Author: Eric Knight, Oxford
Financing the transformation of the global economy may yet prove to be a key lever in brokering agreement between developed and developing countries on emission caps and targets in the current international climate negotiations. China, India, and a number of other Asian countries in the G77 are increasingly focusing on multilateral finance for technology transfer and development as a cornerstone to any agreement.
In a report released at the Bonn negotiations in June this year, the Expert Group on Technology Transfer (EGTT) reported that current estimated global expenditure on commercialising mitigation technologies is between US$77-164 billion annually. Read more…
Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University
As Michael Cucek wrote last week, Japan has witnessed the subdued brutality of the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) Government Revitalisation Unit (GRU) taking back 1.4 trillion Yen from various extremely unhappy NGOs and bureaucrats. This process of creative destruction is rarely seen in Japan, and while comparisons to the Meiji Restoration by some DPJ politicians are exaggerations, the fact is that Japan is witnessing a real shake up in power distribution. And as in any such shake up, there are winners and losers.
In this case the winners are the DPJ over the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Ministry of Finance over the other Ministries. Let me talk about the DPJ first. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale
Prime Minister Rudd’s prominence in the Copenhagen meeting on climate change has not stopped the political process in Australia from staggering decisively backward from the introduction of an emissions trading scheme in Australia, as the rest of the world inches towards an international agreement to cut carbon output. Although it’s unlikely that Copenhagen will produce that agreement, the announcement last week of US targets and Chinese initiatives in addition to the participation of both President Obama and Prime Minister Wen in the meeting enhances the prospect of movement towards one. Stephen Howes, in this week’s lead, notes that many in Australia, including the stalling forces in the opposition, argue that we should ‘wait for Copenhagen’ before legislating an emissions trading scheme. This approach, he suggests, though apparently grounded in hard-nosed realism, is naïve. Read more…
