Suzuki Foundation has a newer 2009 Carbon Offset Guide for the Canadian market, but which should be helpful for US groups too.
• My grad alma mater Tufts published research on carbon offsets in an April 2007 paper. It is a couple of years old now, but still informative. Mostly oriented towards air travel, the authors rate both carbon footprint calculators and offset programs.
• GreenAmerica has some helpful tips: don’t buy tree-planting offsets (too difficult to ensure permanent sequestration); or from exchanges like the Chicago Climate Exchange (puts your money into carbon commodities, rather than directly funding projects; DriveNeutral, in SF is one of those)
• For something really different, instead of donating money so that your carbon footprint can be “neutralized” tit-for-tat, you may consider donating money to grassroots groups working against fossil fuels. San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has one of these non-offsets programs.

Here’s an alarming and important piece by George Monbiot, an environment journalist in the UK, published in the British newspaper The Guardian on November 20th. The Urgent Threat to World Peace is….Canada. He concludes, “The harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a century.”

Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

This week, CARB, or the California Air Resources Board released a draft of the state’s cap and trade program to limit the emission of CO₂ from major polluters. From the original passage of California’s landmark global warming bill AB32 in 2005, cap and trade was intended as a centerpiece for reducing the state’s contribution to global warming. KQED’s Climate Watch has a few details, including some enviros’ disappointment that CARB has not spelled out some of the most pernicious details, including auctioning of allowances (who gets their existing level of pollution grandfathered in, and how much do polluters pay for the right to pollute), offsets (can I pay for a re-forestation project in Borneo instead of making actual changes at my plant?), and markets (are we seriously thinking of allowing hedge funds to create new exotic financial instruments called “carbon derivatives”?).

A group of scientists has released an update to the IPCC‘s 2007 Report, called the Copenhagen Diagnosis. It includes “policy-relevant climate science published since […] the last IPCC report” and is intended to guide policymakers who will meet for climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Sea Level Rise Projections from the Copenhagen Diagnosis

Overall, it indicates what many scientists already know: the Fourth Assessment Report underestimates many of the anthropogenic climate changes that are happening and likely to continue. Specifically, ice is melting faster in Antarctica and Greenland than was predicted, contributing to global sea level rise about 80% higher than earlier projections. The latest forecasts predict sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit by this time. In order to avoid the worst impacts, we must move to de-carbonize our economy, and global emissions must decline rapidly within the next five to ten years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change

“Carbon dioxide emissions cannot be allowed to continue to rise if humanity intends to limit the risk of unacceptable climate change. The task is urgent and the turning point must come soon. If we are to avoid more than 2 degrees Celsius warming, which many countries have already accepted as a goal, then emissions need to peak before 2020 and then decline rapidly.”

–Professor Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA