D.LIGHT Receives UNFCCC Approval for Ground-Breaking Carbon Offset Project

D.LIGHT RECEIVES United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) APPROVAL FOR GROUND-BREAKING CARBON OFFSET PROJECT

Approval Marks One of the First Times Portable Solar Lanterns Will Generate Carbon Credits

New Delhi, India - D.light Design today announced that it has received approval from the UNFCCC for a ground-breaking carbon offset project in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India. The project, which innovatively tracks the reduction in carbon emissions that result from D.light solar lamps replacing kerosene lanterns, is the first of its kind to receive UNFCCC approval. The decision by the UN body, the only organization with a global mandate to evaluate the effectiveness of emission control systems, acknowledges the extent to which portable solar lighting products can contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

Kerosene and other fuel-based sources of lighting are one of the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the developing world. It is estimated that a single kerosene lantern may emit as much as 1 ton of carbon dioxide over the course of five years; each year, kerosene lamps are responsible for over 100 tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

“D.light’s solar lanterns vastly improve the lives of our individual customers, but they also benefit the global environment,” said D.light CEO Sam Goldman. “Every D.light solar lantern purchased means that less kerosene oil is being burned and fewer carbon emissions are polluting the atmosphere. D.light is proud to be a leader in providing quality products for off-grid families and in doing our part to combat global warming.”

UNFCCC approval is only given to applicants who meet a set of strict requirements, including definitively proving that the project contributes to carbon reductions and developing a scientifically reliable monitoring and tracking system. A majority of previous solar projects approved by the UNFCCC have primarily consisted of solar farms or other fixed, large-scale solar PV (photovoltaic) systems, which makes tracking carbon offsets fairly simple.

In contrast, D.light solar lanterns are individually utilized by hundreds of thousands of different households who regularly transport the lanterns between the home, workplace and field. As part of meeting UNFCCC requirements, D.light is pioneering an innovative monitoring and tracking system that will change the way carbon offsets are measured. The streamlined monitoring process will allow D.light to scale the project quickly across diverse distribution channels and geographic regions.

True to its social mission, D.light considers the carbon offset project as a creative strategy to make its solar-powered lanterns more affordable and accessible for customers around the world. All revenue from the resulting carbon credits will directly support D.light’s efforts to scale and meet the global need for solar-powered lighting for families who are currently relying on dim and polluting kerosene lanterns.

This impact should grow exponentially in the coming years. Even as implementation in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar begins, D.light is already taking steps to expand the project to other countries across multiple continents in the near future.

About D.light Design

D.light Design is an international consumer products company providing high quality solutions for people without access to reliable electricity. Our mission is to enable
households without reliable electricity to attain the same quality of life as those with electricity. We will begin by replacing every kerosene lantern with clean, safe and bright light. By 2020, we aim to have improved the lives of 100 million individuals.

D.light was recently awarded the Social Venture Network’s 2009 Innovation Award, and named as one of the world’s top 100 clean technology enterprises by the CleanTech Group. It has also been featured in Fortune Magazine, Time Magazine, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. It is financed by prestigious venture capital firms including Nexus Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, the Mahindra Group; with investment from leading social enterprise funds Acumen Fund and Gray Matters Capital. To learn more, please visit their site.

Article Courtesy of Got2BGreen: http://www.got2begreen.com/green-infrastructure/dlight-receives-unfccc-approval-for-ground-breaking-carbon-offset-project/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Got2begreen+%28Got2BeGreen%29

Copenhagen Forecast: Snow, Protest, Apocalypse; Can Obama Clear the Air?

The Final Stretch

Citizens around the world have called for a fair deal at climate talks, and in Copenhagen, they plan to make that call louder tomorrow with civil disobedience. The world's leading mayors have also called for a real deal, as have some of America's leading businesses. But where it counts, in the negotiating rooms, something is, sorry to say, still rotten in the state of Denmark.

No one said bringing all the world's countries together to hash out a deal -- or really, the foundations of a deal -- would be easy. But after nearly half a decade of facing the inconvenient truths of climate change, and its economic, political, and moral imperatives, does it have to be this hard?

Though we may not be fighting the apocalypse, as Greenpeace would have it, in Copenhagen we're staking the boldest claim yet for the future of the earth. We've messed it up -- we know that -- and we have the power to correct our mistake. So of course it has to be hard, because it has to be good.

Where We Are Now

To get things on track for the last day before heads of state take over, Denmark's Environment Minister, Connie Hedegaard, has formed five small groups to sort out the five "crunch issues" at the summit:

Improving the targets to be set by developed countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are causing climate change

* The mitigation actions of developing countries;*

* The long-term finance to be provided by rich nations so that poor countries can cope with climate change effects;

* How to deal with emissions caused by the aviation and shipping industries; and

* Special circumstances of some countries (such as Russia) in relation to mitigation.

The Divisions

The end times may not be upon us, but the developed and developing countries certainly look more divided than before. The African nations, which suspended talks on Monday, want a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, a regime the US and most other developed countries reject outright.

Rich countries are also reluctant to dole out the long-term aid poor nations need to survive and fight climate change. The US is especially adamant that it won't give China any money -- or reparations, as the US negotiator idiotically called them -- because China doesn't need the US's money. China's negotiator seemed to agree with that at first, but then Beijing backtracked, saying China deserves money too.

