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Press Roundtable VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: Thank you very much. I am Conrad Lautenbacher, the Administrator of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, commonly called NOAA. It’s a body of the U.S. Department of Commerce in the United States. I’m in Geneva basically to participate in the opening of the 15th World Congress of the WMO and to give them a report on the status of GEO, the Group on Earth Observations, which is what I’d like to talk about for just a few minutes here, and then I will turn it over to Professor José Achache who is the Director of the Secretariat for GEO. I am one of the four co-chairs of GEO, which is called the Group on Earth Observations. It is a ministerial level group. It now has the active support of 68 member countries and the EC, the European Commission, as well as 46 global and intergovernmental international organizations. These are the UN organizations such as the WMO, UNESCO, FAO, et cetera, that are interested in the use of observing systems and provide for economic and social benefits around the world. This organization is represented by countries from all regions of the world. The four co-chairs are the EC, China, South Africa and the United States. It has an Executive Committee of 12 nations including the four co-chairs that I mentioned. The organization is committed to developing what’s called GEOSS, the Global Earth Observing System of Systems. It’s a higher level combination of the types of observing systems that countries have and that other intergovernmental and international organizations, as I mentioned that are part of the group, work on and support and need to help them with their purposes and their missions. It takes the idea of reaching to a higher level for all of the systems that we have today, the pieces that we have. No matter how efficient each one of these pieces are, such as an atmospheric system or an oceanic system or a biological system or fisheries management, that if you could bring them together and create a global system, and then to have various layers, as I call them, geographic information system layers of this information, it will help us to address all sorts of things -- public health, weather, climate, energy, agriculture, clean water, planting, fisheries, management of life on earth and life in the ocean. It’s also an end-to-end system so it’s not just a collection of data. It’s an information system. It’s designed to provide information broadly to the policymakers as well as to average citizens around the world. It will help with development, it will help with economic progress, it will help provide equality around the world and the opportunities to develop efficiency and trade and commerce and wise use of resources. A couple of examples to mention to you are such things as malaria. Malaria is considered a health issue but in fact it is connected with the environment. We know very well, for instance, in Niger there is a clear correlation between rainfall and malaria. There are clear correlations between the atmospheric and land conditions that occur. And by working together in understanding all of the environmental factors that produce malaria you can predict ahead of time where and when these outbreaks will occur and you can make best use of your resources for inoculations, for bednets, for vector control of mosquitoes, et cetera. So it is a way to avoid reactive response to the kinds of diseases that we have today. Cholera, same conditions. Cholera is caused by temperature, rainfall, water depth, living marine organisms. The combination of scientific information from environmental factors -- physical, chemical, biological -- along with the understanding of the disease itself, the health factors, can help you provide all the information, you could build a global warning system for cholera and be able to deal with that. Water. In many cases people have too much of it and sometimes there’s not enough. Understanding how the water cycle works and being able to predict where droughts are going to occur months in advance gives you an advance on being able to deal with the agricultural issues. Air quality. Air knows no political boundaries. All nations are interested in good air quality. We’re interested in knowing where the various factors that change the quality of the air come from and how they can be corrected. Having accurate information for all nations will allow us to improve such things as tracking the health of the smoke and particles that come from wild fires; dust that carries meningitis -- where does it come from, where is it transported, how can we deal with it? So these forecasts for air quality worldwide would be very important. Global sea level change. We don’t have, for instance, a system which allows us to track on a real-time basis the changes in sea level rise. Much of it comes from projections and from scientific models. I want to mention one point here before I turn it over to José. We’ve just announced in the United States something called CarbonTracker. This is a climate tool to be able to look at the effectiveness of individual efforts to reduce or store carbon emissions so we’ll be able to track the natural uptake and release of carbon and compare it then to what the anthropogenic or manmade uptake is. The system is here to be able to provide the demonstration of what goes on in very fine detail. What we need to do now is populate the observing system. Most of the carbon measurements that we have today that populate it come from the United States and some selected other points around the world, but this will allow us to get very refined measurements. It will help with climate models and our being able to deal with improving those models based on a real understanding of the carbon cycle which right now is parameterized, as they say, in the models.
Two directions essentially in which we are working: First is coordination, synergies. There are observing systems, plenty over the planet, provided by national agencies, regional agencies, some international agencies, but there’s a need to coordinate all these observing systems to develop synergies to get more value for money for a number of governments because the public money is scarce and we need more observing systems. Hence, we have to develop the proper synergies to enlarge and make our observing systems more efficient and sustainable in the long term because we’re talking about issues which we’ll be developing over decades. So we need long-term sustainability. That requires funds. That’s why we need to develop this coordination, these synergies. Specifically, GEO has been designed to address, as you can see in the flyer that is being distributed, nine societal benefit areas that have been mentioned by the Admiral -- disasters, health, water, climate, weather, biodiversity, agriculture, ecosystems, and energy. That covers more or less all the environmental issues that we will have to deal with in the near future. But the value of GEO is that it is trying to coordinate an observing system to address all these nine societal benefit areas at once. This is how we’re going to avoid duplication. So far most of these observing systems have been developed independently and we have enormous duplications and redundancies together with enormous voids and weaknesses. The first direction is synergies and coordination. The second is access. In many cases the observations exist but they can’t be accessed by the users. What we want is to bring this data, this information to the end users. So there is a very strong focus on users’ needs, what are their requirements, what kind of information do they need. And in many cases, because we want to talk not just to the scientists and the political experts but also to the public, to possibly industry, what are their needs and in which form should the information be distributed. Then, easing the access to the data. There’s a political dimension to it which involves data-sharing principles, data policies. Different countries have different opinions about what should be the policies on the distribution availability to data, to information, to observations of the planet. You have private companies doing high resolution imagery, but you also have some countries which consider that water information is national security and hence we will have and GEO will have to address these issues, to implement free and open data access for all. Then there’s a technical dimension to data access which is that technically people can go to the data. So we are developing two things. One is a GEO Portal which will be a single point of entry to earth observation data from all possible sources, from all members, provided by all systems and in such a way that they can be used by and navigated by all users. For those users in developing countries who do not have access to wideband internet and cannot use the kind of highly sophisticated portals that are developing nowadays, we have developed an alternative which is GEO Netcast. This is a system which was implemented by GEO by combining the resources of EUMETSAT in Europe, NOAA in the U.S., the Chinese Meteorological Administration in China, and presumably the Russians to cover the higher latitudes, to broadcast the data globally over the planet. Users will be able to receive this data with a very simple dish and a small PC so that whenever and wherever there is a digital divide because high speed internet, wideband internet, is not available, then the GEO Netcast system will compensate. So this is the second direction which we’re working, which is easing, making access to the data doable, accessible, comfortable. Thank you. QUESTION: Sir, I want to ask you a question. There were tornados in the U.S. lately. A small town was wiped out of the earth. How can you predict such events as you’re moving into that direction as you’re speaking about? I mean, predicting natural disasters. LAUTENBACHER: Yes, and remember, that’s one of the societal benefit areas of GEO. Predicting major disasters that can occur from weather, from oceans, from earthquakes, that sort of thing. Tornados represent a particularly difficult problem and we have made a great deal of progress, meteorologically speaking, in the last 20 years. Twenty years ago the warning time for a tornado was actually negative. In other words you didn’t know until it touched down and disturbed something. Today our average warning time for tornados is about 13 minutes. That’s better than nothing. And 13 minutes, when it’s warned properly and you have communication systems, can save many lives, and we have. We have saved many lives in the United States and that technology has been translated to other countries that need the kinds of warning systems. So there is great progress in technology. So from less than zero to 13-minute warning time. I believe it’s possible to get to an hour warning time. That’s a real stretch, but I think technology within the next 20 years can help us do that. That means that we will have to be able to predict the formation of a tornado before it is actually formed. Today we are looking at radar pictures, satellite pictures, and surface observing information to be able to get to this 13-minute average time, but that is after an initial tornado, the tell-tale signature in the atmosphere can be observed. What we need to do is get further ahead of the problem, to be able to tell when it’s going to occur. I think it’s possible to do that. Some of my scientists will tell you it’s a stretch, but I think it is possible. QUESTION: How long does it take to reach the other warning time, in your assessment? LAUTENBACHER: Twenty years, probably. We will have to have better radar systems, we will have to have better models with bigger computers and finer resolution. Those are key pieces, and that will take resources and more research time. QUESTION: I’d like to ask you about the carbon tracking tool. Are you currently using it? How are you planning to use this in the fight against climate change? Does this indicate, perhaps, a greater commitment on the part of the government to get more actively involved in doing something about bringing down greenhouse gas emissions? LAUTENBACHER: First of all the United States has been very interested in greenhouse emissions for a long, long time and has invested a great deal of money, $35 billion over the last five years in the current administration. So we are very interested in it and have been interested in it and this is part of the process that began a number of years ago to build a carbon tracking system. We have to have a way to measure the carbon in the atmosphere and in the earth. We have to understand the whole cycle. So this is part of a program that’s been going on for quite a while. It’s not all of a sudden magic that’s come from nowhere. We have in the United States put in place about 60 very precise carbon measuring stations. We are taking samples from around the world, atmospheric samples basically, and analyzing them in our laboratory. This tool has been developed in the last couple of years to be able to take that information and provide it in some way that people can use it. Again, it’s sort of the GEO, GEOSS principle. Getting the information in a form where it can be used and make sure that it is available. So what we need to do at this point is populate more of that system, of the observing system. But the tool is set up now so you can look at it. It’s not a real-time tool at this point. We have to take information over a period of months and input it. So it will be updated at least annually, but the potential exists to do it more often and have it more readily available. QUESTION: Could you explain how you use the information? You’re gathering the information, but what are the practical consequences of that? LAUTENBACHER: The practical implications are two-fold. First of all you will be able to distinguish between the carbon that is naturally produced, naturally released or naturally absorbed, uptake and input, versus man-made, anthropogenic carbon. That’s very important. Then you’ll be able to compare that across something like two cities that are next to each other. You’ll be able to see exactly what’s going on. Today we cannot do that. It’s done by economic and what I would call parametric estimates based on how much fuel is burned. People make estimates, and in some cases they can measure what’s produced from a power plant by looking at how much fuel they use and what the chemical equation would tell you is being released. But this is going to give you the measurement in the atmosphere and that’s very very critical. There are lots of other processes going on. The carbon dioxide dissipates, it’s absorbed. There’s more released from the ground and plant life around in the area. So there are many many factors that go into determining what the carbon content is. Today when you look at the measurements of carbon in the atmosphere, they are taken from basically our reference stations. The first one was on Mauna Loa, so it’s taken at a very high altitude in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, away from all the influences, man-made influences, so that we can tell what the sort of reference carbon level is in the atmosphere. This will allow us not to just take the carbon measurement on the top of Mount Mauna Loa, but be able to do it in all the localities with some degree of accuracy. So that will be very useful to tell how our mitigation measures are working and what ought to be done and to look at the difference between mitigation and adaptability, for that matter. Does that help? QUESTION: Two little questions. First, this GEO observatory system which you want to make available to access globally, has it, so far, ever been able to sort of predict in real time any major disaster until now? Being able to communicate to the affected parties? Second, on the CarbonTracker, I’m sure you don’t have CarbonTracker all over the U.S. at this point in time. You have it in some places. But has there been any sort of study or estimate that has been done to establish the global criticism that the U.S. produces the maximum man-made carbon, the image that man-made carbon emission is highest in the U.S. Has there been any sort of assessment of this? LAUTENBACHER: First of all, GEO has only been in existence for several years and it is based on the systems that are already present to try to build them and bring them together as Professor Achache mentioned so that we can gain more from them. We’ve had three summits; we now have a ten-year plan; so we are working on GEO. Has GEO helped with predicting any disasters? Remember that after the Indonesian tsunami members of GEO started working together -- WMO, IOC, United States, Germany, Thailand, India, for that matter, Indonesia -- to start building a system in the Indian Ocean to warn about tsunamis. Today, thanks to that cooperation, we have the first deep ocean assessment buoy in the Indian Ocean -- QUESTION: Where is that, sir? LAUTENBACHER: It’s off of Thailand. It’s called the DART Buoy. It is in the water producing data as of December 2006 . GEO helped bring people together. It’s a coordinating/integrating body to try to make sure that all the resources can be brought together. The International Warning Center in Hawaii has now taken on the job of transmitting any information to the countries of the Indian Ocean should there be a disaster, and there have been earthquakes and potential tsunamis -- nothing like the size of the 2004 tsunami -- that have occurred and people have been warned given this system. Tsunamis are something that was on everyone’s mind because of the tremendous tragedy that happened in the ocean by not warning people. So that system is coming along very well and it’s something that GEO has been very interested in supporting. The member nations and organizations of GEO have stepped up to help with that project in the Indian Ocean. You asked something else. CarbonTracker. The United States is probably around 25 percent of the greenhouse gas picture, but what you have seen in the last two years in the United States will be surpassed by China next year. The developing nations now produce a great deal of the greenhouse gases that are influencing our environment which I think makes it imperative that the entire world work together collectively to ratchet down the production of these greenhouse gases. I think you see that from the IPCC reports. QUESTION: Just one small question to the first question. Is there a criteria to share information? Because almost every country is now having satellites and modern [inaudible] satellites. Countries like India, China, all of them are producing so many of them and they’re all working on the same project. Is there a criteria on how this information will be shared? LAUTENBACHER: That’s what we’re trying to do, is create that criteria. Jose, do you want to talk about that a little bit? ACHACHE: First of all, to share the system and contribute systems to this GEOSS that we’re building up, contributions to data-sharing and understanding of data-sharing principles are necessary. Then the criteria are more technical. They’re about the interoperability of the systems. We are not going to change the existing systems and use them. So the best way to use them is to define how they can be made easily interoperable. In terms of achievement, if I may come back to the previous question. As the Admiral stated, GEO was created just two years ago so we’ve just started working. It was created through a series of ministerial summits where commitments were made. We’ve been working over these two years. Indeed, we established coordinated early warning systems in the Indian Ocean which showed that it’s operating very well. We’ve also initiated and achieved some development in a number of other areas. We’re developing a wide land fire early warning system. It was mentioned that meningitis early warning would be very useful to optimize the data and to mount vaccination campaigns. We’re working on systems to provide solar data, solar [radiants] for all these projects that the World Bank is financing in Africa to establish solar farms as well as directly informing the users and the managers of these solar plants of providing the information. There’s a sand and dust storm warning system that is also being established, and a number of other achievements. These achievements, early achievements I would say of GEO, we have to be modest, we’ve only been working for two years, will be presented in November this year because GEO will have a ministerial summit. It’s going to be in Cape Town in South Africa. It’s going to be just five years after the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, so we will see where we are. Johannesburg was the first time an international summit stated that earth observation, including earth observation from space, could be very useful for implementing the agenda of Johannesburg and promoting sustainable development. One of the achievements that will be presented at the summit in Capetown on November 30 will be a joint decision of Brazil and China who jointly operate a CBERS satellite -- it’s China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite. It’s a remote sensing instrument. They have decided to distribute the data or to provide the data free of charge for Africa and the Caribbean. What GEO is doing is implementing the technical instruments that are needed for this data to be acquired over Africa and to be distributed to the users. So they will be acquired with three stations. One will be in South Africa to cover all the south of Africa. There will be one provided by Spain in the Canary Islands which will cover the northwestern part of Africa. And Italy together with Kenya will have a station in Malindi in Kenya which will cover the other part. So with these three stations CBERS will be able to cover entirely the African continent, and then the data will be distributed by this GEO Portal I mentioned and using GEONETCast for those users who will not be able to use the internet. So these are the kind of achievements, the kind of mechanisms that we are putting in place. And always, the data policy issue is always central to it. So there is a joint decision by Brazil and China to actually distribute their remote sensing data free of charge and these are the kinds of decisions we’re trying to push. QUESTION: I would like to ask two facts and figures. On the ice melting in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. [Inaudible] atmosphere and the [inaudible] of the stratospheric push of protection. LAUTENBACHER: I don’t have detailed figures with me, but if you look at a summary of the scientific papers that are available, both Poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic react faster to global warming than the equator. You can see melting in general in the Arctic and you can see some melting, although there’s also some ice formation going on in the Antarctic. If you look at the temperature increases in those regions they have been greater than they are at the equator, say and in the temperate zones. That clearly is an effect of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. You would have to look in the reports to see what the exact changes are. Part of the problem is we also don’t understand completely the mechanisms of melting of the glaciers and the large ice sheets. It looks like they could melt faster than the models predict today. So the IPCC reports that are out do not take into account the latest papers that we have on ice melting of large ice sheets. Does this help? I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking. We can provide you references to the papers that talk about this phenomena. ACHACHE: If I may, understanding the ice sheets’ behavior is a very good example of why we need observations and why observations are critical. It’s only been until very recently that a consensus was established about the melting of the ice caps because it was extremely ambiguous. We would see some parts of the ice sheet breaking off on the edges. We could see an increased flow and acceleration of the flow towards the edges as well, but there were some indications of thickening in the center so that the total volume of ice was difficult to estimate. There are indications that things are happening at the bottom of the sheet and not just at the surface. But in the Arctic in particular you can see cracks and melting and rivers flowing at the surface. It was very difficult to reconcile all this data. It is still very difficult to reconcile them and to put them into a model. Probably over the last six to twelve months we’ve made a number of progress thanks to gravity measurements. It turned out that gravity for this space mission called GRACE which was jointly developed by the U.S. and Germany, we’ve had very accurate measurements of the gravity field changes over the polar caps which showed that gravity has changed, hence the masses have decreased. That’s a very solid indication. Altimetry also is providing indications, in situ measurements are as well. But they are not entire reconciled by the model. Then the question is, indeed we see indications that the behavior may not be exactly, correspond exactly to the models. The only way to improve the models and to be able to improve the forecast for the future is to improve these models, is to compare the models with what really happens. Again, that’s where observations are needed, to monitor the situation so that we can compare with the predictions of earlier models and improve the models for the future. QUESTION: I understand that a few years ago new ceilings have been opened to these areas. ACHACHE: Yes, there are several indications that it’s melting. The Northwest Passage in Canada, which is critical actually for the routing of the sheeps and for their economy, seems to be opening earlier than usual. So there are indications that it’s melting, there’s no doubt about this. But what I’m saying is that it’s been difficult to reconcile them and to capture them into a model which would allow us to forecast the future. Observing the situation is fine, to the extent that it allows us to predict the future and to see how it’s going to be in ten years so that we can take the proper action. QUESTION: I don’t understand exactly when this tool to track carbon dioxide has been built or has been made available. I don’t know how you say that. And when is it going to be possible to have the data? I just would like to know what is new today about that. LAUTENBACHER: This CarbonTracker was only announced about a month ago so it’s a new development from our laboratories in Boulder. It is on a web site. I can give you the web address if you’d like to go and look at it. It’s available for anyone with access to the internet to look at it. QUESTION: This is the first international press conference that’s been done on it? LAUTENBACHER: It is. I don’t think we’ve announced it internationally. The United States put out a press release inside the United States so you’re probably the first international audience that this is being announced to. QUESTION: What you mean is I can go to the internet now to get the data from this tool. LAUTENBACHER: Yes. QUESTION: What I would like to know is, because you said something is not clear for me. You said there were carbon trackers before this tool. So what