Peaceful Responses: UNFCCC brought nations together to peacefully negotiate a shared solution to dealing with climate risks

What If Climate Change Triggers Cooperation, Not Conflict? | Diana Liverman: "We have a climate convention (UNFCCC) that has brought nations together to peacefully negotiate a shared solution to dealing with climate risks and an unprecedented series of international scientific assessments - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - that brings together thousands of researchers to communicate climate risks to policy makers. Despite criticisms of lack of progress, the climate negotiations have resulted in transfer of funds from richer to poorer countries, collective efforts to reduce emissions, and intensive collaboration to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. And when climatic disasters strike, such as Hurricane Haiyan, we see outpourings of humanitarian response founded in the long tradition of cooperation across international boundaries in response to hazards and the military helping with peaceful emergency response and recovery.

So, conflict or cooperation? To decide, we need better-designed studies, more rigorous analysis and less melodramatic claims. We need studies that hypothesize peaceful resolution to tensions connected to resource competition and climate change, and statistical studies that use research designs that are open to the possibilities that climate extremes might have no influence on conflict and might, in fact, have positive outcomes. Rather than raise fears of conflict, scholars and strategists should seek best practices for cooperative and peaceful responses to the stresses of climate change."



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UPDATE: “Transformational” Deep Decarbonization Climate Strategies, Global Solution to Climate Change

“Transformational” Deep Decarbonization Climate Strategies (video): "Deep Decarbonization is the first global cooperative program to identify practical pathways for major industrial economies toward a low-carbon world economy by 2050. Unlike many recent assessments, it focuses potential solutions rather than agonizing statistics and definitions. In this sense, says Laurence Tubiana, the French Ambassador for climate change, co-chair of SDSN, and IDDRI founder, it is a “transformational milestone.”

From the report introduction:

The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) is a collaborative initiative to understand and show how individual countries can transition to a low-carbon economy and how the world can meet the internationally agreed target of limiting the increase in global mean surface temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius (°C)."



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UPDATE: AUSTRALIA: Cleaning up its Electricity Sector on a New Clean Coal Technology called DICE

The search for the clean coal holy grail - Background Briefing - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "That technology is called DICE—or Direct Injection Carbon Engine, a modified diesel engine running on a mix of coal and water—and it has just received $9 million in funding for stage one trials, including $1 million from the Victorian and Commonwealth governments.  

Ignite Energy Resources, a member of the DICE network, recently recieved a $20 million grant to produce liquid fuel for DICE engines from brown coal, among other things.

‘Minister Greg Hunt and Minister Ian Macfarlane for energy are very interested in DICE, because it offers the opportunity of reducing CO2 emissions for electricity from brown coal by 50 per cent, and it offers the opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions from black coals by around 30 per cent,’ says John White, chairman of the DICE Network and co-founder of Ignite."



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