Climate Discussions Continue
Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change continues.
Our friends at SES are making the most of this opportunity to travel to Europe. Not only did they fundraise their own travel expenses and are staying with host families, they are also reporting back detailed outlines of their experiences to our community. Here are a few highlights:
December 7th marked the beginning of an annual event called Fossil of the Day awards, held by Climate Action Network. They present awards to different countries based on the poor solutions they’ve suggested during climate talks that day. One of our student bloggers was shocked to hear that on the first day of the awards, a train-loving bicycle-doting health conscious Sweden was amongst one of the winners of this sarcastic award.
Land scarcity and land use was the topic of a meeting another student, blogged about. His attention was caught by Dr. Fredrik Hedenus, who suggests a tax on meat to mitigate methane output, which is a leading green house gas.
“Hedenus noted that Methane sources are non-point emission sources and, as stated earlier, this makes it difficult to control and regulate than CO2. Our best option then, is to begin with the strongest most defined known source, livestock. Hedenus suggested that, because these are non-point emission sources, we must implement output based policies. The C.C.C. estimates that benefit-cost ratios could reach approximately 2 through a beef meat tax in OECD countries. This tax would reduce global emissions by 30-70 million CO2 ton equivalents per year by GWP calculations over the next 100 years.”
Read ses-climate.blogspot.com for more about the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cophenhagen, Denmark from Apple Valley high school students from SES.