is new is that this common tool on GEO, that means that it’s shared by different numbers of countries, and the possibility to get the data on the net. Is that correct? Is that the news? LAUTENBACHER: Yes. What’s new about it is that it collects the information that we have today from a variety of land-based carbon measuring stations. Not just the one on Mauna Loa or the one at the South Pole where we look at what I would call the basic levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is measuring carbon dioxide and could measure it here in Geneva. These stations that the United States have been putting around, we have about 60 in our country at this point, there are several that other nations are starting to put in. We’re using that information to show how you can build a model showing where carbon dioxide concentrations are and the differences between the man-made carbon dioxide and the natural carbon dioxide. So this is a model -- It’s modeling of information that’s now being collected which we have started to work on over the last five years. The United States has been doing this since the time I first came over here to tell you we are interested in climate change and we’re investing quite a bit of money in trying to deal with the problem. So this is now a compilation of the information gained over the last five years in a form that can be looked at geographically across the world and has the capability as we get more information, more carbon stations, to produce some very high resolution of where carbon, what’s happening in our carbon cycle. Information we do not have today on a global scale. Does that help a little bit? You can go and look at this.
QUESTION: You mentioned relating to GEOS, you state the policy issues. I’m wondering whether you can tell us what you expect the general public to be able to access in terms of information. Presumably they won’t get the information that the Chinese and Brazilian satellite, for example, will be distributing to certain countries. And on the carbon measuring tool, will this be able to tie in in any way with carbon [trading sieves] if it was spread out across the world? LAUTENBACHER: Let me say a word and then I’ll let Jose talk about it. Generally speaking on the last question, the carbon tracking system would help us with verifying any kind of a cap in trade or a carbon trading system. Obviously if you’re going to have a carbon trading system it has to be based on real information. It has to be based on what’s actually happening and where it’s most important and what the real value of carbon is. Otherwise it’s not going to work. So much of what we do today is based on economic and chemical estimates of what various outputs are of types of carbon sources. Having real information on the various places that produce carbon and maybe don’t absorb it or uptake it in some way, would help. It certainly would be much better to have real information available to design a system that would work. So mitigation is very important. The other point is that the hardest part of GEO is not the technical piece of it. It is really the international negotiations to develop policies that allow us to exchange data. As José mentioned, many countries see some of this information as highly important to their national security. We must find common ground where nations can obviously protect their national security, but where they affect other countries to develop this policy of trading information. It’s going to be very hard because every country has a different business model, if you want to put it, on data and environmental information. Remember the environmental information is the basis of our economy. We live in a highly technical world. That information is important for business, it’s important for security, it’s important for daily lives in many countries. So this is a high hurdle to cross and we will take that on with obviously great diligence and emphasis. ACHACHE: I can only agree with that. I believe the next major revolution in economy is that we’ll see is dealing with environmental information. It’s going to have tremendous consequences in all areas. Now public access, your question. The public is interested to access images and the success of Google Earth is clearly a demonstration that they’re interested, but it’s useless. Images, like any data as such, is absolutely useless for the public. The public is interested in information. Information that has meaning to them, that will allow them to make a decision. Is it going to rain today? Where is it going to be sunny in this part of the world this summer? The earth is such a complex system of systems that to make this information available you have to combine dozens of different data, different observations. It’s only by combining these observations, combining all this data within a model that you’re able to provide the information that the public is really interested in. So the public will have access to more and more data, more and more observations. It might be fun, like Google Earth. It might be interesting, surprising, decorative to be on the walls. It’s not really what’s going to be important. It’s producing the information. Then in order to produce the information and to produce the information for all, and this is where we talk about co-development, [central] development for all, then the information has to be available under certain conditions to the professionals who produce the information. Whether they’re public organizations or private