Shown above are Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah (Left) and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The former; once the director of the office of the Minister of Finance and Petroleum, once the director of the Office of the Minister of Interior and the Acting Minister of Finance and Petroleum, once the Minister of Energy and Industry, and curently director of the Gulf Helicopters Corporation, member of the Directors Board of Gulf Airways Corporation and current director of Qatar Petroleum, is a very down to earth guy with concerns for global climate issues. Enough so that this once OPEC president has become president again of the COP 18 theater show. Although the Qataris have only attended two COPs, this seemed…
From Sarah:
Last fall, I took my favorite law school class. Karl Coplan, an expert in environmental law and the co-director of Pace Law School’s esteemed Environmental Litigation Clinic, taught a course on the Clean Water Act. He ran the course as a simulation: a quarter of the class represented industry, a quarter environmental activists, a quarter government lawyers or scientists, and the last group was administrative law judges. As the class’s EPA General Counsel, I wrote an internal review on a proposed National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit. I felt good about handing that paper in, but I was marked down for allowing chlorine discharge to continue and for limiting too strictly aluminum and manganese discharges.
At Yale this fall, I am taking Physical Sciences for Environmental Management. Shimi Anisfeld –…
I was one of many surprised when Qatar was chosen to host this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP). Qatar is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas producer and home to the world’s third largest natural gas reserves. The country’s pro tennis tournament is the Qatar ExxonMobil Open. An OPEC member chairing a United Nations climate change conference? Simply put, carbon has made modern Qatar what it is today. Sixty percent of the nation’s GDP comes from oil and natural gas. Due to high prices and increased output, the country is booming. While some were disillusioned with the selection, Qatar is actually the perfect place to host a COP. Ignoring fossil fuel production and consumption isn’t going to achieve much and OPEC nations have a role to play. Bill…
Doha, Qatar: "mosquitos" (willing participants at UNFCCC) are flying and "breeding grounds" (Red Cross Climate Change Centre team members and myself) are waiting for "mosquitos" to return to lay an egg [card]. Once the "mosquitos" return to the "breeding ground" with an egg [card] they then seek out more humans to bite in order to lay another egg [card].
On the other front "medics" (other team members) are waiting to give out cure/clear out [cards] to humans bitten by "mosquitos." Once those previously bitten have a cured/clear out [card] they then seek out the "breeding grounds" to clear out the egg [cards]. The battle rages on!
Our activity seeks to create conversations and human interactions via game play. Follow @helloAntidote to see how…
As part of our project with Latvian NGO homo ecos:, Kathryn Wright, Bunyod Holmatov, and I are keeping an eye on topics here at COP18 that are important to Latvia. Aviation and maritime transport (shipping) are vital to the Latvian economy, which relies heavily on the sector to maintain connections to other nations in the EU and around the world. The UNFCCC has expressed interest in taking action to limit emissions from this sector, as it is both carbon-intensive and global in nature. Parties agree that regulation of aviation and shipping should occur through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and International Maritime Organization (IMO), but disagree over what “signal” the UNFCCC should send to the ICAO and IMO…
Though my personal Twitter account languishes from disuse, this semester I have started tweeting actively under the FES handle. In Doha, I've gotten to put this skill to serious work. Through the International Organizations and Conferences class, David Emmerman, Bunyod Holmatov and I partnered with homo ecos, a Latvian NGO whose primary focus is generating environmental awareness and social movements in Latvia. Our role was to help in climate policy research and capacity building for the larger Latvian NGO community. To do this, we produced a policy paper about key issues for Latvia at COP18 (Short primer: http://homoecos.lv/uploads/files/COP18_Short_Primer(1).pdf). The paper was intended for NGOs and ministries and distributed to the Latvian delegation. We also agreed to facilitate a social media campaign for…
Before I started my graduate studies in August, I was campaigning incessantly with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to drive the Rio+20 Earth Summit process towards real actions and accountability. I am carrying on the same mission to the UN Climate Conference in Doha with fellow students from Yale, but with a new tool at hand – a smartphone and web app called DecisionMakr - to crowdsource accountability.
Why am I obsessed with accountability?
We have had exactly 20 years of negotiations since the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, out of which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was officially born. We have had a plethora of summits, conferences, intersesssionals, “informal informals”, and have spent billions of…
The COP18 UN climate negotiations have kicked off without too much fanfare. Host country Qatar is hosting its largest ever conference, with an expected 17,000 participants, including 1,500 media (although I heard only about half of these anticipated media actually got accredited). So far, expectations are quite muted for the conference, with Doha meant to be mainly an "implementation" Conference of Parties (COP) meeting that will not end in the high drama and pressure of its predecessors, Durban, Cancun, and Copenhagen.
Hey Everyone! Hope your Thanksgivings (for U.S. students) were most excellent—filled with good food and good company!
I’m back with the latest from FES, continuing with more Featured Alumni. This time, I’ve got Dan Berkman, MEM ’12, taking some time to talk about his experience at FES, and the work he is now doing on disaster preparedness in Washington, DC (a very, very popular destination for FES alumni).
Dan Berkman was one of my good friends at FES, and he very quickly acquired the name Disaster Dan around campus. Contrary to what you might think, Disaster Dan was so named because of his ability to FIX disasters, not to cause them (usually). While he was at FES, he exemplified the kind of entrepreneurial attitude that does so well at the school, and took…
This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post and The Metric, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy's blog.
Expectations for the global climate negotiations taking place over the next two weeks in Doha, Qatar, are dismally low, and major political transitions in China and the United States – the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases – further temper hope for any kind of game-changing proposal. So what are the more than 7,000 civil society members and 1,500 journalists(myself included) in attendance going to do to make their opinions count and to hold their governments accountable for accomplishing something in Doha?
Well, there’s an app for that, and it’s called DecisionMakr.
Having attended many of these negotiations in the past, I question the value of emitting carbon…