What China says it doesn't deserve is to have its emissions cuts overseen by any carbon police, a demand the US insists is an absolute must for any climate deal. Meanwhile, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) says that an upper limit of two degrees Celsius of warming isn't good enough as it would result in a loss of coastlines and sometime entire islands; they want a 1.5-degree cap, but not all developing nations do. And now, thanks to a backroom deal between France and Ethiopia, even the African nations are showing rifts.

The Agreements (Sort Of)

There have been some promising steps forward, apart from the promises made just before the summit by China, India, Brazil and others. Yesterday a number of potential financing options were put on the table. Today Holland committed to the 40 percent cuts called for by Kyoto.

Meanwhile, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation scheme, known as REDD, got a dollar amount affixed to it today: $22 billion to $37 billion to jump start the plan, which would seek to halt deforestation in developing nations completely by 2030. (Currently, the only money being offered for a climate deal is a meager $30 billion in so-called "kick-start" financing over three years; some groups also call it "kick-end" financing because it doesn't go beyond that date).

But ultimately, these steps forward are signs of good will and good faith, not agreements that are likely to make it into a final agreement.

Endgame - Or New Game?

With expectations as low as ever, and anger and concern rising, Barack Obama may be well positioned to attempt a modest Hail Mary pass when he flies in on Thursday. The timing of the White House's report today about green jobs seems fortuitous; what better way to prime the American public for a ramping up of the US's carbon cutting commitments? But chances are, his throw won't be strong enough, and if it is, he may not have any teammates to catch it.

At the summit where world leaders were supposed to ink a binding deal on climate change, environmental groups, activists and journalists are already preparing for a greenwash, and getting ready to pack their bags for the next possible climate agreement end zone in Mexico.

Before they get there though, they may need to help remake the game completely.

Article by Alex Pasternack Courtesy of Treehugger.com http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/copenhagen-forecast-snow-protest-apocalypse-can-obama-clear-the-air.php

Why Care About Copenhagen?

Copenhagen. You’ve probably heard the name of the Danish capital about a thousand times in the past month or two. Or maybe you haven’t, and it’s just starting to pop up in your local nightly newscast.

What happens at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this month could very well alter the future of businesses and lifestyles around the globe. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of environmental concern (or if you’re on it at all), Copenhagen is going to be a big deal.

More than 10 years ago, countries around the world joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), working to reduce global warming and to cope with whatever temperature increases are inevitable. Representatives from these 192 countries will meet at the Conference to work toward a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

The Convention on Climate Change establishes a setting to discuss legally binding means of addressing these issues, and it “recognizes that the climate system is a shared resource whose stability can be affected by industrial and other emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

Neglecting environment and climate would be the greatest political tragedy of the last five decades. - Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Program. Photo: Flickr/jimg944

The Copenhagen Diagnosis: 2°

The recently released Copenhagen Diagnosis is a compendium of the most current, peer-reviewed science behind climate change theory. Its research is an update of the information previously released in the groundbreaking Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007.
According to the Diagnosis, “The atmospheric CO2 concentration is more than 105 [parts per million] above its natural pre-industrial level. The present concentration is higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years, and potentially the last three to 20 million years.”

Additional findings from the report:
• Satellite and direct measurements now demonstrate that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea level rise at an increasing rate.

• Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80 percent higher than IPCC projections from 2001. Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit by that time.

• In 2008, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were approximately 40 percent higher than those in 1990.

“The reconstruction of past climate reveals that recent warming in the Arctic and in the Northern Hemisphere is highly inconsistent with natural climate variability over the last 2000 years,” said Dr Alan Haywood, reader in paleoclimatology at the University of Leeds, U.K., and one of the authors of the Copenhagen Diagnosis.

The take-home message: The report concludes that global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to 10 years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change. This means that global temperature changes should not exceed a 2 degree Celsius increase above pre-industrial values.

OK, so all this jargon sounds great, but what does it mean for us?

Climate Change Policy and You

Even though polar bears on melting ice, and even Denmark, may seem too far away to be relevant to life here in the U.S., the decisions reached at the Conference will have resounding effects across the global economy.

The Diagnosis recommends that to stabilize the climate, “a decarbonized global society, with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, needs to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton of CO2 by 2050.”

To put it in perspective, this figure is 80 to 95 percent below the per-capita emissions in developed nations (that’s the U.S.!) in 2000.

At this point in time, educated speculation is our only means of guessing, but one thing is for sure, change is in the air.

Governments have cautioned that the conference is unlikely to produce a binding agreement to substantially cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases at this point.

However, others disagree with this forecast. “To me, there is enough reason to have a sense of optimism right now that a deal could be made in Copenhagen that is not just a political deal, but is meaningful in terms of the scientific targets,” said Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Program.

“We just hope we can work together in a way to avoid the mistakes that we made that have created a large part of the problem that we face today,” said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Systems to mitigate carbon emissions may be put in place here in the U.S. New technologies and cleaner power will probably be in the mix with these adjustments. However, what will actually happen here at home is still part of a cloudy future.

Even if the environment doesn’t fall on your top 10 list of priorities, discussions about climate legislation at national and international levels will affect your lifestyle in the long run. The important factor is to be as educated as possible about the politics, policies and science at hand, and to decide what aspects are most important to you.

“Global climate change is by far the most complex issue we’ve taken on,” said Kevin Tuerff, president of EnviroMedia, a green marketing firm. “But we have faith Americans will contribute to the solution if they take time to understand the connection between our everyday lives as consumers and important issues like cap and trade being discussed in Copenhagen at the United Nations climate change conference.”

Courtesy of Jennifer Berry at Earth911.com
http://earth911.com/blog/2009/12/07/why-care-about-copenhagen/