companies making this kind of customized forecast. And timeliness is an issue. Not just commercial. Everybody knows the example of imagery. Commercial remote sensing. Where the images are very expensive. It takes about $5,000 to buy a scene of this very high resolution, sophisticated imagery satellites. Think about weather data. Temperature, wind measurements, pressure. If these data are not available within minutes, like if you make them available three hours or six hours after they have no value any more. They have to be available in real time. This is where the question is. Different countries have different policies on making this information available. In the U.S. it’s available free of charge in real time, in other parts of the world it is not. In other parts of the developing world it does not exist. So we have to make them available where they exist, we have to make sure they exist everywhere. QUESTION: Can I ask you about this carbon system? Is this your answer for not joining the Kyoto Protocol? I mean is this your answer, I mean in terms of saying we have practical measures that could be more useful than a protocol? LAUTENBACHER: There’s no single answer to the Kyoto Protocol. The United States has for a long time, since well before the Kyoto Protocol, a comprehensive program to deal with climate change. We have invested in energy technologies to the extent, we believe the answer is to look at economic development and reduction in emissions. We do not believe that you can thwart the need for the developing world to raise their standards of economic levels for quality of life, for trade, for economic benefit. So the issue is to create the increase in economic activity, at the same time decreasing the growth and then stopping carbon emissions. That requires a great deal of investment. As I said, the United States has invested $35 billion in the last five years to do that. We will continue to invest more. Every year overall there’s been more invested in looking at all sources of energy. So our answer has been to look at alternative forms of energy which the whole world needs, not just the United States. The developing nations need this too. And to transfer that technology we’ve created a number of partnerships to provide that technology to the developing world to allow as new sources of energy come on line that those will be cleaner sources, both from air quality and from greenhouse gases. So the carbon tracker is just one piece of a large program. We’ve committed internally in the United States to reduce our energy intensity, meaning as the economic development increases we’re going to reduce the amount of emissions per unit of economic development. We think that is the best way to comprehensively look at what the world needs and we want the whole world to be involved. We want all of the nations to commit to these kinds of things. I’m not the Secretary of State so I’m not the foreign policy czar, I’m just giving you a technical background. ACHACHE: But in addition we know that the Kyoto Protocol will achieve very little in terms of reducing the greenhouse gases emissions, essentially bringing the emissions in 2012 to the level where it was at the end of the previous century. So it will need much more to actually reduce the emissions. So there are many industrial approaches which are taken and some financial ones, and the figures generally mention the carbon trading market which was also a mechanism to try and reduce the greenhouse gases emission by involving the private sector to deal with that. But it turned out to be a complete failure in terms of market efficiency because the way the trading rights were emitted was completely unrealistic and based on purely prior assessment of features done by politicians without any information base. I guess the journalist from AP is right. This kind of instrument, this CarbonTracker could be a very good instrument to support the proper and more balanced and more efficient development of the carbon trading. QUESTION: I would like to know about [inaudible]. The whole system. Is it also used to measure the level of [inaudible] phenomenon in Latin American coast and South American coast? It’s going to be very hard, less hard, less hard, when coming? LAUTENBACHER: Actually this is a good example of a global system that works fairly well. We’re in the beginning of it, but an El Niño, we call it an ENSO system, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It’s a coupled ocean and atmospheric phenomena. We have discovered with building the system over a 25 year period that not only understanding El Niño for South America, it also is very important for climate phenomena around the world. It actually correlates to climate variability in many continents, obviously very important in the Pacific Basin. But that is an example of a piece of a global system that requires the satellites, it requires the moored buoys along the equator and close to the equator, and it uses our drifting buoys and diving buoys and takes the information. Right now we have a system which allows us to produce an El Niño, La Niña forecast from three to six months in advance. It’s not perfect yet, but it is much better than all of a sudden it shows up and then we have the problem. So we look at it in the United States as having been able to save almost $1 billion in storm damages during El Niño by having this advanced notification -- QUESTION: A billion? LAUTENBACHER: A billion dollars. Saved a billion dollars between one El Niño and the next, when we started forecasting these in 1998 and then the next one in 2002 I guess, 2003. ’98 was the big one. But that is an example of what we mean by a global observing system that will help everyone. Does that answer your question, or was there more to it? QUESTION: Yes. QUESTION: I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit how this $35 billion has been spent in the last five years by energy sector and energy source in the U.S.. And secondly, the cooperation of how do you see it with the corporations? Are they going to wait for government subsidies or are they going to chip into their big profits? LAUTENBACHER: Let me talk about the $35 billion. It has been split basically between climate change science and roughly $10 to $12 billion have been devoted to trying to figure out what’s going on and doing better. You see the results of that in the IPCC reports. The IPCC reports basically, much of the information that’s in them comes out of this investment. The other $23-$25 has been spent on new energy technology and that has been split. We do not believe there is any one at this point, any one magic bullet to take care of this problem. We must use all possible sources of non-carbon producing or minimal carbon producing energy. So if you look at our initiatives, there is a number that are in the renewable area -- solar, wind, water, hydropower, sea, ocean power -- and a number in the nuclear area -- fission and fusion -- as well as carbon sequestration, to understand how to produce a clean power plant. We expect to have a clean power plant on line by 2012. QUESTION: A power plant [inaudible]? LAUTENBACHER: We expect to put a clean coal plant on line by 2012. We are working with an international partnership. In fact the EU is working on that too. ACHACHE: You forgot an important one for the U.S. which is biofuels. LAUTENBACHER: And biofuels, right. Right now we have a huge initiative on reducing carbon emissions from the transportation sector which is one of the largest contributors to global warming. Our plan is in ten years to stop the growth of emissions, greenhouse emissions from automobiles. That’s been a major initiative that’s been undertaken in the last two years to go to biofuels and to stop the growth in emissions from automobiles. It’s been agreed to by the President and the administration. Does that help? Those are the things -- And we can give you a better split. I don't have it all in my head. QUESTION: The clean coal plant by 2012, how much is it through federal and state funds and how much by the power utilities? What’s the split for public/private relationship? Or is it all public money? LAUTENBACHER: It’s not all public money. It is a partnership. I don’t have those figures in my head. If you get in touch with us afterwards I’ll get you some more information on that, but it is a public/private partnership. It is not totally funded by the federal government. ACHACHE: There is a lot of private equity going into developing new solar technologies, new second generation biofuels in the U.S., and Silicone Valley has turned into a renewable energy valley now. Palo Alto is talking about developing biofuels, about developing new generation solar cells, and clean coal. Those are the three areas in which there’s a lot of private equity going into it. QUESTION: Are they chasing a lot of these projects because there’s government subsidies? That’s the criticism that the head of the IEA made here last week, that if you’re going to have biofuels you should have them without government subsidies, and the Brazilians are the only ones at the moment who are efficient in the biofuel area. ACHACHE: Well the biofuel area is a very complicated area. There’s one major problem with biofuels which has not been discussed at this stage but which will turn out to be the major limiting factor, is going to be water. You know that today out of the one percent of water which is available for our use on this planet, 99 percent of it we can’t just touch it, 75 percent goes to agriculture. Twenty goes to industry. Only five percent goes to drinking and sanitation. So agriculture is already the major source of water consumption. If we start developing biofuels to a significant scale, then we’re going to increase this number unless something else changes. If we do, we’re reducing the amount of drinking water. We can’t afford that. So we have a Catch-22 with water behind biofuels, and it’s not yet there because it’s only for local production, it’s only used locally, and we’re not yet in the second generation. But it’s a complicated story. You can’t just dismiss it because there are public incentives. There are too many problems involved. LUBETKIN: Thank you very much. I notice that some of you still have a few questions so we’re going to be staying here for a few minute afterwards if you want to come up with a specific question. Also I was remiss in the beginning for not introducing Madeleine Appelbaum from the Press Office of NOAA who is going to be here throughout the week and can be contacted for follow-up questions or information. Her telephone number is on the press release about CarbonTracker or she can be reached through our office at the Mission. ACHACHE: As well as Nicky Parker who is our press person at the GEO Secretariat and can be reached at the GEO Secretariat. I have a few business cards here, if you need more and if you need to contact us, please do. # # # #
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